Growing Up Rural

About the Book

In Growing Up Rural…….In Dakota e the author uses the mundane experiences taken from ordinary life to sweep the reader up into the Transcendence of the extra ordinary life to tell his stories. He employs both humor and sensitivity, to provide the reader with an appeal that is uplifting to “send you on your way.”. Drawing from first hand experiences of a life that began on the Dakota prairies between post Depression up to and beyond WWII, the author takes his readers on a journey from early childhood on into adulthood. From learning how not to order “chocolate ice cream” at the local drug store to flying B-29’s as a tail gunner over the Yalu River high above Korea, he details the ingredients that equipped him along with mid-western rural America to enter the Information Age of the 21st century. What begins with a time “when a man was no better than the horse that he rode and a man on foot was no man at all”, the author continues on to the day as an adult when for the first time in his life he was fatherless. Readers will find themselves caught between not knowing whether to laugh or to cry as they walk through the stories in this book. Through these vignettes the author provides windows wherein the reader can view his or her own journey in a manner that has both meaning and humor. The stories that he unfolds are stories that everyone will recognize as a part of their own journey towards wholeness.

About the Author

Orlo Espeland was born and raised on the South Dakota prairies three years after the 1929 Stock Market crashed. Born in 1932 during the Great Depression, he grew up on a farm where his parents were sharecroppers. His formal education began in a one- room school where he would walk a mile and a half to school each day. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1961 after having served in the United States Air Force during the Korean War as a tail gunner in B-29’s. In 1963 he graduated from Luther Theological Seminary, St Paul, Minnesota. He retired from active ministry in 1994 and resided with his wife, Audrey, in Dallas, Texas until recently when he returned to his childhood home in Pierpont, South Dakota where he now lives and works with South Dakota Storytelling and organizing and planning the Storytelling Festival In Pierpont. .