A Backward Glance

About the Book

In writing A Backward Glance, the author gives a brief account of his ancestors´ migrations and journeys that resulted in the Grant family being in Washita County, Oklahoma. His parents both came at the age of ten in covered wagons to Oklahoma the same year to homesteads near Cloud Chief in the Cheyenne-Arapaho Strip. The Grant and Haynes families were among the first settlers. They lived in half-dugout sod houses, learned primitive farming techniques, experienced the difficulties of survival on the unsettled prairie, and raised large families. The Grant farm was five miles northeast of the town of Rocky, population 200, and seven miles from the author´s grandparents´ claims. Life on the farm with its primitive household and basic methods of farming was but little removed from pioneer days. The author and his siblings grew up knowing hard work and deprivation. But they also experience the joys of a large and fun loving family that never knew they were poor. Cotton was the money crop and required long hours of arduous labor. The farm could be prosperous one year and a failure the next depending on several factors the most important being rainfall. The story relates the agony of dust bowl days and how farming eventually became impossibility for the family. America was still in the throes of the depression when the nation entered World War II. In the days leading up to the war, the author and his brother were in the University of Oklahoma but, because of the distraction of the coming war, were making little headway toward their goals of earning degrees in engineering. Anti-war rallies were being held on campus while the University was training officers in its ROTC program. The nation was divided between isolationists and activists with the isolationists outnumbering the activists. That was changed overnight by Pearl Harbor. <>Everyone knows were they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news of Pearl Harbor. How the author and his family heard of the attack and their reaction to the news is a story that was repeated millions of times across America. The discussions he and his friends had the evening of December 7, 1941 was, for them, a once in a lifetime experience. <>An account of the author´s decision to enlist after the Declaration of War and his parents comments give an insight into the anxiety´s families were experiencing everywhere. The narrative includes a description of the enlistment procedures in the early days of the war and how a farm boy coped with the military life. The chapter on army days is the story of an ordinary soldier during the four year of war. It gives his thoughts on the life of a soldier compared to working on a farm. <> A Backward Glance also gives a soldiers viewpoint of using the atomic bomb to end the war. He compares the effects of the war on Americans with that of citizens in Europe and Asia and he writes about friends who did not return from the war.

About the Author

Fred Grant was born in 1920 on a dry weather farm seven miles west of the fictional Martin homestead that is the focal point of Prairie Pioneer. His father and mother both came with parents as youngsters to Oklahoma Territory in covered wagons when the Cheyenne-Arapaho Strip was opened for settlement. He remembers sitting for hours listening to his father and uncles talk of pioneer days. That is how he gained much of the knowledge to write Prairie Pioneer. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Grant enlisted in the Army Air Corp. During the war he courted and married a girl from Kentucky. Upon receiving his discharge in October 1945, he returned to the University of Oklahoma earning a degree in Civil Engineering. After graduation, he worked on the design and construction of civil projects in the Midwest for eighteen years. He finished his career in Philadelphia with the Water Pollution Control Program of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now retired, Prairie Pioneer is his third publication. He and Betty, his wife of sixty-four years, live in Cherry Hill, New Jersey