He accompanied the family to town on Saturday nights and to church on Sunday mornings. Observing the patterns of small-community life may have fostered the keen sense of finding, observing, and writing detail which later made his journalistic columns so appealing and realistic. These early days also provided material for later writing, and he told his readers of his mother, his father, his boyhood fear of snakes, the incessant midwestern wind, and the heat and laziness of summer country days.
Years later he would write home commenting on his parents' attendance at the state fair or suggesting that the foreign stamp on his letter be given to a neighborhood child. About his mother he wrote in one of his columns: "My Mother would rather drive a team of horses than cook a dinner. But in her lifetime she has done very little of the first and too much of the latter. She has had only three real interests--my Father, myself, and her farm work.... My Mother probably knows as little about world affairs as any woman in the neighborhood. Yet she is the broadest-minded and most liberal of the lot."
His understanding and compassion for ordinary people and those left out of the mainstream of life may have had its beginnings in his youth as well.
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