Winnie Sayre’s Cornfields

Winnie Sayre’s Cornfields, Memoirs of a Kansas Farm Girl, tells us a lot about Berkeley as a place where the diverse and distinct parts of American culture, personalities and value systems clash. I, and a surprising number of others here, come from backgrounds and “flatlands” more Middle-western and near-south like hers. Wanting and making something different, we have come here.

Winnie Clark Sayre published Cornfields in 2014 mainly for her family, but I publicize it because she’s an excellent writer with a great life that’s seldom the kind held up as a noble ideal. And coastal, Berkeley people and politicians can’t afford to misunderstand or ignore what makes our mid-country people (voters) tick.

Both wise and lucky to choose “Bob” as a GREAT husband early on; she worked as a journalist in Salina, Kansas, had four children, moved to California with him in 1964 after Army bases in Texas and his “Ag” jobs and Grad school in Kansas and Wisconsin. Sayre went into teaching child development and English in Richmond, UUCBerkeley congregation organizing, hosting AFS Students when the kids were in school; and then “women’s clubs” like American Association of University Women and El Cerrito Gardeners. And then she and Bob had the good fortune and intrepidity to travel the entire world, it seems, before and after they retired, fueled by a deep curiosity and global humanistic vision.

 “A Kansas farm girl who found happiness by having the courage to defy tradition and follow her dreams…” And love. In 2009, she calls her nine grandchildren “my bodyguards, my honor guards, my crown of jewels, as I tried to find words for the pride” she was feeling. “Normal,” to some extent, mostly wife-and-mother, but exceptionally depicted in her honesty and understated authenticity.

 “I have intentionally chosen friends who are stimulating and intellectually curious, as opposed to the people who pull down shutters early in life so that later they can’t even find their reading glasses. I grew up knowing many in the latter group.”

Winnie* “loved to read, but” her “Mother read very little. I would take on leadership roles whereas she would cringe at the thought. I was social and felt energized when around people, whereas she felt uncomfortable being around people who weren’t part of her family. She imagined that most people thought they were better than she was,” (my italics wc) she “accepted the idea that women were equal work partners, essential to the family economic unit, but believed men should have more power.”

I really think coastal feminists, techies, “liberals” and metro people need to take note of this, because it’s an All-American personality type, character and theme reminiscent of Arlie Hochschild’s people in the recent Strangers in Their Own Land as well as Steinbeck’s classic Dustbowl-era Grapes of Wrath.

She doesn’t hold back about her Mother’s peculiar and absolute lack of physical affection, use of “the strap,” rigid rules and shame on her and her siblings. “My Mother” (never referred to as “Mom” or “Mama”) “never once hugged or kissed me.” Never once? Ouch. But actually not that uncommon in those times, places and environments, even now.

She and the farm required exhausting physical labor of Winnie starting at age 3, child care of her younger sister and brother by age 7 and the proverbial “dreaded four-buckle rubber overshoes needed for snow and mud” worn on the walk to the one-room Rosemound schoolhouse a “mile and a half away” September through April for eight years. I’d note that this is not so different than some of the lives Maya Angelou, Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison portrayed. Rural, more flatlands prairie, a little further North and isolated; but the same sense of community conformism with unique "characters" sticking out of every clan and neighborhood.

Her life there, particularly isolation during “The Great Depression, The Dust Bowl” and “the polio scares” that limited even their weekly visits to town on Saturday nights reminds me of sheltering-in-place and our shocking discomfort with the abrasions of intimate family life; but about 10 times more “lonely.” She read everything she could get her hands on in her attic hideaway by a dormer window, her teachers’ books at school; Look, Life, Saturday Evening Post magazines Uncle Homer gave them, and dared to recite memorized poetry out loud to herself as she rode to bring the cows home to milk when she was 13.

Some early afternoons when she had a break in her chores and younger siblings occupied, she could “go out to my nest in the earth under the mulberry tree” where she “first felt a connection with something beyond” herself and “sense that the world held much more than my Kansas farm experience.” She eventually sought out that “more.”

Even the parochial, gossipy, closed-minded prejudices and staunch misogyny of high school and “town life” across the river in Hardy, Nebraska chafed her “stubborn,” poetic and “social” inner drives. “Everyone …knows how the local people are related” “shunning individuals who don’t conform to the accepted norms.” Winnie’s parents were “agnostic” farmers, having been raised in over-religious or atheist households; and were neither Germans nor Danes, as the town community was divided, literally, “with Danes expected to live on one side of the road and Germans on the other,” so it’s not entirely surprising she grew up testing limits and living “beyond the pale.”

“As a teenager, I always tried to please and be accepted,” but when it came to her senior year, when “the boys in my class seemed so immature;” she wrote in her diary “I had to be brave and build my character and not let little things like not having a date bother me,” even though “For me, that hurt.” This May Queen, editor of the school paper, class president and valedictorian “learned that with persistence I could accomplish some of my goals” by demanding to be “the only one in my class going to a four-year college,” even though it was “a waste of money,” a neighbor told her father, “to send a girl.”

Why do I write about her? Because I think everybody has an “Aunt Jo.” Our Aunt Jo took the extra “n” off her name and wrote her name Jo-an, dealt with two older brothers and isolation, two husbands and children; but learned bookkeeping from our Grandmother to keep track of the price of the gas and repairs on the truck Grandpa “RT” used to take chickens, eggs and produce into town. Not a rebel visibly, but eventually Treasurer with my Dad as VP and Uncle as President of a five-state operation sold to a transportation conglomerate in the early 1980s when Reagan brought deregulation to interstate commerce and presaged obsolescence to “the family farm.” Smart survivors, she was “quite a gal.”

Are these people only habitual, obedient drones ruled by wind, water, animal behavior, seemingly ancient traditional customs, sunshine and rain? Maybe. And we might take a lesson from that habit, those customs and those people. They SURVIVED.

Winnie Clark reminded me of my Father’s Illinois farm relatives with their staunch, wordless, diligent ways; and the Southwestern Minnesota town people in Minneota in 1976 and then in Milan, MN, pop. 356, when I moved out of the Twin Cities to relax after total burnout, disenchantment and later police, legal and social harassment drove me away.

“I had not had a real friend during my eight years of country school…” Winnie said, “I was shy...(felt) inferior,” and may have been overprotected for good reason. Girls and women could control a “web of power” with friendships, groups and gossip; but Winnie was not allowed “regular access to a car” like her brother, for example, and “felt very restricted compared to my older brother.”

She was told, “It would not be safe for me to drive myself. ‘If the car breaks down, there’s no telling who might come along and rape you,’” which is not as outlandish as it sounds, and echoes American class and races’ wealthy white lawless supremacy over others’ lives and bodies along with our severely misogynist, violent roots.

“In the 1960s,” Winnie “gorged on the writings of the feminist movement” and worked with the AAUW “to promote equality for women and girls.” Even in 1954 for their wedding, she and Bob agreed to “leave out the word ‘obey.’ It was enough to ‘love and honor’,” but it took a long time for her to realize “that I was keeping my mother’s voice alive as my own inner critic by always blaming myself when things didn’t go well.”

Carl Jung said that the ability to hold paradox, two seemingly contradictory forces or aspects in mind at once, was the “measure of emotional maturity.” Crime, economic pressure, clash of values, beliefs or family struggles can split a family; can make a community, nation or even the world seem like either/or, fragmented, permanently divided. Or these pressures can provide an opportunity to dig up, examine, transplant, reintegrate and restructure intimate or global culture. Maybe just based on what works.

When things don't work, don't feel comfortable Americans pick up and move. Just walk away from the family farm or the age-old, neighborhood customary way of doing things we saw our elders struggling or uncomfortably "putting up with."

Sometimes all the way to Cali-for-ni-ay. We’re not so different from each other, after all…

 (c) Wyndy Knox Carr, The Berkeley Times, (short version) published 23 July, 2020.

*I refer to her as Winnie rather than Mrs. Sayre or Sayre in this review because I attended a non-literary group with her for four years before her death, and we called each other by first names there. I mean it as no disrespect, even in a “book review,” and feel honored to have been a fellow-seeker with her on “a first-name basis.” The opinions and selections about her childhood and background from her book are completely my own as a feminist, post-Midwestern book reviewer now residing in Berkeley. I hope these do not offend her family, friends and memory; for she was much loved and respected, and sorely missed by our group. wc