First Years: A Farm Boy Faces the Future: A Memoir

This is the memoir of the early years of the second son of Michigan farmers in a family of five siblings. His father had an eight-grade education; his mother completed high school. He was born three weeks before Pearl Harbor was attacked, and until the 1950s, when post-war America began to prosper, he lived in near poverty in an uninsulated two-room-plus attic house that had been a granary. He lived on the farm until he entered the army at age 21. In many ways, it was an isolated childhood so that he had little exposure to a world outside the immediate farm community. The nearby Methodist church had a congregation of perhaps sixty members—mostly neighboring farmers. He attended the same public school from kindergarten through 11th grade all in the same 1880s building. His graduating class of fifty students in 1959 was the first to attend the new high school. Except for a two-week family Christmas vacation to Florida in a car pulling a small camper trailer, he essentially remained in Michigan. Only on one occasion in all those years before college did he not sleep at home or with close relatives. When somewhat by coincidental circumstance, he was admitted to Michigan State University, and although he was the class salutatorian, he was very poorly prepared both academically and socially. Within his extended family, he was first to attend college. This memoir is a story of transition and gradual growth. It attempts to emphasize how early life on a farm instilled personality and character that worked in both positive and negative ways as he matured. This memoir covers his life through college and two and a half years in the military and includes an appendix timeline of significant events in the world and in his life from 1941 to 1966.

"Ed Demerly opens a window on the past, showing in vivid detail what life was like in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Viewing his life on a farm, in a small Michigan town, in a family of seven, we see the constant work, the family dynamics, and communitarian practices. He writes of the garret bedroom he shared with his brothers: “We boys used to practice writing out alphabet letters with our fingernails in the frost on the roof boards.” Demerly remembers “the chickens singing and sunning themselves and cackling their deliveries in the winter coop.” The values and discipline he learns on the farm support him at each stage of life—at the university, in the military and Army Ranger training, in the Peace Corps, and through his adult and professional life. This compelling American story will be of interest to anyone who contemplates writing their life." ~ Rick Bailey, Get Thee to a Bakery, a memoir in essays

"First Years is one of the most artistically sketched and moving memoirs of our time. All the narrative situations carry reflective weight, description, and passion. His story begins with the true dynamics of his past life as a shy, obedient American farm boy who later joins the Army, Peace Corps, and higher ed where he worked for over forty years. It ends with understanding and acceptance." ~ Mary Saad Assel, PhD, Henry Ford College, retired educator and author.

Ed Demerly retired after forty-six years of teaching - everything from fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, middle school, high school, and thirty-six years at Henry Ford College in Dearborn, Michigan, where he co-founded the English Language Institute and received the Faculty Lectureship Award for his 1992 lecture on the parallels between Gangsta Rap and Walt Whitman's poetry. He taught for a year in Australia and for two years in Malaysia as a Peace Corps volunteer. Ed served in the army as an airborne ranger in the Medical Service Corps and is a past president of the National College English Association and a member of The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. He and his wife, Martha, live in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where in his retirement he is occupied with volunteer work that includes organizing public forums focused on justice and peace and counting frogs for the Rouge River Conservancy. He's a gardener of okra, cherries, asparagus, rhubarb, raspberries, peas, apples, flowers, and so much more-still a farm boy.