Gordon Green (1912-1991) grew up on a small farm in that part of south-western Ontario so vividly recalled in this book. He graduated from the Arthur public and high schools and, after a year at teacher’s college, taught in a one-room country school. Here, for an annual salary of $525, he taught all eight grades plus first year high school.
In 1936, with $39 in his pocket, he went to Michigan, and after a hungry summer in Ann Arbor he enrolled in the University of Michigan. Six years later he graduated with a degree in science. He made his way through college by working in a steel mill from midnight till eight in the morning and then starting classes at nine.
It was at the university where his talent for colourful writing first came to light, and here he was not only a repeated winner of scholastic literary awards, but he began publishing short stories in magazines all over America.
In ‘42 he joined the Army, and after the war he returned to his Alma Mater, where he became a Teaching Fellow while earning his Master’s in Creative Writing. In 1948 he was accorded a Major Hopwood Award in Fiction, the first Canadian to be so honoured. The Montreal Star promptly brought him back to Canada and gave him a desk in the editorial department of its rural weekly, the fantastically popular Family Herald. Gordon was Magazine Editor here until the tragic and undeserved death of that journal in 1968, and it was here too that his wit and joie de vivre made his byline a household word throughout the country.
Others no doubt know him better for his daily radio commentary, his Sunday morning CBC national broadcast for “Fresh Air,” and as a columnist for the Toronto Saturday Star and other papers.
Gordon now lives in an historic stone house near Ormstown, Quebec, where with the help of his wife Cheryl and their nine-year-old daughter Laura they somehow manage 450 acres populated by a herd of beautiful Belted Galloway cattle and sundry other livestock.
Farmer Green, who holds a Ph. D. in Canadian Literature, taught for a number of years at Dawson College, from which he is now retired. He has, however, resumed teaching part-time at the Kahnawake Survival School, America’s first all-[First Nations] high school.
