JERRY APPS

Public Presentations:

Stories From the Land
The Midwest in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s was a special place where parents and children worked side by side and neighbors stuck by each other through good times and disaster. Apps helps us remember farm life before electricity and indoor plumbing, when cows were milked by hand, and farm kids attended a one-room country school. You’ll learn about old time radios, party line telephones and picking pickles on a hot July day. Jerry Apps brings it all back through his stories and readings. Within each story we see how loving and supremely educational growing up on a farm can be, for it is here that youngsters learn not only how to chop the heads off chickens and drive a tractor like a grown-up, but also to deal with illness, disability, and death.

Ringlingville USA
Audiences will learn about the seven Ringling Brothers who started with next to nothing and became the most famous circus family ever known. Based on Apps' book, Ringlingville USA: The Stupendous Story of Seven Siblings and their Circus Success, this talk explains how the Brothers got the idea for a circus, what circus life was like, and how the Brothers, through hard work, business savvy and some luck, became the largest circus in the world. Also included are the behind-the-scenes activities that make a circus operate successfully—the Ringling Circus was a self-contained city with barber shop, dining hall, blacksmith, livery and, of course, the big top that at one time held more than 12,000 people.

Old Farm: A History
Jerry Apps tells the story of his land, from the last great glacier that dug out its valleys and formed its hills to his own family’s forty-year relationship with the farm they call Roshara. Apps describes the Native Americans who lived on the land for hundreds of years—tapping the maple trees and fishing the streams and lakes—as well as the first white settlers who tilled its sandy acres, plowing the native grasses that grew taller than their teams of oxen. Apps chronicles his family’s efforts on this old farm—restoring an old granary, growing a vegetable garden each year, reestablishing a prairie, managing a woodlot and enjoying nature’s sounds and silences. Apps also describes the process he used for researching the story that resulted in the book Old Farm: A History, for those interested in doing a genealogy of their property.

Other Public Program Ideas: Reading groups might explore the Link Lake Series, which includes several of Jerry App’s novels, including The Travels of Increase Joseph and In a Pickle. These books consider agricultural and environmental issues from a historical and contemporary perspective. Contact Jerry Apps directly to plan a discussion series, with the author, to draw out these themes and issues.