Prairie Town Boy

"In those years as a boy in that prairie town, I met little wonders of many kinds." The great storyteller Carl Sandburg's accounts of his Midwestern youth is filled with family love, boyhood scrapes and adventure, and the exploration and discovery of his own America. Young "Charlie" has dreams of baseball fame; he is arrested for skinny-dipping in a "No Swimming" area; his first jobs as paper boy and pop-bottle washer lead to seeing the world "on the road," soldiering, and finally a scholarship. On his way to Lombard College, he remembers one of his earliest lessons—that one can never have enough education, whether it's gained in the classroom or through the adventures of life, the "little wonders" discovered in "scraps and pieces."