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    Many Hands Make Light Work: A Memoir
    Many Hands Make Light Work: A Memoir
    Many Hands Make Light Work: A Memoir
    Ebook329 pages5 hours

    Many Hands Make Light Work: A Memoir

    By Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy

    5/5

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    About this ebook

    Many Hands Make Light Work is the rollicking true story of a family of nine children growing up in the college town of Ames, Iowa in the ’60s and ’70s. Inspiring, full of surprises, and laugh-out-loud funny, this utterly unique family champions diversity and inclusion long before such concepts become cultural flashpoints.







    Cheryl and her siblings are the offspring of an eccentric professor father and unflappable mother. Mindful of their ever-expanding family’s need for cash, her parents begin acquiring tumbledown houses in campus-town, to renovate and rent. Dad, who changes out of his suit and tie into a carpenter’s battered white overalls, like Clark Kent into Superman, is supremely confident his offspring can do anything, whether he’s there or not. Mom, an organizational genius disguised as a housewife, manages nine children so deftly that she finds the time—and heart—to take in student boarders, who stir their own offbeat personalities into this unconventional household. The kids, meanwhile, pour concrete, paint houses, and, at odd moments, break into song, because instead of complaining, they sing as they work, like a von Trapp family in painters caps.







    Free-wheeling and contagiously cheerful, Many Hands Make Light Work is a winsome memoir of a Heartland childhood unlike any other.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShe Writes Press
    Release dateAug 6, 2019
    ISBN9781631526299
    Many Hands Make Light Work: A Memoir
    Author

    Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy

    Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy and her eight siblings grew up with a paintbrush in their hands and a song in their hearts. As soon as they were old enough to wrench a nail out of ancient lumber—so it could be used again—they were put to work renovating old houses in Ames, Iowa. Cheryl’s growing-up years included babysitting for a local family that kept a lion as a pet. A real, adolescent-aged lion. Uncaged. Using a flyswatter to defend herself, she survived the lion, and today is a freelance journalist for The Wall Street Journal as well as the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. The Tribune distributes her articles to newspapers and websites around the country, such as The Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Baltimore Sun, and Orlando Sentinel. Her previous book, USA to the UK: The Easy Way, a lighthearted look at moving overseas, was published by British Petroleum’s London headquarters for an international readership. McCarthy holds an MBA from City University in London and a bachelor's in journalism from Iowa State University. She lives with her husband in Bellingham, Washington.

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    • 5/5
      After seeing all the news coverage of events from 1969, like Woodstock and the Apollo 11 moon landing, one can't help but be nostalgic for that time, and that makes it the perfect time to read Cheryl Stritzel's family memoir Many Hands Make Light Work.Stritzel came of age in Iowa in the 1960s and 1970s, one of nine children born to Joe, an agronomy professor at the University of Iowa, and his wife Marcella. Joe saw that as more young people were going to college, more housing was needed. So they bought up several homes in the neighborhood and turned them onto student housing.Joe and Marcella grew up during the Depression and their mentality was to do for themsleves. Therefore, the children all pitched in and helped rehab the homes. The youngest children, dubbed "the Littles" pulled nails and stacked wood, the older kids tore up carpets and tore down wallpaper. (One old house had 22 layers of wallpaper!) In the winter, they got up early and shoveled all the sidewalks of the homes before heading off to school.Having nine children meant being thrifty. They had a commercial milk dispenser installed in their kitchen and bought milk in five-gallon metal cans. They grew green beans, green peppers, and varieties of lettuces in the garden of one home, huge plots of tomatoes in another home, and an entire yard was filled with sweet corn.They had peach, pear, plum and apple trees. One the more memorable scenes was of the children undergoing preparation to pick the cherries from the fifteen foot Montmorence cherry trees that dominated their yard.First Mom made plates of pancakes, topped with butter and honey (from their own hives of course), and a single slice of bacon. (The children grew up never realizing that you could have more than one slice of bacon for breakfast.) Then the Baseball team, as Dad called them, donned their equipment- each had an old metal coffee can with a piece of twine at the top that allowed for the can to hang off their waist so they could use two hands to pick more efficiently. Singing "Oh, What A Beautiful Morning" from Oklahoma meant that work could begin.Many Hands Make Light Work is such a delightful, warm-hearted book. The memories (eating Spudnuts donuts after church, Greg sitting at "the Toast Seat" during breakfast, stopping at the A&W restaurant for 11 root beers to go along with the packed sandwiches during a rare family vacation) will bring to mind your own family memories.The craziest story involved Cheryl babysitting for a family. It should be an easy job- the only child, a baby, would be asleep, and Cheryl could watch TV and do her homework. But as the parents were leaving, they handed her a flyswatter and told her that if the lion acted up, just tap him on the nose. Yes, they had a lion. Not a baby lion, one that was more like a teenager. He slept in the chair in the living room, where Cheryl was to be. That scene was straight up nerve-wracking, but as I was reading it, I thought to myself, yeah, that kind of stuff happened back then.I can't recommend Many Hands Make Light Work more highly. It brought me joy, made me laugh ,and and made me feel grateful for growing up in my own big Catholic family. If you grew up watching The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, this is for you. I loved reading all about the Stritzels, and if you long for a good family story, pick up this book now. It's one of my favorite books of the year.Thanks to She Writes Press for providing me a copy of this wonderful book for an honest review.

    Book preview

    Many Hands Make Light Work - Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy

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