Description
In Eugene’s Boy: A Life Remembered, Bill Therkelsen, a former electronics engineer, takes readers to the past in heartwarming, often amusing vignettes from his life as a child in 1940’s Des Moines, Iowa to his time in the Naval Reserves, to his later years, where he spent time with family and friends at his cabin in Minnesota’s northwoods. The stories, originally published on his blog “Northern Lights,” are filled with warmth and love.
Growing up in the Midwest was always an adventure for the author of Eugene’s Boy. Echoes of Jean Shepherd’s humorous stories abound, as Therkelsen recalls streetcars, flash cameras, department store Christmas windows, the advent of television, and more.
Readers need not have grown up in the 1940’s to find a home in these stories, for the themes of home and family are universal.
Kathryn Gahl –
The vernacular of EUGENE’S BOY is down-home and authentic, the author telling of small town life in the 30s and 40s, hilarious schoolboy hijinks, and even tricks played on a petty officer in the Navy.
Read this heartwarming memoir to understand the Heartland, its family values, do-it-yourself determinism, and “how much fun it was” in a time of no television, computers, or cell phones.