Growing Up in North Dakota: A Memoir

Growing Up in North Dakota is a vivid story of the "pioneer" period of the state's history. Here are stories of "horse and buggy days;" of haying, harvesting, and thrashing; and of hard times, long winters, and one room schools.

Philo T. Pritzkau was born in 1902, in the sod house built by his immigrant German-Russian parents near Burnstad, North Dakota. Before his retirement in 1972, he was Professor of Education at the University of Connecticut, where he was director of the Curriculum Center. He is the author of Dynamics of Curriculum Development and On Education for the Authentic. He has been a teacher in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Minnesota. Patricia Pritzkau MacLachlan, internationally acclaimed for the prairie story, Sarah, Plain and Tall, is his daughter.

Patricia MacLachlan writes in the Foreword, "It is my profound belief that we live nurtured by our first landscape, both our spiritual one--our family--and our physical one, the land where we began. I grew up with all the stories and remembrances put down in my father's memoir, and many more...It is no surprise that in my own writing I see my father's land, his life, and many of his values. In my book, Sarah, Plain and Tall, I see the North Dakota prairie and the slough, the family dogs, and the people he loved."

This 102-page book, filled with photographs, is available through the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection.