Many Hands Make Light Work

Many Hands Make Light Work: A Memoir of Family, Faith, and Frugality is for any reader who is really, really done with misery memoir.

Many Hands follows our rollicking family of nine children growing up in the college town of Ames, Iowa in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Inspiring, unconventional, full of surprises and laugh-out-loud funny, this real-life family misses the memo on dysfunction, instead offering readers an entertaining look at how to build a family, even during times of cultural chaos and social division. As such, its time is now.

We kids, dressed in a ragtag collection of hand-me-downs, are the offspring of an eccentric professor father and unflappable mother. Think of the classic Cheaper By the Dozen, but in the Midwest, in an old Victorian house in the middle of fraternity row.

Mindful of our ever-expanding family’s need for cash, our parents start acquiring tumbledown houses in campus-town, to renovate and rent. Dad, who changes out of suit and tie into a carpenter’s battered white overall, much like Clark Kent into Superman, is supremely confident his tender offspring are capable of pouring a concrete driveway or painting an entire house, whether he’s there or not. Mom, an organizational genius disguised as a housewife in Bermuda shorts, manages nine children so deftly she finds time—and heart—to take extra student boarders into our home, some of who stay for years, stirring their own offbeat personalities into our unconventional and outsized household.

The cast of students living with us evolved from Midwestern farm girls to West Coast hippies to international students, notably John Lin from Taiwan, who once tried to roast a whole chicken in the oven without a pan. Over the years, atheists, as well as Protestants, Jews, and Muslims, folded seamlessly into our Catholic household. Our family was a living example of diversity and inclusion, decades before such concepts became cultural flashpoints.

Together, Mom and Dad forged us nine, arrayed in cut-off jeans and holey T-shirts, into a tight-knit crew they dubbed their Baseball Team. By age ten, every one of us knew how to hammer a nail, spackle a wall, prune a shrub. Dad managed us all by tossing off pithy and infernally cheerful sayings, such as “Details make perfection, but perfection is no detail!” or “Many hands make light work!” We were always in motion; we didn’t languish on “the plains of lethargy,” another of Dad’s favorite phrases.

One might think growing up in a household that valued family, faith, frugality, and hard work would occasion pity from outsiders. But among our friends who spent their summers riding bikes and lounging at the pool, many actually envied our lives and wanted to join in. We sang as we worked, our voices harmonizing, rather like a von Trapp family in painters’ caps.

Throughout the book, the reader joins with us as we tumble into trouble but get out of it with a song and a prayer. Brimming with humor, this memoir shows you can create a family that is, as a contractor once said of our work, built for the ages. Many Hands Make Light Work is a lighthearted and winsome memoir of a Heartland childhood unlike any other.