A ten-year old Wisconsin farm girl watches her favorite cow Rosie being loaded on a truck and taken to slaughter. She vows never to be a farmer or a farmer’s wife. She is a fourth generation of German pioneer settlers in North Central Wisconsin. Despite having an often-idyllic childhood, by the 1950s, the country’s post-war optimism fed teenage Block’s hope of going to college to escape her barricaded and often small-minded world of farm, small community, and church.

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