Fred McTaggart

I spent the first 12 years of my life in Pawnee, IL, a small rural town 18 miles south of Springfield. Most of my relatives were farmers, and some still do toil the soil in Sangamon County. My parents lost their farm during the Great Depression and moved into Pawnee during the mid-1930s. After years of searching, my father got a job as a car inspector for the Central Illinois and Midland (C&IM) Railroad and, after a massive layoff at that facility, took a job with the Illinois Terminal Railroad in Decatir. Illinois. It was there that I lived from age 12 until age 22, working at the Decatur Herald and Review Sports Department from 1956 until I completed an M.A. in English at the University of Illinois.

I was a full-time instructor of English at the University of Missouri from 1962 to 1964, then worked for three years as a community/membership relations representative for Region 5 on the UAW International Union. From 1967 until 1973, I was at the University of Iowa, teaching English again and earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore. After a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Newberry Library's Center for the History of the American Indian, I took a job as assistant professor of English at Western Michigan University. My first book, a narrative of my experiences with the Mesquakie Indians of Tama, Iowa as I was doing my Ph.D. dissertation, was publ;ished by Houghton Mifflin (1976) and University of Oklahoma Press (1982). Later, while working as a free-lance writer in Kalamazoo, I wrote Kalamazoo County: Where Quality Is a Way of Life, published by Windsor Press.

My self published book, Sangamon Soil: A Family History and Memoir, is a cultural history of the rural Midwest centered around the experiences of my family as they came from various parts of the country and world to settle on farms in Sangamon County.