Tell me a Story When You were Little: A Memoir that Teaches Discipline

THE STORY DEDICATED TO Stephen J. Warnock’s 9 grandchildren, revolves around a family that lived at Mt. Caroll in Illinois. Stephen’s father taught vocational agriculture at the Community High School. His work with the Smith-Hughes program of the federal government required him to connect much with the local farmers where the students lived. Set some several decades ago, most of the students participated in the FFA or Future Farmers of America. The father toured the country and all the back roads of the remotest parts, bringing with him his children as their age would allow. They, therefore, learned much from such exposure.

Writing his memoir by the seasons and their cycle, Stephen details how they were brought up as a professional farming family.  He had 4 brothers and they formed their own Warnock Nature Club. Learning nature together with discipline, in conducting their meetings, they used Robert’s Rules of Order.

The boys learned much about flowers, trees, birds, animals and were required to identify the species and label the parts correctly. The family kept encyclopedic references that the boys consulted, and identified the species they found depending on the behavior they observed. For example, if one found a bird he didn’t know about, he would stay at a distance and observe it for characteristics. Upon going home, he would look up references for identification. Then he would draw the parts and label them as close to reality as possible. The family had a lot of excursions to nature together.

At home, the little brothers each had assignments in feeding animals and cleaning their places. They observed strict discipline as in adhering to exact time of feeding and milking the animals every day before school, when they go home for lunch, and after school.

The story tells much about the values of parents bringing up children in the most proper way, letting them experience work and have a sense of responsibility even while very young. Here’s an excerpt from Stephen’s account -

When we moved to the farm, the pasture and the fields were infested with weeds. Dad worked hard to bring them under control, and as we grew older, he mobilized our help. He assigned us each a weed for which we were responsible and granted us the title of commissioner. Every time we saw one of these weeds, we were to destroy it. I was the Mullen Commissioner and took the job seriously. As time went by, I became rather fond of the Mullen Plant and hated to destroy it, as it did have some enduring characteristics. The ploy of making us commissioners worked because gradually we reduced the weed population in our pasture.

The common Mullen (See image left) may not look like weeds to others, but to farmers, they are a problem.

The book is suggestive of how government can help strengthen its agricultural sector and how it can help citizens by way of employing them in conservation projects. Most of all, for the ordinary reader, the book showcases how children should be formed to become useful citizens.

The writing? It is cramped and takes on the repetitive SVO pattern such that reading becomes monotonous. Subject-verb-object. Subject-verb-object. Subject-verb-object. Rarely does it shift from this pattern. When it does, it goes back again to the SVO pattern.

In some Filipino cultures, storytelling is used purposely to let children get bored and eventually fall asleep, such that there is really no plot, no logical direction of the story. But not so with this book. It is dedicated to the 9 grandchildren of the author who incidentally found no need for literary complexity such as varying sentence patterns. But the memoir is more of a piece to be read - not simply heard.

The book also exhibits many of those superfluous elements that are advised against in contemporary writing. For example, you don’t begin with, My name is so and so, but the author writing in 2002, does exactly it! The book opens to, “My name is Stephen J. Warnock.” There's still the need to adopt effective writing principles since readership would likely expand to public – not just the grandchildren. Authors owe readers that much.

To appreciate the story, one can just skip reading the long descriptions of terrain and follow the action where it goes. If one is observant enough, the author actually has a ribbon somewhere where he virtually neatly ties the beginning to the end and the book can be appreciated as having used some literary device. Where is that?

Somewhere in his earlier chapters, Stephen J. Warnock mentions about a great horned owl making his mating call: Oot, oot, too, woo, hoo, hoo. That is the promise of spring coming, the child narrator said. If you can ignore the long descriptions by the chapters, you can spot his owl hooting and simply begin from there. Then as the last chapter ends, after everyone and everything has been blasted cold by the outgoing winter, there comes again the mating call of a great horned owl, oot, oot, too, woo, hoo, hoo. That is the promise of spring coming, and another cycle begins – winter, spring, summer, fall – he wrote.