Janine Pfeiffer Knop
Jackie Pfeiffer McGregor
Work hard. Support neighbors, take good care of your livestock, make do by making it yourself and getting it right. Enjoy community dances, school events, and 4-H. Work harder.
Those were parts of life in rural North Dakota in the 1950s, as recounted with love by sisters Jackie Pfeiffer McGregor (formerly of Sitka) and Janine Pfeiffer Knop in their memoir “While the Windmill Watched; a Slice of Rural America in the 1950s.”
The two grew up on a farm near Menoken, North Dakota, where they learned about domestic arts from their skilled mother, school and 4-H, and about raising and showing livestock from their father.
The parents, Jack and Eudora, had started married life in an 1800s house with no indoor plumbing, running water or electricity, their only income at first coming from trading eggs for groceries and selling milk to the creamery. But by working hard, really hard, being self-reliant, and keeping up with land and animal management advances, they and their children – who were farmhands and homemakers from about age 6 – they lived well.
The sisters said they wrote the book to serve “as a time capsule for younger generations to hear firsthand the lived experiences of that time, that place, and those people ....”
Their accounts are mainly wholesome – many exclamation marks! – with hardships noted but not dwelt on.
Reading the sisters’ book is indeed like stepping back into rural North Dakota in those days of the mid 1900s.
In his comments on the book, Bill Thomas, of Prairie Public Broadcasting, said “If your Christmas morning was get up, eat, feed the animals, then open presents, you will find this sisterly memoir a rich remembrance ... Jello salad, the Young Citizens League song, cattle drives, skillfully home-made clothes, and, of course, a blizzard or two. The Pfeiffer sisters evoke it in detail. ...”
Both sisters earned home economics education degrees at North Dakota State University. Jackie McGregor and her husband Bob taught in Sitka for more than 21 years – she also was a member of the New Archangel Dancers and other groups – then retired and left Sitka in 1991. They now live in Colville, Washington.
Janine Knop and her husband, Fred, farm near Atlantic, Iowa, where they breed and raise award-winning sheep, She also has a local and online business, Miss NiNi’s Fine Desserts. Both sisters have two daughters and grandchildren.
The book is available for $16.99 plus shipping through the North Dakota State University Bookstore in Fargo, (701) 231-7761, www.ndsubookstore.com and https://www.whilethewindmillwatched.com/.
–S.M.P.
