Farmed Out in Ontonagon County

"You're the man of the house now, Pat."

After learning that a 46-year-old father had dropped dead at the dinner table, a neighbor put his hand on the boy's seven-year-old shoulder and outlined the course of his future. From that moment on, heavy burdens fell on those skinny shoulders.

In 1947, Pat's distraught mother brought her children to her family's rural Finnish homestead in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Pat labored to find ways to support them, but his chronically ill mother had to farm her children out to live with others and work for room and board. When she remarried, they moved to a hardscrabble farm under the critical scrutiny of an abusive stepfather. The day the stepfather stabbed a pitchfork into Pat's back, the boy left, never to return.

Pat struggled for everything he needed, including wrangling with school officials to enter high school without parental permission. To support himself, he found work in the unlikeliest of places - a rough-and-ready carnival, manure piles, and oat fields where he harvested rocks and weeds.

Despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Pat excelled academically and was elected student council president.

And then one day the police arrived at school, handcuffed him and hauled him to court for a crime he didn't commit.

Times were very different in postwar America- or perhaps not. Farmed Out in Ontonagon County chronicles the boy's journey of hard knocks, hard work, persistence, forgiveness, and a strong belief in the Almighty.

THE BOY PREVAILED.