The Soundproof Cab and the Electric Chair

In his memoir of growing up in a religiously conservative but economically progressive community of North Dakota farmers in the 1960s and 70s, Tom Seibold recalls a "peaceful place of kindness and plenty, a sunny island of order and affection and modernity." Within a steady weekly cycle of work invariably concluded by a day of rest and worship, the author's family and their fellow believers pursue both temporal success and eternal salvation. Their local church is at once the center of...
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In his memoir of growing up in a religiously conservative but economically progressive community of North Dakota farmers in the 1960s and 70s, Tom Seibold recalls a "peaceful place of kindness and plenty, a sunny island of order and affection and modernity." Within a steady weekly cycle of work invariably concluded by a day of rest and worship, the author's family and their fellow believers pursue both temporal success and eternal salvation. Their local church is at once the center of their social life, a symbol of their denomination's industrious worldwide mission work, and a place where Bible study, sermons, and traditional hymns teach and inspire. Yet woven in with the promise of the glorious Second Coming they long for are visions of imminent apocalyptic doom, casting shadows of dread and fear.Part personal memoir, part family history, and part cultural history, "The Soundproof Cab and the Electric Chair" lovingly recounts and poetically ponders the author's youthful relationship with his church, his family, his peers, popular culture of the era, and the flowering consumerist mindset of America in the Johnson/Nixon/Carter years.This vivid, lyrical portrait of a rural, ethnic culture quickly transitioning into a conceptually middle-class suburban one describes a home base of "modern living amid grain bins and machine sheds and endless vistas of crops and pasture," a place of family togetherness, religious devotion, recreational adventure, and "imperturbable freedom." It was for Seibold a childhood where "earth, family, labor, and food from familiar hands all formed a social and physical cocoon whose memory still sustains me today."