On November 1, 1951, the Daily Register-Mail carried a story under the headline “Cully, Husky Enjoy Chat of Earlier Days.” It revealed that Carl Sandburg was back in Galesburg for an unscheduled visit. He was spending time with friends of his childhood and planned to make no appearances at any public events.

 

The newspaper headline referred to Sandburg's childhood nickname “Cully” to identify the famous author and to “Husky,” Oscar F. Larson. He was the commissioner of zoning for the City of Galesburg. The two men met at City Hall and recalled that notorious Sunday afternoon when Sandburg, his brother Martin, Larson, and four other boys went swimming naked in a muddy old pond on East Fifth Street inside the city limits. They were arrested and spend several hours in the city jail.

 

It so happened Larson was celebrating his 74^th birthday anniversary that day. Sandburg was invited to join the festivities at the Larson home in the evening. He stayed overnight at the Larson house. Sandburg's 74^th birthday would occur on January 6, 1952, just a couple of months in the future.

 

Sandburg was in Galesburg to gather material about his early life. He had been working on his autobiography for some time and wished to gather more information from relatives and his friends in the Berrien Street neighborhood of the 1880s and 1890s.

 

He planned to leave on Saturday for California, where he would visit with his older sister Mary Sandburg Johnson. He expected her to provide additional information about the experiences and happenings of their early years. A year later the autobiography was completed.

 

Always the Young Strangers was published in 1953, on his seventy-fifth birthday. After birthday celebrations in New York and Chicago, Sandburg came back to Galesburg to sign copies at the O.T. Johnson Department Store. The book cost $5 ($44.75 in today's money) per copy.

 

The reviews of the autobiography were favorable. The Kirkus Review said “as one gets into the rhythm of the story one feels that here is America, in the pattern of a small town of the midwest, of the people that made its blood and sinew—if not its social register; of instilling in youth the mores, the standards, the ideals, the dreams, the harsh realities that made up life of those who were poor, but did not know it fully.”

 

The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society reviewer Alan Jenkins (pastor of Central Congregational Church) compared the new autobiography to Sandburg's previous books such as the six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. “In this new book he gives us crucial phases in that saga in terms of one Swedish immigrant family.”

 

The Indiana Magazine of History published a lengthy review by Parry E. Stroud.”The picture of Galesburg that Sandburg builds up little by little is an interesting one. It is perhaps the truest and best balanced account yet written of the Midwestern small town, avoiding the distortions of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, and yet possessing some elements of their vision of rawness, violence and sexual hypocrisy and spiritual and cultural poverty.”

 

Penelope Niven, Sandburg's biographer, described the book as a “forthright narrative of his boyhood as a discerningly universal story of coming-of-age.” It can be read by anyone, anywhere, and there will be connections made by the reader.