Live Arrival Guaranteed

A Sandhill Memoir

by Hazel Grange

Hardcover
ISBN 1-883755-08-5 $23.95

Hazel Grange wrote her love story. The love of the land and her commitment to her husband, Wallace. Even the Great Depression could not stop this couple from making there dream come true.

In 1946, Hazel Grange surveyed the wildfowl ponds on Sandhill Game Farm, the unwanted wasteland she and her husband Wallace had bought at tax auction in the 1930s. "I could see this place," she writes "the place where I was now standing, when it was smoking and laced with underground tunnels of fire. Where then was the fishing ground of the birds? Where then were the birds? The smoke had long since cleared away. In its place there was now the smoke of these thousands of wings."

The subtle and graceful prose of Live Arrival Guaranteed. A Sandhill Memoir will catch up the reader in the struggles and quiet victories of the Granges as the young couple over- come bad weather, indifference, and the Great Depression to make their dream of a wildlife farm a reality.

This book is a rare window into rural life during the Depression. And it is a love story, of two people-one totally committed to the crusade and the other totally committed to the crusader.

Though less well known than their Wisconsin contemporaries Aldo LeopoId and Sigurd Olson, Wallace Grange and his wife, Hazel, were an important force in the early wildlife conservation movement. They fought ignorance and indifference - as well as bone-numbing winters and the Great Depression - to establish wiIdlife farms in Door County and Wood County, Wisconsin, based on the theory that wildlife is best preserved through the restoration and management of native habitat.

In her Live Arrival Guaranteed.- A Sandhill Memoir, Hazel recounts her part of their journey, from an obedient and somewhat ambivalent wife to a full partner in her husband's work. Hazel's memoir preserves the more personal side of their struggles and triumphs during the years 1932 to 1946. The book is a rare window into rural life during the Depression. And it is a love story, of two people-one totally committed to the crusade and the other totally committed to the crusader.

Hazel St. Germain Gange was bom in Lynn, Wisconsin, on July 3, 1905. The seventh of eight children and orphaned at a young age, her childhood was extremely difficult. In spite of this, Hazel was an exceptional student. Though she had to work while attending high school in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, Hazel won many scholastic honors, including a statewide essay contest sponsored by the Wisconsin Civil Service Commission in her freshman year. She was graduated from high school in January of 1924, despite contracting a nearly fatal case of scarlet fever in her senior year.

A college education, though deeply desired and deserved, was out of the question for Hazel. She took jobs in factories, restaurants, and her sister's boarding house to earn her living. In 1927 an old nemeses and competitor for class honors at Ladysmith, Wallace Byron Grange, won another prize when Hazel consented to marry him. The couple married on April 12 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Wallace was pursuing natural history studies at the University of Michigan. Olaus and Adolph Murie, who were also studying at Michigan, stood up for the couple at their wedding.

The couple moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where Wallace took a job as Wisconsin's first Superintendent of Game. The couple then moved to Washington, D.C., when Wallace became a co-operative agent for the U.S. Biological Survey (later the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). In 1932 the couple rnoved back to Wisconsin to realize Wallace's dream of opening a wildlife farm. Throughout their married life, the Granges were friends with suck preeminent naturalists as Sigurd Olson, the Muries, and Aldo Leopold. One of Wallace's books, Those of the Forest - self-published by Hazel's Flambeau Publishing Company-won the coveted John Burroughs, Medal in 1955.

Hazel currently lives in Calio, North Dakota. Her autobiography, Live Arrival Guaranteed was accepted for publication by Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc. in the 1950s and by the University of Wisconsin Press in the early 1980s. Neither arrangement suited her, and the work remained unpublished until 1996 when it was published by Lost River Press, Inc, of Boulder Junction, Wisconsin.