Terry Allen Degner

My Brave Little Man: a Memoir Terry Allen Degner

When a very young boy and his siblings, their family challenged by deprivations imposed by an abusive and neglectful father, are abandoned to an orphanage by an intellectually disabled mother, the boy responds with amazing resourcefulness and bravery. My Brave Little Man meticulously unveils the growth of a creative and distinctive personality-from the inside out-as he overcomes a series of adversities. This memoir, a true story that had to be told, is the clear, unique voice of a survivor of the kind of childhood that is usually the undoing of less hardy souls. With novelistic flair and impressive detail, the author chronicles his first eight years in a rarely visited slice of the country.

In 1950, a doctor in Duluth, Minnesota, wrote in his medical file that a four-year old boy had been admitted to St. Mary's hospital as a "rather severe behavior problem." "This is," the doctor notes, "a broken home and the mother-child relationship is not good." That boy is the author. He had been shuffled from one nesting arrangement to another for all of his short life. First, he had lived with his grandparents on their rustic farmstead near Cook, Minnesota, then with his intellectually disabled mother and a mostly absent alcoholic father, and finally with a boorish relative. In spite of a dysfunctional family life, he had been relatively happy. The real problems started when the author's mother dropped him and his two younger siblings off at an orphanage. A week later, they ran away to find their mother, and he ended up at the hospital in a straight jacket. Thus began the author's journey of triumph over multiple misfortunes. Eight years later, while lying on the banks of a river on his adoptive parents' farm and inspired by the many Dickens novels he had read, the author promised God he would share his story with the world. My Brave Little Man is the fulfillment of that promise.