Grandma's Kitchen

Wanda Gág loved walking to her grandparents’ Minnesota farm as a child. She was delighted to find it virtually unchanged when, as a successful 34-year-old author, she took a side trip during a Midwestern book tour in 1929 to pay a visit. There was the familiar sewing machine, the wall calendar, the newspaper rack. There was the old couch where, she said, “all the Gágs had sat thousands of times.” Newly acclaimed for her 1928 book Millions of Cats, Gág inserted a sleeping cat into the print—perhaps a sign that she, too, was part of this mythic place.