“Snicklefritz is a delight.” – W. M. Baillie

Winifred Elizabeth (Manning) Allbeck —“Snicklefritz” as her papa nicknamed her—began her life in the dead of winter when the world was being torn apart by The Great War and devastated by the Spanish Flu, the worst pandemic in recorded history.

Nearly 100 years later, she and her daughter, Ellen Allbeck Maurer, sat down to tell her intimate story—interwoven with grand changes taking place in American rural life. From kerosene lamps and one-room schools to the Great Depression, times changed—and so did her life. School years were followed by long-distance loves—captured through letters presented within the book—and her world expanded to include a happy forty-four-year marriage to Frank, whose tale blends into hers. The secluded life of the farm girl of the early 1900s eventually blossomed into adventures in more than two dozen countries on three continents.

Snicklefritz relates comical anecdotes and tender memories in Allbeck’s own voice, and more than 1,000 photos, sketches, recipes, diaries, and letters illuminate the stories, just as the tales themselves shed light on a world that most of us have only seen in fiction.

“HUMOROUS… TOUCHING…LOVING DETAIL… A DELIGHT!”

“Narrated in loving detail, Snicklefritz rewards readers with countless humorous and touching accounts of ‘the way it used to be’ in rural America.”

W. M. Baillie
Professor Emeritus, Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania
Author or Editor of seven books of Columbia County history

“RICH IN DETAIL…AMUSING…INTIMATE…A DELIGHTFUL STORY!”

“Snicklefritz is an . . . account of how rural America and its people encountered the modern world, seen not through the lens of abstract history or a chronicle of events, but through the eyes and words of a delightful woman who lived through those momentous times.”

Gary Cross
Distinguished Professor of Modern History
Pennsylvania State University