Raymond Schairer was born in 1922 and grew up on a farm just outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, near the one founded by his great grandfather. Raymond's ancestors were part of the first wave of German immigrants who came to the United States in the late 1820s, and were among the first Germans to settle in Michigan. Raymond worked the eighty acre farm with his father, and later alone, until his retirement in 1990. In his childhood, and young adulthood, all their farming tools, plows, cultivators, manure spreaders, were pulled by horses. By the time Raymond retired, and for several decades before that, he was farming exclusively with tractors and combines. Barefoot Boy is Raymond's recollections of one year of his childhood, the year he was ten years old. Though the way of life he experienced then has long since disappeared, Raymond's stories vividly evoke the richness of that time in the Midwestern United States.