ABSTRACT
My recollections of childhood are of feeling highly valued; I suspect I was indulged. At my birth on November 18, 1924, Mother was 38, Father was 48, and they had been married over 13 years. My only living grandparent, my maternal grandmother, had recently moved to my parents’ house. She was in ill health and died within a year. Mother’s niece Helen, almost 14, was the other family mem ber. Her mother died when Helen was 7, and my parents reared her from that time as their daughter. She was strongly attached to me and often took me along on her activities. With my arrival, a nurse maid was added to the household because Mother was manager of what for that day was a supermarket. It was part of a chain head quartered in Boston, and Mother made frequent trips there to at tend meetings.
