"Mother and Dad started dating again after the war, and with Grandma Fred’s coaxing and Mother’s proposal they were married and started a family right away. We three children were born two years apart. So my parents went from the war to domesticity.…

"I grew up in the South but I couldn’t wait to get as far away from that Southern lifestyle as I could get. So, I moved to California, lived there twenty years, flew to Honolulu for ten years. Got as far away as I could get. Then Bob’s business…

"After my dad’s father died from a measles epidemic, his large family of five siblings and his now single mother Frederica lost her farm during the Depression. During the war, Dad’s sisters went to work. The older sister married…

"We descend from one of the largest intact plantations in Georgia: The William Harris Homestead on Highway 11 in Monroe, Georgia. In 1825, my mother’s great grandpa William Harris started the homestead on 500 acres acquired in a treaty with the…

“I was in my teens, my early teens then. And then Mother remarried and took my two older sisters and I into Chicago. But I left school at fifteen, and I like to say that’s when I really started learning. I know school people don’t like me to tell…

“Well the one thing with this letter here also, the whole page is about food. That’s the only thing you were living for, you know. I remember my father saying, looking at a poster in the bakery, 'that’s what bread used to look like.' That was…

“I remember things gradually getting worse. The rules and regulations they became harsher and harsher. And there were all kinds of things you really had to watch out for. And they were starting to take things. There were no more cars. They were even…

“During the war, we only had part-time school. I remember having to go quite a distance to go to a school that was still available, but it had to be shared by other schools that had also been taken over by the Germans. And I believe I went to…

“My earliest memory is the beginning of the war. I remember my 6th birthday that everybody was forgetting about my birthday because the city of Rotterdam was burning. I remember the sky being all orange because of the fires. That’s one of my…

“I can remember Christmas presents. And I probably was 5 or 6 years old. My sister [Carolyn Wallace]. And see [my father] sitting in his recliner. My mother [Mary Wallace] would fix breakfast. And just the four of us sharing Christmas together is…