It was mid-summer 1937, a hot day in Bainbridge, Georgia. My mother had returned for the first time in 17 years to the community of her childhood. She had long been through a hard row to hoe period of life. Leaving home in 1920, she went 1,000 miles north to the growing industrial area of northern Ohio. She sent money home to her dying father, and lived on the residue of her wages. She met and married the man who became my father, only to lose him to five years in a sanatorium, and death from tuberculosis in 1929. She held tenaciously to her three children, losing them for a short period, and surviving on her own labors, until she… Read more
