When I set about writing this manuscript I knew I wanted it to be a photograph album of sorts, word pictures of people and places that were a part of my life. Some of the memories are humorous, other so painful that even now they are difficult to describe, but they are as true to life as the passing of time and the softening of a sharply focused lens permits them to be. This is my story as a child growing up poor during the Great Depression and our family's struggle to survive during the most dramatic upheaval in modern American history, .