The generation that toiled through the Great Depression and won 
the Second World War has become known as "the greatest 
generation." But not all of them qualified for that exaggerated 
epithet in the eyes of their own children.

    In this tender but unsparing memoir, Mary Cimarolli remembers 
a world in which the family home was lost to foreclosure, her 
father made his way by bootlegging, and school was a haven in 
which to hide from her brother’s teasing. Her stories are about 
struggle and survival, making do and overcoming, and, ultimately, 
reconciliation.

    From her perspective as a child, she describes the cotton stamps 
and other programs of the New Deal, the yellow-dog Democrat 
politics and racism of East Texas, and the religious revivals and 
Old Settlers reunions that gave a break from working in the cotton 
patch. The colorful colloquialisms of rural East Texas that dot the 
manuscript help express both the traditionalism of the region and 
its changes under the impact of modernization, electrification, and 
the coming of war.

    Along with these regional and national trends, Cimarolli 
skillfully interweaves the personal: conflict between her parents, 
the death of her brother a few days before his sixteenth birthday, 
and her own inner tensions.

_________________________________________________________

MARY CIMAROLLI is a retired professor of English at Richland 
College, a community college in the Dallas area.


Number Four: Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, sponsored by 
Texas A&M University-Commerce


What people are saying about this book

“In the hands of a lesser writer, such a tale could slip into 
sentimentality, become cloyingly nostalgic. Ms. Cimarolli’s prose
offers none of that. This memoir, then, is far more than a mere 
account of one woman’s life. Blended with the bitter, almost daily 
tragedies and disappointments are the richer tastes of a world that 
had no expectation of hurry, no anxiety about synthetic needs or 
artificial expections. Instead she offers a sampling of the exotic 
flavors of a time and place all too rapidly fading from living memory. 
This volume preserves a large number of those recollections, worth 
reading and keeping so that we never forget that some things of 
value cannot be purchased.”—The Dallas Morning News