Author Description

A grandmother recalls for her children and grandchildren the life she led as a young girl in a New York family made up of arrivals from Nova Scotia. Born to a Wall Street broker during the prosperous 1920s, Catherine Mathews recounts how her life changed when the stock market crashed in 1929, bringing on hard times for her family and necessitating a long series of moves from town to town, state to state. "We were part of a new down-and-out middle class," Mathews recounts, "on the move, looking for work, looking for a cheaper place to live." Then her brother was caught up in World War II, just as her father had been in World War I. With warmth and wit, Mathews offers up the details of daily life in those bygone days to give readers a flavor of what growing up was like alongside the momentous events of the first half of the Twentieth Century.