Publisher's Synopsis
We children, nieces, and nephews of Shirley Webber have read the memoirs that she sent us. But we didn't know the broad perspective we would find in the files that she left after her death. Her memoirs, along with those of her brother Vernon Irish and the letters she wrote in the last few decades of her life, paint a picture of one particular journey through the twentieth century. The siblings' recollections of their Irish and Blume grandparents bring us back to the harsh realities of old Yankee rural and immigrant urban life around the turn of the last century. There is much vivid detail and good humor in the descriptions of the middle-class neighborhood of their childhood Chicago home in the twenties and Great Depression. The relationship between their spirited mother, raising a large family as the wife of a successful doctor who was also a "domestic tyrant," makes for fascinating psycho-logical reading. Throughout the memoirs and into the letters, we see Shirley ever noting and responding to the currents around her: the simple pleasures of her childhood - laced with outrage at her father's injustice, her exposure to the leftist politics of her activist neighbors and the University of Chicago, her work in Social Services and the view of "fairness" it brought out in her, her marriage and child-rearing in fulfillment of the "American dream." Finally, we see a mind seeking spiritual discovery, giving advice, pursuing expertise - and perfection - in a wide variety of endeavors, grappling, at times, with the ambivalence of her generation of women about her role as a wife supporting her husband's upward mobility, experiencing the sorrows of life and losses of age, and offering consolation. What she wrote to a friend could be applied to her: Hers was "a life beautifully lived." "Oh, your tales are wonderful! Scratching the chickenpox, varnishing the floor and the chair leg, etc. I burst out laughing so many times. . . You do write so very well . . . and have rich and wonderful things to relate. Just the neighborhood stories themselves are so unique and full of flavor. You could do a Chicago neighborhood story using vignettes and character portrayals. I can't think of a book like that." -Juin Whipple Foresman, writing to Shirley after reading her memoirs
