IMAGINATION -- by Jane Kelley
In this newspaper clipping dated May 5, 1939, my grandmother sits at her desk in front of a typewriter. She is 42 years old. Her fourth novel, Mrs. Pennington , is about to be published. The caption reads: "With the heating pipes above her head in the basement of her Whitefish Bay home, Katharine Carson concentrated on writing a novel of summer days at a Kansas Chautauqua Assembly in her grandmother's times." In 1880, Chautauquas were "a week when the first families of Ottawa, Kansas enjoyed a combined feast of reason, soul, music, patriotism, and society." Those basement heating pipes "lent the feeling of a ship's deck," the reporter said. My grandmother could escape from the demands of two schoolgirls (my mother and her sister), and her mother-in-law, her sister, and her brother-in-law who also sometimes lived with them. It was the Depression Era. Families did what they could to help each other. Hopes were high for this novel, which the publi...
