Trying to Get it Right This Time, by Mary M. Leue

TRYING TO GET IT RIGHT THIS TIME:
MY REMINISCENCES
by Mary Macomber Leue
From the back cover:

Arriving in North Texas in the midst of a sumnmer-long drought, it felt at first to the young family as though life would never again be bearable. Both the climate and the culture seemed impossibly alien. It was some months before the heat let up, they found new friends, and life began to flow again.

After nine years everyone in the family felt very settled, but Bill continued to be unhappy - and when the call came for him to move to a new teaching job in Albany, NY at the new State University, he accepted it with relief.

One again the family trekked across the country and found a house big enough for everyone. Bill's mother and Bucky, now old and vulnerable, were living with them. The older kids attended Milne School, a lab school run by the University, but Mark and Ellen were stuck with Albany's outmoded and abusive public schools. Ellen finally moved to Milne's junior high school, but Mark spent four pretty dreadful years in grade school &endash; made even harder to bear for everyone by the illness and eventual death of Bill's mother; and Bucky's death following a fall which broke her hip. The international situation was also intensifying, both John and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, the Viet Nam War was escalating, and the draft threatened to drag our three older sons into the army.

The fabric of the marriage between Mary and Bill was beginning to fray badly. The three older boys were away at college. Mary joined The Brothers (a black ghetto men's action group in downtown Albany) for almost three years. Following college, two of the older boys got married, and then Bill, Mary, Ellen and Mark spent a Sabbatical year in Oxford, England, leaving the older ones to their alternative service. Life was beginning to change in many, many ways.


US $10.95 ISBN 1-878115-14-6 Canada $12.95