ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In addition to the people you'll meet in these pages, there are others who helped make this book possible, but whose stories are not told here. On that account, I'd like to extend thanks and gratitude to the friends and co-workers who helped me find just the right pictures among boxes of family photographs; who checked dates, facts, and references from old documents; and who questioned easy assumptions with hard questions. Thanks, then, to my longest-tenured assistant and long-time friend of our family, Bonnie Clanin, and to Lynn Culp, Erica MacDonald, Ryan Rippel, Jeremy Derfner, Jennifer Masters, and Jeannette Yim.

And thanks to Jim Braman who kept alive stories about the people and events that touched our lives in the 1930s. Jim is an engaging storyteller, and someone I've had the honor to call “friend” these last seventy-five years.

And thanks to Monica Harrington, a communications expert who was a champion of this book before it became one, and who has the experience and skill to help introduce the finished work to readers.

Thanks to Mary Ann Mackin who helped me envision a book for a broader audience while I was writing one first intended only for my children, and who helped craft a coherent whole from hundreds of individual stories. And also to Tom McCarthy for his editorial support.

Thanks to Andrew Wylie and Scott Moyers, both of the Wylie Agency, who read a scant dozen pages or so and, on the basis of that glimpse, were able to imagine the next two hundred. And thanks to Roger Scholl, a Doubleday Publishing Group senior editor charged with turning a manuscript into a book.

And, finally, and most important of all, continuous thanks and gratitude to my family for their support and encouragement. To my wife, Mimi, and to my children, Kristi, Trey, and Libby, who reviewed drafts and offered suggestions in matters where my memory had not served me well enough.

Thanks to all of you for showing up.