sons had already graduated and was off to college, she began to see that her life would never change, and her dreams would never come to pass, if she didn't at least earn the diploma that was denied to her as a teenager. She began enrolling in night school GED courses at Grant Union High, and life became a shuttle from her day job to her night school.

There we were, the two of us, me in my first weeks at the new school, and she with her three nights a week in the classroom, endless homework assignments and daily grind at McClellan.

I had gotten so adjusted to the latchkey life, I hardly noticed the change. The same old cycle returned: being set upon by bullies, one or two of whom I actually befriended, neglecting my homework, reading books that were not on the school's reading list — I remember beginning David Copperfield about this time — and perusing the Home and High School Encyclopedia set my mother purchased volume by volume to replace the Childcraft books from the Rio Linda days.

Television was almost non-existent for me at this time because, being apartment dwellers, we no longer had access to a rooftop antenna and were using rabbit ears to pull in the black-and-white signal from two networks, CBS and NBC.

1960 was an election year, and I remember the political conventions, which for some reason I found fascinating. I think my mother tuned in because she wanted to hear Eleanor Roosevelt's speech, being an admirer of the former first lady and especially her husband FDR, still an icon to my mother's generation after two decades. Once the speech was over, though, we seldom turned the TV off during the convention.

As much as she admired Mrs. Roosevelt, my mother liked Ike and would have preferred the working class Nixon over the elite Kennedy, whom she considered a spoiled, pampered playboy. I really had no preference at the time, so absorbed in my reading and my new school that the world beyond that to me was nothing more than a just another current event. I remember my mother's disappointment in the election's outcome and her firm conviction that "Joe Kennedy bought this election."