Musings - on the editor's mind

Timothy Eagan wrote a book titled “The Worst Hard Time.” I have been thinking of my mother’s journey and the hard times that shaped her.

My mom, born in 1920, would have been 100 in May. She was nine in 1929 and a child of the Great Depression and, at 20, not old enough to vote for Roosevelt in the 1940 election.

But more than that, she was 100 percent Lithuanian. All four of her grandparents were born in Lithuania. My mom grew up in the ghetto in Brooklyn and didn’t speak English until she started school.

All of that, more than I know or can surmise, went into making her my mother. She went i...