She was born a child of privilege. Her father was rich oilman, her mother a product of the San Antonio social scene. They owned a big house in the posh Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas. Their car had Leopard-skin seat coverings. Her father did well in the oil business, but he tired of the easy success and looked for new challenges, so he started an equity investment business. The year was... 1927. He was much better at predicting wells than markets.

By 1930, the little girl was five and her mother had had enough, so the marriage dissolved. Mother and child returned to San Antonio, but by then their little community had already been devastated by the Depression. Fortunately, the extended family was able to weather the worst of the Depression. Though the affluence was gone, the desire was not, and as appropriate, she was introduced to the San Antonio social world at the age of 16. She made an immediate impression. She was--in a word--beautiful. She could also sing, and was scheduled to appear on a nationally syndicated radio show on December 8, 1941. She never got another chance.

Some of the most eligible men in the area courted her. All officers, of course. They would give her wings, bars, and ribbons as tokens of their affection- tokens that would delight her sons years later. In high school, she had taken secretarial courses, which helped land her a job in the secretarial pool of Gulf Oil in Houston. It was there that she was asked to write a letter to her supervisor's nephew, then serving in the Navy.

Parts 1, 3, 4, Epilogue