Devon LaHar remembers playing cards with her brother in the back of the family station wagon during their cross-country driving trips from California. She spent 14 summers on a farm in southwestern Michigan and in the Lake Memphremegogg town of Newport, Vermont. When Devon is not reading and editing stories for Growing Up On Memory Lane, you can find her at county fairs sampling preserves and fruit pies.

Karen Glaesemann recalls her mom talking about the hardships of walking a mile to school (uphill both ways) while she scoffed and rolled her eyes. Her three children are doing the same then when she shows them old pictures and tell them about her growing up years in Unionville, population 1,785, in northern, rural Missouri. They love to taste the products of her labor when she makes homemade jam, but they do not understand her overwhelming urge to save fruit that her friends and neighbors let fall to the ground. In addition to editing and doing graphic designs for Growing Up On Memory Lane, Karen designs and maintains the Small Town website and spends her spare time doing puzzles, volunteering at MOPs and creating a small town life for her family.

Growing up, Lyn Adelstein visited Grandma Rose in Oak Bluffs, on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Favorite activities there included checking out scary horseshoe crabs and fiddler crabs in the lagoon, eating lobster rolls at Nancy's crab shack on the pier in Oak Bluffs, jumping the waves at South Beach, and best of all, driving a huge 1949 Chrysler Highlander down a long sandy road to West Chop Lighthouse, at the age of 8. Her father and uncle swore her to secrecy, of course.

Richard Barrett remembers eating soft-shell crab caught off the dock in Gulfport, Mississippi during summer visits with his Grandma Mae. He also loved to camp and fish on Padre Island and drive his International Scout down the beach in Corpus Christi, Texas. Richard is an avid genealogist who has been known to visit local cemeteries while on business trips to photograph relatives' headstones. Richard has completed four books for family and friends: Leaves from Family Trees, a collection of national and international family reminiscences; The Fire of Life, a collection of stories written by Ray Lahar; What a Life! a memoir of Nancy Lahar; and Walk by Faith, a history of Pleasanton Presbyterian Church in northern California.

Go Reading on Memory Lane
in our first collection of stories
Growing Up On Memory Lane.

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Updated: 2.23.05