In addition to losing her father at age ten, having to drop out of high school to go to work to help raise her three younger sisters, my grandmother Margie suffered an even more wrenching blow when she was pregnant with her second child. Her mother Matilda had developed cancer and pregnant Margie took my then 2 year old mother with her, home to Louisville, to help care for her dying mother. Her sisters Georgia May and Matilda were both working as telephone operators and her youngest sister Esther was just 14 and still in high school, so there was no other family member available to stay with  my great-grandma. In order to keep her little one quiet and entertained, Margie taught my mom to recite all four verses of the poem by James Whitcomb Wiley called "Little Orphant Annie." Mom would recite this for her grandma Matilda who died a few months later. Daughter Peggy was born soon thereafter and the following year mom and Peggy both contracted whooping cough; they fortunately survived the illness. Even more frightening at age ten mom caught rheumatic fever for which she was placed in the Kosair Children's Hospital, in a wheelchair, for a year. Margie was extremely over-protective of her oldest daughter especially during the polio epidemics of the time. The difficulties didn't end when mom was grown and married. About 1959 mom was hospitalized for a few weeks with bacterial endocarditis and this illness left her so weak she was unable to care for us kids. Two year old David went to live with Dad's mom, Leora Mae and Virginia and I went to live with Margie and Wallace. We finished up the spring term and spent the summer with our grandparents as it happened they lived across the street from Clark Elementary school. At age 49 after having two more sons, mom had a heart attack and needed a pacemaker implant. Margie was 72 by then and her beloved husband was in the early stages of Alzheimers' disease. She kept Wallace at home for over 10 years until she could no longer care for him. It literally killed Margie to put Wallace in a nursing home; she spent all day every day at his bedside until she was diagnosed with bone cancer. Margie was admitted to the same nursing home and rapidly declined. She died a few months before her husband of 57 years. Margie certainly was a major worrywort, but after all she had some major worries in her life.