Life story, childhood: Hearing stories, I had a privileged childhood.

The Great Depression: I used to see soup lines; people standing around and they would come to the house and beg. A lot of them who came were alcoholics. You would never give them money you always gave them food and half the time it would be thrown away down the street.

Pearl Harbor: I lived in the city, Philadelphia downtown, the old part of the city. Most people moved to the suburbs. When the war came; I can remember Pearl Harbor distinctly, I was playing with a friend on a Sunday afternoon, and we were reading Nancy Drew's. Her mother came and told us that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. So my mother immediately came to get me. During the war all the men were gone, my mother became a warden; one of those people that wore a big tin hat and carried a flashlight. They were afraid that they were going to bomb us. Looking back it was probably legitimate, because there were all these German Submarines off the coast of New Jersey. We had rationings like sugar; I remember we had state stores. You couldn't buy liquor at any drugstores, you'd have to go to a state store and they would allot liquor. But my grandfather was old and he got what the doctor said for medicine. So my mother went to Harrisburg to get that. Anyway we got through the war, but there was legitimate concern because the U-boats were out on the Atlantic side and a friend of my mothers used to go out to a summer place called Sipe Max Lane, New Jersey and she was out walking her dog and she saw a U-boat surface. She came back and told all of her friends and nobody believed her. So there was some concern. But it didn't really affect me like it did my mother, my mother had been really affected by the First World War, because her brother had been killed at the famous battle, at Chateau Thierry, it's rated like Guadalcanal; it was a real bloodbath. Actually when we moved in during the Depression when my grandfather was getting quite old, the house was a shrine to to him- my dead uncle.

Roosevelt: I can remember when Roosevelt died, that was April of 1945 and my grandfather took all the grandchildren down to where they carried him from Warm Springs up by train to Hyde Park. He thought it was important because he was the President. It didn't dawn on me until later, what he had done.

Growing Up: I had a very rich life, we went to the theatre a lot. Philadelphia where I grew up is sort of a try out town and I remember seeing "˜My Fair Lady' before it went to New York and we knew it was going to be a hit it was so wonderful. All the musicals I saw, today I'd like to do those things with my grandchildren, but we can hardly afford it.

Summertime: I went to summer every camp in Maine; it was a horrible camp for me because it was a very competitive camp and I'm not a competitive person. My mother had gone to that camp and we wore the same bloomers that she wore. They had two teams, the moderns and the classics; course I was a classic. It was called Beaver camp and we would go on a train from Philadelphia all by ourselves to Maine. It was one on my first experiences on a train and we slept over night.

College: I went to a collage called Wheelock College which is in Boston Massachusetts. We went to the theatre a lot because Boston was another tryout town. It was a very exiting place to go to school because there was always MIT and lots other schools around.

Post-Graduate: Teachers ended up marrying engineers; I think that people tend to marry people opposite than themselves. My husband is an MIT graduate, I met him briefly but I did not marry him at that time, not until I was 28. Over the years we kept up with each other. I came to California because at the time there was a real need for teachers and I taught down in Sothern California and it was right after the war and people were having children again and the schools were multiplying and I had 40 kids in the morning and 40 kids in the afternoon. I took me almost the whole year to get to know the children's names.

I ended up in San Francisco where I taught and reconnected with my engineer husband and married him.

I want to thank the people at the Elms for being so kind and helpful to me, while I was working on my Girl Scout Silver Award. It truely seems like a wonderful place to live.
Sincerely -Morgan Manter