Rhyme and Reminiscence

About the Book

About the Author

eighth of nine children, and the first of her British immigrant family born in the United States, Joyce Roberts grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where she roamed widely and where she witnessed the second of that city’s great floods. Aspiring to a career as a journalist, but confronted by the realities of the Depression, she seized the one opportunity available to her to obtain a higher education – she signed a contract with the Army to become a nurse in return for the training she would receive. After graduation from nursing school (and relieved by the war’s end of her obligation to the Army), Ms Roberts worked as a pediatric nurse and then as a nurse anesthetist. She interrupted her nursing career to raise three children and to help her husband found and run a successful business; she later returned to nursing, finishing her career as an emergency room nurse. In her sixth decade she turned finally to her avocation, and began to write reminiscences and poems about her family the experiences of her youth. This volume is a collection of her work. At the time of her death in 2002, Joyce Roberts lived and wrote in southern New Jersey.