Smackers and Tootsie Toasters

About the Book

Born in the days of the Great Depression, the Lindberg kidnapping, Amelia Earhart, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; growing up in the World War II years with rationing, air-raid drills, war bonds and paper drives; graduating from college in the fifties; marrying; raising a family with all of its ups and downs; and retiring following a forty-year teaching career provided a wealth of memories presented in this book as a collection of vignettes and photographs. Using writing as a way of dealing with her husband’s Alzheimer’s, the author also shares her feelings in free verse as well as prose. A quote from the author: “SMACKERS and TOOTSIE TOASTERS are long ago words from childhood. ‘Gimme a smacker,’ Daddy would say as he scooped me up in his arms, and I’d plant a kiss on his cheek. Slipping cozy warm bedroom slippers on my feet, Mom called them my ‘tootsie toasters’. Precious memories!”

About the Author

Ann Dahl Luce was born in Jamestown, New York to second generation Swedish parents at the height of the Great Depression. She is a graduate of State University of New York at Fredonia earning a Batchelor of Science in Education degree, and through the years has participated in numerous post-graduate courses of interest and value as enhancements to her long and varied career as an elementary school teacher. Married, with a daughter and two sons, she lives in the house in East Randolph, NY that she and her husband built in the late fifties. Now retired, she enjoys her two granddaughters, travel, learning about American Indian culture, writing, and loves people. She calls writing great fun as well as therapy for coping with the death of a son, her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease, and life in general.