My First Sixteen Years

About the Book

In a time during the depression when thousands of little girls around the world were wearing Shirley Temple curls and taking dancing lessons, some parents took their ambitions for their children more seriously. They pulled up stakes, and found their way to Hollywood, to a city that was unique in the world, but it wasn't always what they had expected. It was a puzzling place for a child, and not all of the children took to it. The author found it an almost crushing experience, but she found refuge in the most unlikely places.

About the Author

Anelle Kloski has recently retired from a career as a corporation and university librarian. Her years as a working adult were spent among doctors, engineers and architects. But the story she tells is of her very early life, when her parents left the Texas countryside to bring her to Hollywood, to make her a "movie star". She looks back at some famous people she came across, but she feels lucky to have gotten out of Southern California intact, and able to recognize things which were more important to her. She now lives with her husband of more than forty years in a Yellow Pine and Black Oak forest in Northern California, where she gardens and is researching and writing about her early pioneer ancestors.