Dark Bread and Dancing: The Diaries of Sue Rawson

Sue was born when Teddy Roosevelt was President, raised in the brand new town of Pettibone in the North Dakota prairie. She honeymooned in the Black Hills of South Dakota when Mount Rushmore was just a mountain. She raised five children, three of them born during the Depression. She made music, she traveled, she taught. She knew about love and loss, about disappointment, delight and despair. Along the way she discovered that life can hold both meaning and purpose. Sue lived one hundred years. Through much of it she recorded in ordinary spiral notebooks the minutia of her days and thoughts – the price of gas, what she thought of The Feminine Mystique and almost always what they had for supper. Her daughter Rosemary has distilled them down to a charming, personal, sometimes funny portrait of a life well lived. In many ways Sue’s life is unremarkable. In others it is the story of every woman who evolved through the amazing history of the Twentieth Century.