We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
CENTER of attraction these days in the Scott household is young Mike who seems to be built just as sturdily as his famous father.
are helping Vera forget the dreariness, fright and hunger that were part of her childhood
But she knew that day-dreaming wasn't enough, ^hen she was only 11 she started to work in the hotel dining room with her mother. She thought it would be wonderful to wait on tables, because of the tips. But she was so shy she couldn't talk to the customers, so she helped out by cleaning off the tables instead.
Because she had been so completely on her own ever since she was seven, Vera developed a strength within herself.
"Poverty and loneliness can be awful," she says, "but I gained a lot of security within myself because of it I knew, after a while, that no matter what happened I could take care of myself. Nothing would ever frighten me again because I could find the solution within myserf."
She did when she was 14. Her mother's work as manager of the hotel's coffee shop began to take her on travels, so it was decided that Vera would live with her grandmother in Wichita, Kansas.
VERA, who'd never learned how to make friends in her own home, found it even more terrifying being thrust into a new town. She retreated more and more into a shell, and was made ever more miserable because she and her grandmother didn t see eye-to-eye.
"We were two generations apart," Vera says. "We were like strangers, and we couldn't live together."
When Vera discovered that her grandmother could rent her room to a paying boarder, the situation became in
tolerable and Vera moved out. Instead of weeping over her unwanted position, she did something about it She went to the Western Union offices, and by fibbing about her age, got a job working after school until midnight. Where to live? She talked the local "Y" into giving her a room and meals in exchange for working in the cafeteria at breakfast
"I didn't want to give up school," she says. "I knew how important it was to a girl like myself. I had to have the schooling so that I could get a better job for myself later on. I had to think of making a living, so I took up typing and bookkeeping."
For three years she continued in a rigorous groove, getting up at 5:30 to work at the Y, going to school until 3, then hopping a bus and working until midnight.
There was no time for boy friends or fun, no time for anything but work and school.
Then suddenly, the picture changed. Ironically, although she'd never been able to attend a school dance, she was named one of the queens of the Senior Prom.
This started her on a string. of beauty contests which ended by her being sent to Atlantic City as "Miss Kansas."
But she wasn't taking any of her good luck for granted. She asked for a leave of absence from her Western Union job. "Ill need it when I come back," she told her boss.
"T had no talent," she recalls. "I couldn't sing or dance or entertain like the others. I went because it was a free trip and I'd never had a trip like that before."
continued on page 64
57