Did I Ever Tell You?

Did I Ever Tell You? is a non-fictional collection of essays written by Margaret "Peggy" Shields Hinde specifically for her then seven-year-old granddaughter, Amanda Margaret Czerniak, in 1992. It is an amusing and poignant account of what life was like as a young child growing up in the Depression years of the 1930s in Philadelphia.


She recalls the happiness and the losses she experienced with such short stories as Did I Ever Tell You About My Street?, Did I Ever Tell You About My School?, Did I Ever Tell You About My First Lie?, and Did I Ever Tell You About The First Boy Who Loved Me?, just to name a few. She concludes her essays with the end of her elementary school years, before she sets off for junior high school and enters young womanhood.


Although Peggy Hinde, born in 1925, was a prime time member of what Tom Brokaw has since labeled 'The Greatest Generation,' her recollections are timeless and serve for subsequent generations of parents and grandparents to be inspired to record their life experiences for their children and grandchildren. After all, the past teaches us how to deal with the present and the future.


Peggy Hinde died in June 2003 at the age of seventy-eight, having experienced a wonderful life with no regrets whatsoever. Did I Ever Tell You?, therefore, is published posthumously and is dedicated to her granddaughter, Amanda, upon her marriage to Byron in April 2010.