My Book of Happy Memories

"...I have been married fifteen months, and we have moved fifteen times. Lest our monthly vacations arouse suspicion, let it be quickly known that my husband is not a piker - he is an engineer. Not the nice sane kind who drives a train and always gets back to his starting place, my husband is an engineer-in-the-field, and we have neither starting nor stopping place..."

Joan Getchell Cole was a prolific writer, and recorded every adventure, small and large, that she had while travelling for her husband's work with the Pitometer Company as a Water Works engineer. Growing up in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, spending summers by the water, this nomadic life was new and exciting for her. When they settled and had their three children, Joan continued to write - sometimes entries in her children's baby books, sometimes longer pieces on "Wartime Bedpan Techniques" or "Youth Today" - and she gathered and kept all this writing hoping to put it in the "book of happy memories" she always planned to write.

When Joan passed away suddenly just shy of her 36th birthday, she left her three children and husband with this abundance of words and reflections on the life she had led. When she had grown into a woman, her eldest daughter, Joan Cole Pendergast, collected and kept all she could find of these writings, and compiled them into this book with the help of two of her grandchildren. My Book of Happy Memories is the book Joan never got to finish, and is a labor of love from the daughter who remembers her as a warm and loving woman, full of life.