In the year 1926, a baby was born who would come to be known as Mom.  She was given a name that would be forever misspelled and mispronounced…Le Ella Belle.  This was my mother.  She was raised outside a small Nebraska town on a farm with her mom, dad, sister, and brother.  She was the oldest of the three children.  And it wasn’t long before she had sailed through her school lessons and become the teacher herself.

She started teaching school in a one-room schoolhouse because being a schoolteacher was of course a proper job for a woman.  As for my mother, she had bigger dreams.  She wanted to become a nurse.  As the story goes, she was met with resistance from her father.  He had very strong feelings about how “nice girls” would never go into a profession like that and do the things that nurses would have to do.  But my mom had a mind of her own.  And when she got something in her head it was...