The above photograph was taken in early August of 1933. The woman on the left is my father’s mother, Virginia. She is posing with her friend Marian Cunningham. They are in Colorado.
That year, America was fully and firmly in the grip of the Great Depression. Jobs and, by extension, money were very hard to come by. Virginia’s husband was working in New Jersey and their only child, my father, was living with Virginia’s parents in Atlanta. Virginia was in Colorado simply because that’s where her job was. This situation was not uncommon in America in 1933.
While researching the company my grandmother worked for in Colorado, I stumbled across newspaper accounts of a sensational crime in New York City that Virginia and her husband and her parents would have undoubtedly been following that August. It was in all the papers.
Continue reading “A Murder in Queens”