Life Magazine, 1972

I had a lot of fun working on this project. My mom and I went to Half-Price Books and looked at the old magazsine racks. She picked up this issue with Liz Taylor on the cover and laughed. She said she remembered it. My mother has always idolized Elizabeth Taylor ever since she was a kid. I think this is because my grandmother loved her too. They loved her violet eyes and her jewelry. She's also pretty funny in her interviews.

When my mother looked at the date on the magazine she said it was the date she graduated from high school. She then began to tell me that my grandfather didn't want her to go to college at Texas Weslyan. He wanted her to go to secretarial school. This might be appalling to most people, but my grandfather only went to school until seventh grade. He was in a family of thirteen and the son of a sharecropper. They were so poor that they couldn't afford shoes. The kids at school would tease him because he didn't have shoes and being red-headed with buck-teeth didn't help much, either.

In the end, my mother was the first to graduate from college and she worked three jobs to pay her own way.