Word: lees
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They had been married ten years. Big, slow-moving Albert and his neat, pretty wife Josie-Lee, seldom escaped the dawn-to-dark drudgery of farm life. They made little money. But few U.S. couples were happier. They had 52 acres ot land near Memphis, a white cottage, a little herd of dairy cattle. They had four children-a baby girl and three little boys. Both had been raised on the land, both were from plain, churchgoing Methodist families and neither had ever expected life to be different...
Then, when Albert was 40 and Josie-Lee 32, the U.S. went to war. They packed up and went to Memphis, Albert to work in a tire factory, Josie-Lee to a job in an aircraft plant. In two years they saved $3,000. But they lived in a squalid water front boarding house, saw little of each other or their children...
There were strains and irritations in their new life. Albert, who had never touched liquor, began coming home drunk. Then he quit going to church, spent half their savings on a car. Then he took up with an 18-year-old girl war-worker. Josie-Lee went to the tire plant, where she fought her rival with fists and fingernails. She won, but Albert, who had watched, simply walked away with the weeping loser...
Terrified, Josie-Lee went to the other woman again, to plead for her husband. Said the girl: "He's anybody's prey. If I get him, I'll keep him." As stonily, Albert said: "I've worked all my life. It's time I was enjoying myself." He asked Josie-Lee to divorce him. At last she agreed. Last week she was back on the farm with the children. Albert had married the girl, lost his war job, headed somewhere away from Tennessee...
Young and Middle-Aged. With variations major and minor, the same bathetic, woeful, touching story was being enacted last week by thousands of other U.S. husbands & wives. Like Albert and Josie-Lee, many were over 30, many had children, most had been happy before the war. But they had not withstood loneliness or temptation or big money, or the contagious recklessness of the times...