Aileen and Roy

<i>Aileen and Roy</i> is the story of the author's parents Roy Cochran who rosefrom a sod house on a hard-scrabble farm in western Nebraska to the statehouse in Lincoln as governor and his wife Aileen Gantt Cochran a pioneerteacher and superintendent of schools in the Nebraska sand hills. RoyCochran's three terms as governor (1935-41) covered the most critical yearsin the history of the West when the population was ravaged by drought andthe Great Depression and new state-federal programs-social security theWPA-were coming into being. Aileen Gantt grew up in the small town ofNorth Platte at the end of the 19th century and supported her widowedmother and siblings as a teacher and county school superintendent. Theirstory drawn from unpublished memoirs and family letters provides a uniqueand intimate picture of life in a small western town around the turn of thecentury. It is also the story of two remarkable people who faced the challengeof governing in a time of despair and change.