Mary Grimes

Aileen and Roy: Up from the Sand Hills to the State House Mary Grimes

Aileen and Roy is the story of the author?s parents, Roy Cochran, who rose from a sod house on a hard-scrabble farm in western Nebraska to the state house in Lincoln as governor, and his wife, Aileen Gantt Cochran, a pioneer teacher and superintendent of schools in the Nebraska sand hills. Roy Cochran?s three terms as governor (1935-41) covered the most critical years in the history of the West, when the population was ravaged by drought and the Great Depression and new state-federal programs?social security, the WPA?were coming into being. Aileen Gantt grew up in the small town of North Platte at the end of the 19th century and supported her widowed mother and siblings as a teacher and county school superintendent. Their story, drawn from unpublished memoirs and family letters, provides a unique and intimate picture of life in a small western town around the turn of the century. It is also the story of two remarkable people who faced the challenge of governing in a time of despair and change.