The other side of the family...

I want to give some blog space to my other grandmother, especially because my mother's mother lived with the Meltons in Weston, Connecticut from 1939 until we moved to Greenwich in 1954.

The McClure's were Yankees, and my father used to joke that he was twenty-one before he knew "damnyankee" wasn't one word. He may have been joking, but he was in some way acknowledging the Melton's rural Southern roots.  The McClures were well-educated, urbane Midwesterners. My grandmother was a writer who had published five novels. Grandfather was trained as a medical doctor, but he decided the budding auto industry was more to his liking.  Later he switched  to a third career in finance—unfortunately just before the Great Depression.

When she was widowed in 1939, my grandmother McClure moved into a wing of the Melton house they'd built especially for her.  My father truly loved "Nellie," as he called her, and the extended family lived in happy symbiosis until the Meltons downsized in the mid-1950s. Nana McClure then bought a house with her sister, Gladys Sibley, in Westport, where they lived happily for ten years.