It's a Girl!

Set in the 1950s in the hills of Bradford, Pennsylvania, It’s A Girl! weaves together the delights and heartaches a girl faces in the family and the town where she grew up. Reading It’s A Girl! will take you back to lingering, tender-hearted memories that everyone knows in childhood. But in Bradford, Pennsylvania, the stories seem to never fade. Is it because Bradford was such a rich town? Oil was discovered in the 1870s but oil derricks were still in back yards in the 1950s. The rich oil producers seemed to give the town a glow and in this glow the trees seemed to be greener and the sky a brighter blue. The ever-present derricks and oil men almost altered a child’s understanding of the world.

The town has huge churches, candy stores, bakeries, barber shops, Dipson’s and Shea’s movie theatres, tailors, chemists, oil producers, a Stock Exchange building called the Option House, restaurants, diners, grocery stores, dry cleaners, pet stores, women’s and men’s fine clothing stores, a Jack and Jill children’s store, a music store, Brauser’s department store, and a fur store, called Tate’s, where men could afford to buy their wives a mink.

It’s A Girl! navigates through a childhood full of nature and neighbors’ back yards right up to a foggy memory of graduation from senior high school.