My First 87 Years

Privately Published [Published Date: 2002]. Hardcover, 384 pp. Very good in very good dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with silver lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and light creasing along edges. light overall scuffing to covers as well. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Black and white illustrations with some in color. [From front jacket flap] In Jane Brown's early 20th century Panama Canal Zone childhood, men worked, women ran the house, trained the children, and undertook to run projects improving the community. After graduation from Smith College, she envisioned a similar life, married, and at age of twenty-four was ready to have children, when the traumatic death of her husband shattered plans for what she perceived as a desirable, conventional future.Two years later, she married a Foreign Service officer assigned to the American Embassy in Peking. She needed to learn Chinese, so she got a teacher and realized that to be an intelligent Foreign Service wife, she needed to take the course in Chinese art and civilization being offered by a distinguished scholar. Later, a friend who was painting a banker's portrait, handed her a brush and paints. These two unplanned opportunities absorbed her for the next fifty years. Her husband's early retirement from the Foreign Service due to Joseph McCarthy's unreal assumptions caused a move to California where she and a handful of others founded the Society for Asian Art, whose members worked for ten years to obtain the Brundage collection, now a large part of the Asian Art Museum. After her husband died of cancer, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree at age fifty-two, which resulted in an unexpected offer to teach. A chance dinner turned into a twenty-five year happy third marriage. A fellow painter's invitation Io join a writing class turned into this book. At 87, she feels she has been very lucky.…