Memories Are Like Clouds

About the Book

Memories Are Like Clouds, a touching memoir, is a fond remembrance of growing up when life seemed simple.

Gliding on the porch swing while listening to their mother’s stories of her youth, counting dead goldfish at the five-and-ten cent store, playing pick-up baseball games down near the dump, collecting Ralph Kiner and Stan Musial baseball cards, helping Daddy at his candy business, devouring Sgt. Rock comic books, and running numbers for the neighborhood bookie in a housedress filled Kenny and Diana’s innocent days in East Vandergrift, Pennsylvania.

The author weaves together the universal experiences shared with millions of other baby boomers such as that first television set, iceboxes, “Amos ‘n Andy,” hula hoops, and the milk man and the individual memories specific to this family (the rag man and his tired old horse, the Polish Barber’s dirty adventure magazines, and shotgun weddings at the Slovak Club).

This coming-of-age tale, filled with hope and old-fashioned values, will delight and engage and then, long afterward, persist in memory.

About the Author

Diana Dell was born in 1946 in East Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, where she grew up, and graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in journalism. She worked as a journalist on a newspaper and also taught second and seventh grade classes. In 1970, after her brother Kenny was killed in the Mekong Delta, she went to Vietnam as a civilian with USO. There she was a program director in Cam Ranh Bay and director of public relations in Saigon, where she hosted "USO Showtime," a daily program on American Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN) radio. In addition, she set up "Feed the Children" programs in orphanages, coordinated programs and publicity for the 14 centers in-country, and escorted USO shows and visiting celebrities around Vietnam--from the Delta to the DMZ. Upon leaving Vietnam, following the Easter Offensive in 1972, she worked in Europe for a year as publicity director at the Frankfurt USO and two years as a freelance writer and photographer in Athens and Madrid. After owning an advertising agency in Massachusetts for 10 years, she taught Vietnam War history and journalism classes at Tampa College. Diana divides her writing time between Boston and Clearwater, Florida. She is also the author of Memories Are Like Clouds, a childhood memoir set in the 1950s.