Violeta Gladstone was the epitome of beauty and grace. She was born in St. Petersburg, Florida on the eve of the Dust Bowl turned on its head. That’s right; the Dust Bowl was a big problem for agriculture in the late thirties. The rains helped, as did the drought and the floods and that meant crops were not able to be harvested as before and those who couldn’t get out to work or who couldn’t make it work helped out in the labor and delivery fleets. Violeta Gladstone, her father and mother all became part of what we know as the Great Depression as farm workers to support their families.
Violeta grew up in Louisiana in what was still called the White zone. She was part of the American public in those days and everyone knew who she was. She was smart, articulate and very opinionated. She supported her family with a small inheritance from her mother, which enabled them to send three sons to college, one of them to Tulane University.
Her parents died when she was twenty-one and was single and beginning to wonder about love and marriage. She visited San Diego with her sister who was working there and had an older man who signed her over after her marriage. Violeta was twenty-four years old and knew that this man could never be replaced and didn’t love her. At the age of thirty she decided that she was done being a dependent.