Winnie Ruth Judd Reminiscences Letter

              1 

	It is realy hard to know where to start, when I first came to Phoenix, and lead up to the tragedy, for I had been quite ill just before coming to Arizona, then go back years preceding it or start back as far as I can remember year by year. 
	I have been married a little over 18 years - half of my life - Each of my predecessors in life - the boy my father raised from infancy and my husband's first wife gave up and committed suicide. 
	It seems I have never in my life as a child or since I married been allowed to be like or do anything others around me were doing. I always wanted terribly to please thos whom I ed. When I was a child I never rebelled against my parents strict narrow religious customs them too intensely, but so much of the time the only relieving consolation in being deprived from doing the things other children around me were doing was to say to myself, Thats all right, my little boy and my little girl can do this and that. Because of that and a determination to not let frightening things I heard in "Revival Meetings" affect me I lived in an imaginary existance continually. Some things became an obsession with me. It wasn't wrong things I wanted to do just to be like other children, my class mates in school. I was never allowed to go to shows or dances, wear jewlery, flowers on my hat, go to Halloween parties. I've never been to a circus or carnival. Every year when I was in the 6th, 7th and 8th grades our classes went together and had a Halloween party at one of the teachers just 2 blocks from our house. I sat on the curb at the corner of the church and could not go because it was a masquerade. Once in a school play, of all girls, I was chosen to be the bride in a mock wedding. I could not, as it 
was mockery of something sacred. 
	My parents were gentle and kind and showered me with affection. Both of my parents had taught school. Our family friends and associates were the religious half of the middle class. My mother was past 39 when I was born. She did not marry until she was 38 and my father was a