Flight of the Robin: Fourteen women's compelling correspondence from WWII to the present

NEW RELEASE! March 2025

328 Pages

Paperback

Authors: Vivian Douglas Smith, Debi Smith Jaworek

Vibrant, historic letters exchanged between fourteen Ohio college coeds beginning in 1947 – a chronicle of their lives and the times in which they lived spanning three quarters of a century. The Flight of the Robin has an amazing multi-generational scope of the decades it covers, particularly the gradual, subtle, and hard-fought evolutions of women’s roles, identities, and opportunities in post WWII America.

One moment for which these friends shall be forever grateful happened in a dorm room in 1947, where a group of them had congregated. They were, of course, all women, certainly no men in the dorm without adequate supervision, and many of the men still serving in the military. Somebody – none of them can remember who – said, “Why don’t we start a round robin letter when we graduate?” This off-the-cuff suggestion spawned a letter that circulates from 1947 to the year Vivian Douglas Smith finished putting together this book. The fourteen of the coeds who began it in the early years had become thirteen, all over 90 years of age, all – more or less – still vertical and ventilating.

All of Vivian's letters were in a three-ring notebook, growing bulkier by the year. Together, they are a walk through the latter half of the twentieth century and on into this one. They watched the world change together, their roles as women evolve, and they supported each other along the way. They shared a bond that they would not have imagined when they began writing the letters.