Chronicled here are several years in the life of a married woman in her 20s, whose husband's career as a junior executive will involve numerous "transfers", my sister recounted that she moved 10 times in 13 years. These letters find Mary and Ralph Shell in Durham, North Carolina, Dayton, Ohio, Norfolk, Virginia, St. Louis, Millburn, New Jersey, Omaha, Leawood, Kansas, and the Upper East Side of New York. They bring to life a vanished era in which dual-income households were still the exception, even for college-educated couples, and where many of the consumer goods and services one takes for granted in the 21st century were still small luxuries. But change is already in the wind, the 1950s, a decade that my sister considered to be intensely boring, has come to an end, a new and more exciting 1960s are underway with their space race, Kennedy administration, and even greater prosperity.--from the preface by Robert Decker.