WOMEN: Mother-of-the-Year

When circuses play little towns in Kansas and go away leaving their 'tanbark rings stamped on the prairie, the town youngsters bring in their ponies and try to duplicate the Daring Feats of Horsemanship they have just witnessed. At least that is what they did in the early 1880s and among the girls of small Oswego, Kans. who would try backflips and pick-up-the-handkerchief was an extremely pretty, darkhaired girl named Harriette Flora.

Just before Christmas in 1886, Harriette Flora, aged 17, married a steady-going 19-year-old Arkansas country boy named Carl Raymond Gray. In that year he had won a promotion...