Recalling Yesterdays

Plunged into poverty by the Great Depression, Mary Joy tells how—after losing their home in Minneapolis—she and her family lived off an acre of land in then-rural Eden Prairie township. Volunteer work during a political campaign in 1968 led to a job offer that launched her back into the work world. Mary Joy’s memoir covers the ups and downs of her 27-year career in government, corporations, the University of Minnesota, and environmental organizations—rising from a secretary role to an executive level. She also tells about her 40-year marriage, her mid-life metamorphosis, and her people-to-people diplomacy experience with Russian citizens during a Volga River cruise in 1990.

Mary Joy Breton of St. Paul, MN Mary Joy Breton, eighty-nine, is retired from careers as assistant to the governor of Delaware and as national Audubon Society vice president. Along with a couple of other volunteers—no one, not even the Bretons, is paid—they run the six-year-old nonprofit publishing company, which has published four books about restorative justice and community peacemaking and has two others in the works.