Frances Swearingen took her first breath on Feb. 22, 1925 in Nashville.
A divorce led her mother to move to Franklin, Ky., to live with her grandmother. When Frances was four, Tom England married her mother. They provided love and food on the table during the Depression and were always good to her throughout their lives.
As a five-year-old, Frances remembers walking daily across town to school with the older children. Some made the walk miserable for her.
“I cried every day in those early grades. It wasn’t until the third grade that I realized I could do school, and I never looked back. My best subjects in high school were biology, Latin, French, and chemistry.”…