When my sister and I took our mother, Arlene Troutman, to the assisted living facility in the Watermark here in Philadelphia a little over ten years ago, she was already showing signs of dementia. But she still had her memories of her youth pretty much intact.

So when she met some of the Watermark employees, all of a sudden, out of the blue, my mother launched into a story about how as a teenager she had baked a white angel food cake and entered it into a contest, and she ended up coming in first place in that contest.

I didn’t recall ever hearing that story before, and I don’t think my sister had either.

I few days ago I decided to see if there was any mention of it in the newspaper at the time.

Of course, my mother was named Arlene Zellers at the time, so that’s what I searched for.

Sure enough, in the January 22, 1942, edition of the Lebanon Daily News there it was, along with all the other winners from Lebanon County at the Pennsylvania Farm Show.