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22 | SUN LAKES LIFESTYLES | FEBRUARY 2017 | We have new members to our committee, continuing our work in making the libraries special! Janell Karabatsos is our new treasurer. She has lived in Sun Lakes for three years. Previously she worked for the superintendent of San Bernardino schools as a multimedia specialist. She would like to have more best sellers in our libraries. Janet Contreras will be an immense help by coordinating our volunteers. She is a seven year Sun Laker who is involved in two book clubs; Janet's ongoing challenge is improving at Spanish. Barbara Lindlan will take over secretarial duties. She has enjoyed helping in libraries before. She's always been a daily reader and in her schools was the top reader in the library's reading program. After her husband's death (he was a voracious reader as well) Barbara had a library built in his honor in Mexico where they lived. Sheila Cannon and her husband of 60 years moved from Redlands to Sun Lakes in 2014. She was active with volunteering in Redlands and wants to continue the same in Sun Lakes. Please join me in thanking these Sun Lakes residents. Back to J.R. (Roland) R. Tolkien. He was an orphan at 12; his mother died of acute diabetes. Local Catholic priest Father Francis Morgan became his guardian. At Exeter College he majored in English Literature and Philology, which is defined as the study of language, specifically how language or words develop. He was allowed to finish his degrees before going for military service. He graduated with first-class honors in 1915. He joined the army and after basic, was assigned to the Signal Corp. Roland had met a young woman named Edith Bratt, three years his senior and Protestant, when he was 16. They dated and became close. Tolkien's guardian saw Edith as a distraction to his studies. Tolkien reluctantly agreed not to talk or correspond with her until he turned 21. The night of that birthday, he wrote to Edith (also an orphan, she lived with a family friend). He said that he had never stopped loving her and asked her to marry him. They met, went for a long walk in the country then sat under a railway bridge, talking all the time. Convinced of his steadfastness, she agreed to marriage. Tolkien convinced her to convert to Catholicism, causing her guardian to order her to find different lodgings. They married on March 22, 1916, moving closer to where his unit was stationed. Called to France in June '16; he wrote "Parting from my wife then…was like a death." At the front he was in charge of enlisted men from Lancashire, feeling a deep affinity for these men but military rules forbade forming friendships. Before going to the front, in writing home, he developed a code of dots so that he could inform Edith about his location. In the trenches he developed medical complications and was sent back to England to convalesce; he gradually recovered. He was demobilized in Nov 1920. He was able to land a job at The Oxford English Dictionary, editing "W" words. In about a year he was accepted to the post of "reader" in English Language at the University of Leeds becoming the youngest professor there. More next month. Library Committee

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