in these late days

This is Dolores Jeanette Harrison, who was the smartest girl at Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Alabama. She probably would have been the smartest girl at your high school also, but being the daughter of a failing farmer in Blount County, Alabama isn’t a recipe for success, so I can’t point you to an online biography of her — though I will say that she worked full-time, with two breaks to bear children, from age 15 to age 80. She was a bookkeeper and accountant; always a math whiz … at least until recently. Her name is unusual. She was the eighth child in her family and by then her mother was tired of coming up with names, so she delegated the task to her older daughters. They named their new sister after two favorite actresses, Dolores Del Río and Jeanette MacDonald. Dolores married young. I don’t know much about that marriage except that it didn’t last long. She moved to Birmingham and got work in a bank, where one of her co-workers introduced her to a cousin, Carl Jacobs. Carl…