For many months after the death of my little girl, in November of 1950, when the miraculous vision and the church records coincided, I told the story to many people. They all wanted to listen.
But, after awhile, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, I grew exhausted. I began to leave things out.
I still felt, however, the tremendous impulse to tell it. I was impelled to tell it, for I could not hold it within me. I wanted to help others believe as I had been shown how to believe, particularly parents.
When I was granted, quite suddenly, a voice scholarship at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, with the great artists John Charles Thomas and Madame Lotte Lehmann, in the summer of 1951, I rode out on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and returned by the Northwest Passage on the Milwaukee Road. The train company kindly rerouted my ticket.
In Seattle, Washington, I had a sister, Celeste, whose husband is Dr. Morton E. Bassen. He arranged for me to tell the story into a dictaphone, and he had his secretary type it. He tested me for extrasensory perception at the same time. He is interested in ESP, as many people are today. Nothing significant was found.
Thus the twenty-two pages, the nucleus of a book, suddenly were there in my hands. From this, all the writing has stemmed and has grown into three separate books, the first one completed being Linda.
Eleanor B. Wasserman
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