We are sad to report that our oldest contributor, Monica Agnew-Kinnaman, died at age 106 on May 24th. She was sharp as a tack right to the end and was still contributing beautifully written, entertaining stories to our books.
Monica was an amazing woman. Born in Britain, she served in the British Army during World War II in the anti-artillery division, where she was assigned to gun sites that fired on German planes as they flew bombing missions over England. (She was supposed to be one of the WWII veterans who attended a commemoration in France on June 1st, but she missed it by a week.) She met her first husband during the war and had a son who was raised in England.
Later, she divorced and moved to the U.S. where she met her second husband—thus the hyphenated name. How many 106-year-old women have a hyphenated last name? Very modern of her! That’s when she had her daughter, who has been keeping us up to date on her mother’s various activities during the last few years.
Monica received many degrees over the next few decades, even earning her PhD in psychology at age 70 after a career as an RN. She published many books in her later years, mostly focusing on her many beloved rescue dogs and on miracles. We published eight of Monica’s stories in Chicken Soup for the Soul books and we are featuring one of them today in this newsletter.
If you’d like to see this amazing woman in action, you can watch this TV segment from May 6th, the day she talked about WWII to a group of fifth-graders. To watch the interview click here.
Destiny
Chicken Soup for the Soul: I Can't Believe My Dog Did That!
By Monica Agnew-Kinnaman
The purpose of life is a life of purpose. ~Robert Byrne
For many years I had been privileged to take in old abused dogs that were rescued from a life of cruelty and misery. This was no great self-sacrifice on my part. It was as gratifying for me as for the victims. The dogs came from many sources and were just as likely to be a Great Dane as a Toy Poodle or a mixed breed of unknown parentage. I loved them all.
I grew up in England in the 1920s and always had a variety of pets, from horses to white mice, so I was well accustomed to caring for animals. Our home was on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, not far from veterinarians Alf Wight and Donald Sinclair, better known as James Herriot and Siegfried Farnon of All Creatures Great and Small. Alf Wight and I were friends long before he wrote his beloved books, and I greatly admired the work he did.
(Keep reading)
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