To many of my acquaintances I am known as a “Floridian,” but actually I started my life as a “snowbird.” My earliest years were spent near the Canadian border in Clayburg, New York. I was the third child of William and Kathryn Gleason. In the summer of 1926 my parents, my two older brothers, Thomas William and Robert Joseph, a younger brother Francis Patrick and I moved to Florida. In Florida, before I entered the convent, my mother gave birth to three more children. We then had the “Florida crackers and the snowbirds.”

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