Big Doc's Girl Author:Mary Medearis (excerpt from foreword by Maureen Daly) — I have known many seventeen-year-old girls, but never anyone quite like Mary Clayborn, Big Doc's girl. In her life in hte back country of Arkansas she had all the excitement and romance of any girl her age, without ever seeming "typically seventeen." Maybe she was different because her father and mother... more » were different--he a country doctor who drove through muddy roads to treat malaria and buckshot wounds in exchange for half a hog or a bushel of turnips, and the mother the one who taught piano lessons in the front parlor to help with the family income but knew how important a new dress could be to a girl. And yet Mary was like all the other girls because she lay awake nights thinking of young Dr. Bill Sheehan and was breathlessly unsure when he asked her, quite unexpectedly, to marry him on her next birthday ... Maybe one of the things that made Mary wonderful, but different, was the fact that the Claybornes also shared their troubles and worries ... Mary, at seventeen, was allowed to live--and then to love--as a woman, not a child.« less