vivian strong

Vivian Strong was born Vivian Josephine Lamke in the winter of 1927, the second daughter to Florence (Krause) and Elroy Lamke. Growing up on a rural farm near Coon Valley, WI with her four siblings during the Great Depression, they were poor, but didn’t know it. A self-proclaimed tom-boy, her favorite place was with the animals, exploring the woods and fields around her farm, and working alongside her father in the barn.

After tragically losing her father in 1942, at the age of 15, she and her mother moved to town where she met Earl Albert Strong, eventually married, and settled down to raise her own family. She would raise six children, enjoy spending time with her eleven grandchildren, and many more great-grandchildren. Vivian began compiling her memoir in the early 90s and was able to see drafts of this book before she passed away in April 2022, just months after celebrating her 95th birthday.

LISA K. ADAMS

Lisa K. Adams is Vivian Strong’s grand-daughter from Vivian’s second born, Linda Jean Adams. Being a life-long writer has taken Lisa on a journey from short stories in elementary school, teenage poetry, and college philosophy to a life-long career in marketing. She has worked in radio and television, most recently spending time in hospitality marketing.

On the drive home after a visit with her grandmother in April of 2018, she experienced a calling to write her grandmother’s stories. She quickly collected the memoir books and scraps of paper Vivian had been collecting throughout the years.

In the summer of 2018, she took a part-time job writing for a hyper-local magazine where she would turn questionnaires filled out by residents into one-thousand-word feature articles. For the next year, she practiced turning fragmented bits of information into a cohesive story for the monthly magazine, but did very little work on the memoir beyond getting everything typed up and into an editable format.

Early in 2020, Lisa found herself unemployed when the hotel she was working for closed. All good intentions to work diligently on the stories quickly faded as the COVID-19 pandemic began to preoccupy the thoughts and minds of the world.

On January 17th, 2022, nearly one month to the day before Vivian’s 95th birthday and on a glorious full moon, Lisa woke at 4:44 a.m., her computer turned on, and she knew it was time to finish this memoir. A week later and the manuscript was finished. She would like to dedicate this compilation to all the strong women who came before her.