Jul 29, 2026 / Globe PR Wire / Before the papers ever reached a typewriter, they existed as loose sheets of lined school paper, filled with a mother’s handwriting and tucked away in binders for decades. Now, those poems form the backbone of Smile, Darn Ya: Adeline’s Legacy, a new book by Laurie Tanoura that documents one family’s passage through the Great Depression, divorce, and rebuilding, told largely in the words of the woman who lived it.
Adeline Alzina Keyes Canning was born in 1889 and graduated from Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana, in 1906, teaching school at seventeen. She married Worden Canning around 1910, and the couple had ten children. Her husband built a business empire of four feed mills, located in Hutchinson, Princeton, Bethel, and New Germany, before the 1929 crash wiped it out. Customers who owed him money simply could not pay, and the family lost everything.
The losses compounded from there. Canning’s firstborn child, who had cerebral palsy, died in 1930. Her fourth child had already died in infancy of what doctors now recognize as sudden infant death syndrome. By 1935, Canning and her husband were divorced, leaving her to raise nine children alone, much of it during the hardest years of the Depression. Through it all, she wrote poetry, often addressed to her siblings and children, full of wordplay and the kind of dark, dry humor that surfaces in families under strain.
Those poems might have been lost entirely if not for Canning’s daughter, Donna Coral Canning Good, who saved every page and eventually retyped much of it for legibility. A dental technician by trade, Good also served on the Pequot Lakes City Council and ran for mayor at the age of seventy-five before she died in 2013.
The project reached its current form through Good’s daughter, Laurie Tanoura, who discovered two additional binders of original poems held by her sister, Linda, material written on old school paper in the hands of Canning and several of her siblings. Tanoura retyped the entire collection and arranged it chronologically into twelve sections, adding her own poems and stories from more recent decades.
A publisher’s note included in the book states plainly that historical punctuation, spelling, and lineation were preserved throughout, an editorial choice meant to protect the authenticity of each writer rather than modernize their voice.
For historians, genealogists, and readers researching the lived experience of the Great Depression from a woman’s perspective, Smile, Darn Ya: Adeline’s Legacy offers primary-source material rarely available outside family archives, poems written not for publication, but for survival and connection.
