What Growing Up in Wayne Means

Author DeWitt Henry might have left his hometown of Wayne after he graduated Radnor High School in 1959, but his memories and musings of growing up in Wayne are still fresh.

Henry recently recently published 21 stories from his childhood on Radnor Patch.

From the homes he lived in to the characters he encountered in Wayne, Henry describes life in Wayne in the 1940s and 50s. A longtime resident of Massachusetts, Henry recently came back to Wayne for a reading at the Radnor Library.

"The institution I was surprised by was the Farmer's Market," he said. "It's the Cracker Barrel, the civic association of the suburbs. I love the feel of it."

"I could not afford to live there, but I think it would be a lovely place to be," he said of Wayne today. "The thing that impressed me the most was a sense of graciousness."

Henry said the exercise of publishing pieces on Radnor Patch, many of which came from his book Sweet Dreams, reminded him that "the terrain that you live in can also be a terrain of imagination." He encourages anyone to write down their own memories and tales from where they live.

Henry's novel, The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, won the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and was based on workers in his family’s Germantown candy factory, who meet, marry and raise a disabled girl in New Jersey (University of Tenn. Press, 1991). His two full length memoirs are Sweet Dreams: A Family History (Hidden River, 2010), about my childhood, coming of age, marriage and career, and Safe Suicide: Narratives, Essays, and Meditations (Red Hen, 2008), about his midlife journey. All are available from Amazon, Barnes and Nobel and other online sellers in both paperback and e-book formats.