Keatley, with his younger brothers, had been placed in an orphanage by his father after his mother's death. Too old to be put up for adoption, Keatley was "farmed out" as a hired hand, working for families who sometimes abused him. As he grew older, he found work as a ranch hand and cowpuncher. Eventually he became a horse rancher in Wyoming. When he reached middle age he travelled to California to find his father's second family and there met Jepson, a second-generation Californian who taught in the town of Yorba Linda.
"It was a romance right out of Zane Grey--the bachelor rancher meets the lonely schoolteacher," Snyder explains in Something about the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS). "My parents were living in Lemoore, California, when my older sister, Elisabeth, and I were born, my father having accepted what he thought of as a temporary job until he could get back to ranching." The onset of the Great Depression, however, put a stop to William Keatley's dreams of returning to a pastoral life--as did the arrival of a younger sister, Ruth.
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