The Path I Chose: In My Own Words - Hardcover

Jasmine Burchell Lindsay Moran was born in Romford, Essex, near London, in 1934, but her story begins long before with her Scottish grandparents and great-grandparents. Their steadfastness, their trustworthiness and their "faerie" ways of knowing things before they happen can all be traced through four generations to Jasmine herself. Jasmine was barely five years old when Britain declared war on Germany and the bombs began to rain down on Hornchurch Airfield and Jasmine's hometown. At seven, she was evacuated to Birmingham, and became responsible for her two-year-old sister. The placement became intolerable because of the jealousy of the family's child, and Jasmine was able to finally alert her mother, who had to go through a court proceeding to get the two small girls removed. But bombs still fell on Hornchurch and London, even after their return. Jasmine can still hear the sounds of the aircraft, the bombs, and the screams more than 75 years later. To distract her and the other children from the sounds of the bombs, a teacher asked Jasmine to sing and her beautiful voice, inherited from her mother, was discovered. She soon left public school to train in London's famous Aida Foster Theatre School and Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. She studied singing, dancing, acting, and elocution, as well as reading, writing and arithmetic, and performed in numerous plays and pantomimes. By the time she was a teen, Jasmine was performing in traveling stage shows all over England and in London's Latin Quarter. When Rogers and Hammerstein's South Pacific opened in the famed West End in 1951, 17-year-old Jasmine was among 300 actors a day auditioning for parts. She was chosen for the part of Ensign Pamela Whitmore, a small speaking part in the chorus. It was soon after that she met American Melvin Moran, serving with the U.S. Air Force in England. After dating for a year, Jasmine faced the difficult choice of continuing her career or leaving home and family to follow her heart and begin a life in the U.S. Arriving in the U.S., Jasmine suffered from culture shock, horrible heat and the long distance from her beloved mother. But settling in and beginning her family, she came to fulfillment, especially as she was able to continue performing in a semi-professional capacity in Oklahoma City theaters. Karen Anson is a 1969 graduate of New Lima (Oklahoma) High School and Seminole State College and she attended the University of Oklahoma. She spent more than 20 years as an editor at The Seminole Producer. She has been published in Oklahoma Today and by the Associated Press. The Oklahoma Hall of Fame published her biography of Melvin Moran, Moving Heaven and Earth: The Life of Melvin Moran, and The Impossible Dream: A History of the Jasmine Moran Children's Museum. Anson lives in Seminole with her husband, Jerry. They have three adult children and five grandsons.