Aileen and Roy is the story of the author8217;s parents: Roy Cochran, who rose from a sod house on a hardscrabble farm in western Nebraska to the state house in Lincoln as governor, and Aileen Gantt Cochran, a pioneer teacher and superintendent of schools in the Nebraska Sandhills.160;Roy Cochran8217;s three terms as governor (19358211;41) covered the most critical years in the history of the West, when the population was ravaged by drought and the Great Depression, and new state-federal programs8212;social security, the WPA8212;were coming into being. Aileen Gantt grew up in the small town of North Platte at the end of the nineteenth century and supported her widowed mother and siblings as a teacher and county school superintendent. Their story, drawn from unpublished memoirs and family letters, provides a unique and intimate picture of life in a small western town around the turn of the century. It is also the story of two remarkable people who faced the challenge of governing in a time of despair and change.