Author Linda Lee Cermack Kocan recently donated a copy of her recently-published book Harvesting Memories to the East Palestine Library. The book can also be purchased online with half of the proceeds to benefit the East Palestine community. The other will benefit Kocan’s high school association. (Photo by Stephanie Elverd)

EAST PALESTINE — Linda Lee Cermack Kocan is a lot of things. She’s a wife, a mother, a former beauty queen, an intellect, a philanthropist and most recently a published author. But before she was any of those things, she was an Ohioan — growing up on her family farm in Dillonvale.

Dillonvale is a small rural community in southern Jefferson County, situated less than a mile from the banks of the Ohio River and shrouded by leafy maple trees and the occasional weeping willow whose roots drink up water from Pine Fork and Short Creeks. It rests in the crook of a valley and in between green hills that were once rich in coal.

It’s also an hour-and-a-half drive from East Palestine but it was in the East Palestine Library that Linda sat down to talk about her book “Harvesting Memories” — an intimate and heartfelt recollections, memoirs and short stories that pay homage to her childhood in the 1950s spent on her family’s farm where she learned lessons in humanity and humility and in a time when altruism was a cornerstone of character .

“I was taught that if you give something away it comes back to ten folds,” Linda said. “That’s what my grandparents and parents taught me.”

The train derailment happened when Linda was halfway through writing her debut book. Like the rest of the world, she watched — not from Dillonvale but from Towanda, Pa. where she built a life with her husband Mark. Her heart went out to the residents living through it. It went out to East Palestine. It went out to Ohio. It went out to her home.

“I just thought how terrible it all was. How frightening it would be to live through that, to worry about what was happening or worse worry about what it could all mean later on in the future,” Linda said. “I just thought about growing up on my family farm, my parents and my grandparents. How they would want to help and expect me to. I didn’t know what to do but I knew I had to do something.”

That something turned out to be her book. While it is a tale of rural life in Jefferson County, half of the proceeds of the book will be donated to the community of East Palestine. The other half will be donated to the Dillonvale High School Alumni Association.

“Ohio is her home and these are her people,” her husband Mark said. “Hardworking, honest, people. We’ve done well for ourselves. We’ve been blessed. We want to pay that forward by giving away every dollar this book earns, to give back to the place that gave Linda so much. She’s not from East Palestine but she is from Ohio, and her childhood on that farm in Ohio shaped her.”

Linda originally started penning the book for her children and for her children’s children to pass on the lessons she learned and show them the grit and grace from which they descend. It started with a few stories scratched on notebook paper. Mark encouraged Linda to keep writing and he saw Linda’s talent, even if she didn’t. Eventually, the idea for the book was born. It was a much bigger project but with the same simple purpose.

“I just wanted my children and grandchildren to have a piece of what I experienced growing up,” Linda said. “I wanted to pass on the stories and the legacy of life on that farm. I wanted them to know where I came from and by extension where they came from.”

“They came from good stock,” Mark interjected.

Both sets of Linda’s parents immigrated from Czechoslovakia and settled in Dillonvale, overcoming the struggles of being strangers in a new land. Her father Edward dropped out of school to work in the mines and married her mother Anna at the onset of the Great Depression. After being diagnosed with black lung disease, Edward turned to the land to provide for and feed his family of five of which Linda was the baby.

Linda describes herself as the “a lone survivor” of that brood, as her grandparents, parents, sister and brother are all gone. The book, which will soon be available to at the East Palestine Library, is dedicated to her parents.

Harvesting Memories is a 284-page paperback which can be purchased for $20 at bookstore.dorrancepublishing.com. It is also available in hardback for $30 and in eBook edition for $15.