Decoding Darkness: The Search for the Genetic Causes of Alzheimer's Disease

Julia Tatro was fifteen when she first laid eyes on the blond, blue-eyed lifeguard at Campello swimming pool in Brockton, Massachusetts. His name was Johnny Noonan, and before long she was crazy about him and turned his head -- this shapely Tatro twin whose five-foot-three-inch frame spun with energy and whose smile and laugh carved a deep dimple on her left cheek. Both were students at Brockton High, and so became high school sweethearts. Johnny was a New England diving champion, and when they went to dances together, he was paid to do diving demonstrations during intermissions, making Julia all the prouder of "Champ," as his friends called him. After high school, they married. Johnny worked as a telephone lineman, switched to insurance, then eventually joined the Stoughton fire department where he rose to lieutenant. They had their first baby, then a second. Of true Irish-Catholic stock, they then had a third, a fourth, and a fifth. Julia loved bearing children, watching their idiosyncrasies emerge, and hearing their chatter. As their family expanded, filling their barn-red house with voices, her children remember her singing, "Oh Johnny, oh Johnny, how you can love!"

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