She said the experience “gave me a new perspective on life… in bed in the body cast, horizontal, I saw things I wouldn’t ordinarily see.

I studied expressions, the details of wallpaper, and tiny hairs peeking out of people’s ears.”[3] She would spend many more months in partial casts, a wheelchair, and homemade braces that her father invented to enable her to become more mobile.

She studied art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she was “strongly influenced” by her teacher, the muralist and painter Kady Faulkner.

[9] She spent her time painting, and studying with Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

I think it was the feeling of those times that the handicapped should be put away out of sight.” In an interview from 1978 she "takes credit" for initiating a change in the city's views on accessibility.

[10] In the early 1970s they built a home in West Haven, Connecticut[12] which they shared with a pet cat, Boy, who appeared in many of her illustrations.

She was a member of Denton Community Historical Society (DCHS),[14] and a supporter of the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association,[15] the Junior League of Lincoln, Lincoln City Public Library's Heritage Room[4] and the University Place Art Center (now Lux Center for the Arts).

She worked as an artist for Balco Research Inc. in Newark, New Jersey,[7] in New York's City Planning Office[16] and for Addison Wesley Publishing Co.

[20] ‘Washed-out’ shades tended to dominate her illustrations – dusty browns, mauves, ochres and dying yellows; she called them “old world” colours.

[3] Her characters were described as “peculiar, unique and slightly out-of-proportion, but never cute.” Of her style, she said “I work primarily with ink on fine pen points and turn corners where I have never been.”[21] She advised two-term US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser on his first children's book Bag in the Wind (finally published 2010) after it received a “lukewarm” reception from children's book publishers.