After a professional career as a news reporter, editor and college professor Ann Callaghan Allen retired from teaching at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She returned to her hometown of Oswego, New York, and wrote her first book, "The Madame's Business", chronicling the life of Malvina Guimaraes, an early entrepreneur who challenged the social norms of the day and built a financial empire, only to see it threatened by an unscrupulous husband who had nineteenth-century law and conventional thinking about a woman's place on his side. Her second book, "Holocaust Refugees in Oswego: From Nazi Europe to Lake Ontario" again taps into Oswego's rich history where the only shelter in the US during WWII for victims of the Nazi Holocaust was housed. The story of the relationships between the city residents and the refugees is an instructive tale for our time.
