Lest They Forget

An attribute tom valenta once admired in his wife was the methodical way she went about things. "Say we were setting up a piece of kitchen equipment," he says. "She'd have read the instructions and made it work while I was still scratching my head trying to figure out step one." In her 30s, with the couple's three children all at school, Marie Valenta went to university to study primary school teaching, finishing each year in the top 1% of her class. More recently, she learned bookkeeping to make herself useful in the family's public relations business. She was clever? "Marie's...