Pauline Crawford Crabb is the oldest of the five children of Paul and Catherine Crawford. Born in Los Angeles, California, she spent nine years in the Philippine Islands, where her father worked in a gold mine. Following the Japanese invasion of the islands in 1941, she and her family hid in the mountains of Luzon for eleven months, before surrendering and being held as civilian prisoners of war in the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila for the next twenty-six months. Following their return to the United States, her family settled in Idaho where she lived for ten years.
At Idaho State College, she met her future husband, Leon Crabb, whom she married in the summer of 1953. After a year in Las Vegas, they settled in Pasadena, California, where they were both in the field of education, and where they raised their family of three children.
My Life Defined looks at how the author has dealt with the many choices and challenges one faces in various stages of life. It is a deeply personal memoir, relating the joys and sorrows, the hopes and dreams and sharing of faith in an almost fifty-year marriage.
The 2016 edition adds a chapter about her return to the Philippines for the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Santo Tomas Internment Camp.
