Edith Littlefield Sundby was born the second youngest of twelve children on an Oklahoma cotton farm without electricity and running water. After working odd jobs in rural Oklahoma, she spent a year abroad in Australia as a Rotary Exchange Student. Upon her return, she paid her way through college selling Bibles door to door in Tennessee. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oklahoma, she became one of the first female sales executives at IBM and spent twelve years working there before becoming a vice president at Pacific Bell in San Francisco. She and her husband then relocated to San Diego, where she gave birth to twin daughters before becoming vice president of sales at an internet start-up company. She and her husband had just mortgaged their house to start a new company when Edie received a diagnosis of stage four gallbladder cancer and was given three months to live. Now, nine years later, despite 0.9% odds and after almost one million milligrams of chemo radiation, as well as liver, lung, colon, and throat surgeries, she is vibrantly alive and the only person to have traversed the historic and largely unmapped 1,600-mile Mission Trail that spans from Loreto, Mexico, to Sonoma, California. |
