Jean Russo was a single mother in the 1950s, badly paid and living with her parents in Gloversville, New York, a dead-end town whose heyday as the hub of the leather-goods industry was just a distant memory. ‘You are getting out of Gloversville’ was her mantra throughout Richard’s high school years. And when he finally made his intrepid escape from the family home on Helwig Street – fleeing to a far-flung college in a banger nicknamed The Gray Death – Jean saw her chance of a better life elsewhe...