​In the early 1980’s, she returned to college, now Arizona State University, changed her major to drama and theater, and graduated with a B.A. degree in 1986 at age 59. Also during those years, she interviewed and taped conversations with her older siblings, embarking on a project to write the story about her mother and the Allen family.
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For the next 40 years until shortly before the pandemic of 2020, Pearl had a full second career as a professional storyteller using the name “Grandma Pearl,” during which time she wrote up many Allen family stories, some that she used professionally.
In 2012, she decided to move to Texas, after having spent 75 years of her life living in Arizona, to live near her children. A fractured ankle limited her physically after 2014. Advanced heart disease responded to heart valve replacement surgery in 2021. And later that same year, she finalized her draft and copyrighted her family’s saga, titled “Maud and Pearl: The Matriarch and the Odyssey.” The genre is non-fiction biographical American family saga.
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Her book was edited by her son, Dan Goggin, and nieces and nephews over a several year period, together with professional editor/publisher Teresa Lynn and her publishing company, Tranquility Press, Georgetown, Texas.
Iralene Pearl Allen was born March 21, 1927 to Ezekiel Allen and Maud Hall, the youngest of nine children. Her earliest memories were of growing up on the Marlow 20-acre farm, owned by her older brother, Leo.
At age 10, she moved with her mother to Tolleson, Arizona, where she graduated valedictorian at age 16 in 1943. She attended Arizona State College in Tempe for 2 years, majoring in pre-engineering. She married James D. “Jimmy” Goggin, an Air Force fighter pilot in 1945, and they had three children, Danny, Pat, and Janet. Jimmy died on active duty in England over the North Sea, and she and the young children returned to the US. She settled with her children back in Tempe in 1955.
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​In 1957, she remarried to Bill Andree, and inherited two stepchildren, Kathi and Herb. Bill left newspaper advertising and became an apartment and later a home builder, and Pearl began a career in apartment management and real estate. She and Bill had two children together, Ray and Lilly. After her older children had left home, she and Bill and the younger children began an adventurous sojourn of 7 years of living in Australia, returning to the States in 1977, returning to live in Sun Lakes near Tempe, the year that Maud passed away.​​​
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