A Lady, First

School DaysMost people look upon Miami Beach as a place where you go to get old and play golf, or as a place to go when you're young, to partake of "what's hot" at the South Beach nightspots. It was actually my birthplace, in 1926, in St. Francis Hospital. I was baptized in a properly posh spot-Star Island No. 2-replete with mansions, none of which belonged to the Baldriges. My father, Malcolm, a young lawyer from Omaha, Nebraska, at the time, had taken my mother and their two boys, four-year-old Mac and two-year-old Bob, to Miami Beach to make a quick killing in Florida real estate, which had begun to boom. My parents must have looked upon the experience as a sort of how-to-become-a-millionaire gamble, which unfortunately they lost. Shortly after I was born, the real estate along Collins Avenue in Miami Beach turned sour. At least I have one souvenir of this Florida experience: a birth certificate printed on pale pink parchment, with gold lettering, announcing "Your Treasure is Registered," a document that would cause me great embarrassment every time I entered a new school and had to present it. In 1928 my parents packed us all up and took us back to Omaha, from whence they had come. My father returned to the practice of law in his strict father's office, smarting under the I-told-you-so attitude of his gruff parent. Mother, Regina ("Jean"), was the beautiful titian-haired daughter of one of the town's most respected horse-and-buggy doctors, James Connell. She and my father, a Yale football star, captain of the wrestling team, and a World War I hero, had married a couple of years after he had returned from France. People who were born around the Great Depression of the 1930s, which began with the crash of the stock market in 1929, remember that period as a great leveler of society, a time that drove families together with iron ties and that made you appreciate your blessings more than ever before or ever after. I didn't understand or remember the economic theory and sociological results of that era. I just remember having young parents, two grandmothers whose lifetimes extended far beyond those of their husbands, and two brothers who were to make my life absolutely miserable, even though they were the best thing that ever could have happened to me. Our grandfathers died before I was born, but we lived in Grandpa Baldrige's big old house in Omaha. Both grandmothers, as was the custom in those days, came to live with us, at separate periods, of course. World War II would have started early if they had shared the big house with us simultaneously. There was a real respect for grandparents in those days. They were considered special and wise, and were paid honor by the younger generations. They were instrumental in the installation of values in their grandchildren. Manners, too. At dinner they would make mental notes about everything from "Bobby was particularly noisy with his soup tonight" to "Malcolm and Letitia had an unacceptable fight over the last piece of cake, carried on under the table." There would be a private conversation with each child later about these transgressions, parents not included. I remember every detail of that house at 124 South Thirty-ninth Street, it was so big and utterly fascinating. There was a large stained-glass window on the landing of the carved wood stairway, which culminated in a two-foot-tall bronze statue of a nude Winged Mercury. This statue was much scrutinized and disrespected. My brothers would adorn him with their neckties, sometimes a stocking cap or baseball cap over his curly head, and often a bandage taped with adhesive on his private parts. My father, an only child, marveled at the wonderful calm and serenity that surrounded my mother, who had grown up in a family of boys and therefore knew what all the noise was about. My memories of my mother are clear, luminous, spiritual. She ran a perfect household, was always at the frontBaldrige, Letitia is the author of 'A Lady, First' with ISBN 9780670894536 and ISBN 0670894532.