MY DARLINGS

ISBN: 9780761870838 Géneros: HBJK:BM Sinópsis: My Darlings is a memoir of the rollicking life and times of the grande dame of Oakland Floridafrom growing up in the frontier town of Denver to studying voice in the big city of Chicago to pioneering in the backwoods of central Florida Grace was born in 1884 in Denver and moved to Chicago around the turn of the century to study voice in hopes of becoming an opera singer Instead she married the delightful Charles Frederic MatherSmith twenty years her senior and the newlyweds made their winter home in rural Oakland Florida when central Florida was still a primeval jungle teeming with wild animals and exotic flora just beginning to be tamed by homesteading farmers ranchers and fishermen As Grace says it was the hand of Destiny that led her new husband and her to Oakland where Grace raised her family shook up the community and lived for more than fifty happy years As recounted in her memoir Grace was a devoted wife and mother a pioneer a community organizer an opera singer a midwife a businesswoman a philanthropistand a great beauty whom men found irresistible Grace was the first woman in Florida to drive a car the owner of the first telephone and phonograph in Oakland and of the first bathtub and flushing toilet in central Florida and the first person to drive a car to the top of Pike39s Peak without a mechanic Grace39s voice comes across loud and clear in her memoir which is illustrated with more than 20 family photos She was flamboyant theatrical uninhibited adventurous energetic glamorous exuberant unconventional willful irrepressible bighearted and generous to a fault Her memoir quotes family and friends who describe Grace as being like a thoroughbred horse always out there in the limelight born for the concert stage and the opera and prone to gallivantin39 around She was larger than lifea force of natureand has been likened to Auntie Mame As Eve Bacon wrote in her book Oakland The Early Years Grace h