The Girl from Brooklyn
JUNE 27, 1950, SHOULD HAVE BEEN A DAY OF triumph for an ambitious young girl just turned 17—the culmination of four years of outstanding academic achievement. It was graduation day at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, and Ruth Bader had been chosen as just one of four students to speak for her 800 classmates. Instead, it was a moment of great anguish.
Two days before, Ruth’s mother, Celia, had succumbed to cancer. It had been a painful, four-year struggle, and for the sensitive adolescent, watching the physical deterioration of the parent who represented nurture and security, along with her father’s silent grief, had been wrenching. Yet with Celia’s encouragement, Ruth had won prestigious college scholarships, played in the school orchestra and cheered on the football team as a baton twirler—never once revealing to her schoolmates the illness that shadowed the Bader household in Flatbush.
Celia Bader had given birth to her second daughter, Joan Ruth, on March 15, 1933, at Beth Moses Hospital in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. (Ruth’s first name was dropped in kindergarten when there too many other children who answered to Joan.) The Baders brought the infant back to their apartment in Belle Harbor, a town near the ocean in the borough of Queens, just as they had her older sister, Marilyn. The new baby, energetic from the start, kicked so much that Marilyn promptly dubbed her “Kiki.” The name stuck.
The joy of the baby’s arrival in the home was
