My Darlings: A Memoir

My Darlings is a memoir of the rollicking life and times of the grande dame of Oakland, Florida-from 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 Mather-Smith, 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 philanthropist-and 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 Pike's Peak without a mechanic. Grace's 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, big-hearted, 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 gallivantin' around." She was larger than life-a force of nature-and has been likened to Auntie Mame. As Eve Bacon wrote in her book Oakland: The Early Years, Grace "hit staid little Oakland" like "a social bombshell."

Publisher: Hamilton Books

Published: United States, 24 December 2018

Format: Paperback, 168 pages

Age Range: 0+

Other Information: Illustrations, unspecified; Halftones, Black & White including Black & White Photographs

Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 0.9 centimeters (0.28 kg)

Writer: Grace Mather-Smith, Russell P. Kelley, III

Table of ContentsList of Figures Preface by the Editor Acknowledgments Note from the Editor Introduction 1Arriving in Oakland 2Pioneer Ancestors 3Denver 4Chicago 5Pioneering in Oakland 6Weighty Matters 7Back to Oakland 8Edgegrove Farms 9Family Trip to Europe 10Carmen 11Trip Back West 12Civic Improvements 13Flowers, Fruits and Friends 14Tales and Tall Tales 15First and Second Marriages 16Hawaii 17Widowhood 18Last Thoughts Epilogue Afterword by the Editor Appendix - Mather-Smith Family About the Editor

About the AuthorGrace Mather-Smith was born in Denver in 1884 and died in rural Oakland, Florida, in 1961. In between, she was a devoted wife and mother, pioneer, community organizer, opera singer, midwife, businesswoman, and philanthropist. Russell P. Kelley. III was born and raised in Palm Beach, Florida. After a career as an international business lawyer that took him around the world, he returned to live in Palm Beach where he has enjoyed rediscovering Florida and the memoir written by his great-grandmother.