We Used To Own The Bronx: Memoirs Of a Former Debutante

BIOGRAPHY

Eve Pell, author of the nationally acclaimed "WE USED TO OWN THE BRONX," reported for three award-winning PBS documentaries and is an award-winning writer published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, Ms., Runners World, and other publications. She was a staff reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting. She taught journalism at San Francisco State University and lectured at Stanford.

Raised as an American princess whose family came to the New World some 375 years ago, she grew up in enclaves of privilege and wealth. Pell Grants are named for her cousin, Senator Claiborne Pell. "We are a sort second-tier American family, not quite as significant as Roosevelts, Tafts and Adamses," the Senator used to say.

Eve and her brother were kidnapped by feuding parents after their mother scandalized New York society, leaving her husband and running off with another blue-blood. For a time, the children had round-the-clock armed bodyguards. She vividly describes the dark side of privilege and wealth. And, in "We Used to Own the Bronx," she describes bizarre upper-class behaviors: her younger sister was offered a race-horse to turn down a Wellesley College education, her grandmother never entered her own kitchen; her grandfather had an employee of his club (with the same foot size), break in his new shoes. Her stepfather showed the future debutante how to train his fighting cocks.

Defying her family, Eve married a Catholic from Chicago, moved to San Francisco, and broke out of her upper-crust wifely role to join the 1960s fight for social justice. Turning to political activism and reporting, she covered famous trials and other events for radio stations and news services. In the tumultuous 1970s, as prisons exploded in violence, armed Black Panthers walked the California streets and heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped, she encountered people at the opposite extreme of society from her aristocratic friends and family. In "We Used to Own the Bronx," readers gain fascinating insights into two fascinating aspects of that dramatic and conflicted period in America.

Eve has gold medal awards in international senior track and field competitions and won first place California's storied, gruelling Dipsea race.