Who I am

My parents were very interesting people. My dad's family, the Ridders and Naumanns, came to America in the 1840s, supposedly to escape being executed by the Kaiser for rebellious activities. My mom's family came from Spain to Puerto Rico, where her great grandfather was a naval captain in Ponce during the Spanish-American war. At the end of the war he had to decide whether to go home to Spain or stay and be an American. He chose America and named his first daughter America Anna. My mother's mother died in childbirth when mom was only 3 years old. She and her brothers were shipped off to New York to be raised by three maiden aunts.

Dad was a founder of the NY Ski Club, and mom, a barely 5'tall Puerto Rican, for reasons she never explained to us, joined the ski club. They met, fell in love, and married, then moved to Washington DC for his work.

My sister, brother and I were all born and raised in Washington. It was a great city in the 1950s and '60s. My parents were staunch Republicans, but were very opposed to the Democrats on the Hill who refused to allow Washingtonians to have home rule. They thought this was very wrong, and they resented not being able to vote!

I'm the product of wonderful Catholic schools, although I'm not a Catholic any more. I attended Blessed Sacrament Parochial School, Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, and Georgetown University, class of 1968. My most famous classmate is Bill Clinton, who I met the first week of freshman year. This tall, skinny kid with the whiteboy Afro, stuck out his hand and said, "Hi! I'm Bill Clinton and I'm running for freshman class president!" We've been friends ever since.

After school I married a very nice man I'm now divorced from - we are great friends and parents, just not very good mates. We had two wonderful sons. One lives near his dad in VA, and one is traveling the world, currently in Ipanema Beach.

AFter being home with the kids for a while, I joined the staff of the National Gallery of Art, as an exhibition supervisor. This was a great job! I learned to love working with the public, especially when the public is behaving badly. Any moron can behave badly back, but it's a kind of game to return kindness and helpfulness to rudeness and aggression. My first day on the job, at the opening of Treasure Houses of Britain, the charming Prince and exquisite Princess of Wales walked up to me and began a conversation about tourism in Britain - as if my opinion mattered. It was a wonderful experience, and I knew I was gonna LOVE that job. I stayed at the Gallery from 1985-'87, leaving only because there was no large, special exhibition scheduled for several years, so I had nothing to do.

In 1992, my friend Bill, now Governor of Arkansas, announced he was running for president - an announcement all his friends had been expecting for 24 years. I worked hard as a volunteer in the campaign in Washington, and never imagined there would be a job for me if he won - but there was. The day after the 1993 inauguration I was called to the White House to head up the Visitors Office - more about that later. I'm the first and only person in history to hold that job for all eight years of an administration, and that was in the Clinton years, when the First Family actually WANTED the public to visit. We found a way to accommodate 1.5 million visitors a year - a great record. For eight years I was the White House "Egg Lady", coordinating the annual Easter Egg Roll, an event for 30,000 people on the South Lawn, the day after Easter. I worked on State Visits, Arrival Ceremonies for heads of state, Balls, receptions, and every other kind of event the White House hosts. It was not unusual to walk out of my office, across the House, and to the Oval Office for a few moments with the President. These were amazing times, and now I'm writing a book about it all.

In 2005 I happened to see a CBS television program about Baja California, Mexico. They interviewed lots of happy Americans who seemed to love living on the beach. They talked about how affordable it is. It's only 45 minutes from downtown San Diego, a great city. Two weeks later we were here, just "looking". But, to my own surprise, I bought a little house on the beach, went home, quite my job, put my house on the market and planned my move to Mexico.

I will write the blog about all these experiences, and hope you find it interesting. If you have questions about the move, or about living in Mexico, please post it, and I'll be happy to answer.

Hello, and welcome to Boomer in Baja, the blog of Melinda Bates, transplanted East Coast girl now living in Baja California Norte, Mexico.

I'm a proud part of the first year of Baby Boomers, born in 1946. All my life, for reasons I don't completely understand, I have found myself on the leading edge of things. Deciding, for my own purposes, to do something, pursue something that interests me, and finding shortly after, that millions of people coming up behind me are interested in exactly the same things. So, when I quit my job, and sold my home of 30 years to move to a little house on the beach in Baja, I figured there will be a lot of my contemporaries following soon enough.

This blog (at least to start) is about my experiences with that move, the process of divesting oneself of a lifetime of acquisitions, moving to a place where I knew no one, adjusting to a new and very different country, gutting and rebuilding a house, in Mexico!, and settling in to a new life of writing.

This post is a brief introduction, a scout, so to speak, with many more to follow. I'll add photos of our new life, and political musings, and descriptions of life in Mexico. I look forward to hearing from new friends of all ages, and from all over. So, once again, welcome to Boomer in Baja!