Mimi Lee
First Lady of Maryland (1920-2011)
Mathilde B. "Mimi" Lee (May 1, 1920 – August 9, 2011) was an American chemist, athlete and philanthropist who served as the First Lady of Maryland from 1977 to 1979 when her husband, then Lt. Governor Blair Lee III, became acting governor following the departure of Governor Marvin Mandel.
Biography
Early life
Lee was born Mathilde Boal on May 1, 1920, in Washington, D.C. She was named for her paternal grandmother, a distant relative of Christopher Columbus. Her mother, Jeanne de Menthon, a native of France, was a descendant of the 11th century French saint, Bernard of Menthon. Lee's father, Pierre de Lagarde Boal, was an American diplomat who served as the United States' ambassador to Nicaragua and Bolivia during the 1940s. Boal, who was fluent in English, French and Spanish, lived in ten countries by the time she completed college.
Boal graduated from Elmwood School, an exclusive all-girls school in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where her father was stationed for a diplomatic post. She obtained a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1943, graduating cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Boal took a job as a chemist with the Rockefeller Foundation in Colombia after graduating from Bryn Mawr College. She soon became engaged to Francis Preston Blair Lee III, a naval officer during World War II, whom she married in 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mimi Lee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.