It’s not often I write a #NotableSororityWomen post about someone I’ve met. Truth be told, I’m up against a deadline. For the past six months, I have been a caregiver to my father. Readers may have noticed that my posts were few and far between. My father passed away on Monday. My goal at the start of the year was to have the #WHM2019 posts appear without interruption. I tried my best to bank the posts so all I had to do was publish them early in the morning before he awoke. I researched and wrote in the rare few minutes I had to myself. I made it almost to the middle of the month. I told myself that a post about a notable Pi Phi shouldn’t be too hard to write today, but who could be the subject of a quickly written post, one that has to be done before I face this day of dealing with the things of my father’s death?
Mimi Baird came to mind, maybe because of the father connection. Her book, He Wanted the Moon, is about her father, one who disappeared from her life when she was a young child.
I met Mimi Baird when I presented a program on Grace Coolidge at the University of Vermont. Later, she and Cyndy Bittinger, former Executive Director of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation and an expert on Grace Coolidge, became alumnae initiates of Grace’s Pi Beta Phi chapter at the University of Vermont.
Mimi’s father, Perry Cossart Baird, Jr., a native Texan, studied at Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas. He was a member of Alpha Tau Omega at both SMU and the University of Texas and he served as an officer of the Texas chapter. He graduated from the University of Texas with honors and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He attended Harvard Medical School and again graduated with honors.
Dr. Baird left Mimi’s life in 1944 when she was six-years-old. She and her younger sister attended her father’s funeral in 1959. His death was due to a seizure, likely caused by the prefrontal bilateral lobotomy he was subjected to a decade earlier. Between those years, Mimi had very little interaction with her father or his family. Due to her father’s manic depressive episodes, her mother was advised to divorce him. Divorce she did and she quickly remarried. No more was spoken of her father other than he was “ill” and was “away.”
Twenty plus years ago a box with a manuscript was sent to her from a Texas cousin. It was an accounting of her father’s life written during his hospitalizations. The pages were out of order and it took a great deal of effort to piece together. When she completed the puzzle, Mimi discovered what happened to her father. The primitive and cruel methods the mentally ill were subjected to in the 1940s and 1950s are described by the person who endured them. Her father had hoped that his manuscript, which he titled Echoes from a Dungeon Cell, would be published someday. Although it took more than half a century, his story has indeed come to life thanks to Mimi and Eve Claxton.
Brad Pitt, a Sigma Chi, purchased the film rights and it is said he will play Dr. Baird in the movie. Award winning screenwriter Tony Kushner is adapting the book for film.
This is a story of a daughter’s discovery of her father’s life. It tells a story that is compelling, heartbreaking, and eye-opening. And it is a triumph in that Dr. Baird’s story is finally told, by the daughter he barely knew. Thank you Mimi for your efforts in making your father’s story a reality.
