Garden was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1938, to a Red Cross executive of Sicilian ancestry, and his wife, a trained social worker with parents of German descent. Both of her parents strongly influenced Garden's thinking. "When I was growing up," Garden relates in
SAAS, "Dad used to tell me that a girl could do anything a boy could do, but that in order to get recognized, she had to do it twice as well. I could do anything I wanted, he'd say, if I worked hard enough at it." "Mum was a strong woman, both physically and emotionally," Garden continues. "She was my best friend while I was growing up, my confidante, and my rock. I could talk about almost anything with her, and she always encouraged me to think for myself." Almost as influential was Garden's great-aunt Anna. "She had been born in Germany ... [and] had no children of her own, but she brought up my mother and her brother and sister," Garden explains. "She understood children and dogs as did few adults, and had unending patience with both."
"We moved a lot when I was a child," Garden explains in SAAS, "partly because of my father's job with the American Red Cross and partly because of the housing shortage that followed World War II." Although she was born in Boston, Garden's family moved to New York City, then to Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts.
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