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The Fabulous Life of Gertrude Sanford Legendre

 Portrait of Gertioe Sanford, 29.
Courtesy of Kathryn Smith
Portrait of Gertioe Sanford, 29.

Kathryn Smith, author of Gertie: The Fabulous Life of Gertrude Sanford Legendre, Heiress, Explorer, Socialite, Spy (2021, Evening Post Publishing Company) joins Walter Edgar to tell the amazing story of Gertrude Sanford Legendre, a woman whose adventurous life spanned the twentieth century, beginning in Aiken, S.C. in 1902 and ending at her plantation outside Charleston in 2000.

Gertie was a daring and fearless woman whose adventures included being the first American woman in uniform held as a POW by the Germans during World War II. She also partied on the Riviera with the Murphys, the Fitzgeralds and Harpo Marx in the 1920s, undertook numerous challenging expeditions for natural history museums (and lead four) and befriended some of the greatest personalities of the 20th century, including Dr. Albert Schweitzer, General George S. Patton, Lilly Pulitzer, and Bing Crosby. In her later years, she became an ardent conservationist, fighting for habitat preservation on the South Carolina coast and leaving her 7,000-acre plantation in a conservation easement, a place where the beasts can grow old and die.

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Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.