New York judge rises from projects to the Supreme Court

NEW YORK: Sonia Sotomayor's ascent to a U.S. Supreme Court nomination began in a Bronx housing project, fed by Nancy Drew, inspired by Perry Mason and encouraged by her hardworking immigrant mother.

Her mother worked two jobs after coming to New York from Puerto Rico, including as a nurse at a methadone clinic after her husband died when Sotomayor was 9. She saved up and bought Sotomayor the only encyclopedia set in the neighborhood.

She got her first taste of the law as she buried herself in Nancy Drew books, but it was an episode of Perry Mason that provided the defining moment in Sotomayor's childhood.

Watching the camera settle on the judge at the end of an episode, she immediately realized ``he was the most important player in that room,'' Sotomayor said in a 1998 interview with The Associated Press.

President Barack Obama built on her rags-to-riches story as he nominated her to the Supreme Court, following a distinguished legal career in which she served as a prosecutor, corporate litigator, trial judge and, most recently, member of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

Ellen Chapnick, the dean for the Social Justice Program at Columbia Law School, said one of Sotomayor's former students at the university ``called me  in tears and said it is a wonderful, wonderful day.''

She said Sotomayor's touch with common people is demonstrated whenever she walks through the courthouse, connecting with the guards in the lobby or a clerical worker from another chambers with the same interest as with lawyers and judges.

Sotomayor knows how life struggles can interrupt dreams.

By time she was 8 years old, Sotomayor had begun insulin injections for juvenile diabetes. After her father died, her mother sometimes worked two jobs, but she always kept a pot of rice and beans on the stove.

The Manhattan-born Sotomayor's humble upbringing has shaped her personality _ vibrant and colorful, and so different from the Bronx projects where she grew up in a home with a drab yellow kitchen. She is a food-loving baseball buff as likely to eat a hot dog at a street corner stand as to settle in for a fancy meal at a swanky restaurant.