born in Somerville, New Jersey on June 1, 1945, a premature baby weighing 2½ pounds. Seven weeks earlier, on April 10, 1945, her father was killed in action in Germany in World War II when his jeep ran over a landmine. The many letters that he had written to her mother from Europe later inspired Kim Vaeth and Richard Danielpour to devise the song cycle Elegies for her. She described her feelings about her father in her 2004 song lyric "To my Dad", which was set to music by Jake Heggie and performed by them on his album Flesh & Stone. Von Stade was named after her maternal grandmother, Frederica ( Bull) Clucas. Her family later came to call her by a nickname, Flicka, Swedish for "little girl", which her father had borrowed from Mary O'Hara's novel My Friend Flicka to bestow upon his favourite polo pony. On December 6, 1946, von Stade's mother married Lieutenant Colonel (later Brigadier General) Horace William Fuller. Employed as a diplomat by the US State Department, he took von Stade, her brother Charles and her mother with him on assignments in Italy and Greece, but his duties allowed him so little time with his stepdaughter that she scarcely got to know him. Her memories of her childhood in Athens inspired one of the poems in her lyric cycle Paper Wings, which was set to music by Jake Heggie and performed by them on his album The Faces of Love: The Songs of Jake Heggie. On October 6, 1950, Sara Fuller and her children left Le Havre on the SS America to return to the United States. The Fullers divorced in 1951. Sara von Stade established a new life for herself in Washington, D. C., working for the CIA as a secretary. Von Stade remembers her early self as a "latchkey kid" with a dynamic, clever, humorous, volatile mother whose "problem with booze" did not compromise her passionate attachment to her daughter. Von Stade began her education at the Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a college-preparatory school near the Bethesda Naval Hospital., later transferring to the Holy Trinity School, Georgetown, a parochial school founded by Jesuits. When she reached grade 8, her mother relocated to Oldwick, Tewksbury Township, New Jersey, and she spent two years at the nearby Far Hills Country Day School before returning to the care of the nuns of the