When the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., a prominent politician in Baltimore, got engaged in 1963, the family sent her photo to The New York Times to accompany an engagement announcement in the Society pages.
That 23-year-old woman, Nancy D’Alesandro, would become better known in the decades that followed by her married name: Nancy Pelosi.
Both Ms. Pelosi and her father, Mr. D’Alesandro, a Democrat who served as the mayor of Baltimore from 1947 to 1959, have files in the Morgue, The Times’s repository of newspaper articles, photographs and other archival materials. When searching for Mr. D’Alesandro’s photo file, the caretaker of the Morgue found a file for Nancy D’Alesandro. That’s where the engagement photo was stored.
The photo was published on June 1, 1963, above an announcement with the headline “Miss D’Alesandro Is Future Bride of Paul F. Pelosi.” Mr. Pelosi, per the announcement, was a graduate of Georgetown University and worked for the First National City Bank of New York (now Citibank). Ms. D’Alesandro, the announcement said, was a graduate of Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University) in Washington, D.C.
The article referred to her father’s political career and that of her brother, Thomas J. D’Alesandro III, who was the Baltimore City Council president at the time. (The younger D’Alesandro died in 2019.) But there was no mention of the bride-to-be’s political aspirations.
The couple were married in Baltimore on Sept. 7 of that year.
Ms. Pelosi, of course, went on to achieve great political success. In 2002, Ms. Pelosi, a Democrat, was elected House minority leader, becoming the first woman to head a major party in either chamber of Congress; she made history again in 2007, when she became the 52nd speaker of the House of Representatives, the first woman in the role. She was elected again in 2019. As Lulu Garcia-Navarro wrote in an article accompanying an interview with Ms. Pelosi for The Times in November, “Perhaps no Democratic politician has been a greater antagonist to Donald Trump than Nancy Pelosi.”
While the photo was technically not misfiled, its discovery is a reminder of the surprises that can be found, after some digging, in The Times’s archives.
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