Some little girls want to be princesses when they grow up — but not Sonia Sotomayor.
She dreamed of solving mysteries like her hero Nancy Drew. But after the little 8-year-old Bronx girl was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, she was told that people with her disease couldn’t grow up to be crime-fighting private investigators.
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Young Sonia responded with the type of pull-up-your-bootstraps pluck the heroine of children’s literature would have surely appreciated.
A chance episode of “Perry Mason” — another childhood favorite — brought an epiphany for Sotomayor that allowed her to switch career goals but still kept alive her zeal for justice.
“I realized the judge was the most important player in that room,” Sotomayor said in an interview with the Associated Press after she was appointed to the 2nd Circuit Court in 1998.
Not even 10 years old, she had already set her sights on a career in law that would take her from a South Bronx housing project to a likely spot on the US Supreme Court.
“Your childhood environment shapes your perceptions, your character, your sense of values,” she has said.
Indeed, Sotomayor seems comfortable straddling her working-class past with her Ivy-Tower-tinged present.
She loves baseball and ballet with equal fervor and lives in a tony West Village condo she festoons with kitschy Halloween decorations every year.
Another passion is interior design. She is known as much for her keen decorating skills as she is for her ability to scout out talented contractors.
While working as a trial judge in 1995, Sotomayor made headlines for writing the injunction against Major League Baseball that effectively ended the baseball strike.
Her command of the law and decisive ruling — done in 15 minutes — reportedly prompted the Yankees to invite her to throw out the first pitch on Opening Day.
She declined after deeming it improper — a likely tough call for a devoted Bombers fan who grew up in the shadow of the House That Ruth Built.
That ruling might have forever endeared her to baseball fans, but several years later she didn’t name that as her most memorable decision.
Instead, she recalled the mixed emotions she felt upon signing her first decision, sending a drug offender to prison.
“[I had] a deep, deep sense of, ‘There but for the grace of God could I have gone and many that I have loved,’ ” she said.
That she didn’t go down a wayward path, like many in her immediate vicinity, is most likely because of her mother.
As a young widow, Celina Sotomayor worked six days a week as a nurse to provide for her two children.
When a travelling salesman showed up at their door, she bought a set of encyclopedias from him — making the Sotomayors the only family in the neighborhood to own one.
The Puerto Rican native scrimped and sent her children to Catholic schools.
Sonia Sotomayor excelled at Cardinal Spellman HS in The Bronx, where she graduated as valedictorian.
Her high-school debate coach, Ken Moy, encouraged her to apply to Princeton. She got in and received a full scholarship.
Former classmate Sergio Sotolongo — a friend who went to Cardinal Spellman and Princeton with Sotomayor — described her as “humble.”
When she won the prestigious M. Taylor Pyne Prize — Princeton’s highest distinction for an undergrad — Sotomayor kept it quiet even from her friends, he said.
“I found out about it by reading in the newspaper,” he said.
She married Kevin E. Noonan shortly after graduating college, but they divorced seven years later. They had no children.
After Princeton, she headed to Yale Law School, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
In her senior year, she balked when a major Washington law firm prodded into her Puerto Rican background during a recruiting dinner.
A partner at the firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge asked her a series of questions she found discriminatory, like, “Do law firms do a disservice by hiring minority students who the firms know do not have the necessary credentials and will then fire in three to four years?”
Another question was, “Would I have been admitted to the law school if I were not a Puerto Rican?
Sotomayor filed a discrimination complaint with Yale against the firm.
After school, she began her legal career as a chain-smoking assistant district attorney in New York City under Robert Morgenthau.
That was followed by a stint in private practice at a white-collar firm, then President George H.W. Bush appointed her as a federal judge in the Southern District.
From there she was appointed to the prestigious 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.
When she took the oath of office for her new gig in 1998, she was helped into her robe by then-fiancé Peter White. The relationship ended, and she is currently dating a research scientist with the Rockefeller Foundation.
News of her likely rise to the top of the US legal system thrilled pals from her native Bronx to her new home in the West Village.
Neighbor George Hackett said, “We were all hoping she’d get it because we think she’s great.”
And John Johnson, 82, a former worker at the Bronxdale Houses who remembers the bookish little girl, said, “I feel good and proud.”
Additional reporting by Kavita Mokha