Kentucky-born wife of Justice Alito speaks to UK audience

The Kentucky-born wife of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice spoke at a lecture in Lexington Saturday about the life of her prominent political family.

Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Justice Samuel Alito, addressed an audience of about 200 at the Singletary Center on the University of Kentucky campus. Samuel Alito was in attendance.

Martha-Ann Alito touched on several points, including the education of women, her early life in Floyd County, her education at UK, being raised in a military family and raising a family as the wife of a prominent national figure.

The speech was sponsored by the UK College of Law and the Hellenic Ideals Program of the Bluegrass, a non-profit dedicated to honoring ancient Hellenic principles.

State Deputy Chief Justice Mary Noble of Lexington received the group's annual award. Noble invited Alito to speak.

"I thought, 'what the heck, I can ask," Noble said. "And she responded enthusiastically, being this Kentucky girl, that she was ready to come home."

Alito and her husband, who live in Washington D.C. and have two grown children, were named Kentucky Colonels.

Alito, 56, was born at Fort Knox, one of Kentucky's military bases, but lived in several other states and overseas growing up, she said. Her father, an Air Force captain, relocated frequently.

Kentucky roots shaped her. She recalled how her mother, a New Jersey native, had called her "the hillbilly" and the "barefoot ridge-runner" because she was always barefoot.

"She just couldn't keep me in shoes," Alito said. "I took that as such a point of pride."

At UK, Alito studied textiles and merchandising until switching to a comparative literature major two semesters before graduating with a bachelor's degree. She received a master's degree from UK in library science.

Alito met her husband while she was working as a librarian at the U.S. attorney's office in Newark, N.J., where Samuel Alito worked as an assistant U.S. attorney.

The two were married in 1985, five years after their first date.

"He's a very deliberate man," Martha-Ann Alito said, drawing laughs and applause and alluding to her husband's professional reputation.

Alito spoke at length about her frustration with national media outlets and bloggers during her husband's appointment process to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006.

She recounted how a national newspaper photographer reduced her daughter to tears at a high-school swim meet, and how reporters clogged her street trying to interview neighbors and family.

But she was too busy as a parent to pay much attention to the "daily ad hominem attacks which bordered on the ridiculous" against her husband, she said.

This story was originally published October 3, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Kentucky-born wife of Justice Alito speaks to UK audience."