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First Shoes. During the 18th century diamond rush in the inland plateau state of Minas Gerais, Diamantina was a rich, bustling city of 40,000 inhabitants. A local diamond magnate even had an artificial lake and several miniature ships built, so that his mulata mistress could ease her nostalgia for the sea without making the three-week muleback trip to Rio. By the time Juscelino Kubitschek was born, Sept. 12, 1901, the synthetic sea had long since vanished, along with the diamonds, and hillside Diamantina had shrunk into an uneventful, cobble-streeted town with a population of less than 10,000.
Even by the standards of Diamantina, the Kubitschek family was poor. When Júlia had taught her son all she could, she persuaded Diamantina's Roman Catholic seminary to take him as a pupil at a reduced tuition fee. On his first day of school, Juscelino, then eleven, put on his first pair of shoes, bought with money earned as a grocer's errand boy. Recalls one of his seminary teachers: "I never saw such a remarkable memory in a child. He could recite an entire page by heart after reading it once. He was not what I would call deep, but he certainly was bright."
After a few years, even cut-rate fees proved too costly for Júlia's pinched purse, and Juscelino had to leave school. At 18, having taught himself Morse code, he qualified as an operator in the Minas Gerais state telegraph system. He left home for Belo Horizonte, the state capital, with one spare shirt and a roast chicken. During the months he had to wait for an opening, he lived largely on bread.
Beyond the Horizon. The future President worked as a telegraph operator in Belo Horizonte for seven years, putting himself through preparatory schools and medical school. On the job from midnight to 7 a.m., he started classes at 8 a.m., snatched a few hours of sleep in the afternoon. He got his M.D. (cum laude) at 26, resigned his telegrapher's job the same day. Meanwhile, his sister Maria had married a prosperous Belo Horizonte surgeon, who made Kubitschek his assistant. A year later, bitten by wanderlust, Kubitschek borrowed money from rich friends and took off for Europe—supposedly to study, but actually to satisfy his itch to see what lay beyond the Belo Horizonte horizon. He did some serious postgraduate work at clinics in Paris. Berlin and Vienna, but he also spent a lot of time in cafés.
Returning to Belo Horizonte broadened and polished by travel, he married the pretty, dark-eyed daughter of a wealthy politician. The marriage was happy. "He has not always been a perfect husband.'' Sarah Kubitschek said secretly. "But after all. perfection is dull." The Kubitscheks have two children. Márcia and Maristela, both twelve. Márcia was born to them; they adopted Maristela five years later, to spare Márcia an only child's loneliness.
The Call to Politics. Prospering Surgeon Kubitschek became increasingly absorbed in politics as years went by, serving as secretary of the state government and later as a federal deputy. In 1940 the governor of Minas Gerais named him mayor of Belo Horizonte. With that, Kubitschek gave up surgery altogether.