Birth and Early Life
Bullitt was born Dorothy Frances Stimson in Seattle in 1892, four years after Washington became a state, to C. D. Stimson, a lumber and real estate magnate, and his wife Harriet. Wealthy throughout her childhood and early adulthood, in 1918 she married A. Scott Bullitt, a lawyer and aspiring politician 14 years her senior. Scott Bullitt, a member of a prominent Kentucky family, became a prominent Democrat and friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was scheduled to place Roosevelt's name in nomination for the U.S. presidency at the 1932 Democratic National Convention when he died of liver cancer, leaving Dorothy a widow at the age of 40. She attended the convention as a delegate in her late husband's place, and presented a plank outlawing child labor for the party's platform.
After Scott's death, Dorothy Bullitt hired a lawyer and took personal charge of her family's real estate holdings. Her father had bequeathed her a considerable number of properties in downtown Seattle, but it was the height of the Great Depression, and the Bullitt properties were losing lessees rapidly as businesses failed and their owners moved out. Working in the almost exclusively male business world, and despite knowing next to nothing about real estate at the time of her husband's death, Bullitt personally restored the family's real estate business to financial health. An increasingly prominent member of Seattle's business community, Bullitt became a member of a number of corporate boards and a regent of the University of Washington, and was named Seattle's First Citizen in 1959.
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