Judge Dixie Chastain, the first female University of Miami law school graduate and a Miami-Dade County juvenile judge for two decades, died Oct. 25 at 100.

Chastain was Florida's sixth female judge, appointed in 1965 to a newly created third seat on the county's Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court.

She became a circuit court judge by constitutional revision in 1976, retired in 1978, then served until 1995 as a special-appointment senior judge.

Among her final rulings: ordering former Miami Dolphins star running back Eugene ``Mercury'' Morris to pay $10,000 in child support during a paternity case.

Chastain was a role model for the next generation of women in the law, including Janet Reno, who became the nation's first female attorney general under President Bill Clinton.

``Dixie Herlong Chastain, when I was 7 years old, sat out under my rose apple tree on North Kendall Drive when it ended at 112th Avenue and made me able to say to my mother, `Yes, I can become a lawyer because Dixie Chastain is a lawyer,' '' Reno once said.

Active in civic affairs, Chastain belonged to the Miami Woman's Club and the Everglades Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She was a deacon at Central Baptist Church.

In 1977, the county commission named the juvenile justice building in her honor.

Born Dixie Louese Herlong in the southwestern Alabama town of Manistee -- once a thriving lumber community, now just a dot on maps -- she grew up in Princeton, north of Homestead.

Her mother, Edie, ``would drive a school bus, which was actually a trailer pulled behind a model T Ford, to transport children . . . to the new school, called Redland Farmlife School,'' Amanda Louese Jones, one of Chastain's 12 great-grandchildren, noted in a 2004 college paper.

The family moved to Miami in 1918.

Edie and James Herlong wanted their two daughters to attend college after graduating from the original Miami Senior High School, a radical notion in 1925.

She spent a year at Stetson University before enrolling at the newly founded University of Miami just after the killer hurricane of 1926, one of 560 original students.

She studied international and aviation law at UM's law school, and in 1930 became the youngest woman admitted to the Florida Bar.

Not only did Chastain have to deal with workplace sexism when interviewing at law firms, but the Great Depression made jobs scarce and she ended up as secretary to a justice of the peace.

``Her mother insisted she become a court reporter because she'd never get a job as a lawyer,'' said Senior Judge Tom Petersen, a longtime colleague.

This made her a footnote in history on February 1933, after would-be presidential assassin Giuseppe Zangara tried to shoot Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami's Bayfront Park hut hit Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who later died. Chastain, on her way to the park, rushed to the Flagler Street courthouse, where she took his confession.

About the same time, Dixie Herlong met a handsome young Georgia-born constable named Reginald Bryan Chastain. They married in August 1935. Dixie began a solo practice. She and ``Reggie'' Chastain had two sons and a daughter by 1941.

Reggie died in 1988.

In the early 1950s, she joined a downtown firm, then left in 1956 to become investigating attorney for Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court. Gov. Hayden Burns later named her to the bench.

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