;)
Lady Romney at the School of Hard Knocks
They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income. It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting. We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time. -- Lady Romney, 1994
We got married and moved into a basement apartment. We walked to class together, shared the housekeeping, and ate a lot of pasta and tuna fish. Our desk was a door propped up on sawhorses. Our dining room table was a fold-down ironing board in the kitchen. Those were very special days. -- Lady Romney, GOP convention, August 2012
Mitt and I do recognize that we have not had a financial struggle in our lives. -- Lady Romney, "Meet the Press," September 10, 2012
Oops. Guess that phony poor-mouthing wasn't polling too well. Nonetheless, I think maybe we should let Lady Romney know that she & Little Lord Willard weren't the only students who struggled to make ends meet on a paltry inheritance. Here's my contribution. Please feel free to add your own. It can be real or more like this:
It Was the Worst of Times, It Was the Worst of Times. I'll just skip right over my undergraduate days, where I worked my way through school on summer jobs, research assistantships & tuition scholarships. Let's get on to the days when my first husband was finishing his last years of grad school. Although Lord & Lady Romney didn't have to work, we did because neither of us had a family inheritance. My husband had teaching jobs -- where he was paid by the course; he didn't have a full-time salary or standing -- & I worked at one of the universities where he taught. After a while I got pregnant -- to keep my husband out of Viet Nam -- & had to quit work. But I still worked researching my husband's dissertation, & after my son was born, I went back to school, too. We first lived in a third-floor walk-up on the Near North side of Chicago, then we moved to -- a basement apartment in Rogers Park -- just south of Evanston. It had linoleum floors -- no fancy mismatched carpet. To keep to our schedule of classes, my husband & I used to meet on the El platform & trade off our infant son. Our desk was a door propped up on oak filing cabinets I found in the alley. We didn't have a bed! (My husband & I slept on an avocado-green sofabed in the living/dining room.) We didn't have a car. The summer after my son was born, to save the cost of a round trip on the El, I used to ride my bike 18 miles through Lincoln Park on Saturdays to the Chicago Historical Society to read microfilm for my husband while he stayed home with our son & worked on compiling the research I'd done.
Not counting baby food, I never spent more than $20/week on groceries; it was usually closer to $10. We had a black-&-white TV. During the 1968 Chicago convention, burglars stole it & our typewriter.
When my husband finished his dissertation, which I edited & typed (on a new electric portable), he got a full-time job teaching at the University of Southern California. After we moved to SoCal, I got a job as a claims adjuster for an insurance company so we could save for a down payment on a house. Shortly after we bought the house, I got pregnant again -- my husband's bright idea -- and he promptly left me for one of his beautiful USC students. While I was packing up to go live with my parents (my mother was less than thrilled) for my "confinement," my husband's sheepskin came in the mail. When he came around to collect his mail, I gave him his half of the diploma.
"Very special days"? You bet. I learned a lot. Like -- diplomas are made of high-quality rag bond. If you tear them carefully, you get a beautiful deckled edge.
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Reader Comments (22)
Poor Lord and Lady Romney. All those years of poverty, living on cat food and peeing off the back porch (a real challenge for Lady Ann) not having indoor plumbing and all.
Once again the Romneys demonstrate their complete lack of understanding of how (or caring about how) the vast majority of the 99 percent live. And affecting a "we had it really tough" invented storyline is an incredible insult and a slap in the face to people who really have it tough. The idea that she can blithely make use of that kind of imagery as a punchline is viciously inhumane to those who have to tough it out everyday and do whatever they have to do to survive and make a life for themselves and their kids out of the droppings left them by such as these pig fuckers.
Not to mention all those who will join them if her Ladyship ends up having to give up her reduced circumstances to move into a true slum: the White House.
Execrable is too nice a word.
Let's see, which is better, 9 Lives, Friskies, or Little Sheba? Better stock up now.
And after that, time to go shopping for a guillotine. Mitt mentioned, in a slap to some poor slob, that Lady Ann has multiple Caddies. I'd like to see how she looks riding in a tumbrel.
I love the diploma story! My husband and I were grad students a few years before your time, and your narrative is so familiar, except that we never worked outside the U--he taught math, I taught English. Never a basement apartment, though, but some "interesting" adventures in housing--we seemed to move about every year.
Also familiar alas is the wife supporting the husband until he gets the degree and leaves her for a student. I still remember the surprise my male colleagues in the PhD program had when one of the younger guys took a year off to work supporting his wife's schooling--he explained to them that it was only fair. Shock!
My favorite personal story is a remark a male friend made when I told him the news that I had been accepted by a sought-after professor as his PhD student. "Why do you need a PhD? You're married!" My answer--"So are you, Phil."
We always wanted one of those desks made with a door, but our apartments were too small. Lots of our friends had them, of course. On the floor?? Once I bought a porch rug, as they used to be called--they were made of some kind of straw like straw hats. We thought that was the apex of sophistication.
But I never liked tuna fish. I think we ate lots of hamburger, which was called that, not "ground beef," and far from the quality of the ground sirloin I buy these days.
I would like to see more of Ann Romney as she is hilarious. Investments! At that age I did not even know what those were.
I guess this is show and tell for many of us when we were young and stupid.
In my first marriage, my husband was a graduate student in geology at the University of Wisconsin--from which we both graduated. I got a job as a lowly project assistant in the Political Science department and ended up being mostly a gopher. My salary (in 1961) was $5,000 a month. That is what we lived on--in a little house on farm property near Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin. Rent was minimal there, but it was an hour to Madison each way. We had no children during that time, but ended up taking care of 5 cats, who showed up on our doorstep, and a pregnant dawg--who gave birth to 5 puppies. As a future community organizer, I was able to get homes for all of the pups with Poly Sci grad students.
We moved to Washington, D.C. after my husband did not finish his PhD thesis, and he got a job (through connections) with the Peace Corps. I went to work as an assistant to John Gardner at the then HEW. The best part of my job was answering his hate mail, but I did get to cover hearings on the Hill--the uninteresting ones. We finally had a baby, and I realized that our marriage was untenable, so I left him--after a weird affair with a Black artist who wanted to paint my feet (?) I stayed in D.C. with our son, while my heartbroken husband went back to Wisconsin and finished his Ph.D. He moved in with a woman he met in a bar 3 months after we separated. My son and I lived in a commune, and I went to Graduate School on scholarships to get an MSW--so I could do something interesting with my life. I helped set up a daycare center on Capitol Hill (where we lived) which was featured in that illustrious glossy rag, "Woman's Day." Yikes.
Several years later, after I had my degree and was doing post-graduate work, I met my present husband in a mental hospital. Yes, really. He was the Director, and I was a lowly psychiatric social worker in the adolescent unit. My salary at that point was $10,000, which had to cover rent, daycare, food and everything else. I got no child support from the heartbroken husband who had remarried and had another family. I slept on a mattress and box-spring on the floor, and covered the box-spring with American flags.
Forward 40 years. I am living, mostly retired--except for 25 hours a month supervising former clients via Skype--in a lovely little community on the Oregon Coast. But it has lately been invaded by Tea Baggers who bout houses with underwater mortages on the cheap, and have all overdosed on Kool Aid. So it is not the Paradise I had hoped for. But my husband and I have our health, four grown children who have their own lives and are not dependent on us, and a wonderful old 3-legged cat (Tripod) we call our "love child."
Life is good. Getting older is the pits! Definitely not for sissies.
@Kate "My salary (in 1961) was $5,000 a month."
Is that correct-(seems very substantial for that period)? 'cause my 1961 job paid me a whopping $150.00 a week (as ad director for a department store).
My down in the mouth story includes a world when abortion was illegal along with birth control for women. I, too, had a first husband; a handsome lad who was a football player for the U.of Mo. while I was a first year student at a nearby fancy girl's college. At the end of that year during the summer I discovered I was pregnant (after one episode, I may add). Even though my father was a dentist and perhaps could have gotten one of his many doctor friends to perform an abortion, this apparently was not an option. I was put on a train at four in the morning (god forbid anybody would find out about this) with an apple and a sandwich in a brown bag off to St. Louis to marry a young man I really liked, but didn't love. We lived in a Quonset hut for a year while he finished his undergraduate stint. I gave birth to a nine pound dead baby––cord strangulation during labor–-no ultra sound in those days and within the next year the marriage was kaput. Tuna fish and pasta eating cited as hardship is laughable, when lives can be ruined because of curtailment of women's rights–-something that the Romney rats would like to curtail. I look back on those days with bitterness and sadness–-and feel so fortunate that I managed to change a life that could have been a disaster.
@ P. D. Pepe: thank you for sharing a story of true hardship that has meaning in terms of both public policy & social mores.
Marie
Re: Growing down; I was held back in the sixth grade because I was dumb and made every effort to prove it. By the time I was a senior in high school I had become so truant I was politely asked to move along. Hitchhiking through the South Bay of Los Angeles I helped a cement contractor pick up his form boards that had spilled from his truck on the side of the road; a career was born. I cleaned form boards and dug footings until I was told to cut a form board with a skilsaw, career advancement. Ten bucks an hour cash; eighty a month for rent; life was good. Traveled to South America, ran into PC volunteers; signed up; built schools and learned to hate the State Department. There was where I wish I could transport Ms Mitt and Mitt. Lived poor? Shit. The community I lived with maybe had a per capita of one hundred US a year. Poor is eating cockroach rice. Poor is no shoes and pin worms from pig shit. Poor is swollen stomachs from parasites. Poor is six children at twenty for the women and death at forty for the men. Poor is looking at the cover of a two year old "Newsweek" with the story on poverty in America and asking how anybody could be so rich as to have a washing machine in front of their nice house(rural slum in Alabama).
Poor is watching babies die from diseases conquered long ago. Poor is grinding out a living without hope for tomorrow. Poor is no fucking teeth from sucking on cane because it's the only sweet you know. Poor makes you old when you're young and dead before you're old.
I came home and cried in a grocery store when I saw the rows of different kinds of dog food, fuckin' Americans, so wealthy the dogs get choices.So I know poor and Ms. Mitt; you don't know shit about poor.
Reading the stories out here this morning makes it even clearer how difficult life can be when faced with economic, employment, healthcare, and social constrictions. Things most one percenters know very little about. And these are the people who are striving to write, by proxy, even more of these stories. Of course, they don't have to suffer the consequences, they just like putting people in these positions. Like PD says, the Romney Rats and his teabagger and wingnut allies want to push us back to the early 20th century when rights were only for the rich, the white, and the well connected and a hypocritical religious code is strictly enforced for everyone else.
Just as an aside, I heard this morning that the state I currently live in, a very red state, has one of the smallest percentages of residents with at least a bachelor's degree. We all know that a college degree (separate from a college education) is not a direct passport to a great job and a good life, but not having one can condemn someone to permanent underclass status and employment (apart from those who are able to gain education and experience in skill positions such as electricians and plumbers and the like).
And the (not so) funny thing is that these are the very people lining up to vote out Obama so Willard the Rat can reduce their standing even further and ensure that their kids will have little to no chance of ever attending, never mind graduating from, some kind of post secondary education.
Hardship made to order by the GOP. People who don't have a clue what that word means.
In the "Them that gots, gets" category, that is, receiving credit, money, position, and power without doing squat to earn it, I see that polls taken in Ohio and North Carolina, among other states, show that Republican voters are upset that Willard the Rat is not being given credit for finding and killing Osama Bin Laden.
I kid you not.
This, from Charlie Pierce this morning:
"...15 percent of registered Republicans in Ohio think Willard Romney deserves more credit for killing Osama bin Laden than does the president. Another 47 percent aren't really sure who does. In North Carolina, 29 percent of them give the credit to Romney while a whopping 56 percent of them find it too difficult to answer the question of whether the credit should go to the guy who actually gave the order, or to the guy who forgot to mention the troops in his acceptance speech not long ago."
So Romney, who stated unequivocally that he wouldn't spend dime one going after Bin Laden, and who is nothing but a private citizen (unemployed, as he likes to put it, poor dear) with no connection to the military or ability to order raids by Navy Seals or the fucking Boy Scouts of America, for that matter, is being given full and sole credit for bringing him to justice by large numbers of wingers.
Is this a great country or what? This is like a team of scientists coming up with a low-cost, can't fail solution for turning back global warming and Jim Inhofe taking the credit.
Never fear, The Rat will not disavow this undeserved credit. I mean, has he ever? After all, he and Lady Ann have had a tough life. It's their turn now.
For some reason (actually many; he's been on my mind a lot lately) Joe Hill's words run through my mind this AM. "This is my last and final Will..."
I trust not, just my last post for a while. Unlike Akhilleus, I will not be going as far as Mars.
Would like to stick around and see where the Chicago strike ends up, though. Have spent most of a life living in and thinking about the world of American public education and while I hardly have all the answers, I think we most often fail to find them because we don't ask the right questions, often willfully, I believe. There are a lot of answers out there we don't want to hear.
Over the years we have viewed schooling from the perspective of one model after another, whatever is currently in vogue or convenient. Standardized tests come with the industrial mechanical production model; the open classroom, free-form initiatives of the seventies saw schools and children as living organisms, too messy for a simple production model; today we're trying an updated version of the first model, substituting some version of electronic/computer wizardry for the mechanical component of the assembly line. That view, married to unfettered capitalism, which sees everything as a potential profit center, yields private for profit on line charter schools, the modern apotheosis of the Right's American educational perfection. Computers are so much easier to deal with than professional teachers and communicating with students by telepresence eliminates any classroom disruption before it starts. How wonderful it all is.
But try as we might schools and schools can't be simplified so easily. When we talk about education in any society, we should be talking about the whole shebang, the society as a whole because the schooling we provide our children is a microcosm of who we are. Everything we do in our schools represents something we do outside them. They embody the knowledge and habits of mind, the behaviors and moral underpinnings of our culture. Our schools are where we work it all out. That why they are always real and always exciting, and every time we simplify them, we are simplifying ourselves.
In short (I must quit; I have a plane to catch) the educational models so dear to the Right ignore, as they always do, what's real. They never account for the human stories like those told by Marie and those who responded to her with their own experiences, and because of that, they are mere dreams and lies. And that is why they don't work and why the struggle to make schools and the society they represent match reality will continue. As they have over our history in Chicago and everywhere else.
As always, I'm late to the party, due to having to spend my mornings working. By now the conversation has moved beyond the personal, so I'll spare you all my story, except to say to PDPepe that it's in some ways similar to yours, save that I seem not to have managed to turn it around, despite working my tuchas off to try. I lost everything by getting pregnant 10 years before Roe v. Wade, and there has been no yang to complement that yin in almost 50 years.
My daughter, on the other hand, is living a full, rich life with a good job, a loving husband and three grown children. She had choices that I didn't. I'm not happy about her two abortions, especially since I offered to take her to the gynecologist for birth control pills when she entered puberty, but the children she has were wanted and well-loved. She also had an ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed her. Thank goodness it happened decades ago and not under a Romney presidency or she'd have been left on a gurney in some hospital hallway to die.
Finally, thanks to JJG for the reminder of what third-world poverty looks like. Even under current conditions in America there are people who care and can help; there are religious and other NGOs that are available to try to alleviate the worst of it. Doesn't make it acceptable, but puts it in perspective. Also says some good things about at least some of our citizens.
I think of myself as poor and feel pretty hopeless most of the time, but as a friend of mine says, it's probably because I'm a dour, melancholy Celt. (I rather like that description, actually.) Yet I take some time every day to remind myself that I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, and that I have a cushion between my current situation and homelessness and hopelessness. I also have my dogs, who (pace JJG!) get premium food and medical care, while I eat beans and rice (a good diet, actually). As I recall, that's not how Lord and Lady Romney treat their dogs -- hell, it's not how they treat their "help!"
I don't know what the answer is, but I'm inclined to agree with those, like Bill McKibben, who advocate a return to local economies. I try to do my part: I buy local whenever I can, support artisanal businesses, try to be as self-sufficient as possible. I know plenty of people who farm -- many of them raise sheep and alpacas for their wool (I'm in a spinning guild) and one even runs a boarding kennel on her farm. She once described her life as "a hard life, but a good one." Now that, in my view, is what being rich is all about. All her clients, people and dogs alike, adore her. The Romneys and their ilk will never know anything like that.
In my view, THAT is what makes them poorer than any of us will ever be.
I guess I had it pretty easy: at the University of British Columbia, I had a merit scholarship that covered tuition; I worked in the dorm to cover my room and board completely and my work as a parking lot attendant covered everything else: no loans, no contributions from parents.
At graduate school at Yale, I was on a $200/month scholarship for four years, which allowed me to live pretty well. After that I drove cab in NYC until I got my Ph.D. By that time, my wife was an assistant professor of English; so we could afford 8 years of unemployment and over 1000 rejections from academic jobs for me until I gave up and went to law school at Berkeley.
Most years after that were middle class until I started a new business three weeks before 9/11. It took two years for that to break even, and I was homeless for almost a year of that and a hair's breadth from bankruptcy the rest of the time. Eventually, we created a national brand that had over 80 franchise locations by the time I retired last month.
And no, I didn't do it alone: I was surrounded and supported by a lot of very smart people (educated for the most part in public colleges and universities) and supported by an infrastructure paid for by our taxes. So unlike the Mittster, I am not and never claimed to be a "self-made" man, even though I didn't have wealthy parents and a privileged upbringing. The American people through their governments and their taxes created the conditions for my success.
Re; answers for AK; Need to read "Fear of a Black President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic for September 2012. He explains it.
Re: Rose in Mich.; my five rescued perros live in Byzantine-like luxury surrounded by scented (their own) pillows and feast on wheat-free dishes loving placed in crystal bowls. Belly rubs and walkies take up the few free hours not devoted to naps and general horse play. Dogs are more honest than us and I respect them for that.
JJG,
I've read the Coates article. A great piece of work. I was impressed with his candor about his feelings toward 9/11. The world is a very complicated place. Events change us as much was we impact those events. Gray zones rarely give way to all white or all black, but that's what the Romneys of the world would have us believe. Get on board or you must be some kind of hater of America.
RD Pepe-
Your story touched my heart and made me furious! How terrible that you had to go through that--ditto Rose in Michigan!
I think a YouTube testimonial about your experience--which would undoubtedly go viral--would be an excellent antidote to the R&R craziness. This is such a fucked up country! Mitters and the Missus have NO CLUE about what people like you have gone through. Nor do they care.
But young people would get fired up by understanding what people of our generation had to go through when getting pregnant by chance. And the first time, yet! Yikes! I am glad you both survived and can tell your stories!
I've got one of those suffering married students stories, but not for sharing right now. What I really want to know is if you divided the diploma horizontally or vertically.
Wow, just wow to all these honest assessments and poingnantly written remembrances of the lives you have all lived and what I consider the common-ness that connects all of us. I could take a little from each of your stories to tell my own, but have always been ashamed that circumstances and poor choices made in my misbegotten youth never got me that tearable (horizontal or vertical!) degree I have always coveted.
How did you all become the insightful, caring humans you are and Willard the Rat and Lady Romney became the condescending, self- righteous prigs they are? Guess money doesn't buy you a moral compass even if you go to church twice a day on Sunday, eh?
Re: Don't think anyone will see this but; Why must women bear the sorrow of man's seed. I've lived with four women in my life and each had a story like the ones told today. I never cheated or left a woman for another; my lack of trust and inability to open myself to the other destroys my relationships. Married twice, divorced twice; I have supported the gaining of two university degrees and bought a house for a third. No regrets here; I love as I can and my current mate seems to understand.
But I can't help but feel that there is something wrong when so many Maries and PDs and Roses get treated like tissue.
The social issues on trial today are so important for women they impact everything else.
Here's my story. I wasn't surprised when my father told me, during my second year of college, that he had no money for more college education for me. I had lots of siblings all headed for college. A sane person would have taken time out to earn some money, but I kept going to college. A kindly dean found a way to get me a loan. I found a, shall we say, plain place to live. I worked at any and every job I could find. One of the things I skimped on was food. I lost alot of weight and kept moving forward.
That was all years ago; everything worked out.
But I remember the hunger.
It could explain why many of my charitable contributions go to "meals on wheels" and food banks.
It's hard to think when you're very hungry.
Thanks to everyone for sharing your stories. JJG's story reminds us that the rank poverty -- and the terrible effects of it -- he witnessed in South America is rare in the U.S., thanks mostly to government programs to help the poor (and all of us). These are the programs that Romney & Ryan would cut, so we could see these kinds of effects again -- children starving to death, people of all ages dying of easily-preventable illnesses & exposure to the weather.
Another thing that struck me in reading the stories is that most of us -- even if we suffered some inconvenience or true hardship -- thought higher education was important enough to pursue. Of course it was easier way back when: college tuition was usually in the hundreds of dollars, not thousands. Grants & loans were often available. So somewhere some adult, whether a parent or teacher or other mentor, likely convinced us that education was worthwhile. In my case, I had plenty of role models, but I specifically remember it was a child who made me decide to finish my undergraduate degree. I was walking home from the El one day when a 7- or 8-year-old asked me if I was his teacher. As I told him "no," the thought that went through my mind was "... because I don't have a college degree; I'm not qualified to be a teacher." With only a year to go & tuition around $0 at a state university, going back to school was a pretty easy decision to make.
@Jacquelyn: I hope you won't continue to be ashamed of your personal history. As you can see from the stories shared here today, we all have made some choices we wished we hadn't -- and most of us will goof again. But for better or for worse, the one thing we own is who we are, and that is -- to a great extent -- the sum of our experiences. I'm not especially ashamed of the dumb things I've done (some I've turned into cocktail party yarns which I imagine are amusing) & I'm not proud that things have worked out reasonably well (but hardly perfectly) for me. A lot of how things turn out is chance, even if we are supposed to be the masters of our fates & the captains of our souls. One thing I figured out a long time ago is that secrets -- because they are secrets -- take on an importance they don't usually merit. I'm not suggesting you start running a daily blog confessional, but I have found that a life with few secrets is easier than one in which I present myself at every moment as if I'm in a job interview & making a good impression could put me on Easy Street. As the wise man Mitt Romney once said, quoting the Roman philosopher Popeii (with whom I was previously unfamiliar), "I yam what I yam."
@Pompano Pete: an excellent & important question. Vertically -- top to bottom -- right through the university seal.
Marie
Thank you everyone for sharing stories from your past. I will attempt to share a bit of my own life.
My parents divorced when I was 13 (my brother 3) and this was at a time when child support payments were not enforced. We lived in a small town in central NY - very conservative! It has been said by some that it is extraordinary that I found my way out of this small town. I was lucky to have a very special art teacher who encouraged me to apply to art school, and he guided me every step of the way. The high school guidance counselor even asked this art teacher if I was smart enough to go to college. I had average grades, and artistic ability, but the closed minded counselor could not see that. My art teacher said to me, "Julie, get out of this town. If you don't like college and want to return, it will still be here". I went and never looked back.
Here's the thing, I went to a state college. I had some financial assistance, low interest loans and a part-time job on campus. I had NO help from parents. Fortunately, in the mid-70's, there were programs to help low income students. I know my education made a big difference in my life! Not so much in a monetary way, but rather the college experience exposed me to people who came from diverse backgrounds. I think the experience made it possible for me to travel within the world with a more open mind than I might otherwise would have.
I moved to NYC after graduation, and worked 50-60 hours a week to keep a roof over my head. I had no phone, tv or car! I went from a dumpster bed to a new futon! Fortunately, most museums were free, and films were reasonable. Once, a friend gave me her front row seat ticket to see the NY ballet!!
Oh, and I can't forget that I did utilize the services of Planned Parenthood for birth control while in college.
It's so easy to look back at this time with a romantic sort of memory, but there were times when I wasn't sure how I would pay the rent or the college loan, and I wished that my parents were covering all my expenses like some parents were able to do for their kids.
While not financially easy to go to college, it was doable! I don't know if today a person from similar circumstances as myself would be able to get through 4 years of college without incurring a burdensome debt. And, I believe republicans want to make sure they can't!!!
These wonderful and poignant stories of the cravings of the curious minded are like a sort of group therapy. I have my own, but they would be redundant at this point. The sad part is these sacrifices were made in an environment where there was assurance that somehow rewards would come from these sacrifices. Today that assurance no longer exists as social status seems to trump intellectual ability. The pirate attitude in business rewards the most craven i.e. characters like the Lord Mittster and the Lady Ann.