WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney made a surprise appearance on Fox host Brian Kilmeade's radio show Thursday morning to respond to a
on his time as a prep-school prankster and occasional bully of closeted gay students.
"They talk about the fact that I played a lot of pranks in high
school," Romney said. "And they describe some that you just say to
yourself, back in high school I just did some dumb things and if anybody
was hurt by that or offended by it, obviously I apologize."
“I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school and
some might have gone too far and for that, I apologize," he added.
It's never quite clear whether a politician's high school years are
fair game for political attacks. Romney suggested during the interview
that the acts he was apologizing for were merely youthful indiscretions;
the
described him pinning a closeted gay classmate to the
ground and cutting his long hair, for example. But with the story
suggesting latent homophobia in an adolescent Romney and with President
Barack Obama having endorsed same-sex marriage on Wednesday, the piece
reverberated.
Still, Romney said he was "not going to be too concerned" about the
item. He insisted that he grew up in a tolerant environment and that
there was nothing about his pranks that were discriminatory towards
gays.
"The people involved didn't come out of the closet until years
later," he noted. "The idea that this is something that was known by me
... is obviously absurd. I had no idea that this person might have been
gay."
“I don’t remember that incident and I’ll tell you I certainly don’t
believe that I, I can’t speak for other people of course, thought the
fellow was homosexual," he said earlier in the interview. "That was the
furthest thing from my mind back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.
But as to pranks that were played back then, I don’t remember them all,
but again, high school days, if I did stupid things, why I’m afraid I
got to say sorry for it.”
The idea that Romney, as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee,
holds the same mindset now as he did in his prep school days is, of
course, absurd. People change, including Obama who had, until Wednesday,
spent several years in public life opposing same-sex marriage.
piece still presents problems for the former
Massachusetts governor, in part because of the brutish context it
provides for his policy platforms. Earlier in the day, his campaign
adviser Ed Gillespie
would be campaigning on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The night before, Romney himself
with a reporter who asked him about his opposition to civil unions.
Clearly, social issues are posing a problem for Romney, and that was
exemplified by the uncomfortable laughs that punctuated his responses as
he discussed his behavior with Kilmeade.
Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week
spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at
the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded
with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he
thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried
briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind
Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed
homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with
bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having
it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an
incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens
Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenage
son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s
look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered
Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching
out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their
plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room
where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground.
As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney
repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
The incident
was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts
independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist;
Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and
David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former
student who witnessed the incident asked not to be identified. The men
have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean
Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008.
Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county
chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored
their recollections.
“It happened very quickly, and to this day it
troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he
joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to
Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic
thing to do.”
“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood
friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred.
“It was vicious.”
“He was just easy pickin’s,” said Friedemann,
then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall,
expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.
The incident
transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering
schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.
Friedemann,
guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and
waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the
famously strict institution. Nothing happened.
(What’s your opinion: Are Romney’s high school actions relevant to his campaign?)
Romney is now the presumed Republican presidential nominee. His
campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, said in a statement that “anyone who
knows Mitt Romney knows that he doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his
body. The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and
Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.”
Campaign
officials denied a request for an interview with Romney. They also
declined to comment further about his years at Cranbrook.
In a subsequent interview Thursday morning with Fox News Channel, Romney said he didn’t remember the incident but
apologized for pranks he helped orchestrate that he said “might have gone too far.”
After
the incident, Lauber seemed to disappear. He returned days later with
his shortened hair back to its natural brown. He finished the year but
ultimately left the school before graduation — thrown out for smoking a
cigarette.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, David Seed noticed a familiar face at the end of a bar at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
“Hey,
you’re John Lauber,” Seed recalled saying at the start of a brief
conversation. Seed, also among those who witnessed the Romney-led
incident, had gone on to a career as a teacher and principal. Now he had
something to get off his chest.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t do more to help in the situation,” he said.
Lauber
paused, then responded, “It was horrible.” He went on to explain how
frightened he was during the incident, and acknowledged to Seed, “It’s
something I have thought about a lot since then.”
Lauber died in 2004, according to his three sisters.
Romney
came of age during his six years at Cranbrook. First as a day student
and later as a full-time boarder, he embraced and became emblematic of
the Cranbrook way — a strict disciplinary code and academic rigor that
governed the school by day and a free-wheeling unofficial boys code of
“Crannies” at night. Wherever the action was, so was Romney. He wrote
the most letters to the girls at the sister school across the lake and
successfully petitioned to get placed in the top classes. He was not a
natural athlete but found his place among the jocks by managing the
hockey team and leading megaphone cheers for the football team. Although
a devout Mormon, one of the few at the school, he was less
defined by his faith than
at any other time in his life. He was a member of 11 school
organizations, including the Spectators’ Club and the homecoming
committee, and started the school’s booster outfit, the Blue Key Club.
It
was at Cranbrook where he first lived on his own, found his future wife
and made his own decisions. One can see the institution’s influence on
his demeanor and actions during those years, but also how it helped form
the clubbiness and earnestness, the sense of leadership and enthusiasm,
apparent in his careers as a businessman and a politician. “He strongly
bought in to community service,” said Richard Moon, a schoolmate at the
time. “That hard work was its own reward.” What is less visible today
is what was most apparent to his prep-school peers: his jocularity.
Now, nearly half a century later,
Romney’s presidential campaign has turned to the candidate’s youthful antics as
evidence of his capacity for harmless, humanizing pranks and as an indication of his looser, less wooden self.
“There’s
a wild and crazy man inside of there just waiting to come out,”
Romney’s wife, Ann — a graduate of Cranbrook’s sister school, Kingswood —
attested in a television interview this month, evoking what she saw as
his endearing and fun-loving prep-school persona. Many of Romney’s peers
from his high school days echo that version of the candidate,
describing him as the humble son of an automobile
executive-turned-governor who volunteered at the nearby mental hospital.
They recall an infectious laugh, a characterization first documented in
his senior yearbook.
“If you should ever by chance be walking
down the [Stevens Hall] corridor at 2:00 a.m. and hear rising tones of
boisterous, exuberant laughter, you are almost sure to find its source
is Mitt Romney,” the yearbook reported. “A quiet joke, a panicky
laughter and another of the Friedemann-Romney all-night marathon
contests has begun.”
But Friedemann and several people closest to
Romney in those formative years say there was a sharp edge to him. In an
English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time,
recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with
Romney shouting, “Atta girl!” In the culture of that time and place,
that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers
using similar language.
Saul, Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, said the candidate has no recollection of the incident.
Teachers were also the butt of Romney’s brand of humor.
One
venerable English teacher, Carl G. Wonnberger, nicknamed “the Bat” for
his diminished eyesight, was known to walk into the trophy case and
apologize, step into wastepaper baskets and stare blindly as students
slipped out the back of the room to smoke by the open windows. Once,
several students remembered the time pranksters propped up the back axle
of Wonnberger’s Volkswagen Beetle with two-by-fours and watched,
laughing from the windows, as the unwitting teacher slammed the gas
pedal with his wheels spinning in the air.
As an underclassman,
Romney accompanied Wonnberger and Pierce Getsinger, another student,
from the second floor of the main academic building to the library to
retrieve a book the two boys needed. According to Getsinger, Romney
opened a first set of doors for Wonnberger, but then at the next set,
with other students around, he swept his hand forward, bidding the
teacher into a closed door. Wonnberger walked right into it and
Getsinger said Romney giggled hysterically as the teacher shrugged it
off as another of life’s indignities.
“I always enjoyed his
pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a
career as a public school teacher and said he has been “disturbed” by
the Lauber incident since hearing about it several weeks ago, before
being contacted by The Washington Post. “But I was not the brunt of any
of his pranks.”
In later years, after Romney went on a Mormon
mission, married and raised five sons, he seemed a different person to
some old classmates. “Mitt began to change as a person when he met Ann
Davies. He gradually became a more serious person. She was part of the
process of him maturing and becoming more of the person he is today,”
said Jim Bailey, who was a classmate of Romney’s at Cranbrook and later
at Harvard.
* * *
By the 1950s, George and Lenore
Romney had cracked the Motor City firmament and made their home in the
exclusive enclave of Bloomfield Hills. When it came to educating their
children, the clear choice was Cranbrook.
Built in 1927 by George
Booth, publisher of the Detroit News, and named after his father’s alma
mater in Kent, England, Cranbrook stood out as an architectural gem in
the Michigan woods. Modeled on British boarding schools with “forms”
instead of grades, “prefects” instead of RAs, “masters” instead of
teachers, it also boasted the work of famed Finnish architect Eliel
Saarinen. Cranbrook had all the trappings of an elite school where kids
walked around like junior executives and, as Tom Elliott, Class of 1966,
recalled, learned mantras such as, “Remember who you are, and what you
represent.”
“If you went to Cranbrook,” said a classmate, Peter “the Bird” Werbel. “You were creme de la creme.”
The
Romney children walked under arches reading “A Life Without Beauty Is
Only Half Lived”; past a field overlooked by Greek-style sculptures
where the Detroit Lions practiced; and then a statuette of the school’s
symbol, the archer from Book V of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” who “aimed an arrow
high.” (In the mug honoring Romney’s Class of 1965, a naked woman
replaced the aiming archer.) They looked out of leaded-glass windows in
the academic buildings, crossed the spruce-spotted quad lined with
modernist fountains and sleek statues of coursing hounds. They studied
in reading rooms featuring frescoes and marble friezes. In the
chandeliered dining room, students waited on fellow students and sat on
straight-backed spindle chairs bearing the school’s insignia of a proud
crane. After dinner, they wiped their mouths with cloth napkins.
In 1959, Mitt Romney enrolled at Cranbrook as a 12-year-old seventh-grader.
For
the most part, the school broke down along the usual lines of jocks and
brains, popular kids and introverts, all trained with the expectation
of joining the next generation’s elite. The students gave one another
chummy nicknames. There was Moonie and Butch, the Kraut and Flip.
Romney, his name short to begin with, was playfully teased with chants
of
Wiiillard, Wiiillard by his friends.
Ron Sill, a
Romney classmate especially attuned to the counterculture of the 1960s,
rolled his eyes at the dance instruction and lessons on how to hold a
teacup and properly shake a man’s hand. He preferred to listen to folk
music in the coffee shops of neighboring Birmingham. Taro Yamasaki, the
son of the architect of the World Trade Center and several Bloomfield
Hills houses, then went by the name Michael and encountered what he
called a “veiled racism.” “I was a linebacker in football,” said
Yamasaki, who went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer.
“And the coaches would call me Kamikaze.” Sidney Barthwell, the son of a
prominent Detroit pharmacist, was
the only African American student in Romney’s class from
the seventh through 12th grades. Now a Detroit magistrate, he said he
tried to introduce some west Detroit swagger to the school, but it was,
he said, “pretty Republican and pretty WASP-y.”
There was a
significant Jewish contingent, and several of those students said they
never sensed any obvious prejudice. During Romney’s tenure, there were
also Middle Eastern exchange students, usually from Kuwait.
Abdulhadi
M. al-Awadi, a Kuwaiti student, had fond memories of the school and the
respect and special attention he received from teachers. He recalled
Romney as the “son of Governor Romney” who was “very sociable.” When
some students put up pictures of Israeli statesman David Ben-Gurion in
the hallway near his room, he did not believe it was meant intentionally
to offend him, but he was bothered by it. “It’s human nature. But they
did it. That’s their right.”
Faisel F. al-Abduljadir, a Kuwaiti
student spending his senior year at Cranbrook in part to improve his
English, said the teachers and students went out of their way to treat
him with respect, showing consideration for his celebration of Ramadan
and bathing requirements. But he acknowledged being “angry” about a
caption under his picture in the senior yearbook that read, “Take a left
at the next Synagogue.”
Religion was not much of an issue for
the students. There was mandatory chapel time on Tuesdays and Thursdays
when they sang Episcopalian hymns and the school song, “Forty Years On,”
but it was studiously nondenominational. The campus’s elegant Christ
Church had a Star of David, an Islamic crescent, and yin-and-yang sign
above its wooden door. The Mormon Romney joined Jews and Protestants on
Cranbrook’s Church Cabinet, which focused on community service.
Some
students admired Romney for what they saw as his lack of airs, saying
he did not trade on his father’s status as an auto executive and
governor. Romney even came in for teasing because American Motors, the
company his father ran, was considered at the bottom rung of the
big-auto hierarchy, below General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
“Boys
in a boys’ school can tease and make fun of almost anything,” said
Bailey, a scholarship student and head prefect of the school who
described Romney at the time as an awkward adolescent with a penchant
for practical jokes. The children of other auto executives would taunt
Romney for the Ramblers he and his father drove. “That’s not a car,
that’s a bicycle with a dishwasher for an engine,” Bailey recalled them
saying.
Others noticed a distance between themselves and Romney.
“I was a scholarship student, and he was the son of the governor,” said
Lance Leithauser, now a doctor, who attended the school with his
brother, Brad, now a noted poet. “There was a bit of a gulf.” Even a
close pal like Friedemann felt that distance; their friendship was
confined to the dorms. When Romney left the campus on weekends, he never
invited him. “I didn’t quite fit into the social circle. I didn’t have a
car when I was 16,” Friedemann said. “I couldn’t go skiing or whatever
they did.”
Lou Vierling, a scholarship student who boarded at
Cranbrook for the 1960 and 1961 academic years, was struck by a question
Romney asked them when they first met. “He wanted to know what my
father did for a living,” Vierling recalled. “He wanted to know if my
mother worked. He wanted to know what town I lived in.” As Vierling
explained that his father taught school, that he commuted from east
Detroit, he noticed a souring of Romney’s demeanor.
Romney was
bowled over by the wealth of some of his friends. He briefly dated Mary
Fisher, the daughter of the philanthropist and diplomat Max Fisher, who
acted as a finance chairman to George Romney’s political campaigns. At
her house, he watched the James Bond film “Goldfinger” in the family’s
private theater before it was widely released. He reported excitedly
back to Friedemann about the theater, noting that the seats even had
numbers.
The largest chasm of all at Cranbrook was between the
boarders and the “day boys.” Students within the limits of Detroit’s
Eight Mile Road had the option to attend the school without boarding.
The requirements for enrollment as a day student were generally tougher,
leading day boys to consider themselves academically superior. Day boys
also had the freedom to leave campus when school let out late in the
afternoon. Often those with cars would gas up at nearby service
stations, cruise Woodward Avenue and plot “how and where we could get
some beer,” said Gregg Dearth, who went by the nickname Daiquiri Dearth.
Drugs were generally unheard of, but day boy parties often included
someone downing beers or toting bottles of scotch.
Romney began
his Cranbrook career as a day boy and quickly adapted to the school’s
unofficial code. He was prohibited by his religion from drinking alcohol
but excelled at elaborate practical jokes.
During spring break
of his senior year, when most of his friends went to Florida for
vacation, Romney stayed behind to make movies for an upcoming Cranbrook
talent show. For one, he filmed his friends Stu White and Judy Sherman
seated at a table to dine on fine china on a Woodward Avenue median as
their friend Pike John, now deceased, acted as the waiter. Romney filmed
the luncheon until a police officer pulled up. “And that was it,”
Sherman said.
But in a well-known prank in which Romney flashed a
police siren and, bearing a fake badge and cap, approached two friends
and their dates parked on a dark country road, there was a stronger
undercurrent of fear to the incident than commonly conveyed. Candy
Porter, a Kingswood boarder from a small town in Ohio, had a strict
11 p.m. curfew. As Romney and his Cranbrook pals played out the joke,
pretending to be shocked over empty bourbon bottles in the trunk, Porter
thought of the dorm mothers waiting at the door and the threat of
expulsion. “I just remember being like a deer in headlights,” she said.
“I just remember being terrified.” Once she realized it was all a prank,
and was safely back at her dorm, Porter joined in the laughter.
Romney’s sense of humor ran through his family.
Sherman,
a friend of the Romneys from high school, recalled Ann telling her
about the time Romney and his older brother, Scott, dressed up in white
coats and wheeled a gurney up to the Birmingham train station to meet
their aunt. When she got off the train, they rushed her away as if to a
madhouse.
* * *
By the time Romney started dating Ann in
his senior year, he had immersed himself into the Cranbrook culture. In
1962, when his father won the governorship and his parents moved to
Lansing, he entered the boarding life as a resident of Stevens Hall,
named after the school’s first headmaster. From the inside, Cranbrook
was an entirely different place.
“The day students,” said Steph Lady, a boarder and now a screenwriter in Hollywood, “it was like they didn’t even go there.”
Romney breathed Cranbrook day and night.
He
met the Kingswood girls at the Get Acquainted Dance in the school gym.
There was the Chateau de Noel girl-ask-boy dance at Christmas, and the
World A-Fair, in which students dressed up in the garb of other nations.
He sang in the Glee Club and started the Blue Key Club, an organization
of students who “know the campus and Cranbrook traditions well” and
served as ambassador to parents and prospective students. The school
newspaper noted that his “diligent and capable leadership” of the
homecoming weekend, where he delivered a “brilliantly hilarious
monologue,” earned him a citation reserved for “students whose
contributions to school life are often not fully recognized through
already existing channels.” He was co-chairman of the Speculators Club
and played a leading role in the American Field Service, which helped
bring foreign students to the campus. He also served a leadership role
on a student cabinet organization and during his senior year took a bus
with some Kingswood girls to volunteer at the nearby state mental
hospital. There, he danced to spinning 45s and talked and ate chips with
the young patients.
“His altruism was apparent then and is
apparent now,” said Candy Porter, who volunteered with Romney at the
hospital. “I just remember him being really nice,” said Mary Fisher.
Romney
also found time to contribute to the school paper as a special
correspondent at the funeral of President John F. Kennedy. “Mitt Romney
Comments on Kennedy Funeral,” read the front page headline on the Dec.
17, 1963, edition of the Crane. “Note: Personal comments and
observations made by Mitt Romney in Washington, Nov. 25, 1963.”
“The
old Washington theory of relativity, briefly: one is important only
until a bigger brass appears, was blatently [sic] obvious for whenever
before have we had the top potentates of the world here to outrank our
dignitaries? We all recall the day when we saw a senator of the like in
some big, black limosine [sic] drive through our town. Most likely our
mouths were hanging wide open as our Mommies and Daddies told us the man
out there was a very important person who worked in Washington.”
* * *
Even
without extracurricular activities, Cranbrook demanded long days. The
morning bell rang at 7 and breakfast was served in the dining hall at
7:30, coat and tie required. After breakfast, students returned to clean
their rooms in anticipation of white-gloved senior prefects who scoured
the bed frames for dust. After classes and study hall at 9:30, students
could go beneath Stevens Hall to the school store, where the boys
received letters, via an inter-school postal service, from the girls at
Kingswood. Some were perfumed.
The letters Romney wrote were
delivered to the Green Lobby in Kingswood. Around 10:15 every morning,
the girls, all wearing saddle shoes, hoped to hear their names called
amid walls of rich green tile, and banisters, benches and clocks all in
the art deco style.
“The person who wrote the most consistently
was Mitt,” said Lyn Moon Shields, who dated Romney in the fall semester
of 1964. Gentlemanly and fun, Romney was her best date in her six years
at school. He called every evening and picked her up in his powder blue
Rambler and drove her up and down Woodward Avenue on weekends, and to
school dances where she wore blue-green formal dresses and he a dark
suit and tie. “Things were so innocent,” she said. “We kissed each
other, I think Mitt would admit to that.” One day, she said, Romney just
stopped calling. He had taken an interest in a Kingswood sophomore.
“They got intentional about their relationship very soon,” Shields said
of Mitt and Ann.
Like every other student, Romney completed a
rigorous workload that made most college requirements seem easy by
comparison. Between the seventh and eighth grades, the faculty selected a
dozen or so students to enter an advanced-placement program. Romney at
first was not among the chosen, and he objected. “He went into the
headmaster and convinced him that ‘I should be in this,’ ” John French,
who had been friends with Romney since they served together as Cub
Scouts, recalled Romney telling him. “He had gumption. He had his sights
on what he wanted to achieve.”
The time after class was set aside
for sports. Romney was not a natural athlete, according to classmates.
He wore the Cranbrook “C” on his white tank top as a cross-country
runner, but the greatest impression he made in that pursuit was
collapsing near the finish line during a meet — although his
perseverance won him admiration and applause. He was more at home on the
sidelines, cheering the football team on as a member of the Pep Club,
chanting such cheers into a megaphone as “Iron them out. Iron them out.
Smooooth.”
He participated on the school’s hockey team as its
manager, lugging a duffle bag full of pucks and sticks. Dressed in suit
and tie and three-quarter coat, he rode the bus with the uniformed
players and kept stats in the coach’s box at the cold outdoor rink. The
team’s senior year began with promise, but ended badly. The players took
out their frustration on the ice, getting into brawls with Lakeview and
Catholic Central. During one fight, Maxwell pulled the jersey over the
head of an opposing player and pummeled away. Romney dashed onto the
ice, slipping and sliding in his Brogan wingtips in an apparent attempt
to break up the fight.
During the winter of Romney’s sophomore
year, the faculty assigned him and Maxwell to mop the floors of the
academic halls, part of a World War II-era program meant to instill a
work ethic in the students. During their six-week detail, the two old
friends had long, rambling conversations about religion, and Maxwell
pressed Romney on how he could believe in Mormonism.
As Maxwell
later recalled their discussion, he asked Romney, “How can you believe
that thing about the tablets?” referring to the divine gold tablets
Mormons believe were discovered in New York and translated by Joseph
Smith.
Romney, he said, responded, “What about the Virgin birth and the holy trinity?”
“I don’t believe that, either,” Maxwell responded. The discussions ultimately came down to a faith vs. reason equation.
“You simply have to have faith,” Romney concluded.
“That’s a cop-out,” Maxwell said.
While
there were seeds of Romney’s future devoutness at Cranbrook, he was
then more interested in goofing off. In the evenings, he cut loose with
Friedemann, a scholarship kid from the small town of Romeo, dubbed the
Kraut. The two boys stayed up late, joking around and racing mops like
racehorses up and down the hallway.
One regular in the Stevens
Hall revelry was the school’s security guard, Chester. In police
uniform, chubby and middle-aged, Chester would let Romney and Friedemann
examine and play with his gun. In the student yearbook, Romney posed
with his arm around Chester wearing thick black glasses, similar to
those the guard wore, but also a ski hat and a silly Jerry Lewis
expression. At the Swingin’ Sweeney Dance, Romney pointed a toy gun
under his chin as two girls shook hands in front of him. A photo of the
pose ran in the yearbook above the caption, “Give a guy enough rope and
he’ll hang himself.”
Romney spent months trying to convert
Friedemann, the son of New Deal-worshiping Democrats, to the Republican
Party. He asked to meet his friend’s grandmother, so that he could
convert her, too. “He talked politics all the time,” Friedemann said.
“It was more big government versus small government. He was a business
guy back then.”
Romney’s political and personal idol, George
Romney, was never far away. Once Crawford Elder, a student a year behind
Romney, saw the governor in the basement under Stevens Hall getting a
haircut from Everett Arthurs, the school barber and part-time bartender
at faculty cocktail parties. When Ev, as he was widely known, dropped
dead after a round of golf, Gov. Romney eulogized him at a tree
dedication ceremony on the quad, a few steps away from his son’s room.
* * *
After
lights out, John Lauber often left his door open. Larry Olson and some
other boarders would check for the hall monitor they called Sneaky Pete
and slip into Lauber’s room. From there, they would crawl out his
window, climb over the bushes and scurry off campus to Lone Pine Road,
where a pizza truck regularly parked. Sated, they would climb back
through the window and check on the bottles of apple juice that they
hoped fermenting grapes would turn into hard cider. Then Lauber and his
friends played poker until the early morning.
When Lauber’s
younger sister, Betsy, visited the campus, she said she found him happy
and sporting a preppy look. He took her to an off-campus party at a
fellow student’s house where they danced to Motown records and laughed.
But
he was always a bit different from the rest. During breaks from school,
he worked as a mortician’s assistant. He spent more time devouring
books than making friends in clubs.
“He was very quiet, not a
jock,” said Steph Lady. “Very soft-spoken. I know nothing, probably gay,
but who knows. We were so stupid and naive. I know there was
homosexuality there, but we didn’t even have a word for it. And there
was homophobia then, too.”
On an overcast Saturday, David Craig, a
senior prefect and day student, drove his car down Martell Drive along
the school grounds and saw a figure duck into the hedges. He thought the
person might be trespassing and stopped, only to find Lauber puffing on
a cigarette. In a move that he said he later regretted as an excess of
the “dorm trooper” mentality instilled by Cranbrook, Craig reported
Lauber to the headmaster. Soon after, Lauber was expelled.
“He just disappeared,” Lady said.
Sudden
disappearances at Cranbrook were not unheard of. Students might pass a
dorm neighbor on the way to class and come back hours later, with all
their belongings gone and their beds stripped by maintenance staff. Bad
behavior and bad grades were not tolerated.
Ben Snyder, who as an
assistant headmaster later spearheaded the school’s effort to recruit
inner-city students, said Cranbrook in Romney’s time “had its standards
and applied them briskly when needed.” As chairman of a group of faculty
members and students who were in charge of discipline, he described a
strict school in which offenders could be “dismissed, period.” Snyder
could not recall dealing with any transgressions involving Romney. “I
wouldn’t expect to see him,” Snyder said of the disciplinary tribunals.
“The family was so straight, they don’t do those types of things.”
On
June 12, 1965, Romney concluded his Cranbrook career at a commencement
ceremony at the Christ Church, in which his father delivered a keynote
address reported on by the local papers.
“This is a special
occasion for us as a family,” George Romney told the gathered boys
before emphasizing that religion and “the one girlfriend whom you
finally take the greatest interest in” and good health habits were
critical for a successful life. So, he said, was character. “Developing
character is going to be more important than your education from now
on.” The ceremony concluded with all the boys singing a final rendition
of their school song, “Forty Years On.”
Forty years on, when afar and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today,
When you look back, and forgetfully wonder
What you were like in your work and your play,
Then, it may be, there will often come o’er you,
Glimpses of notes like the catch of a song –
Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,
Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along,
Follow up! Follow up! Follow up!
Forty years on, Mitt Romney accepted the school’s 2005 Distinguished Alumni Award.
A year earlier, John Joseph Lauber died at a Seattle hospital.
The
boy few at Cranbrook knew or remember was born in Chicago, grew up in
South Bend, Ind., and had a hard time fitting in. He liked to wander and
“had a glorious sense of the absurd,” according to his sister Betsy.
When the chance to get out of Indiana presented itself, he jumped at it
and enrolled at Cranbrook. He never uttered a word about Mitt Romney or
the haircut incident to his sisters. After Cranbrook asked him to leave,
he finished high school, attended the University of the Seven Seas for
two semesters, then graduated in 1970 from Vanderbilt, where he majored
in English.
He came out as gay to his family and close friends and
led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring
with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders. After an extreme fit of
temper in front of his mother and sister at home in South Bend, he
checked into the Menninger Clinic psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kan.
Later he received his embalmer’s license, worked as a chef aboard big
freighters and fishing trawlers, and cooked for civilian contractors
during the war in Bosnia and then, a decade later, in Iraq. His hair
thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle,
the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that
December.
He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.”
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-prep-school-classmates-recall-pranks-but-also-troubling-incidents/2012/05/10/gIQA3WOKFU_print.html
