. . . And His Lovely Wife (11 page)

My face burned. I wanted to apologize to her for this lapse in my father's judgment that put me first, but the words wouldn't come. Their dresser was a gray hand-me-down of something meant to resemble wood, and until that moment I never thought she had wanted anything else. But everything I had had up to then, I'd had to share with my siblings. This was the first thing I'd ever been able to call mine, all mine, and I didn't want to give it up. Instead, I promised Mom I'd polish it every week with Lemon Pledge, and every week that's exactly what I did, trying to earn the right to own the first real wood dresser in the house.

Life changed in other ways, too, after we moved. Dad built his own garage, and he took up gardening, which he never wanted to do when he had rented. “Nah, why should I make a place look better for somebody else?” he said whenever Mom suggested any home improvements. “I want to work on my
own
home.”

Some things, though, didn't change. I could still hear outside my window the whistles and groans of the trains winding their way toward Cleveland or Pittsburgh late at night. And we still had the portraits of Jesus and Jack Kennedy hanging in the living room. Dad called it “the Jack-and-Jesus wall,” but only many years after the president was killed.

The Kennedys were the model for all things Schultz in our home, on a smaller scale, of course, starting with my mother. Imagine the tall, sophisticated Jackie squished down to four feet eleven with a beehive, and you had my mother's version of the First Lady. Mom wore white gloves to church because Jackie did, and strung pearls around her neck for an evening out because Jackie did that, too. She also raised all of us as if we were just an invitation away from visiting the White House. It was always “Thank you” this and “Yes, please” that, and she even tried to get us to say, “Oh, that would be so delightful,” but none of us could manage to say it without elevating our voices to Eleanor Roosevelt heights and then collapsing with laughter.

Sometimes, Mom would talk about Jackie as if they'd just spent the afternoon over finger sandwiches and photos of their kids. “You're just a few months older than Caroline,” my mother would say, as if she were trying to talk me into playing with a girl down the street. She also liked to say that had Jackie already been in the White House when I was born, she would have named me Jacqueline. Instead, I was named after Constance McKenzie of
Peyton Place,
and it always irritated my mother when I pointed out that I was the namesake of a woman who bore a child out of wedlock.

“Lana Turner played Constance McKenzie, and she was nothing but class in that role,” my mother would say with her hand on her hip.

I was in first grade when JFK was shot, and it was the first time I ever saw my father cry. My parents had little money for books when I was growing up, but we had our own copy of the Warren Commission's final report on the Kennedy assassination, as well as numerous biographies of both John and Robert Kennedy. When my dad gave me an old trunk in 2002, I opened it to find stacks of newspapers and magazines from November and December 1963—all of them chronicling the Kennedy assassination.

For Dad, the Kennedys were a promise that even his life could get better. We weren't Catholic, and we weren't rich or famous, but just like the Kennedys, we were descended from immigrants and we were Democrats, and that was enough for my father. He raised us to believe that the workers' right to organize was our family's only route to power, and I used to joke that we knew Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs before we learned any lullabies. He also raised us never to date bankers or Republicans, which we quickly learned were the same thing.

You'd think that, having steeped me up to my eyeballs in all this left-of-center activism, my dad would not have been at all surprised to learn he'd raised a budding feminist, too, but I thought his red hair was about to catch fire the first time I stood in the driveway and announced I would keep my name and discard my bra for the rest of time. When I was in college I sent my mother Marilyn French's feminist novel
The Women's Room,
and my father wouldn't speak to me for weeks.

“She threw the book at me,” he roared in a rare phone call to my dorm room. As I quickly discovered, he wasn't tossing out a metaphor, either. Apparently, my mother had just read the now infamous passage where the character Val declared that all men “rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.” In an unprecedented moment of courage, Mom looked over at Dad, who was sitting in the recliner watching a basketball game, and hurled the paperback at his head.

Over time, Mom changed more than the rest of us. She was full of stories about her new job that she tried to make funny, but she was usually too tired anymore to cook a family supper every night. Family dinners around the table grew rarer and rarer until they just stopped. She always hated the heat of summer, but she started wearing sweaters on even the hottest days to hide the bruises on her arms she got from working on the “mental floor” of the hospital.

Later, she worked as a hospice home care provider, and her colleagues joked that people lived longer when Janey showed up. She loved listening to other people's stories, and they loved telling them to her. She would describe wondrous moments at the end of life, sad that she had to say good-bye but certain that she had cleared their path a bit. Dad would leave the room when she talked about it, but I hung on her every word.

Throughout it all, there was the unspoken message that Mom and Dad's lives would never be what they had wanted, but they had big hopes for us kids. And, as I later said on the campaign trail in so many speeches, they wore their bodies out so that we would never have to.

In 1998, my mother was diagnosed with a lung disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. She had never smoked, not ever, and this diagnosis stunned us. My mother, always quick to dive into her medical books, almost immediately realized that her disease would kill her. Her condition steadily worsened, and we were sitting on my front porch in early September 1999 when I asked her if she was afraid to die. She smiled at me and shook her head. “Oh, I'd hoped to see my grandchildren graduate from college, and I wanted to celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary. But it's not meant to be, and I'm okay with that.”

She saw me wipe my eyes, smiled again, and then told me not to be so sad. “Listen, it's not your time yet. It's my time, and I know things you can't know.”

She died two weeks later. She was sixty-two.

My father struggled mightily with her death, and for a while I wasn't sure he would live much longer. He was only sixty-three, but his body had the track record of a far older man. Bursitis had started attacking his shoulder when he was forty, and he underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery when he was only forty-eight. He later had heart stents put in, one time after a helicopter rushed him into Cleveland, and he had back surgery, too. He had high blood pressure and suffered repeated bouts of gout, and all of us worried about his affection for alcohol, which threatened to become the new love of his life.

Even longer than his list of physical ailments was his litany of regrets about my mother. He was haunted by what he felt should have been. Their life together was hard too much of the time, but my mother never stopped loving him. Two days before she died, she told me she still got butterflies when Dad walked into the room.

Just when I thought we would lose my father to heartbreak, he met a strong, kind woman named Theresa Congdon. She brought Dad back to life. I knew this woman was good for him when she declined an invitation to our wedding because she had already committed to volunteer at Mass. I knew he was crazy about her when I learned from my youngest sister, Toni—once a tattler, always a tattler—that he had called Theresa later that night from his cell phone to read her the menu from our dinner.

In recent weeks, Dad had undergone the first of two scheduled surgeries to clear his blocked carotid arteries. “I want to live,” he told Theresa and Toni. “I've got things I want to do.”

One of those things turned out to be campaigning for Sherrod—in his own way. My dad had once been a precinct captain for the Democratic Party. He didn't wear buttons, though, and nobody merited a bumper sticker on any of his precious made-in-America cars. Nobody, that is, until his son-in-law decided to run for the Senate.

“You aren't going to believe this,” my sister Toni said in a phone call in March. She lived next door to my dad, so there was no refuting her claim when she said, “Dad has Sherrod's bumper sticker on his car.”

“You're kidding.”

“Nope. But don't make a big deal about it 'cuz then he'll get embarrassed.”

“Got it.”

When we showed up in Ashtabula for the April 1 rally at the Good People's Baptist Church, my father and Toni were already seated in the second row of folding chairs, right in front of the stage. Dad had a Sherrod Brown sticker on his favorite suede jacket.

“You won't believe how early we got here,” Toni whispered. She always starts news like this, as if I'm forever doubting what she is about to say.

“How early?”

“We've been here for a whole hour already,” she said, shaking her head as she gestured to dozens of empty chairs. “He wanted to make sure he got a good seat.”

By the time I introduced Sherrod, we had a good crowd, and this local-girl-made-good took full advantage of the microphone to introduce the man who raised her to speak her mind. Twice I got to do that in April, and twice my father's eyes welled up as his fellow workers cheered for him.

That rally was an eye-opening morning for my father as he listened to one neighbor after another describe difficult lives that were only getting harder. His own eyes filled with tears when a man in his late seventies started to talk about how his wife's pension had been cut, but then broke down and handed the microphone to her. “If we had to rely on my husband's benefits alone, we wouldn't be able to afford dog food to eat,” she said. Her husband, ashamed and scared, sobbed.

“Sherrod's got his work cut out for him,” Dad said as we walked out into the parking lot. “We've got a real mess on our hands.”

Dad watched Sherrod work the crowd, shaking hands and laughing with many people my father had known for more than thirty years. “He's one of us, Connie,” he said. “He's going to win. I know a lot of people think he can't pull it off, but look at those people. I haven't seen some of them smile like that in twenty years.” I looked at my father's smile and thought,
Ditto, Dad.

Too soon, our driver, Walter, tapped on his watch and whispered, “We gotta go.”

I turned to my father and whipped my camera out of my purse. “Let me take your picture, Dad.” I was prepared for his usual lecture that he's the same man who raised me and he can't help it if I keep forgetting what he looks like, but instead, he just straightened up and grinned. “Well, then, take it,” he said. “I don't have all day.”

I saw him about two weeks later, this time with my sister Leslie, at an AFL-CIO dinner in Ashtabula. It was the same day my book hit the stores, and several people showed up with a copy for me to sign. I'd already sent Dad a copy, with this inscription: “Thank you for sacrificing so much of you to make so much of me.”

An old family friend, long familiar with my father's cranky stoicism, pulled me aside. “Your dad's showing your book to everybody,” she said. “Don't let him fool you for a minute. He takes it with him everywhere, and it's all he talks about.”

This time one of our field organizers, Steve Lieber, drove me, and as we were leaving, my father tugged on my jacket.

“When are you going on the
Today
show?” he asked, loud enough for anyone within five hundred feet to hear. When I told him, he grinned again.

“I'll be watching,” he said, and then he gave a wave.

Ten days later, Dad was gone.

seven

Name Game

F
ROM
M
AY THROUGH THE REST OF THE CAMPAIGN,
I
WORE THE ONE
and only campaign button that read “Connie Schultz Supports Sherrod Brown.” In case anyone wondered who I was planning to vote for, I guess.

Some days, though, if I was honest with at least myself, the button I wore should have read, “Connie Schultz Has Really Had It with Sherrod Brown.”

Not Sherrod Brown the husband. He was still cute and cuddly, with enough passion for justice to give Moses a run for his shekels. What I was sick of was Sherrod Brown the product.

A big part of a campaign's fieldwork involves branding and marketing the candidate as if he were a new can of Pringles. Supporters could order Sherrod mugs, Sherrod key rings, Sherrod tote bags, Sherrod yard signs, Sherrod pins, even their very own Sherrod mouse pad, simply by clicking on SherrodStuff.com. After more than thirty years in elected office, this struck Sherrod as a perfectly normal thing to happen with one's name. I, on the other hand, began to feel as if I were married to Cher.

And then there were the Sherrod Brown T-shirts. Political activists and groupies love T-shirts, and it was a bit disorienting the first time I watched young women with Sherrod's name stretched across their bosoms wave their pens and yell, “Sign my T-shirt! Sign my T-shirt!” It's not that they were a threat—the sight of Sherrod attempting to sign their backs without touching any part of them bordered on a Monty Python skit—but the whole notion of Sherrod-mania was so far removed from the down-to-earth guy I knew, the one who saved airplane napkins because he hated to waste and pinned his socks together before throwing them in the laundry so they'd remain wedded right through the tumble dry.

I have to admit that I was initially excited when a staff person handed me my personalized Sherrod pin. Oh, my. My very own one-of-a-kind button singling me out as Queen Groupie. I imagined the staff brainstorming over pizza and beer late at night, wondering what they could do to recognize the tireless devotion of the tiresome wife. Maybe they were even thinking,
Hey, you know? The least we could do is give her a special pin.

That's what I imagined, but the bubbles of my initial effervescence started popping as soon as I realized everyone on staff had his or her own one-of-a-kind button, courtesy of the marketing company hoping for a contract. Jeanne Wilson supported Sherrod Brown. So did Melissa Wideman, and John Hagner, and dozens of other staffers who now had their very own one-of-a-kind Sherrod pin.

“Everyone has this button,” I whined to Sherrod late one night as he rummaged through the fridge for a snack.

“Everyone is wearing a button saying ‘Connie Schultz Supports Sherrod Brown'?”

I stared at him, drumming my fingers on the counter.

He turned around and grinned. “Well, there's only one Connie Schultz.”

“Actually, there are dozens of us,” I said. “Google me. You'll find out.”

“You Googled your name?”

“We all did, one day in the newsroom. Someone said it was a great way to show how utterly un-unique we are.”

“You journalists really know how to have a good time.”

I frowned.

“But,” he said, wrapping his arms around my neck, “there's only one Connie Schultz like you.”

“You aren't going to start singing ‘Free to Be You and Me,' are you?”

“Only if you'll hum the chorus.”

Okay, so my button wasn't so special. But for a whole five minutes or so, I did feel unique. That sheen dimmed after a man in Lucas County pointed to the button and said, “Who's Connie Schultz?”

“That's me,” I said, smiling as the creases in his brow deepened to ravines.

“Should I know you?” he said.

“I'm Sherrod's wife.”

He stared at the button for a moment. “You don't have the same name.”

“Well. Right. We married only two years ago.”

He chewed that one over for a second. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

Ah, the name game. Once I started appearing alone on the campaign trail I had to figure out a way to introduce myself. That was harder than it sounds, particularly in other parts of the state where most people hadn't even heard of Sherrod.

This realization scared me, even though Sherrod had tried to prepare me. “Most of those people won't even know who I am,” he said.

“How can that be? You were secretary of state for two terms.”

“In the eighties,” he said. “And nobody knew who the secretary of state was before Ken Blackwell.”

It turned out I had my work cut out for me.

At first, I'd thrust out my hand and chirp, “Hi, I'm Connie Schultz, I'm Sherrod Brown's wife,” but too many people thought I'd just said “Sherrod Schultz.” The power of alliteration. Even if they heard it right, older men tended to wrinkle their noses and say, “If you're his wife, why isn't your name Brown?”

So then I tried saying, “I'm Sherrod Brown's wife, Connie.” People were friendly enough, but too often they smiled and said, “Well, hi, there Sharon, it's nice to meet you.”

“No, I'm Connie. His name is Sherrod.”

“Sharon?”

“No, Sherrod.”

“What kind of name is that?”

I tried just once explaining that. “It's a family name. His mother's from Georgia.”

“Georgia? Then why's he running here?”

I kept trying.

“Hi, I'm Connie, and my husband is Sherrod Brown.”

“Who?”

“Sherrod. Sherrod Brown.”

I'd point to my campaign pin. “That's him, and he's running for the Senate.” I had to tinker with that, too, adding “United States” before “Senate” because too many thought I meant the Ohio senate. But at least they were willing to take a brochure.

And you thought all I had to worry about was my weight, my hair, my makeup, my identity, and my clothes.

Most days, I wore my special button whenever I stumped for Sherrod and usually forgot to take it off when I ran errands, which elicited reactions ranging from disgust to glee in the faces of fellow customers. The whole thing took some getting used to because I hadn't worn a political button since the day I started working for my college newspaper in 1976. It was a new concept for me, this stamping myself with the name of my husband.

Not wearing something identifying my support for Sherrod had its downside, too. I showed up at one fundraiser where two young girls were handing out Sherrod stickers. The hosts' daughter raised her ten-year-old eyebrows at my empty lapel and peeled off a sticker. “Here,” she said. “You need to put this on.”

I shot her my best mother's smile and waved her off. “Actually, I'm married to the candidate.”

She rolled her eyes, turned to her equally appalled friend, and said, “As if
that's
an excuse.”

At a rally in southwest Ohio, a woman who had designed her own Sherrod T-shirt came up to me loaded with pins.

“You need to put one of these on,” she said, not bothering to introduce herself.

“I'm wearing knits,” I said. “Pins tend to snag.”

She frowned and shook her head.

“Look,” I said, “do you really think anyone doubts I support my husband?”

She wrinkled her nose and leaned in. “You look hostile.”

“Hostile?”

“Yeah, hostile to your husband. People are looking at you right now and thinking, ‘What kind of wife won't wear her husband's pin?'”

I looked around the room at all the people smiling in my direction and thought,
Wow, they sure hide it well.

Sherrod never really cared if I wore a campaign button, but he loved it whenever I clipped on the tiny pin that had become his trademark over the last five years.

Members of Congress typically wear one of two pins on their lapel: an American flag, or the official pin that identifies them as an elected official in the House or Senate.

Sherrod didn't wear either of those. This had nothing to do with his regard for the flag. To the disappointment of his friends in the American Civil Liberties Union, not to mention his wife, Sherrod had repeatedly voted for the flag amendment, which would criminalize acts of desecration of the flag. I opposed the amendment on First Amendment grounds, which made me just a tad more popular than Sherrod at ACLU brunches.

Sherrod also meant no disrespect toward his fellow congressmen who felt the need to be identified at all times as members of that elected body. He just wanted the symbol on his lapel to reflect the passion in his heart. So he wore a pin depicting a canary in a birdcage.

The canary pin first found its way to Sherrod in 2000, at a Workers' Memorial Day rally in Lorain to recognize workers who have been killed or injured on the job. The AFL-CIO started the annual observance in 1989, choosing April 28 because it is the anniversary of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Sherrod was waiting to speak at the rally when Dominic Cataldo, a member of Local 1104 of the United Steelworkers of America, walked up to him and handed him a canary pin.

Cataldo reminded Sherrod that coal miners used to carry canaries down into the mines to alert them to the presence of dangerous gases. “It was the only gas meter they had,” he told Sherrod. “They didn't have a union or anyone else looking out for them.”

Sherrod immediately pinned the canary to his blazer, to the delight of the steelworkers. From that day on, he wore it on whatever jacket he pulled out of the closet. So many people pointed to it and asked for an explanation that he designed a four-by-nine-inch card telling the story of the canary and what it represented for American workers. Whenever someone asked why he wore the canary pin, he handed them this card:

The canary represents the struggle for economic and social justice in our nation.

In the early days of the 20th century, more than 2,000 American workers were killed in coal mines every year. Miners took a canary into the mines to warn them of toxic gases; if the canary died, they knew they had to escape quickly. Miners were forced to provide for their own protection. No mine safety laws. No trade unions able to help. No real support from their government.

A baby born in 1900 had a life expectancy of 47 years. Today, thanks to progressive government and an aggressive labor movement, Americans can expect to live three decades longer. It has been a 100-year battle between the privileged and the rest of us.

We took on the oil and chemical companies to enact clean air and safe drinking water laws.

We overcame industry opposition to pass auto safety rules.

We beat back insurance and medical interests to establish

Medicare and Medicaid for senior citizens and poor children.

We fought off Wall Street bankers to create Social Security.

We battled entrenched business interests to enact women's and civil rights, protections for the disabled, and prohibitions on child labor.

We fought for all of it. Every bit of progress made in the struggle for economic and social justice came over the opposition of society's most privileged and most powerful. Remarkably, it was ordinary working families who won so many of these battles against the most entrenched, well-heeled interests.

The canary signifies that the struggle continues today, and that all of us must be ever vigilant against the powerful interest groups which too often control our government.

After he declared his candidacy for the Senate, it didn't take long before the canary pin turned into a symbol for Sherrod's campaign. We bought thousands of the pins from the Steelworkers. Sherrod and I made a practice of removing the pins from our lapels and giving them to people whenever they asked how to get a canary pin of their own. So often, they would try to dissuade us at first, insisting that they didn't mean for us to give up our own pin, but inevitably they were touched when we assured them that we wanted them to have it. One retired railroad worker in Medina started to cry when I gave him mine. “My father was a coal miner in the hills of West Virginia,” he said, tears streaming down his face as his wife held tight to his arm. “You don't know what this means to me.”

Sherrod told the story of the pin so often on the campaign trail that by summer most of us had perfected our own imitations of him talking about the canary in the coal mine. We'd mess up our hair, tug at our imaginary lapels, lean into phantom microphones, and in our own versions of Sherrod's sandy voice, say, “You can't really see it from here, but I wear a canary on my lapel….” Sometimes, four or five of us would perform our canary routine at the same time for Sherrod, and the sight of so many of us talking in raspy voices and tugging at our collars always cracked him up.

“All right, all right, I get it,” he'd say, waving his hands as his cheeks flushed to high red. “You're tired of the canary story.” That never stopped him from telling it, of course, and I never tired of hearing him tell it. Every time he talked about that canary pin, he was making it clear who he was fighting for.

Predictably, some of the bloggers took aim at the canary pin. One of them ran a contest to replace the slogan on Sherrod's bumper sticker: “We're In This Together.” Their suggested slogans ranged from the profane to the pathetic, but Sherrod and I had to admit this one was funny: “Vote for me and you'll never have to hear the canary story again.”

In June, we met a man at the Hog Heaven restaurant in New Philadelphia who reminded us why the canary story mattered.

Jeff Spradling was a sheet metal worker from Bellaire, but before that he had worked eight years in the coal mines. He was in his late forties, with blond hair tied in a ponytail and steel-blue eyes that wouldn't let go of you. He came up to Sherrod shortly after we arrived for a political gathering of about a hundred activist Democrats at the Hog Heaven.

“I don't usually care about politicians, but I have a friend who keeps talking about you,” he said, his arms crossed against his chest. “I looked up your website, and read about the canary pin.”