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Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign stop in Chantilly, Va., May 2, 2012.
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign stop in Chantilly, Va., May 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
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 has long been bothered by the Lauber incident. "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 crème de la crème."
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 counter-culture 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 waspy."
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."....
