Photo courtesy flickr user mdfriendofhillary.
The story—“A girl who soared, but longed to belong”—and the accompanying seven-minute video by Darren Durlach portray 1950s and ’60s Oklahoma—and probably modern-day Oklahoma, to those who don’t know better—as a barren, dry expanse of land where tumbleweeds, oil derricks, and cow farms are the norm.
Warren is the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. Born Elizabeth Herring in 1949—known as “Betsy” at home and “Liz” at school—she was raised in Norman and Oklahoma City.
“Oklahoma’s broad flat surfaces can seem limitless,” the Globe’s Noah Bierman wrote. “The expanses of deep red earth are broken up by occasional oil pump jacks, the region’s tangible economic engines. The houses in and around Warren’s Oklahoma City are a mishmash of styles and sizes, freed from the type of zoning laws that would prevent a neo-Colonial from popping up next to a plain brick ranch. It was, when Warren was a child, a place organized around sturdy hopes, pride of place, and quiet conformity.”
The video paints Warren, a Harvard law professor, bankruptcy expert, and adviser to president Obama, as an exception to Oklahoma’s “abundant” conservatism. She grew up teetering on the edges of middle class, the youngest of four children, her three older brothers all military enlistees. Hopeful they could get their daughter on the college track by enrolling her in Oklahoma City’s premier upper-class high school, Northwest Classen, Warren’s parents moved from Norman to the city, where her mother, after her father suffered a stroke and had to take a lower-paying job, worked full-time at Sears.
“And the culture was then, as now, deeply religious and deeply conservative,” Bierman wrote. “Warren’s family attended a Methodist church, where her mother taught Sunday school…
“Like much of the country’s middle, the culture there remained tethered to an earlier time. A daily prayer was still recited in the morning, with Liz one of the readers. And the ideals of domestic perfection were underscored. The home economics classroom at Northwest Classen school had a wood-paneled living room for the girls to decorate and a make-up table so they could learn proper hygiene and presentation.”
The debate team was her ticket to college; she earned a full scholarship to George Washington University and attended for two years before marrying and transferring to the University of Houston.
“Many of the other youngsters from her neighborhood went to one of the two big state colleges, the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. But Warren did not even apply,” Bierman wrote.
“They left to continue their same lives, lives of pep clubs and football games,’’ Warren said. “I had to go somewhere else. I couldn’t go off to OU. I couldn’t maintain the fiction anymore, not at OU, not there, not with kids living in dorms and buying formals for dances.’’
“She wasn’t fazed by social cliques and the fashionable students sitting around her…” the video stated. “Despite the stark differences between Massachusetts and Oklahoma, in many ways, Elizabeth Warren is still the same girl—except for one major deviation.”
“She was so conservative,” a friend remembered. “And I was the, you know, yellow-dog Democrat who said everyone should get a free everything… I think our positions might have changed now.”
—Holly Wall, News Editor
-
Tpiety
-
Jim Shanor
-
Jessie
-
Rdrcoop
