Here are eight things you might not know about 2016 GOP presidential Mitt Romney and his life outside of politics.
1. Willard Mitt Romney was named in honor of father George Romney’s good friend, J. Willard Marriott, who founded the Marriott chain of hotels, and Milton ‘Mitt’ Romney, his cousin who was a quarterback for the Chicago Bears.
2. Romney did not excel in any particular subject or activity at Cranbrook Academy, a private school, but was a popular “all-rounder” in the school,
according to a website detailing 2012 Republican candidates. He managed the school hockey team, and was on the cross-country team and the pep squad.
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3. Romney got in a little bit of trouble at Cranbrook, reportedly with his future wife Ann Lois Davies and some friends. Although the records aren’t open, he apparently was arrested for a prank, the candidate site said. People who remember the incident said it had something to do with riding blocks of ice down a golf course slope.
4. Romney was a special correspondent for the Cranbrook student newspaper at the funeral of John F. Kennedy,
The Washington Post reported.
5. While he was a Mormon missionary in France, Romney was involved in an automobile accident in which a priest, believed to be under the influence, struck the car Romney was driving, killing one of Romney’s passengers.
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6. Romney spent 28 years working in various jobs for no money,
according to Mitt Romney Central. Those jobs included volunteering for his father’s gubernatorial campaign, working for eight years as an unpaid intern in the governor’s office and serving a two-year stint in Paris as a Mormon missionary. He also took no salary as Massachusetts governor for four years.
7. Romney relies on his wife, Anne, to help him “see there’s stuff beyond the logic; he helps her see that there’s more than just instinct and feeling,”
the couple’s son, Tagg, told Vanity Fair. “Mitt’s not going to do something that they don’t feel good about together,” Mitt’s sister, Jane, told the magazine.
8. A Mormon community in Mexico, Colonia Juarez, was started by Romney’s great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, and still includes many Romney second cousins. “We have a saying: When a Romney drowns, you look for the body upstream,”
second cousin Kent Romney, a peach farmer there, told The Washington Post. “They don’t just flow with the current.”
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