Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents. Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that it was on Fox News Channel that Romney apologized for some of his high school pranks. Romney apologized on Fox News Radio.
This version has been corrected. Mitt Romney returned from a three- week spring break in 1. 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! 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.
Background and development. In 2002, Entertainment Weekly reported that Jackson was the original choice to perform at the halftime show for Super Bowl XXXVI, however. Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that it was on Fox News Channel that Romney apologized for some of his high school pranks. Your source for daily entertainment news and coverage of the films, TV and music you need to need to know about. We were always barefoot in the gym and barechested, gym was a double session on Fridays, Mondays was cross country day and Wednesdays was football in winter and.
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 2. 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 Radio, 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- 1.
I guess we all know by now that anything is possible in a courtroom as long as you keep it in Florida. In their zeal to cheat justice…they forgot that there was.
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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 2. 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 freewheeling 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 1. 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: 0. 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. Wonn. Вberger, 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. Updated: See Editor’s Note below] 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 1. 95. 0s, 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.