Why Bernie Sanders Matters by Harry Jaffe

TWO: Radical Roots

"Virtually every member was murdered by Nazis." —BERNIE SANDERS on his father's family

Midway through Sanders's senior year at James Madison High School in Brooklyn he quit showing up for track practice.

"He was a tremendous runner," says his teammate Lou Howort, who ran a leg in the distance medley relay with Sanders and Dan Jelinsky. "We were great together. Bernie ran the longest leg. We won our race in the Penn Relays." Then "Bernie got distracted by something. He started missing practices and seemed to lose interest."

Sanders had grown up playing sports on the streets and playgrounds of Madison Park, a neighborhood close to Sheepshead Bay on Brooklyn's south side. Every day after school and on weekends he and his buddies would play handball against the brick buildings or stickball in the street or baseball in a vacant sandlot. Sanders was always fast on his feet, and at Madison High he excelled on the track team and became co-captain. He was among the premier long distance runners in New York City.

Martha "Marty" Alpert was a regular track fan, a year ahead of Sanders at Madison. "I remember this tall, skinny kid—gawky, not a good-looking boy—but oh, my God, so fast," says Alpert, now president of Madison's alumni association. "It was rare to have six-footers at fifteen. His legs were very long."

Sanders even got a mention in a 1957 New York Times article. "His specialty was long-distance," Howort says. "We had a great cross-country team." The races were held on a hilly, two-and-a-half mile course in Van Cortland Park, way up in the Bronx.

Through friends Howort finally found out why his teammate no longer came to the track. Sanders's mother, Dorothy, was very sick, and he was spending every day after school and Saturday race days at home with her. "It wasn't as if everyone knew about it," says Howort. "Bernie was a reserved person. He kept it to himself."

The rising track star, it turned out, was more devoted to his mother than to the competition and acclaim he had begun to enjoy. He learned at an early age about sacrifice, the pain of loss, and the rewards of caring for someone you love.

"Bernie was a serious, honest person," says Howort, who, after Madison and college, taught health and physical education in New York public schools for decades and still lives in Brooklyn. "That was never questioned."

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Sanders has never been forthcoming about his roots. He prefers not to dwell on his early family life, what shaped him, his victories and defeats. How the lifelong politician developed his core beliefs about the way the world should work—socialism—remains a mystery.

"He hates talking about himself. He thinks it's a distraction from what journalism should be about: serious issues, not, as he puts it, gossip," writes journalist Rick Perlstein, who's interviewed Sanders a number of times.

His reluctance to share his life story sets him apart from most politicians. Leaders and would-be leaders are usually eager to pen memoirs and paint gauzy portraits of their early struggles so they can "connect" with voters. Obama wrote two books that described his upbringing and the development of his worldviews. When Clinton wants to soften her image as a hard-edged political operator, she harkens back to her mother's difficult childhood and the way that struggle affected her own life.

"The usual path is to begin with biography," Sanders's advisor Tad Devine told the New York Observer. "I don't see us going there."

In his 1997 book, Outsider in the House, Sanders devotes three pages to his early life in Brooklyn. The bare facts give tantalizing hints about the factors and forces that shaped him. Every time a journalist pressed him for details, he parried that his personal story was insignificant and irrelevant compared to the collective problems facing the country. Focusing on his own history might detract from the serious work that needed to be done to correct the myriad injustices afflicting the working class.