2.His father came to America in 1921 at age 17 years from a small village in Poland southeast of Krakow, speaking Polish and Yiddish but next to no English.
3.“Being Jewish,” he has said, even though his parents were not particularly devout, “has greatly influenced my intellectual and emotional development.” He was acutely aware, too, of the excruciating toll of the Holocaust, retaining vivid early memories of going through albums of pictures of members of his father’s family who were “murdered by the Nazis.”
4.He was a fan as a boy of the Brooklyn Dodgers and remains bitter about the baseball team’s move to Los Angeles in 1957. It’s not “the sole reason that I’ve developed the politics that I’ve developed,” he has said, but it was a formative disappointment. “I asked him: ‘Did this have a deep impact on you?’ and he said: ‘Of course! I thought the Dodgers belonged to Brooklyn,’” one of his closest friends once said. “It does lay out the question of who owns what.”
5.At Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, from which he graduated in 1959, he ran for student body president in high school on a platform that included raising money for Korean War orphans. He came in third in the election, but the school took up his cause, anyway.
6.He was cut from his high school basketball team—“one of the major disappointments of my life,” he once said—but he also was a star runner. He was a co-captain of Madison’s track and field team and as a junior finished third in all of New York City in the indoor one-mile race. “I always,” he would explain, “had good endurance.”
7.His mother died when he was 18. His father died when he was 20.
8.He went to Brooklyn College for a year before transferring to the University of Chicago, where on his way to earning a degree in political science he joined the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Student Peace Union and the Young People’s Socialist League—the official youth arm of the Socialist Party. He was a so-so student but spent hours in the library, reading psychology, sociology and history, and Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, too.
9. He penned a 2,000-word manifesto in The Chicago Maroon, the university’s student newspaper, defending sexual freedom and attacking administrators for policies aimed at preventing students from having sex.
10.He was arrested in August 1963 on the South Side of Chicago while protesting racial inequality, charged with resisting arrest, found guilty and fined $25.
11.The summer after he graduated from college, in 1964, he bought, for $2,500, his first house, a dirt-floor sugar shack in the woods outside Middlesex, Vermont. It had no electricity and no running water.
12.He married his first wife in 1964. They got divorced in 1966.
13.In the mid-’60s, his first jobs included stints in New York City as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.
14.During the Vietnam War, he applied for conscientious objector status, but his application was denied. He was too old to be drafted when his number was called.
15.On October 23, 1971, at a meeting in Vermont of the small, anti-war Liberty Union Party, Sanders, 30, raised his hand to run for U.S. Senate. He ran on the Liberty Union ticket for Senate in a special election in early 1972, and for governor later that year, and for Senate again in 1974, and for governor again in 1976. He never got more than 6 percent of the vote.
16.In 1972, he published an explicit essay in a Vermont alt-weekly in which, among other things, men and women fantasize about rape. After the essay resurfaced in 2015, his campaign said it was a “dumb attempt” at satirizing gender roles.
17.For most of his 20s and 30s, he lived “just one step above hand to mouth,” according to a longtime friend, barely paying his bills as an intermittent carpenter and freelance writer. He once ran an extension cord from his “sparse,” “stark” apartment to get electricity from a downstairs neighbor.
18.He started a business producing low-budget filmstrips about Vermont and New England history that he sold to schools. He made a 30-minute documentary on Eugene Debs, a prominent labor organizer in the early 1900s and the five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America—whom Sanders has cited as a hero.
19.He has one biological child, a son, Levi (pronounced LEH-vee) Noah Sanders, who was born in Vermont on March 17, 1969. His mother is a woman named Susan Campbell Mott whom Sanders lived with at the time in the state’s Northeast Kingdom.
20.Levi, as a boy, called his father “Bernard.”
21.In 1981, at 39 years old, Sanders won the election for mayor of Burlington, Vermont, by 10 votes.
22.As mayor, his starting annual salary was $33,824, by far the most he’d ever earned. “It’s so strange, just having money,” he marveled to a reporter from the Associated Press.
23.He once was ticketed for parking his rusty Volkswagen Dasher in the mayor’s spot at City Hall. The officer couldn’t believe it was actually the mayor’s car.
24.He was featured in Garry Trudeau’s nationally syndicated “Doonesbury” comic strip. “The People’s Republic of Burlington,” Trudeau dubbed the city. Sanders was a bit bemused. “I have a hard time with the comics,” he said. “I always miss the point.”
25.Having some fun with the “Doonesbury” reference, Sanders played on a softball team called the “People’s Republic of Burlington” in the 1980s.
26.Sanders served as an elector for the 1980 Socialist Workers Party’s presidential nominee, Andrew Pulley, a Trotskyite who supported the Castro regime in Cuba and spoke favorably of the 1979 Iranian revolution.
27.He visited Nicaragua in 1985 and met its president, Daniel Ortega. He heaped praise on its socialist Sandinista government, which at the time was fighting rebel Contras supported by the U.S.
28.He recorded a five-track album in 1987 featuring covers of folk hits like “This Land Is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome.” Released as a cassette, the recording sold only a couple hundred copies, but its re-release surged to No. 62 on Amazon in 2016.
29.He hung a Soviet flag in his City Hall office to honor Burlington’s sister city in Russia.
30.He’s been married to his second wife, Jane O’Meara Driscoll, a divorced mother of three who ran Burlington’s youth office while he was mayor, since 1988.
31.He “honeymooned” in the USSR in 1988. While on the 10-day trip, an official visit to help establish Burlington’s sister city relationship with Yaroslavl, he praised the lower cost of health care and housing in the Soviet Union and rebuked the U.S. for its intervention in foreign countries. A video of one stop in Yaroslavl, shows him bare chested in a sauna drinking vodka with his entourage and Soviet officials while listening to Russian folk songs and singing “This Land Is Your Land.”
32.He flew to Cuba with his wife in 1989 hoping to meet Fidel Castro. He had to settle for the mayor of Havana.
33.After his trip to Russia, he encouraged the Vermont ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s to build a factory there. “I think we are all here to make a strong prediction: The people in the Soviet Union love ice cream and that Ben & Jerry’s is going to make a fortune,” he said at a news conference. The company did eventually build a factory in the USSR, but it didn’t make money.
34.He tepidly endorsed Walter Mondale for president in 1984—the first time he’d ever endorsed any Democrat—and more enthusiastically endorsed Jesse Jackson in 1988. He made it clear these endorsements did not mean he was more closely aligning himself with Democrats. “Jesse believes that serious social change is possible within the Democratic Party,” he said at the time. “I don’t.”
35.He spent the last few years of his four-term tenure as mayor trying to win statewide office. In 1986, he ran for governor and lost—by a lot—getting less than 15 percent of the vote. In 1988, he ran for Congress and lost again, but it was close—he got 37.5 percent to the Republican’s 41 percent. He won a rematch in 1990 by more than 16 points.
36.While running for Congress in 1988, he brought a TV crew profiling him for 60 Minutes to the local Vermont AP bureau to chastise its reporters for skipping his recent news conference. “It was delicious,” he wrote in his memoir. “I had a lot of fun that afternoon.”
37.The National Rifle Association urged its members to vote for him in the 1990 race for Vermont’s sole U.S. House seat. At the time, he opposed a mandatory waiting period before buying a handgun. But the NRA supported him specifically to oust his Republican opponent, who initially opposed but then supported an assault weapons ban. “It is not about Peter Smith vs. Bernie Sanders,” said Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s Executive Vice President and Chief Executive, at the time. “It is about integrity in politics.” Sanders had supported the assault weapons ban from the outset.
38.He hung a photo of Eugene Debs in his office on Capitol Hill.
39.Over the course of his 16 years in the House, he was the lead sponsor of only one bill that became a law: renaming a post office in Fair Haven, Vermont.
40.Sanders co-sponsored a bill (H.R. 627) that paved the way for Vermont to ship low-level nuclear waste to Sierra Blanca, Texas, a largely impoverished town where two-thirds of the residents were Latino. Among the bill’s most vocal liberal opponents was Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, who noted that nuclear dump sites never seem to be located “where the heavy hitters and the well-connected and the people who give the big contributions live. It is almost always located in communities of color.”
41.Though Sanders steadfastly opposed the 2003 war in Iraq, he supported the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which declared that regime change in Iraq should be the official policy of the U.S.
42.Ahead of his 2006 campaign for U.S. Senate, Sanders made peace with Vermont’s Democratic Party, and opted to seek its nomination. He won it, then declined it, running as an independent while preventing any Democratic opponent from appearing on the general election ballot.
43.His national profile expanded dramatically in December 2010, when he gave what came to be known as “The Speech,” an 8½-hour filibuster on the Senate floor to block a bipartisan deal to extend tax cuts passed under the George W. Bush administration. Sanders became the top trending topic globally on Twitter and turned his address into a bestselling book the next year.
44.Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to persuade him in 2011 not to run a primary challenge against President Barack Obama.
45.He did not endorse Levi’s bid for Congress in 2018, saying the family does “not believe in dynastic politics.” Levi came in seventh.
46.He also declined to endorse his stepdaughter’s 2018 bid for Burlington mayor, the office he once held. She lost.
47.Throughout his adult life he has denigrated Democrats, calling the party “ideologically bankrupt,” dubbing “the two-party system … a sham” and labeling the Democratic and Republican parties “tweedle-dee” and “tweedle-dum.”
48.Ben Cohen, the “Ben” of Ben & Jerry’s and a longtime supporter of Sanders, is a co-chair of his 2020 presidential campaign. In 2016, the ice cream company named a flavor after him—“Bernie’s Yearning.”
49.His older brother, Larry, is also a left-wing politician—in England. Larry was a Green Party county councilor in East Oxford, about 55 miles outside London, from 2005 to 2013.
50.Sanders says he’s smoked marijuana twice. “I coughed a lot,” he said in 2015. “It’s not my thing, but it is the thing for a whole lot of people.”
51.He has an IMDb page, having appeared on screen for two minutes as a rabbi in a 1999 low-budget comedy, My X-Girlfriend’s Wedding Reception.
52.He has all of Beethoven’s symphonies on his iPad. He’s also said he loves ABBA, Celine Dion and disco.
53.He does not have apps on his phone.
54.His go-to dinner is prime rib, corn on the cob, broccoli and fresh bread. He likes his steak medium rare.
55.He owns three houses and is worth at least $2 million and drives a red 2010 Chevrolet Aveo.
Sources: Congressional Record; Congress.gov; El Paso Times; Los Angeles Times; POLITICO; the New York Times; the New York Times Magazine; NPR; Rutland (Vermont) Daily Herald; VT Digger; the Washington Post; Yahoo News; Axios; the Atlantic; CNN; CBS News; Chicago Magazine; the Associated Press; Harry Jaffe’s Why Bernie Sanders Matters; Steven Soifer’s The Socialist Mayor; Darcy Richardson’s Bernie: A Lifelong Crusade Against Wall Street & Wealth.
Source: politico.com
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