The Nominee

By Jim Tuohy

As Election Day approaches it might be useful if we citizens were presented with more information about the family of Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, which I will now provide as a non-partisan, and quite brief, public service.

Mitt Romney was born Willard Mitt Romney in March of 1947. He is the son of George Romney and is named after Milton “Mitt” Romney, his father’s first cousin, and J. Willard Marriott, the hotel guy, who was a fellow Mormon and great friend of George.

Until he started Kindergarten Willard was known as Billy. Then he said he wanted to be known as Mitt, maybe because names with the same double consonants at their ends seem to run in the Romney history (although he could have called himself Bill). Not only were there a Marriott and a Mitt in Mitt the Nominee’s background, there was also Parley P. Pratt, one of Mitt’s great great grandfathers, who had been an early leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.

George Romney’s cousin Mitt, whose namesake is Mitt the Nominee, was a Utah Mormon who was a football star at the University of Chicago in the1920s. In 1925 he joined the Chicago Bears. Another more distant cousin of George was G. Ott Romney, who was the coach of Brigham Young University’s football team from 1928 through 1936.

Cousin Mitt was the quarterback of the Bears for three years. He was the first in a distinguished line of Bears quarterbacks which included, to name just a few, Rex Grossman, Cabe McNown, Kent Nix, Larry Rakestraw and Kordell Stewart. And, of course, the strong-armed Bobby Douglass, who, like Mitt, had the appropriate consonants at the end of his name, but unfortunately did not have a sense of direction or the gift of precision, sad deficiencies in a professional quarterback.

Douglass played for the Bears when their home was Wrigley Field, reconfigured for football with the north end zone at the base of the left field bleachers. Fans of the Cubs are used to seeing home run balls hit onto Waveland Avenue—most commonly by the opposition–where they are chased by souvenir hunters. Douglass was the only quarterback in Bears history who had football hawkers waiting at Waveland and Kenmore for one of his passes to sail over the left field wall.

  However, the Bears traditional futility at quarterback is for another discussion, and we must return to the topic at hand, which is the Romnee—excuse me–the Romney family.

Although no abundance of athletic skill seems to have flowed into the genes of Mitt the Nominee, there was enough that made him an agile cheerleader in high school, a pep squad captain, sis boom bah-ing with the best the Michigan private schools had to offer.

After Mitt graduated from prep school in 1965 he went to Stanford, where he participated in Vietnam War demonstrations. He was on the pro-war side, a side he would remain on through 1969 and five draft deferments.

Although little is known about Mitt’s personal life at that time, some digging by a North Avenue Magazine investigative unit headed by editor Chris Chandler has discovered that Mitt became good friends with a woman named Chastity White who shared Mitt’s ideals and beliefs, including that it was important for Americans to fight in Vietnam but not for people of their station to do the fighting.

No romance blossomed from this friendship, however, because Chastity was not a name with enough of the same letters at the end of it.  Eventually Mitt went to BYU and in 1969 he married Ann (nee Davies) his high school sweetheart.

Mitt and Ann have five sons. The first they namedTagg. The others, I think, they named Bagg, Whiff, Tripp (forTriple A), and in a break from the baseball pattern, Matt, a name more associated with the sport of wrestling than baseball—except in the case of the Doormatt Chicago Cubs.

But wrestling, too, presents some interesting possibilities for names of children of men named Matt—for instance, Flipp and Flopp,.

The Romney family has had long ties with the state of Utah and its institutions. One of these is the state’s only major league professional sports franchise, the National Basketball Association team that moved to Salt Lake City from New Orleans in 1979.  Is it possible that some future member of the Romney clan might be named after it?

Jazz Romney. It has a certain ring to it. A hip name for a hipp family.