Word: lott
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...Iona Lott taught school, and the kids who sat in her classes and visited her home say they can see in Trent her cheerful toughness and her obsessive tidiness. Lott's wife, the former Tricia Thompson, was the oldest of six children and says she "didn't keep house the way Trent was used to." Even in Washington, she once said with a shrug, he vacuums the house "because he doesn't like the way I do it." Lott also re-irons his shirts to get rid of the little wrinkles they pick up on the way back from...
...press conference last week, Lott emphasized his roots as the son of a sharecropper, one who dropped out of school in the ninth grade and farmed cotton on another man's land in return for a share of the harvest. But the land was hilly and so poor that, as locals put it, you couldn't grow anything on it but old. The Lott family didn't have an indoor toilet or bathtub until Trent was 10, but they had their priorities straight, as far as he was concerned; he had a pony and a .22 rifle, which he used...
Trent eagerly absorbed an interest in politics from his grandfathers. His mother's father, a large man with a rich bass singing voice, served as a justice of the peace, sported a handlebar mustache and carried a .38 pistol in a shoulder holster that Lott prizes. His paternal grandfather was a county supervisor. Young Trent loved sitting under the edge of the porch listening to the men talking about campaign tactics and patronage. (Decades later, when he moved from the House leadership to become a junior Senator, Lott said, "I felt like I'd been sent back under the porch...
...high school, Lott was elected student-body president, as well as most popular, most likely to succeed, most polite and neatest. Only his close friends knew of the trouble he faced at home. His parents quarreled constantly--about the money his father spent on bourbon and cigarettes, the nights away from home and his mother's suspicions that Chester Sr. was seeing other women. Young Trent often had to act as a mediator. He recalls, "It made me grow up at an early age." Friends say it also gave him traits common among the children of alcoholics: a desire...
...Pascagoula in which Trent Lott grew up was settled by immigrants from France, Spain, Italy, Lebanon and Yugoslavia. But in Lott's youth, as now, blacks numbered only about 18% of the area's population, and whites didn't feel as threatened as they did in the black-majority counties of the Mississippi Delta. While most neighborhoods were segregated, the largest black precinct was smack in the middle of town, and the races mixed easily on the streets and in factories, where jobs were usually available to all. Lott recalls that "race just wasn't that big an issue...