Word: trent
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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...
...time Trent was ready to start the seventh grade, his family had moved to Pascagoula, where his father got a job as a pipe fitter in the shipyard. Trent was too small for football, so he played tuba in the band. He had such a space between his front teeth that he was nicknamed "Gap." But he was smart and friendly, discreetly helping classmates with homework and lavishing attention on kids like himself who weren't athletic or attractive. "And you know what?" he once told Time. "Turns out we were the majority...
...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 to avoid touchy issues and disagreements and to try to make everyone happy...
...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...
Gerald Blessey, who was among the few integrationists at Ole Miss in 1962, declined to discuss Lott's latest troubles but told Time in 1997 that he considered Lott more of a political opportunist than a George Wallace--style hater. "You could say that Trent was representing the views of his constituents" in supporting segregation. Blessey lost to Lott in a congressional race in 1976 and said that while he and Lott have been "often on opposite sides over the years," he believed that on the issue of race, "Trent has a good heart...