Mitt Romney is going around saying that he made all his money himself, aside from a loan from his dad to buy his first house.<\/p>\n
Journalists who buy that have short memories. I was living in Massachusetts when Romney first ran for the Senate, and remembered this interview with Ann Romney in the Boston Globe (by Jack Thomas, October 20, 1994; the abstract is\u00a0here<\/a>; the full text costs $4.95). Of her student days with Mitt at BYU, Ann said:<\/p>\n \u201cThey were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was tiny. And I didn\u2019t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.<\/p>\n \u201cThe stock came from Mitt\u2019s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt\u2019s birthday money year to year \u2014 it wasn\u2019t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n