The Maine man

Sporting News, The, June 13, 1994 by Steve Marantz

"Up that street," Swisher Mitchell points, "was the way to the Boy Club. That was our second home."

Swisher, Robbie and Paul were crackerjack athletes. Swisher and Robbie played basketball at URI, Paul played baseball at the University of Maine in Orono.

George tried to match the athletic exploits of his gifted brothers, but he was smaller and slower. One of his childhood friends, Paul Maroon, remembers him dragging a bat and ball to the field. "If he didn't bring them, he couldn't play," Maroon says. Mitchell's father was sympathetic and advised him to make his mark with his brain. With his father's encouragement, George practiced oratory at home, reading aloud the Epistles and poetry. He easily mastered his studies and graduated from Waterville High a year ahead of his class. But he was not content to be just a bookworm. He became involved in school politics, made the basketball team as a reserve and played Junior Legion baseball.

Meanwhile, George's mother, concerned about his slow physical development, served him goat's milk -- an Old World remedy -- without telling him. Something worked. George grew two inches in one year and reached 5-11 1/2, taller than his three brothers. By the time George entered Bowdoin College in 1950, he was tall and fast enough to make the basketball team. For four years, he worked a succession of jobs -- dorm proctor, fraternity steward, truck driver, night watchman, construction worker -- to pay tuition and bills. Yet he held his spot on the basketball team and started at guard his last two years.

Mitchell went on to work his way through night law school at Georgetown University as an insurance claims adjustor. His earnings have been modest, and according to public record, he ranks in the bottom 5 percent of U.S. senators in personal wealth. The commissioner's salary of $1 million is not the decisive inducement, says his brother Robbie. But it is an important one. "He doesn't have a lot of money," Robbie says. "He's got houses to keep up in Portland and Washington, and he's always going back and forth. Contrary to what people think, money is a factor."

At the nation's Capitol, on a weekday afternoon in late May, reporters wait for Mitchell to emerge from a closed caucus of Democratic senators. Most of them will write stories on health-care reform -- the issue that is consuming most of Mitchell's final months in the Senate.

First reporter: "Will he answer questions?"

Second reporter: "Mitchell always answers questions."

Third reporter: "He stops and talks. There's a difference."

Mitchell can be coy. Baseball owners, fans and media will have to get used to him. A profile in Congressional Quarterly's "Politics in America" describes him thusly: "As a lawyer, judge and politician, Mitchell relates to interviews as debates and treats questions as three-dimensional traps. He often responds to questions not by answering them but by questioning their premises -- usually with a few words of courteous preface such as |with all due respect.'"