I see how Gabby has gotten her strength from both her parents. Gloria and Spencer gave her the foundation, the life experiences, and an offbeat view of the world that helped shape her.
On the Mother’s Day before she was injured, Gabby wrote a message on her campaign blog: “Today I am thinking about my mom, Gloria. I am very much her daughter, and I am grateful for all her love and support. My mom truly is my greatest inspiration. Both my mom and dad instill in me their values of hard work, treating others with dignity and respect, and giving back, which have made me the person I am today.”
Gloria, nicknamed Jinx, is well known in Arizona art circles as a painter, mostly in oils, and as an art conservator and historian with a great interest in the religious art and architecture of Mexico. She teaches, she collects, she writes art books, and she takes a stand on issues. She believes, for instance, that artists and artisans have a responsibility to consider the effects of aging and the environment when they create their works. She has studied the varnishes artists use, and how sculptures should be crafted to stand the tests of time. As she sees it: “Competent artists are obligated to produce products of structural integrity.”
That statement speaks to how Gloria looks at life and how she raised Gabby and her older sister, Melissa. We all have obligations to our jobs, our families, our communities, and those obligations extend far beyond this moment. In her commitment to public service, Gabby recognized that she had to make good decisions not just for today, or for this election cycle, but for future generations. Gloria taught Gabby that, like a well-made piece of art, her efforts needed to stand the test of time.
Born in Nebraska and raised as a Christian Scientist, Gloria spent parts of her childhood in Arizona and Kansas. When she was twenty years old, in 1958, she got engaged to the son of a farmer her mother knew in Nebraska. “I was raised to go to college to find a husband—the MRS degree,” Gloria says. “This young man was handsome, I was cute, we dated, and then we planned our wedding.”
On the day of the ceremony, 120 guests were waiting inside the church when Gloria pulled up to the front curb. She was sitting with her mother in the backseat of her uncle’s car, looking perfectly lovely in her wedding dress, and in that instant, she came to a realization. “I’m sorry,” Gloria announced. “I can’t get out of the car. I don’t want to marry him.”
Her mother and uncle were shocked, but saw that she meant it. “We put the pedal to the metal and drove off,” Gloria says. They stopped at a gas station, where Gloria found a pay phone and called the church. Someone tracked down her fiancé. “I can’t do it,” Gloria told him. “I’m so sorry. I just don’t see a future together.”
“But everyone is here, standing around, waiting,” the young man said.
Gloria apologized profusely, wished him well, and never saw him again. Her family covered the cost of the reception that never happened. It was a mortifying experience for Gloria, and she felt awful for her fiancé. Still, she doesn’t regret her decision.
Not settling into an ill-conceived marriage at age twenty would help Gloria become a mother who encouraged her two daughters to dream bigger dreams. She let them know that marriage was a wonderful option, but it didn’t have to happen right away, or at all. It was important that Gabby and her sister, Melissa, make something of their lives, and that they be of service to others. Gabby became a career woman and then a public servant in part because her mother showed her the way.
Gloria never shared her runaway bride story with her daughters when they were young. And she told me why: “If you tell children a story like that, you empower them with a lot of goofiness. A girl might think it was OK to do what I did, when it was actually immature, foolish, impetuous, and immoral.”
After moving on from the canceled wedding, Gloria ended up in Tucson, where she studied at the University of Arizona, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s in fine arts. It was there, in 1963, that she met Spencer, a twenty-eight-year-old local tire dealer. He made her laugh. She made him think. They got married the next year. (For both Spencer and Gloria, their marriage was a fresh start. He had been married briefly to a woman in Mexico and had a son there.)
Spencer’s roots in Tucson went back to 1942, when he was seven years old and his family moved there from New York. His father, born Akiba Hornstein, had contracted the Spanish flu in World War I and was told that if he didn’t find a dry climate, he’d die. The move to Tucson at age forty-two helped save his life.
Akiba’s family tree included a long line of rabbis. In elementary school, a teacher couldn’t pronounce “Akiba” and decided to call him “Gifford.” When he and his two brothers started a business in New York in the 1930s selling home-heating oil burners and fuel, they named it Giffords Oil after him. Every day, customers on the phone wanted to talk to the boss: “Let me talk to Mr. Giffords!” He got tired of saying, “It’s Gifford Hornstein. You can talk to me.” So he decided to change his last name as well. By the time he got to Tucson, Akiba had made things easy for himself by morphing into Gif Giffords.
Gif was a natural salesman and a bit of a huckster who yearned to be a philosopher. For a while, he peddled costume jewelry and hearing aids, and also became a real-estate broker. Then, in 1949, he discovered his calling in the tire business, founding El Campo Tire and Service Centers. Spencer began working there as a teen, pumping gas.
In the 1950s, Gif took to airing commercials for his store on local TV, and each spot would begin with Gif’s signature line: “It’s a good, good evening!” After that catchphrase, he’d deliver homilies or offbeat philosophy.
In one commercial he announced, “You are who you are!” and then in sixty seconds told “the story of the scorpion”: A scorpion was clinging to a piece of wood in a river, and a man came along and rescued it by putting it on the riverbank. Without saying thanks, the scorpion stung the man. “Why did you do that?” the man asked. “I just saved your life.” The scorpion answered: “You are who you are. I’m a scorpion and I sting.”
Gif filmed his commercials while standing in front of a banner for El Campo Tire, with a giant tire displayed behind his head. “My father never mentioned tires or why anyone should buy them from him,” says Spencer, who found the commercials embarrassing. “It was excruciating for me to be the son of a TV preacher.”
The commercials, however, were very effective. Gif wasn’t just selling tires, he was selling fulfillment, and everyone in town knew him. Years later, people would tell Gabby that they appreciated the wisdom in those commercials. Some even said, “Your grandfather changed my life.”
Spencer took charge of the company in 1959 and, with savvy business sense, expanded the operation to twelve locations. Meanwhile, Gif eased into retirement. For years, people would stop him on the street to ask him about his philosophy—or their tire pressure. He liked being a mini-celebrity.
To passersby, Gif radiated friendliness and optimism. “It’s a good, good evening,” he’d tell them. It was too bad that he was a remote and often uninterested grandfather to Melissa and Gabby. He could be jovial with them, but mostly he paid little attention to their lives. As they got older, they learned to have no expectations of a meaningful relationship with him or their paternal grandmother, though they were lucky to be close to their maternal grandmother. (Spencer’s parents remained aloof in part because they disapproved of his marriage to a non-Jewish woman.)
And yet, whether it was genetics or coincidence, Gif’s positive outlook seemed present in Gabby. From the time she was a kid, she liked thinking it would be a good, good evening, and that tomorrow morning might be even better.
Spencer and Gloria raised Gabby and Melissa in the Tanque Verde Valley, east of Tucson. The site of the Native-American Hohokom culture dating back to the tenth century, it’s a landscape far different from the one I knew growing up in New Jersey. Tanque Verde is bordered by the Rincon Mountains to the east and the Santa Catalina Mountains to the north, and it’s the very definition of a desert. Its riverbed
s are dry much of the year, and its average high temperature on summer days is 99 degrees. The Giffords would become fixtures in the community there, like the cacti. For eleven years, Spencer served on the Tanque Verde school board. Gloria was busy helping to preserve historic art and missions, and supporting local galleries in Tucson.
Spencer was overwhelmed at work, and he didn’t always have a lot of time for Gabby and Melissa. But there was one parenting rule that was important to him, and he stuck to it: He made sure to be home for dinner every night, to join Gloria and the girls in discussions about schoolwork, current events, politics, art, music, whatever was on their minds. Gabby enjoyed listening to her father, who could be a lovable curmudgeon. He spoke without much of a filter; what he thought was what he said. Though he resisted the impulse to star in El Campo’s TV commercials—he left the hawking of tires to others—if he had become the face of the operation, he may have been more memorable than Gif in spouting his views of the world.
Spencer and Gloria were not your usual suburban couple. When I saw the movie Meet the Fockers, the characters played by Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman reminded me a little of my in-laws. They could be exuberant eccentrics. Conformity never mattered to them.
When Gloria would pick Gabby up from school, she’d sometimes show up wearing a costume—a vampire’s cape or some goofy outfit she had found around the house. For Gabby, it was horrifying to see her mother stepping out of the car-pool line in a turn-of-the-century bandleader’s uniform, complete with an old, dented black top hat made of beaver hair. All the other kids’ eyes widened at the sight of her, and they all had the same thought: “That’s one weird mother.” But in Gloria’s mind, she was doing Gabby a favor. “Let this be the most embarrassing thing you ever have to endure in life,” she’d say.
Gabby wished she had taken the bus. But looking back as an adult, Gabby realized that surviving her mother’s costume antics actually made her tougher and more immune to criticism. If you can live through this kind of childhood mortification, the embarrassments of adulthood are easier to handle.
Gloria and Spencer also had other techniques for toughening up their daughters.
When summer came, they’d load the kids in the car, drive them to the middle of Mexico, and drop them off at a camp where none of the other kids knew English. This was Mexican summer camp. Gloria and Spencer figured it would be a good way for the girls to learn Spanish. This total-immersion experience might have been daunting for other kids, but Melissa and Gabby mostly enjoyed themselves. They liked hanging out with kids from other countries, and even came back with a smattering of French, which pleased Gloria and Spencer.
While Gabby and Melissa were struggling with their Spanish, Gloria and Spencer would disappear into Central America. Later in the summer, they’d pick the girls up and, on the drive back to Arizona, they’d stop in tiny towns collecting artwork, meeting the locals, and tasting another culture.
They’d also learn about poverty.
Gloria and Spencer taught altruism by example. Each year, they sponsored scholarships at a school in Belize, the only Central American country where English is the official language. In 1975, they invited one recipient, a bright boy named Francis, to come live with them in Tucson for a year. (Francis would go on to become a veterinarian and school vice principal, and Gabby still considers him her brother. His connection to Gabby would make national news in Belize after she was shot.)
In part because of her upbringing, Gabby was a kid, and then an adult, who developed a deep concern for other people. But as Melissa sees it, the example set by their parents doesn’t fully explain Gabby’s sense of compassion. There was also something inside Gabby, something Melissa decided was pretty rare.
“Most human beings care about a relatively small group of people,” Melissa says when she’s asked about her sister. “They care about their family, their friends, their neighbors, some of the people they work with. Maybe that adds up to fifty people. Gabby’s number is way past fifty. Her number is in the hundreds of thousands—or the millions. I started realizing it when we were kids. That makes her different from the rest of us.”
Gabby had a kind of empathy that would sometimes backfire on her. When she was in eleventh grade, she traveled to Spain to be an exchange student, and she was hosted by a wealthy family with children her age. The family had servants who took care of all the chores around the house, and that made Gabby uncomfortable. She was always trying to help them out, which upset her hosts.
“Stop doing the dishes,” they told her. “Stop making the bed. Stop helping the maid.”
As they saw it, she was setting a bad example for their children. It was a class issue. The help was there to help.
But Gabby ignored the family’s admonishments, and kept doing the dishes and offering to help the maid. A month into her stay, her hosts came into her room. “Make your suitcase,” they said.
She wondered what that meant. They said it again. “Make your suitcase.”
She realized they were kicking her out. In disbelief, she started packing. Because not everything would fit in her suitcase—she’d bought gifts for her family back home—her hosts gave her a large cardboard box that cartons of tampons had come in. They dropped her off at the train station with her suitcase and that giant tampon box. Near tears, she called her parents collect.
The exchange program was able to find her somewhere to stay that night, and eventually she was placed with another, far more welcoming family. But Gabby had learned the old lesson that no good deed goes unpunished. Things don’t always go well for people who are too nice.
Gabby wasn’t completely selfless, of course. Mixed with her urge to help people was a sense of political savvy that Gloria and Spencer noticed early on. From a young age, Gabby was both a charmer and a negotiator. One day in first grade, she accidentally damaged a library book. “You’ll need to get me a dollar so we can pay the library to make the repair,” Gloria told her. She obviously intended Gabby to use her allowance money. Instead, Gabby went straight to Spencer.
“Hey, Dad,” she said. “Mom says she needs a buck.”
Spencer dutifully reached into his wallet to give her the money. He didn’t ask any questions.
When Gloria discovered what Gabby had done, she wasn’t happy. But she also noticed how carefully Gabby had worded her request. Though Gabby certainly was conniving, she hadn’t lied. Gloria had indeed said she needed a dollar. If Gabby wasn’t stuck in first grade, she could have gotten a gig as a politician’s speechwriter.
“Gabby was always so agreeable, so cute, and she was cunning in this charming way,” Gloria says. Melissa says that throughout her childhood, she watched Gabby’s ability to win over people and felt a mix of awe and envy.
Melissa, now a preschool teacher, is two years, two months, and two days older than Gabby. The sisters always have been very different. “When I was young, I was a nerd, playing Dungeons and Dragons,” Melissa says. “Gabby was highly social and gregarious. We had a lot of sibling rivalry, and we came to identify each other as opposites. For a while, she was a preppy. Later, I was a Goth. She was into horses and pop music and musical theater, so I wasn’t. I was into books.”
Melissa admits that she was jealous of Gabby’s social life. “I didn’t have a lot of friends, and when a friend of mine would be at the house, and Gabby played with us, it bothered me. I’d think: ‘You have so many of your own friends. Let me have my one friend, OK?’”
Gabby could be boy-crazy, too. In middle school, she and a friend made a list of the cutest boys in descending order. She was thrilled when number 3 accompanied her to a school dance. She was always very feminine, too, and very clothes conscious. Her morning would begin with a call to her best friend. “What are you wearing?” she’d ask. Gabby developed a fondness for leather jackets, vests, and long sweaters in the winter.
Though Gabby was mostly a Goody Two-shoes, she had her moments of quiet rebellion. After she entered her teens, there were night
s when she’d dutifully kiss her parents good night, head into her bedroom, and close the door. Then she’d climb out her bedroom window—luckily it was on the ground floor—to meet a boyfriend. One night, someone Gloria knew saw Gabby and a girlfriend walking through the desert on their way to a convenience store, no doubt to meet boys. Gloria was informed, and from then on she kept better tabs on Gabby’s sweet-talking good-night routine.
In addition to boys, Gabby had a great appreciation for horses. She paid for her saddle and riding lessons by mucking out stalls, and when she was a teen, Spencer and Gloria helped her buy a horse, named Dink. Later she’d have another horse, Gus, which she nicknamed Buck-Stretcher, the slogan of El Campo Tire. She’d end up taking Buckstretcher with her to college. (“I learned a lot cleaning out those stalls,” Gabby would later say on the campaign stump. “It was good training, all of that manure-shoveling, for when I entered politics.”)
Looking back, Melissa says, “I think the reason my parents got Gabby that horse was so she’d be too tired and too busy to go after boys.” Gloria doesn’t dispute that. She says that plan worked “most of the time.”
But not always. When Gabby was fourteen, she and some other girls who rode together went to a weeklong horse show in Flagstaff. A young woman who worked at the stables served as their chaperone. One night, Gabby called Gloria. “Hey, Mom, I’m having a problem with my contact lenses,” she said.
Gloria recalls hearing loud music and what sounded like women whooping it up in the background. “Gabby, where are you?” Gloria asked.
“We’re in a bar,” Gabby said.
“A bar?” Gloria said. “And what’s all that screaming?”
“Well, it’s a male strip show,” Gabby told her. The chaperone had taken her and the other fourteen-year-old girls to see a performance of male exotic dancers. (This is how Gloria recalls the story. Gabby insists there were no strippers.)
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