Scorpions for Breakfast

by Jan Brewer

  But when I was around eight, my father suddenly got very sick. His respiratory system failed him. The doctors could do little for him other than recommend that he move to Tujunga, California, where the sea air meets the desert to provide an ideal environment, they said, for people with respiratory problems. So we packed up and moved. And when I was eleven, my father died. Losing him devastated our family. No longer a child and not yet a young woman, I was suddenly without the man I had loved most in the world.

  What I remember most from this period was the overwhelming grief my family and I shared. But I realize now that my father’s death was also my first encounter with the federal government—and it was not a good one.

  My father’s job had involved years of working around the chemicals and fumes of the munitions plant. All these toxins eventually took their toll and made him ill. I remember how, when he knew the end was coming, he desperately sought government disability and survivor benefits for my brother, my mother, and me. He met and pleaded with our congressman and the Department of the Navy to take care of us. He literally couldn’t breathe, and yet he poured every ounce of energy he had left into this final effort. After he died, my mother did the same. I still recall her sitting at the kitchen table with all the paperwork surrounding her, going over facts and dates. And I remember her going, respectfully but persistently, to the congressman’s local office to plead for help. But other than a small Social Security check for my brother and me until we were eighteen, no help ever came. For me, it was a painful and important lesson.

  My mother had never worked outside the home before. Now she found herself alone with two children to raise. Like all single mothers, she needed something flexible so she could take care of my brother and me. So she took every penny she had and bought a small dress store in Sunland, California. Her reasoning was completely practical: As a small-business woman, she would be the boss. If she had to leave work to be with us, she could. And, of course, we could spend time with her at the store. And that’s what we did. She worked seven days a week, fifteen hours a day. She had no choice.

  My mother’s dress shop became my classroom. The things I learned there, working alongside her during those long afternoons after school, shaped me for life.

  For example, I learned from my mother in that dress shop the hard lesson of accountability. When you’re the boss, you’re the last one to get paid—you get whatever’s left after everyone else has their paychecks. I learned patience—and that the customer is always right. I learned initiative. When you’re responsible for a business, there’s no such thing as a job description. If something falls on the floor, you pick it up. If inventory has to get done, there goes your weekend. No contract, no list of responsibilities defines the limits of your duties. You work until the job gets done. Most of all, I learned not to shrink from a challenge. Running a business is hard work, and it’s made no easier by having to raise two children.

  I also learned in my mother’s dress shop about the power of government and the responsibilities of citizenship. I remember watching her cash out the register drawer at the end of every day. She would separate the sales tax receipts from the rest of the receipts, and it was my job to go to the bank and deposit the money into the two accounts she had created, one for the taxes she owed and another for the rest of the store’s expenses. As young as I was, it struck me as odd that there would be two accounts. “It’s our money, isn’t it?” I asked my mom. And she said, “No, we owe the government.” When I asked what for, she said it was for the streets, the firemen, and the schools. She was very patriotic. She said it was everyone’s duty to contribute. But I remember detecting a note of apprehension in her voice as well, and I learned later that she kept the taxes separate because she also feared the government: If she didn’t have enough to pay her taxes, she knew that she might lose the store.

  Like all great teachers, my parents taught me more by what they did than what they said. For instance, when I was very little, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She was fortunate and survived with surgery. But I remember that when she came home from the hospital, she was very sick. My father did his best to work and take care of us, but he was overwhelmed.

  This was a time when the housing on base was still segregated. But there was an African American family named Johnson that was part of the congregation at our church. God bless them, the Johnsons wanted to help out, so they came to visit us on the “white” side of the base. I remember they brought us food. My dad welcomed them into our home, and my mother, though still very sick, was very appreciative. After they left, our neighbor across the street came over to our house, very upset. He was screaming and yelling about how it was wrong to allow those “niggers” into our home. My father exchanged words with him and—pretty emotionally, as I recall—asked him to leave.

  We didn’t talk about it again that night. But I vividly remember sitting at my mother’s bedside the next day. As usual, the lesson she wanted to impart involved doing the right thing and taking individual responsibility. As she did so many times, she reminded me about the Golden Rule that we needed to live by: to treat others the way we wanted to be treated. She told me the Johnsons were good people, and that it was our home and we could choose to have our friends come to our home. She said our neighbors were judging people by the color of their skin, but that wasn’t how I was to judge people. Judge them, she said, by their hearts and by their actions.

  My mother’s words and, more important, my parents’ actions, have stayed with me all these years. I missed my mother more than I can say in those moments after I became governor, when outsiders and critics were saying the most hurtful things about me—saying that I was, in essence, like our neighbor across the street so long ago. If she were with me now, I think she would remind me of her saying: “Doing the right thing almost always means doing the hard thing.” I have always strived to do the right thing—for my family, for my state, and for my country. I can’t say I’ve never made mistakes, but I’ve never backed down from a fight when it came to doing the right thing for the people of Arizona.

  My lightbulb moment came at a school board meeting.

  I was a young wife and mother, attending a school board meeting in the early 1980s—and I was appalled. I was pretty naive about politics, but I knew a lack of common sense when I heard it, and I heard it when the board members opened their mouths to speak. I went home and asked my husband, John, “Who are those people?” And he said, “Well, they’re the school board.” So I said, “How did they get there?” He answered, “They were elected by the people in the school district.” And I said, “Well, I could do at least as good a job as they are, if not better.”

  I had been an Arizonan for less than a decade and had never seen myself as a politician. I had married John Brewer, and while he attended school for his chiropractic degree, I worked to support him. When he set up his practice in Glendale in 1970, I was the office manager. And while we were building his business, we were creating a family. We were blessed with three beautiful sons: Ronald, John, and Michael.

  I was happy raising a family and putting the lessons I had learned in my mother’s dress shop to good use in my husband’s business. It was the darn computers that were my undoing. When my husband decided to computerize his business, I took it as my cue to leave. I had never been a technology geek, and I had no intention of starting then. So I went home and started thinking about what to do next. I had to be active. I became a Cub Scout leader. I tried being an entrepreneur with a short-lived jumping-jack (or bounce house, as they are known these days) business. Finally, I got a Corvette for Mother’s Day, put on a pair of jeans, and went back to community college.

  Then I went to the school board meeting. I wanted to do something to improve education in Arizona, not just for my own sons but for all the kids. I thought they needed some accountability. And it occurred to me, If I don’t do it, who will? When I told my dazed husband that I was thinking a
bout running for the school board, he gave me some good advice: “Jan, if you really want to have an impact on education, you need to run for the legislature.”

  That really threw me for a loop. Who was I, to run for the state legislature? How would I go about it? In 1982 there was a new legislative district in the northwest Phoenix area stretching into Sun City that represented a good opportunity for a novice like me. But could I possibly win? I thought about it for three or four days. Then I checked in with John again. I was sitting in the den of our home when he walked in.

  Me: Guess what I’m gonna do?

  John: What?

  Me: I’m going to run for the legislature. I’m going to do it. Will you support me?

  John: Absolutely.

  Me: [pausing] No, I mean financially.

  John: Oh.

  John ended up being my greatest supporter and most valued mentor. But I couldn’t rely on him for everything. Running for office meant standing on my own two feet. I had to have confidence in myself before I could ask others to have confidence in me. I found myself, yet again, going back to my mother’s dress shop. If I could have half the courage, independence, and determination that she had, I thought, I could actually do this.

  The first order of business was to announce my campaign. I remember sitting in my beach house in Rocky Point, Mexico, hand-addressing invitations asking my friends to join me at my house for an announcement party to kick off the campaign. A few weeks later, more than one hundred people were at my house—even retired Illinois congressman Harold Velde showed up. He turned out to be a huge supporter.

  Next I needed to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot. I had never collected a signature before, and at first I wasn’t quite sure where to start. So, like any mom, I started with what I knew best: the grocery store.

  Slowly, painfully, I learned how to approach people and ask for their support. More than once, I thought I would give up. But when I finally got up the courage to approach people, I was amazed to find that they would actually sign! After I got my first signature, I couldn’t be stopped. “Hi. I’m Jan Brewer, and I’m running for the legislature from District Nineteen. Can I have your support?” I repeated it again and again, with growing confidence. I became a pit bull out there. I actually chased people through the parking lot.

  Every morning, to catch the stay-at-home moms while they shopped, I would show up in front of the grocery store—with Ron, John, and Michael in tow—with my tan, my big hair, and my tennis shoes. In the afternoons I would walk door to door in the neighborhoods. And every evening I would be back at the grocery store to corner the people on their way home from work. I did this every day for five straight months.

  After I had gathered the absolute maximum number of signatures allowed by law to place my name on the ballot came the real test: fund-raising. This was the part I dreaded most. I couldn’t bear the thought of asking people for money. My mother had never taken a dime from anyone—everything we ever had, she earned. The idea of walking up to strangers and asking them to give me money on the promise—even the sincere one—that I deserved their support was completely against my character.

  But I was my mother’s daughter. I had to do it. So I did it.

  I realize now how important it was for me to ask for and receive the donations of those early supporters. I used to have coffees in the backyards of the farmers in my district. We would enjoy the weather, have good things to eat, watch the children run around, and talk about the issues. These people are the salt of the earth. Their beliefs are strong and their desires are simple. They want their families to be safe. They want their families to be provided for. They want to leave behind a better country than the one they inherited. These simple beliefs get twisted and complicated in our political process, but they don’t change for the people who hold them. It was important for me, back then, to hear about them firsthand. To get to know the remarkable Arizonans who hold them. To shake their hands and receive their trust and know that it was now up to me to live up to it.

  It was at one of these small coffees that I received my first donation. I went to the home of a farmer named Ralph Baskett Jr. I remember taking a few questions from Ralph and his guests and having a nice time. I hoped I had earned their trust and support. And just as I was getting up to go, thinking I had struck out, Ralph left the room for a moment and came back with a check. I was floored. I had received the validation of someone’s hard-earned money. He trusted me enough to invest in my future. The Baskett family has supported me ever since.

  I began my life in public service when I was sworn in as a state representative on January 10, 1983. It was a time of change, both in Arizona and the rest of America. The recession had hit Arizona hard, but the state was changing and growing economically and culturally. When I was sworn in, I was part of the biggest class of female legislators in the country.

  In Washington, the Reagan Revolution was under way. It was an exciting time to be entering politics. The country was experiencing a rebirth of freedom, individual initiative, and patriotism. For me, as for so many others, Ronald Reagan was a hero. I looked to him as a bright, steady light of guidance in all the principles that have made our country great.

  It didn’t take long for this wife and mother turned citizen legislator to start knocking heads for truth and justice. I couldn’t help myself. I was constitutionally incapable of backing down when I thought a wrong had been committed. I was surrounded by voices telling me to do the political thing, to think about not upsetting potential supporters in my next election. But those voices were always drowned out by the voice of my mother reminding me that doing the right thing usually means doing the hard thing.

  My first brush with controversy set the tone for much of the rest of my career. It was 1985, and I was beginning my second term in the Arizona House. That year, the state was introduced to a genuinely ugly human being: a losing legislative candidate, part-time cabdriver, and full-time publicity hound named Terry Choate.

  Think of the Phelpses of the Westboro Baptist Church, that family of psychopaths who hold up offensive signs at veterans’ funerals. Terry was just like them, but with less charm.

  Terry got it into his head to build a monument to Vietnam War protesters. Late in 1985, he bought some land on the west side of Phoenix and applied for permits to create the “Jane Fonda Vietnam Victory Park.” He planned to build a thirty-foot tower to fly the flag of Communist North Vietnam, our enemy in the war that had ended just ten years before. He even talked about getting a part of the plane in which Arizona senator John McCain had been shot down to display in the park.

  I was chairman of the Select Committee for Veterans’ Affairs at the time, and I was hearing every day from outraged veterans. I’ve always had a soft spot for our veterans, having grown up on a Navy base and known so many families whose fathers and mothers never came back from World War II and the Korean War. I personally thought that what Terry Choate was planning to do bordered on treason. So I decided to shut him down. Over howls of protest from the First Amendment purists, I introduced a bill to outlaw the public flying of the flag of a country with which the United States did not currently have diplomatic relations—in other words, North Vietnam.

  In my remarks introducing the bill, it was impossible for me to hide my sense of outrage. Now, when I look at my prepared statement, I can see the righteous indignation written all over it.

  The North Vietnamese flag flying over the monument, I told the House, would be “a slap in the face of all our veterans who have fought and those who have died so that we may have freedom! Many came home ZIPPED IN BAGS. For what? For our freedom. And I assure you, THEY DIDN’T LIKE THE WAR EITHER. . . . To allow a communist flag to fly in Arizona is to achieve glory from a traitor’s vantage; to dance on the graves of those LOYAL AMERICAN VETERANS who have fought and died for OUR FREEDOM.”

  I was pretty fired up. To me, this was about much mo
re than Terry Choate. It was about a country that was slowly emerging from years of malaise and starting to feel good about itself for the first time in years. It was about men and women who had sacrificed for their country and come home only to be spat on and called baby killers. Maybe it wasn’t fashionable to stand up for these men and women—maybe it wasn’t intellectually sophisticated to defend this vision of America—but I really didn’t care. I was doing the right thing, as I saw it, for the people of Arizona.

  My bill was overwhelmingly approved by my colleagues in the Judiciary Committee but was dropped by the House when it was declared unconstitutional. So I introduced another bill, this one prohibiting the creation of public parks that would be harmful to the public order. At that point a liberal columnist at the Arizona Republic wrote a column criticizing my bills (in the most illogical fashion, by the way, equating an America-hating, veteran-insulting professional troublemaker with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Elks club, and even newspaper columnists!).

  The columnist’s arguments were weak, but the nickname he gave me caught on. It was at this time that Sylvester Stallone’s action pic Rambo: First Blood Part II was in the theaters, featuring the fighting-for-truth-and-justice character John Rambo. So the Republic christened me “Janbo” for my efforts to defend Vietnam veterans. Soon after, S, an editorial cartoonist, drew a cartoon of me with an American-flag bandanna around my big hair, an ammo belt across my chest, and a machine gun slung over my shoulder. From then on, I was no longer just Janice K. Brewer. I had an official nickname: “Janbo.”

  A couple of years later, after I had been elected to the State Senate, I got involved in another battle that gave me my first real taste of how badly the media can distort issues to suit their agenda. It was 1990, and Tipper Gore, the wife of Tennessee senator Al Gore, was fighting her good fight to warn parents about offensive lyrics on record albums. I had kids who listened to these albums, so I joined her in the trenches. I introduced legislation to require labels on albums with offensive lyrics so that no one under eighteen could buy them in Arizona. This would have an impact on such artists as 2 Live Crew and Ice-T, who were known for their obscene lyrics at the time. Record industry executives vigorously fought my bill. Longtime Arizona resident Alice Cooper lobbied me, and I remember how Donny Osmond, who was trying to toughen his image at the time, flew in from Utah to testify against the bill. He arrived at the committee hearing wearing a black leather jacket and black pants. The committee passed the bill, but I eventually agreed to put it on hold after I came to an agreement with the record industry that they would label albums with explicit lyrics—not just in Arizona but nationwide. So, as far as I was concerned, we had accomplished what we set out to do.