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A Political Natural, Railing Against Politics
Michael S. Steele is running on the theme that "Washington has no clue of what's going on in your life."
(By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)
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"She never took a penny of public assistance because, as she put it, she didn't want government raising her kids," Steele said of Maebell Turner when he announced his Senate candidacy last fall.
In his old neighborhood, people remember Steele as a boy who didn't run in the streets with other kids and instead found the center of his life at St. Gabriel Catholic Church. "Hey, let's play church," he would tell his sister, Monica Turner.
"He used to have a glass with vanilla wafers in it, to symbolize the host, and some apple juice in the other glass, to symbolize the wine. I would line up like I was taking communion, and he would practice saying the mass," Turner, a doctor and former wife of boxer Mike Tyson, wrote in an e-mail. "It was too cute."
When Steele got to Archbishop Carroll High School in Northeast, the boy who had once kept to himself became an outgoing actor. In his first productions, he was often consigned to the back row because he was so tall -- but he didn't often stay there.
"Somehow, he always wound his way up to the front," said James Mumford, who oversaw plays and musicals then and later became principal. Steele eventually became a confident leading actor and a graceful dancer, Mumford said, playing the president in "Of Thee I Sing" and the devil in "Damn Yankees."
In 1977, Steele went on to Johns Hopkins University, where his energy and magnetism led him to another prominent role: president of student government.
Hopkins history professor Ronald Walters, sizing up the politically gifted student that Steele had become by then, made a prediction about his future.
"That was that Michael would go a long way in Democratic Party politics," Walters said. "So I was half-right on that one."
Called to God, Then to Law
After college, Steele shifted gears radically, moving from his frenetic life on campus to the discipline of a Catholic seminary. He eventually joined a handful of other "novices" at an old house in Lawrence, Mass. The routine there: Mass every day, classes on religious life, and lots and lots of quiet time.
The program was supposed to last a year, but Steele left after six months, in February 1983.
He says now that God, who had called him to join the program, also called him to leave. But one of his vows, in particular, provided a push.
"Chastity is a state of mind. And certainly, obedience, I could take being told what to do. But poverty -- whew, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough. Just tough," Steele said. He said he was particularly unhappy when his canary-yellow 1973 Ford Torino became the common property of all novices.
