On values, mobility, a hardscrabble past

Deval Patrick, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, was interviewed Monday by the Globe's Scott Helman and New England Cable News' Jim Braude. The interviews are focusing on the candidates' backgrounds, as part of extensive coverage of their records and plans for the state. Future interviews with the candidates will focus on the issues. Here is an edited transcript:

Q. [We] were talking before the broadcast here about how we've probably both heard a bunch of different times the story of your upbringing and coming from Chicago. . . . I'd be curious if you could sort of tell the story but also explain a little bit more about how you felt, particularly coming as a kid from the South Side, arriving at Milton Academy, [a] totally foreign place.

A. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the '50s and '60s, and I lived there with my mother and my sister and my grandparents in a two-bedroom tenement, spent some time on public assistance. In fact, I shared one of those bedrooms and a set of bunk beds with my mother and my sisters, so you'd go from the top bunk to the bottom bunk to the floor, every third night on the floor. You know I went to big, crowded, broken public schools. But we had a very strong sense of community then, because the kids were under the jurisdiction of every single adult on the block. So if you messed up down the street in front of Mrs. Jones, she would, as we used to say, go upside your head, as if you were hers. And then she'd call home, so you'd get it twice. Wonderful characters in that neighborhood. People who looked out for each other."

Q. Do you ever go back to that neighborhood?

A. I do.

Q. What's it like seeing the building where you spent the first decade of your life?

A. More than spent. I was born in that building in my grandmother's bed without a doctor.

Q. What's it like seeing that today?

A. You know it's smaller, it's more contained, it seems more inward-looking. The neighborhood -- a lot of the more blighted parts of the neighborhood have been torn down, a lot of vacant lots. The Robert Taylor homes, which were the public housing project, 17-story buildings that went on for miles and were just a half a block behind, have mostly been taken down now.

Q. Do you have any friends from those days who you still see?

A. I have a couple, actually. One from my sixth-grade class who I stay in touch with. My sixth-grade teacher, in fact, was a very important part of my life until she passed away just recently. . . . She was present when I graduated from college and law school and when I was married and when I was sworn in at the Justice Department. My family migrated with me to Massachusetts, so my mother lived with my wife and me, first in New York and then all the time we lived in Massachusetts until she passed away last year. My grandmother spent her last few years in a nursing home in Milton where we live, and my sister and her husband live in Milton as well.

Q. How'd you get them all out here?

A. My wife says they tend to follow the largest income. Sometimes that happens in families. . . . I came to Massachusetts in 1970. I was 14, and I had a scholarship through a program called A Better Chance that used to be based in Boston to go to Milton Academy, and it was another world, and I was scared.

Q. What was it like when you first saw the place? I mean, you go from a basement apartment on the South Side of Chicago to one of the toniest academies, private schools in America. Do you remember the first day, the first hour?

A. I remember thinking I had never seen so much privately owned lawn in one place before. You come up the main road of the campus. You see the main green there. They had a dress code there, so the boys wore jackets and ties to class. Well, when the clothing list arrived at home my grandparents got me a jacket to wear to class. But a jacket on the South Side of Chicago is a windbreaker. So on the first day everyone's putting on their blue blazers and their tweed coats and I had my windbreaker, but I figured it out.

Q. Let's go back to Chicago for a minute. . . .You were there in '68 during the infamous Democratic National Convention.

A. You bet your life. . . . [A] lot of historical memory today is about the disruption after the '68 convention. You remember . . . the beginning of the summer riots in many major cities started the summer before. So the South Side was in flames the summer before the '68 Democratic Convention, then the summer of the convention, there was a lot of turmoil generally. The drug trade was growing on the South Side, gangs were very much in evidence, the Blackstone Rangers and the Disciples and so on. And my mother was very worried about me, in particular as a boy, a little less so my sister, getting caught up in all that.

Q. So what was it like for a little boy being out there? There was a lot of racial strife in Chicago at that time.

A. There was a lot of racial strife in Chicago, but one thing to understand about the South Side of Chicago is that it was very segregated. . . . I mean, we went downtown on rare occasions to go to the Sears at the end of the summer for our school clothes. We'd take the State Street bus downtown. That sixth-grade teacher I told you about, remember, we're all these runny-nosed kids from . . . all kinds of scenes at home. She took us to see the first opera I ever saw, she took us to the Chicago lyric opera, she taught us to count in German . . .

Q. Can you still do it?

A. Yes, I can. Eins, zwei. . . to seven. . . . But she made us feel like we could be students of the world, and that's a huge gift for a kid from those circumstances.

Q. Post Harvard and prior to going to law school you end up in Sudan, and you end up drafting your law school application from Sudan. Why did you go to Sudan?

A. I had a scholarship, a traveling fellowship called a Rockefeller scholarship, when I graduated from college, and the only requirement was that you spend a year living and working in a distinctly non-Western setting. I had never been outside of the United States before. I was interested in Africa, I had done some work, I'd worked in a bank training program in the summer . . . and I'd learned a lot about the Sudan. So I wrote [to] everyone I knew who knew anything about the Sudan, or Africa for that matter. I got one response from one person I'd never met who said, ''There's a project the UN is running in Sudan; I don't know what you'll do, but come and we'll make a place for you." So, I made my way there. I got to Cairo. . . . I spent a couple weeks in Cairo and . . . eventually made my way, trekking through the Nubian desert for about the last 10 days of it.

[I] went about six days without a bath at the end, looking like a piece of the desert I'd just come through, to find out the guy I'd been writing to for a year had left the week before for two years in Long Beach, Calif., and had said nothing to his office about my coming. But, you know, I figured it out, talked my way into the project, and got an assignment. And the assignment was to spend several months in the Darfur region about 500 miles west of Khartoum with a Sudanese guy who was about my age who had just graduated from the University of Khartoum -- he spoke some English, I spoke some Arabic -- and to figure out why it is this project was failing.

Q. Tell us about your wife, tell us about your kids.

A. I am married to the extraordinary Diane Patrick. She grew up in New York. She's a lawyer as well. We met in LA. She had been a schoolteacher in the New York City public schools until the financial crisis. In fact, she grew up in a political family. Her grandfather was the first black majority whip of the New York State Assembly, and she lived with them in Brooklyn when she was growing up. . . .

We were set up. I was invited to come to a Halloween party out in California, I was out there clerking. This party was organized so we would meet. I didn't know that, but she did. And I was told to come in costume, and I said, ''Well, I'll come. I'm new to town. I like to meet new people, but I'm not coming in costume." And they said ''No, you have to come in costume; don't be an uptight Easterner." So I got up in this caftan I brought back from Nigeria, and I had a spear and I painted my face and no shoes, and I strode right into the party, the only one there in costume. They had invited no one else to come in costume. She was in a black silk pantsuit as I recall. . . .

I think she was intimidated by the weapon I was carrying, but we dated through that year, and we got engaged and moved to New York and started our family there.

Q. What we learned . . . in the Boston Globe . . . as of late is Deval Patrick grew up poor on the South Side of Chicago, and now we know about Deval Patrick's $5.9 million in mortgages, and $27,000 a month in mortgage payments. Do you ever have these out-of-body experiences where you say, ''Oh, my God, look what I've got now, and look what I had then?"

A. . . . Our first reaction, my wife and I, was to turn to each other and say how do you get to 24 rooms [the size of a vacation home the Patricks are building in the Berkshires] without counting every closet and kitchen cabinet? And then there was a part of us that said, ''You know what? It felt like the message was we weren't supposed to have those things." But . . . our values are not our things. Our values are our values. We have a wonderful house in Milton, which we have filled with family and friends over many years because that's important to us. My mother has lived with us, my sister and her family have lived there, all kinds of what we call strays have lived with us when they needed a place. Everybody gathers there for holidays and family triumphs and tragedies, and that's how we like to live our lives, and the place we're building in the Berkshires is very much about an extension of that.

Q. You've addressed this before, but . . . why are you so reluctant to release the tax returns?

A. Because I don't think it's anybody's business.

Q. Why not?

A. Well, because I just don't think it ought to matter how much we make. We meet our responsibilities, we've been fortunate, we've saved well, we've planned carefully, we've had some great breaks. It hasn't always been like this, including while we've been married. You know, we've had the struggles of young families and young parents, wondering whether we could pay the mortgage and heat in the same month.

Q. But don't you risk people wondering whether there's something else there?

A. They're [going to] wonder. No other candidate has released their income tax returns.

Q. Tom Reilly has.

A. No other candidate than Tom Reilly. Not any other gubernatorial candidate, not any other Democratic candidate for that matter. There are financial disclosures required of any candidate, and those are appropriate, and the state has said what they are and we will make those disclosures when it's time.

Q. One of the things you like to do is cook.

A. As a family we like what we sometimes describe as peasant foods, things that are cooked very slowly that take all day. Before this campaign started we always had Sunday lunch at our house. And my mother was there and around 3 o'clock, and we'd start something before church Sunday early in the morning and let it take its time.

Q. You grew up in a tough part of town, you talk about the responsibilities to your mom, your family. How were you seen by the other kids?

A. You know, I remember the first time I went home for a break -- so, Thanksgiving 1970 -- and my grandfather picked me up at the airport and brought me home. And my grandma met me in the hall of the apartment where we lived and my sister said -- out of the blue -- ''Ooh, he [talks] like a white boy." It was devastating. My grandmother said ''No, he speaks like an educated boy." But it was a snapshot of what it takes to move into a different culture. And it made going to the Sudan a lot less jarring than it would have been. So it's something I think of when I move into new settings, like the corporate world or going into the government or, frankly, running for governor.