From sheltered youth to culture shock

Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, the probable Republican nominee for governor, was interviewed Tuesday by the Globe's Scott Helman and New England Cable News's Jim Braude as part of a series of conversations with candidates for the corner office. 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.

Q. There's one thing that we can't really wait to get to, so we're just going to start there, and that is your love of punk rock. Where did it start?

A. I think it probably started at Harvard, when I came up North for the first time. I was exposed to all kinds of new influences and ideas, and one of them was in 1978 [when] there was a lot of new music out and people were playing the Ramones and Devo and Blondie and it was really fun to listen to something completely different than all the surfer music I'd been listening to back in Daytona Beach.

Q. So who's the favorite band?

A. Probably Talking Heads.

Q. From there now, take us back to Florida, before Harvard, you grew up in relatively modest means. Bring us back to those days and tell us where you came from.

A. Well, I was actually born in Omaha, so I just want to get that out there so that everybody knows that I spent the first two years of my life in Omaha. My dad was in the military for almost all of his life, for 27 years, but what he did when he wasn't full time in the military was that he sold real estate. He had a real estate license, and he would lay out subdivisions. And so when I was born he was with my mother up in Omaha, Neb., laying out a subdivision there, and when he finished with that he came back to Florida. Both my parents were native Floridians, and so I was, from 2 years old on, back in Daytona Beach, and it was a lovely place to grow up, very nice but very sheltered, very quiet.

Q. Were [your parents] strict? You lived an hour away from Disney World, yet your parents wouldn't let you go because they considered it too frivolous.

A. Yes, but let's be fair, too. It wasn't even built till I was well past the age that most people would take their kids to Disney World. And also my parents didn't really spend money on anything that they thought was unnecessary or frivolous. We didn't eat out a lot. We didn't entertain. . . . We kept the focus on things that actually mattered. That's fiscal discipline.

Q. So, what's it like to be a kid of modest means? Your father was an Army guy and all this sort of stuff, [then] he's severely disabled, and you all of a sudden have to go out and get not one job, not two, but three from what we understand.

A. Well, I was very fortunate that my mom had become a schoolteacher when I was about 8 years old. She had started teaching. She taught in the public schools in third and fifth grades. So we did have an income, thank God, when my dad had his very serious heart attack when I was 15. But it was very different than having, certainly, two incomes in the family, and we spent most of our savings on his healthcare costs. We didn't have healthcare insurance for his hospitalization.

Q. One of the jobs you worked at in high school was at a newspaper?

A. That's actually a wonderful story because one of the people who stepped up and was a real mentor to me was the editor, who was a woman, of our local newspaper. It was a family newspaper. And she took me under her wing and taught me a lot of the things I wasn't learning in the schools, because the public schools in Florida where I was were very, very poor. She taught me grammar, she taught me how to write, and she inspired me to go to the local community college when I was 16 and start taking classes in computer science, which was something that they actually needed at the newspaper because they were changing over from all those typewriters that you used to see in newsrooms to computers for the first time. So I had a great experience studying computer science and then going and working at the newspaper for her.

Q. Talk about transitions. You go from the kind of roots you're talking about with these jobs and your family and limited incomes, and all of a sudden you end up at . . . Harvard University.

A. It was a huge cultural shock for me. I'd never owned a coat. I'd never seen snow, that I could remember. . . . I'd never met so many interesting and diverse people as I met at Harvard. It was very distracting.

Q. Were you treated like a second-class citizen at all?

A. Well, maybe as a curiosity at certain points. I showed up wearing the clothes you'd wear in Florida and genuinely not understanding the weather in any way and not being prepared for the kinds of people I was going to meet, but it was fascinating, and I probably got too distracted wanting to get to know the people around me, but it was a great experience.

Q. Did you find it [an emotionally] cold place at all when you arrived?

A. No, no, but I often found that there were a lot of cultural cues that I was missing because I didn't understand what society was like in New York or what our heritage was here in Boston, and there was just a lot that I had to learn. The culture in Florida was much more transient, and there weren't deep roots in the community for any particular ethnic group. I hadn't ever seen whole communities of either Italians or Irish or anyone else that really viewed themselves as a cohesive group, and that's so important to our identity here in Massachusetts.

Q. So you go from there, you end up in Dublin at Trinity College, and you re-meet this guy Sean Healey, who you marry at 25 years old. . . . What we read about Sean in the paper is that he runs this huge corporation . . . he's got a lot of money. Tell us a little bit about the Sean we don't know.

A. Well, I'll tell you the Sean who I met there, and he was a very earnest, very smart young man. He'd been a Marine brat, lived all over the country, and his mom was a schoolteacher like my mom, and his dad had been in the military and was also a lieutenant colonel, like my dad. And we'd both grown up in beach towns and we'd both gone to Harvard, and then we were both on Rotary scholarships going to a university in Ireland and I thought: ''I'm never going to have more in common with anyone in my life, so I'd better just marry this guy now. There's no point in waiting." And it has worked out, thank God.

Q. Why does a very private person, as you appear to be, choose this kind of thing as a career, sort of the absolute opposite of what that kind of person would like to be doing for a living?

A. Well, I mean, it is a struggle for me to get out and talk about things like this versus the things that I really care about, about the things that really force me into politics. And you've made me promise not to talk about any of those things tonight, no actual policy things, but my passion for issues is what has driven me to get into politics. I loved my work doing research for the Justice Department and writing papers on drug policy, or gang violence, or domestic violence, or child abuse and neglect, but at the end of the day what I really wanted to do was do something about those topics.

Q. Was there a major moment that sort of drove you in this direction? In one of the profiles of you it talks about the murder of a fellow church member in 1980 by some serial killer. Was that it?

A. I think it probably was the realization that people who are in positions of power -- policy makers, politicians, people who lead agencies, and so forth -- don't have any time to really figure out what the right thing is to do, and there's this whole group of people who spend their time researching what's the right thing to do and writing papers about it and giving speeches at obscure conventions somewhere, and they actually know the answers, a lot of them. And I was one of those people once, and I realized that there's never any time for those two worlds to connect. . . . And I wanted to bridge that gap.

Q. But was it all from things you had studied and read, is there no sort of personal -- for example, you are very vocal about victims' rights and the importance of justice for victims -- is there any sort of personal story there?

A. . . . You mentioned a friend of mine from home who was the victim of a serial killer in Florida who was eventually put to death. But I've known many victims of crime during the course of my life, and it always changes that person's life permanently. So prevention is really the only thing that can cure that, so I'm very, very focused on victims' rights, and not just on the punishment piece, but on the prevention piece.

Q. Kerry, a yes or no question: Is there anything you like talking about less than your personal wealth?

A. The kind of stuff we're talking about here tonight, all the personal stuff together.

Q. Well, then, if you don't mind it so much, let's talk about it for a second. We showed you a picture of one house [a small home in St. Petersburg Beach]; let me show you a picture of another, in Vermont, if I can for a second. This is a fairly modest house on 145 acres. You're building a larger one, which everyone knows will be your fifth house. . . . You and your husband sought a property tax reduction, 7,000 bucks, went to the highest court in Vermont, you were successful.

A. Well, you know that I oppose taxes generally and would like to see everybody pay lower taxes, and a group of residents who felt that they were being overtaxed, us among them, took our case to the Supreme Court in Vermont and we won, and they agreed to it.

Q. Four of the five candidates for governor are multiple-house kind of people. How do you, despite your upbringing, how at this stage of your life, at 45, do you connect with people living paycheck to paycheck when you're as fortunate, as I assume you'd say, as you are in terms of having no economic concerns or worries.

A. We feel very fortunate, absolutely we do, and real fortunate to be able to, for example, to have bought houses for my husband's parents, and I am very glad to do that. I think that being able to provide security for your family is one of the nicest things that you can ever be able to do, and so I'm extremely grateful. How do I stay connected? I had a lot of years when this wasn't the case, and you don't forget those years. I did not start out with any sort of security blanket. I knew very well from the time I was 15 that the life I made would be simply that. That I would have to work, and if I worked well, and if I studied hard and made good decisions, that I would have a shot in life. And that's something that I think everybody feels out there. They feel that they want to be able to know that they have that opportunity. I want to make sure that people do have the opportunities that I had, through public education, through the ability to work hard and keep enough of their money so that they can achieve the goals of security for their family, so that keeps me very connected.

Q. Your kids, they go to private schools, in a community that's got pretty good schools. How did that decision get made?

A. It got made because I want my kids to be in an environment where they can talk about values and talk about perhaps values in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting, and I want uniforms and I want a very structured environment for my kids. I mean, this is a very private choice I think that parents make, but my dedication to making sure that the public schools are the best they can possibly be in Massachusetts is very real. . . . I spend every Sunday with my mother, and I can tell you that my mother would not let me rest a moment if she thought that I wasn't doing everything I could to protect the public schools. And I live with my mother-in-law who was both a teacher and a school principal, so public education is a topic that's at our dinner table every single night.

Q. Is there an extra burden that you feel sort of representing womanhood, for lack of a better expression, in this race, obviously as the only woman in the field?

A. You know what? I think that people are really going to care about what I do, not my gender. I think people are going to look at me and say here's someone who's going to stand up for the taxpayer, here's someone who's going to provide balance to a fiscally irresponsible Legislature, here's someone who's going to be willing to take a stand.