The New Yorker:

Early in his life, Sanders left the streets of Brooklyn for the woodlands of Vermont. What did the man bring to the state—and what did the state bring to the man?

By Jill Lepore

Sanders arrived in Vermont before the New Leftists did in the sixties, and he stayed after they left. He found his strongest support not with the draft dodgers and the hippies but with the working poor.Illustration by Shepard Fairey; Source photograph by Hal Yeager / Stringer / Getty

Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City Music Hall. The Green Mountains beckoned! Under a shop sign that read “vermont,” a wide storefront window exhibited seasonal dioramas that trapped pedestrians like chipmunks in a sap bucket. Inside, you could find out about snow conditions and fishing holes, inspect a woodstove, get advice about the best time to go leaf-peeping, pick up a train schedule, and buy a jug of maple syrup. A year after the center opened, Alfred Hitchcock went to Craftsbury, Vermont, to shoot “The Trouble with Harry.” People in that little town, population seven hundred and nine, brought the crew blueberry muffins and found a 1913 Buick for the production to use, on the condition that no one drive it more than forty miles an hour, which is about as fast as anyone could drive on those roads, anyway. The trouble with Harry is that he’s dead, flat on his back on a hill outside town, on a patch of grass carpeted with red-edged golden oak leaves, near a fallen log on a spot with a sweeping view of mountains blue and green and purple and glorious. In an interview with Vermont Life, Hitchcock said, “If one has to die, can you think of a more beautiful place to do so than in Vermont in autumn?”

It was in the autumn of the “Trouble with Harry” shoot that Bernie’s brother, Larry, nineteen, brought the thirteen-year-old future mayor of Burlington and two-time Presidential candidate on a subway ride from their three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment, at 1525 East Twenty-sixth Street, Brooklyn, where they took turns sleeping on a bed in the hallway (versus the couch), to Rockefeller Center. Wandering around, they stopped at Vermont, the bureau, and returned home with a brochure titled “Vermont Farms and Summer Homes for Sale.” Somehow, miraculously, Bernie Sanders would eventually own one such property, a stretch of woods in the tiny town of Middlesex, population seven hundred and seventy. “This brook is my brook!” he said, and “This tree is my tree!,” even if he didn’t altogether believe in private ownership. (“I am not a capitalist,” he once told the talk-show host Phil Donahue.)

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