Professor Daley Reflects on Her Interviews with Senator Jim Jeffords

RUTLAND HERALD -- I’ve been thinking about the summer day I drove to Shrewsbury to interview Jim Jeffords for Vermont Magazine. Jeffords had just weeks before given up the longest-held Republican seat in the U.S. Senate, simultaneously returning Senate control to the Democrats and in so doing becoming, if briefly, a household name. I found him perched upon an old Ford tractor, his hair awry, and a goofy grin spreading across his face as he waved my way. He was mowing his overgrown meadow, as oblivious to the slight trickle of blood on his forehead, the result of absentmindedly driving into a branch, as he was to the messages clogging his answering machine.... That fall and winter, after I returned to my job at San Francisco State University and he to Washington, I’d fly each weekend to D.C., where we worked in his little hideaway office at the bottom of the Senate building.