Mitt's primary exposure to black people had been his family's beloved housekeeper, Birdie Nailing, and an acquaintance named Sid Barthwell who was the lone black in his Cranbrook senior class. Still, he returned from San Francisco extolling his father's courage in standing up to the Republican right wing.

In his final years at Cranbrook, Mitt emerged a more serious student and a good-looking teen. Adding to the package was his great head of hair. Mitt had grown up hearing people comment on his father's sweep of slicked-back black hair, white at the temples. But since his early teens, Mitt had patterned his own hairstyle after a man named Edwin Jones, who served as his father's top aide in running the Detroit operations of the Mormon Church.

"He sat up front, to the side at a desk, keeping records," Mitt would recall years later. "I remember that he had very dark hair, that it was quite shiny, and that you could see it in distinct comb lines from front to back. Have you looked at my hair? Yep, it's just like his was some 40 years ago."

When graduation arrived, the speaker was none other than George Romney. He hit upon a surprising theme. Girlfriends, the governor told the 76 graduating boys, "will have more to do with shaping your life than probably anybody else." If the girl you're interested in doesn't inspire you to greater effort than you would undertake without knowing her, then you'd better look around and get another."

George knew from experience the importance of choosing a mate wisely. He often told family members that convincing his high school sweetheart to marry him was "the best sales job of my life." As he looked into the crowd, he knew his youngest son had a sophomore sweetheart he'd fallen for. What he didn't know was that a few days earlier, during a break from the prom, Mitt had taken aside his 16-year-old girlfriend of only a few months and asked her to marry him.

And Ann Davies had said yes.

A question

On one of their earliest dates, Mitt leaned in for a kiss, but Ann had other ideas.

"What do Mormons believe?" she asked him.

Mitt was floored, and frightened. He'd grown up knowing his mysterious faith made him something of an outsider. Now here he was on a date with one of the prettiest girls on campus, someone he knew came from mainline Protestant stock, and she was asking for a tutorial on the LDS Church?

"I was not in the mood to talk about religion," he would say later. "I was much more interested in physical expressions of love."