Workman gained her strength early in life

Nancy Workman's brother died last week.

In the middle of his baby sister's trial for felony misuse of public money, Calvin Bosse died nine days ago at the age of 70. He suffered from multiple sclerosis and had been bedridden for months, and Workman was suffering with him.

But, judging solely from Workman's demeanor during Wednesday's testimony, scant hours after Bosse's death, you wouldn't have known anything was different — and most people didn't. Workman may have been a trifle more subdued, a bit more solemn, but she was otherwise the same.

"I have a rule left over from my childhood: You don't let them see you sweat, and you never let them see you cry," she said during a wide-ranging interview Wednesday with the Deseret Morning News.

The lesson was hard-won. From age 10 to age 20, from the time a stroke rendered her mother an invalid to the time she died, young Nancy Bosse was primary caretaker. Among the lessons learned by fulfilling such an adult role at such a tender age, she learned this:

No matter how bad someone's day had been, if any member of the family walked into the house with anything but a smiling, cheery attitude, the emotionally sensitive, bedridden matriarch would be plunged into a severe depression, upsetting the entire household.

"Stiff upper lip" doesn't quite cover it — members of the Bosse family had upper lips of iron.

"It's about not caving in," Workman said. "Not folding."

Little did the future Salt Lake County mayor know how well that childhood experience would serve her during the most challenging time of her life: eight months of investigation, disgrace, charges, trial and ultimate vindication over her hiring of two county employees to work at a separate organization under the supervision of her daughter.

Her private grief over her brother's suffering, combined with the intensely public nature of the hiring scandal, provided an excellent excuse to break down. But never did Workman relax her visage — save once, when eight jurors returned a verdict of "not guilty."

"Crying a little, yeah. . . ," she said after she walked out of 3rd District Court a free woman. "It was a little too much. It's been an emotional year."

A telling footnote: Workman attorney Greg Skordas was so nervous the morning of the verdict he threw up. Attorney Jack Morgan was trembling as the jury filed in.

Who soothed them? Workman herself.