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At his swearing-in ceremony, Kucinich traveled back to the moment when it all began, a moment immortalized in a black-and-white photo he would hang behind his state Senate desk. There, a frightened 13-vear-old boy stands behind a podium at Tremont's St. John Cantius High School, dressed for the occasion in his Uncle Lenny's suit. The night before, his uncle had dropped the suit off so Kucinich "would look proper for this audience, the ninth-grade class that had chosen his nephew to deliver their freshman induction speech.
Nearly 35 years later, as Kucinich took his oath of office behind that same podium, he spotted some of the people who had applauded him in that gymnasium three decades before.
"There's always closure in life. Things that come full circle," he says. "I thought of what it means to be a young person standing on that stage at age 13 with all kinds of hopes and aspirations. And then to take the journey and to come back through all of it. To come back from the destruction and the chaos and the collapse of a career, to come back to that same stage. You end up in a certain place along a journey that you've been through, almost like an odyssey. you know? You keep sailing and trv to get home. It was great. It was tremendous. This was a moment for me."
Before he turned 18, Kucinich lived in 21 places - including a car.
Sitting in Dimitri's, a 24-hour Greek joint located in Cleveland on Lorain Avenue, Kucinich brushes a lemon wedge off the paper place mat in front of him and jots each address down. He starts with the home he lived in as a baby, and painstakingly - pausing for minutes between some - he adds each address.
That first address was his grandparent's house on Carnegie Avenue, an old wooden home that Kucinich's mother carried him into after she gave birth in October 1946. She demonstrated her devotion to her firstborn through hours of reading. By age 3, Dennis could read, and by adulthood, whenever he felt lost, the words of the greats that he first heard through his mother's soft voice would guide him.
As the oldest of seven, Kucinich was thrust into a position of leadership early in life. When his father, a Croatian truck-driver, was ill or out of town, it was Dennis who made sure that his siblings excelled. "He'd be the one who was out there under the streetlights late at night passing the football with me," says Gary Kucinich, a former Cleveland School Board member and one of Dennis' brothers. "Before a football game, Dennis used to get me pumped up. He used to hit me on the shoulder pad and say, 'Do you want to win this game? Do you want to win this game? Go out there and win!'"
As the family continued to grow and Kucinich's father's income didn't, they were forced in and out of homes all over Cleveland's inner city, with Catholic schools being the children's only stability. At St. Clair Avenue's St. Aloysius School, Sister Leona Nieberding took special notice of Dennis.
"I just had one pair of pants that I wore for a whole year," Kucinich remembers. "They were turquoise pants with black stitch piping on the side. Finally, some kids caught on that I was wearing this pair of pants every day. It was not a lot of fun.
"The good Sister caught what was going on and she immediately had boxes of clothes sent over to the house. Also, she gave me an opportunity to work off some of the fees that we had at the time."
Handing him a floor scrubber and a metal bucket brimming with soap water, Sister Leona watched as Dennis dunked his 12-year-old hands in the water and maneuvered the machine that dwarfed his small body. "They still tell stories at St. Colman about the time when I went to use the floor scrubber and it took off with me," Kucinich says, with a laugh. For 60 cents an hour, the young Dennis scoured grime off the floors of these schools and many others to pay for his and his siblings' tuition.
In 1957, the family endured one of its hardest times. Kucinich recalls sitting with his three brothers and sister in the backseat of the car at age 11, combing the newspaper ads to find a new home. Few, if any, at that time would rent to a family of seven. "But we needed a place. We couldn't find anything."
His father got around it the only way he knew how, leaving three kids behind when he signed the lease. "When the landlord came," Kucinich recalls, "three of us would go clown the back stairs and run a couple yards away until he made the rounds. At least one time, two of us ended up hiding in the closet waiting for the landlord to leave."
Just before that, they lived in their car. "I was always jockeying for positions to sleep on the floorboards of the backseat," Kucinich recalls. But that was OK, because they were together, and less than a year before that they were not.
It was Thanksgiving 1956, and Kucinich's mother, hospitalized for months after giving birth to her fifth child, was ill with what Kucinich now thinks was postpartum depression. While their father worked to try to put things back together again, the kids were sent to Parmadale Children's Village, a Catholic orphanage and receiving home. Christmastime stands out in Kucinich's memory.
"I remember I hadn't seen Gary for weeks and I felt really bad about it," he says. "We went out to play and it was a very cold winter day. They had these hills in the back and kids would be making snowmen and having snowball fights. I was looking for Gary and I thought I saw him; I remember running across this field to go and see him. I ran and ran and ran up to this kid. And it wasn't him. It was horrible."
Three months later, the children were taken in by some relatives in Michigan, and eventually, after their mother recovered, she joined them. Each week, they'd wait for their father to visit from Cleveland, when they'd take drives out to the country to a place Kucinich describes as magical, a place where adults would dance and children would play.
"I remember sitting in the backseat as we were driving there thinking, God, I hope we can keep this family together. Just literally praying that would happen," he says. "What it was like to just be there and watch my parents dance ..." Kucinich's voice trails off and he looks away. "It was really neat," he adds, shaken by the memory. "The idea that we were all together again.
"There was a lot of poverty," he later says. "As life goes on, it strengthened me."
But Kucinich's sister Terry Sikorski says its impact was much greater than that. "By being in the neighborhood, he saw how the people are." she says. "It was just in his blood and in his heart to see how people needed somebody, needed a voice, and my brother, he figured he could help and be that voice. And that's exactly what he is."
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