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Sanders rented a small brick duplex at 295 1/2 Maple Street that was filled with not much furniture and not much food in the fridge but stacks of checked-out library books and scribbled-on legal pads.
"Pretty sparse," Gene Bergman, an old friend, said about the apartment.
"Stark and dark," said Darcy Troville, a fellow Liberty Unionite who lived around the corner and shared with Sanders homemade jellies and jams.
"The electricity was turned off a lot," Barnett said. "I remember him running an extension cord down to the basement. He couldn't pay his bills."
He worked some as a carpenter, although "he was a shitty carpenter," [Liberty Union party member John] Bloch told me. "His carpentry," [Liberty Union member Danny] Morrisseau said, "was not going to support him, and didn't."
He worked as a freelance writer, putting intermittent pieces in the low-budget Vermont Freeman, a Burlington alternative weekly called the Vanguard Press and a glossy, state-supported magazine called Vermont Life.
His writing wasn't a living. The Vanguard paid as little as the rest. "It would've been not more than 50 bucks," said Greg Guma, a former editor. Vermont Life? "Our rate was 10 cents a word," said Brian Vachon, a former editor.
"He was always poor," Sandy Baird, another old friend, told me in Burlington.
"Virtually unemployed," said Nelson, the political science professor at the University of Vermont.
"Just one step above hand to mouth," said Terry Bouricius, who was involved with Liberty Union, served at times as a de facto campaign manager for Sanders and at one point crashed for a couple months on his couch.
Liberty Union "people found it difficult to support themselves while engaging in full-time political work," Michael Parenti, one of those people, wrote in the Massachusetts Review in the summer of 1975. "Some held jobs that allowed free time for campaign activities, while others lived off unemployment insurance."
"His work was to be a politician," Guma said. "He put everything into what he was doing."
If it goes this way, it will really fuck me. I have $600 at -120 for Trump winning by 8 or more. Looks like a lock, but if this Super PAC tightens the gap below 8, that will really suck.Quote: