By Bridget Read
In 1981, when Bernie Sanders had been mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for less than three months, Jane Sanders asked for a desk in City Hall. This was when she was still Jane Driscoll, the 30-year-old divorced mother of three heading up the mayor’s new youth task force. “She is also,” wrote the Burlington Free Press at the time, “the mayor’s girlfriend.”
Driscoll and a fellow task-force member appeared before the Board of Aldermen and asked for neither funding nor staffing — they wanted the desk and a phone. They had to tread lightly: Sanders, a socialist who ran as an independent against a four-term incumbent Democrat, had won the mayoral race by only ten votes, and the almost entirely Democratic board was openly hostile to him. It had recently fired his secretary, Linda Niedweske, in the middle of the night. “We had a lot of adversaries,” Neidweske remembers. To Jane, the desk was paramount; it made a real difference, she explained later, when making calls if you could say you were making them from City Hall.
The aldermen voted in her favor, and the Youth Office was opened on the third floor. Jane manned the phone herself, unpaid, every day between
10 a.m. and 2 p.m., usually. She occasionally answered the one in the…
