NPR digs into Hillary's hidden past

[Divernan]

5. Part of NPR series on each presidential candidate.

This story is part of NPR's series Journey Home. We're going to the places presidential candidates call home and finding out what those places tell us about how they see the world.

Hillary Clinton's family moved to Park Ridge, Ill. in 1950 when she was a toddler. It's a quiet, upper middle class suburb of Chicago. . . Hugh Rodham paid for his family's home outright, with money he had saved as the owner of a drapery business. The house is on the corner. It's brick, two stories tall under big shade trees. . . an affluent midwestern suburb.

There were games of baseball played in the middle of the street. The sewer covers served as the bases. Kids would ride off on their bikes and no one started worrying until after dark.Think growing up in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Interesting - I'd always thought of her as coming from a middle class background - but this neighborhood is definitely, as the report says, upper middle class. I grew up in a similar house in a small town outside of Chicago - the mothers all had domestic "help" several days a week - to do the washing, ironing and major housecleaning, i.e., scrubbing out the multiple bathrooms, polishing the hardwood floors, vacuuming, & dusting. My Mom prepared 3 hot meals a day (we walked home from school for lunch) and played a lot of bridge. Our maid taught me how to iron before I left for college. It was a very cushioned, sheltered, safe life. We never locked our house - day or night.