booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

each cabin. When I talked to Booth about it, he said
he couldn’t afford either one on his present salary.”
When she was First Lady, Jean Gardner told a
reporter they bought their first furniture at Goodwill.
“He always felt uncomfortable in fancy clothes, fancy
cars or whatever,” she added. “I really don’t know why.
Maybe he felt guilty” about inheriting a fortune in the
wake of his mother’s death.
Brick Gardner always drove Cadillacs, even after
he’d stopped selling them. Norton Clapp, who was
worth about $450 million when he died in 1995, drove
a Buick. It wasn’t even the most expensive Buick. That
would have been too showy.
Former aides and friends all tell the same stories
about Booth never having any pocket money, à la John
F. Kennedy, who invariably bummed a buck from aides
for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Rosalie Gittings,
Booth’s personal assistant, executive secretary and exofficio
mom during most of his years as governor, says, “He never carried any money. He’d
say, ‘Well, I need 50 bucks.’ So I wrote out a check to me and gave it to him to sign. Then
I’d dole out the money to him. A woman who had worked for him before said to me, ‘He
borrows money and never pays you back.’ And I thought, ‘Well, you dumb-head! What do
you put up with that for?’”
Nor was Booth a fancy eater. It was his stepmother, Millie, who broadened his
horizons by forcing him to try spaghetti. (“I liked it!”) A hamburger and a medium Coke is
his idea of a balanced meal. Adele Ferguson, the legendary longtime capitol correspondent
for The Bremerton Sun, first met him in the 1970s when he was a state senator in a district
that included parts of Kitsap County. “He’d invite me out to lunch or dinner and he’d always
order a cheeseburger. I figured he must not have any money so I’d order something cheap,
too. I said something about it one time to Jack Pyle from The Tacoma News Tribune. I said,
‘Jesus Christ, this guy never has any money! He always orders the cheapest thing on the
menu.’ ‘Well,’ Jack says, ‘the thing about Booth is that he’s got so much money that he
wants to spend yours to make up for it.’ The next time I got invited out and from then on
I ordered from the top of the menu, and I ate big. I thought, ‘To heck with that. I’m not
going to eat any more of these damn cheeseburgers!’ ”
Booth Gardner at Harvard in 1965. HBS Archives
Photograph Collection: Faculty and Staff. Baker
Library Historical Collection. Harvard Business
School.
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