Sarah Palin, Christian Leader

She started out quiet, spiritual, feminine, studious, strong, kind & congenial

Diane Osborne, a hair-dresser, helped young women in this city as they vied for crowns in pageants, but the one she was sponsoring this time, in 1984, struck her as unlikely. Sarah Heath, at 20, was so soft-spoken, so unobtrusive, so agreeable. . .”

“I kind of worried about how she would do up there on stage,” Mrs. Osborne said. “You have to have a certain go-get-’em to get up there and stand up for yourself, and she came across as such a shy, sweet girl.”

Sarah . . . seemed void of the urgent quest for attention that Ms. Osborne had recognized in others.” [Beauty Pageant Contestants].

As it turned out, Sarah Heath at the Miss Alaska Pageant — now Governor Sarah Palin and former Republican vice-presidential nominee — surprised her hair-dresser who waited nervously backstage in an Anchorage auditorium, by confidently answering questions from judges, circling in a red bathing suit, and capturing second in the Miss Alaska pageant that June.

Many who knew Ms. Palin in her formative years have been likewise confounded by her journey from this isolated city, fewer than 10,000 people nestled in an Alaskan valley, to a national political stage. To them, the Sarah Palin who, at 44, bursts onto the stage at rallies — confident, feisty, piercing in her attacks — sounds nothing like the younger woman they recall.

“I don’t think Sarah ever wanted to lead,” said Lori Ann Perrin, a friend from college.

“She wanted to be a good girl and play by the rules. She wasn’t someone who was trying to break new ground or argue about things or voice an opinion. In a way she was almost a wallflower type.

I’m not sure what happened between then and now, but something must have.”

Her route to prominence was anything but mapped. She was never president of the college class, the social butterfly who collected everyone in the room, the academic scholar who others thought stood far above the rest.

But buried beneath her cheery exterior, young quiet Sarah had a potent streak of competition and grit that would emerge as she pursued modest goals — the pageant, basketball, a television job and, finally, at 28, a campaign for the Wasilla City Council — that seemed to widen her sense of possibility.

“Even her closest relatives said they had no early inkling of this future” declares reported Monica Davie.



Her Mother

“She didn’t talk about politics or getting into politics,” said her mother, Sally Heath, adding that her daughter back then was “never one to be in the limelight.”

Heather Bruce, Sarah Palin’s older sister, said they never really talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up. “Except maybe that, of course, we’re going to have kids,” she said,

She noted at another point, “There was nothing really in high school that I would have thought would have directed her into politics except that she was probably a good debater at home, you know?”

High Standards at Home

Looking out on snow-topped mountains here, the Heath family home is a cross between a natural history museum, science class, tackle shop and favorite grandparents’ house, where supper, on a recent evening, was orange juice and grilled cheese on china plates at the kitchen counter.

Downstairs, tables are packed with skulls, shelves lined with antlers, walls jammed with photographs of people holding up enormous fish, a view from Alaska where one really can see Russia, and a young Sarah running in snow.

Sarah Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, 70 and a retired science teacher, coach and marathon runner, wanders these rooms, grabbing bones and offering curiosities such as asking: “Do you know what causes these growth rings on a sheep horn?”

After the Heaths moved to Alaska from Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1964, a few months after Sarah was born, Mr. Heath fully expected his children — a boy and three girls — to be competent and self-reliant.

He took Sarah Palin on rugged trips where she skied while shooting birds, or held the legs of a moose while he skinned it. He led family runs and expected his children to compete in sports.

“I just pushed her and pushed her,” Mr. Heath said of Ms. Palin. “My philosophy was no pain, no gain, and pay your dues, and the kid never argued with me.”

Sarah Palin, the third of the four Heath children, was seen as “the strong, quiet one,” her older sister Mrs. Bruce said.

"She read a lot, from the local newspaper to “Little House on the Prairie.” Her parents could not recall her favorite books as she grew older, but said "they read Reader’s Digest aloud as a family."

Sarah Palin's mother, Mrs. Heath, 67, once a school secretary, was a quieter influence, considered “the rock of the family” by friends.

As an infant, Sarah Palin was baptized as a Roman Catholic but when Mrs. Heath’s children were young, she began taking them to Wasilla Assembly of God, a Pentecostal church that embraced practices including speaking in tongues, though not everyone took part.

(Some worshipers say they never saw the young Sarah speak in tongues.) Catholic and Pentecostal churches hold clear differences, but Mrs. Heath played down the family’s shift.

“We’ve never been staunch anything,” Mrs. Heath said. “This was just a convenient thing that people in this church that believed like we did and it was nearby and the people were wonderful so we went there, but the denomination certainly didn’t mean a thing.”

While Sarah Palin has attended other churches in recent years, Wasilla Assembly of God was influential in her youth. “She wanted to include her Christian faith and her testimony in her school,” said the Rev. Paul Riley, her former pastor, “and then later in her work place.”

Sarah Palin spoke often of her spirituality, jotting notes to fellow pageant contestants (“Please keep God No. 1. He’s got great things for you, baby”), offering to pray for a college friend who was torn between two men, and choosing as her yearbook message: “He is the Light, and in the Light there is life.”

On her high school basketball team, teammates recalled, Sarah Palin prayed with them before games, and once took part in an ad-hoc church service on a particularly long ferry ride to a game.

Discipline and Setting Goals

Basketball would help shape Sarah Palin’s future. Wasilla’s girls’ and boys’ teams traveled together, and on some trips Sarah found herself with a new boy — Todd Palin, the man she would later marry — the young man who had transferred to Wasilla as a high school senior, a rare newcomer.

Like him, she proved to be a scrappy, tireless player. Never much of a scorer, she was brutal on defense.

“She was kind of tenacious and clawing at them and stuff,” her father said.

Wasilla won the state tournament her senior year - thanks in part to her leadership on and off the courts - and this success broadened Sarah Palin’s perceptions about what she could accomplish.

“I know this sounds hokey,” she told The Anchorage Daily News years later, “but basketball was a life-changing experience for me. It’s all about setting a goal, about discipline, teamwork and then success.”



Her College Classmates Recall

Sarah Palin took a winding path through college. In five years, she enrolled in at least four colleges in three states before graduating from the University of Idaho, where she majored in journalism.

Friends say Sarah Palin’s itinerant college journey was nothing unusual, that it was routine for Alaskans without money to tour colleges in the Lower 48, uncertain about their interests and attracted to anywhere that sounded warmer. Many here ticked off their own tallies of colleges attended.

“I went to 10,” said Mr. Heath, who added that he and his wife did not provide their children’s college tuitions; student loans did.

Sarah Palin and several Wasilla girlfriends moved to the University of Hawaii in Hilo, but were quickly disappointed by endless rainstorms and left, family members said. She then went to Honolulu, entering Hawaii Pacific College (now university).

None of Sarah Palin’s colleges would comment on her grades without her permission, but Chatt G. Wright, the president of Hawaii Pacific, described Ms. Palin as a “very good student . . . while she was with us.”

The next year, she moved to a community college in Idaho, transferring a year later to the University of Idaho in Moscow, where (aside from a semester at a community college in Alaska) she spent five semesters — her longest stay at one college.

There, Sarah Palin was described as diligent but reserved, someone who left few impressions about her intellectual life or worldview with classmates reached by The New York Times.

“She was quiet, she took notes, didn’t speak unless she was called on,” said Darren Love, who said he sat next to Ms. Palin in Religious Studies 133, a class described as “religious viewpoints as they relate to dating, courtship and family life.”

We were able to contact 43 fellow students in journalism, communication and telecommunication majors from the group of 60 in her 1987 graduating class. Only five said they recalled much of anything about Sarah Palin. A good number of men, however, remembered they had a crush on her.

Most others said they had no memory of her at all, which some found puzzling given the communication school’s size.

University officials, including Sarah Palin’s academic adviser and two former professors who taught her, said they recalled little or nothing about her.

She did not work for the college newspaper, nor the university television station, a university official said. Her senior class yearbook reveals a single photo, no campus activities.

Roy Atwood, the adviser, said, “I don’t think she was terribly connected.”

In Neely Hall, where Sarah Palin lived, friends remembered her as a bubbly, organized student who made time to work out at a “body shaping” class and always tried to wake them up to attend Church.

Ana de la Cueva, Sarah Palin’s roommate, said she was an easygoing person who loved to dance, took care each day with her hair and makeup, and would sometimes gaze out their window, missing Alaska’s sunsets.

Classmate Stacia Hagerty said Sarah Palin always seemed to be “up on politics and history.”

And Kim Price recalled her as “a lot like every other college girl,” swapping clothes and once in awhile going to a parties - though she was never known to use drugs or get drunk.

Her Pageant Days

It was the prospect of tuition money, friends said, that led her to compete as Miss Wasilla in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant — a little surprising, perhaps, since she “wasn’t a high-heels kind of girl,” as one competitor put it, and found the swimsuit competition “painful,” according to her mother.

Still, she also vied at one point to be Miss Big Lake (a town near Wasilla), her parents said, and Ms. Bruce, her sister, recalled Ms. Palin competing in another pageant in their valley. In the Miss Alaska contest where Palin took second and Miss Congeniality,

The judges of the Miss Alaska were impressed enough by her interview that in their critique of another contestant, they suggested she look to Ms. Palin’s example. An old program shows that Ms. Palin most likely won $1,075 in scholarship money and gift certificates.

“She was a very sweet young lady who everybody liked,” said Maryline Blackburn, who won the contest. But Mrs. Blackburn said she also saw “flashes of Ms. Palin’s emerging ambition.”

“She had a look in her eye of determination, kind of a sizing people up even behind the smile,” Mrs. Blackburn said.

The experience seemed to bring out in her some new sense of her options — a realization, as another contestant put it, that “hey, I can do this, and maybe I can do even better.”



From Intern to City Council

College degree in hand, Ms. Palin moved back to Alaska and, one afternoon in late 1987, walked into KTUU-Channel 2 in search of work.

John Hernandez, then the sports director, offered her an unpaid internship. By early 1988, Mr. Hernandez asked Ms. Palin to fill in for a sports anchor on his night off.

“She was nervous and stiff, pretty much like she was reading off the teleprompter,” Mr. Hernandez recalled, adding that it was nevertheless a respectable debut.

For a few months, Ms. Palin was paid as a substitute anchor, and Mr. Hernandez said he saw in her someone who might have worked her way into bigger markets and who appeared, in a brief time, to have found new confidence.

In August, Todd and Sarah Palin eloped, summoning witnesses from a senior citizens home beside a courthouse. Their families learned of the marriage by looking in their garages, said Jim Palin, Todd’s father, where each family found a clump of flowers and a note.

“They’re just very, very private people,” the elder Mr. Palin said.

The first of their five children, Track, was born within the year and the couple soon moved back to Wasilla. As their family grew, Ms. Palin joined the local PTA.

By 1992, as Wasilla transformed from a tiny frontier town into an exurb of Anchorage, residents were debating whether to impose a sales tax to finance a police force.

One group of leaders, calling itself Watch on Wasilla, thought it might fend off opposition to the police force by recruiting younger candidates to the City Council. Ms. Palin’s name came up.

She did not seem particularly politically minded, recalled Domonic Carney, a member of the group, but no matter. Like the others on their list, she met three criteria:

> she was not part of the business owners’ crowd,

> she supported the police idea and

> she knew Wasilla’s other young parents.

As Mr. Carney remembers it, he or his wife invited her to run. It was one more moment, however accidental - or providential - when Sarah Palin’s prospects expanded.

Her High School Best friend

Until that first term on the Council, Adele Morgan, a childhood friend whom Sarah Palin described in a yearbook inscription as “one of my superest, bestest, funniest cats in Wasilla High,” had never heard her speak of political aspirations.

But years later, as rumors swirled that Sarah Palin might be pondering a run for governor, her old-friend Morgan asked whether there was any truth to the talk.

“Sarah said, ‘Yeah, I think that this is really something that I should do,’” Mrs. Morgan remembered.

Mrs. Morgan pressed her friend Sarah further: “Would you ever run for president? I mean, what are you thinking here?”

Sarah Palin smiled her widest smile, then shrugged, Mrs. Morgan recalled. “She was, like: ‘Well, I don’t know. We’ll have to see.’

She sure didn’t say ‘No!’ ”