Much has been made of the underlying weirdness of bully barber and android Willard "Corporations Are People" Romney: the family dog on the car roof, the "trees are the right height" - type comments, the examples go on. But this story is particularly unsettling: as a Stanford college freshman, weird Willard liked to dress up in a Michigan State Trooper uniform and impersonate a police officer in public. Robin Madden, a classmate of the Weird One, gave this account:
"Said Madden in a recent interview, 'He told us that he had gotten the uniform from his father,' George Romney, then the Governor of Michigan, whose security detail was staffed by uniformed troopers. 'He told us that he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler.' In Madden’s recollection, confirmed by his wife Susan, who also attended Stanford during those years, 'we thought it was all pretty weird. We all thought, Wow, that’s pretty creepy. And after that, we didn’t have much interaction with him.'”We'll leave it to the psychologists to analyze Willard's dress up habit and posing as a power figure. As the article points out, impersonating a police officer carries criminal penalties, depending on the State and on the number of violations. It's also noteworthy that Willard was a vocal supporter of the Vietnam War at the time, but decided that he preferred police uniforms to military ones, and that someone else should fight for him.
(photo: A young Willard places a toy gun under his chin. People want this guy for President?)
