by Josh Drobnyk

Follow us to the place where Hillary Rodman first shot a gun.

Where she learned to ride horses, to fish and swim.

Where she saw shorefront movies projected onto a sheet.

Read the story in the Morning Call:

SUMMERS WITH HILLARY

Hillary Rodham Clinton's childhood experiences in the Pocono Mountains helped form her family, working-class values.

By Josh Drobnyk
Of The Morning Call

LAKE WINOLA - This is where Hillary Rodham first shot a gun. Where she learned to ride horses, to fish and swim. Where she saw shorefront movies projected onto a sheet.

On the big front porch of her family's two-story cabin overlooking the calm water below, she would listen to folk tales about an Indian princess named Winola, play boardgames with her brothers and watch her father, uncle and grandfather play pinochle. Here young Hillary hit golf balls in the surrounding pastures and would pal around with friends in nearby Scranton.

Long before she ever dreamed of being president, this is where Hillary Rodham Clinton learned how to be a kid.

``Getting ... in the car every summer and many Christmases and going to Scranton or Lake Winola was what my family did,'' Clinton said in an interview with The Morning Call. ``We didn't go anywhere else for vacation.''

Every holiday in the 1950s and `60s, the Rodhams -- Hillary, Hugh, Tony and parents, Hugh Sr. and Dorothy -- would make the 700-mile road trip from Chicago, where they lived, to Hugh Sr.'s hometown in northeast Pennsylvania. During Easter and Christmas, they would often stop at their grandparents' duplex on Diamond Avenue in Scranton, and cram around the dining room table for holiday feasts.

In August, their trip would take them 20 miles further to Lake Winola, where Clinton's dad and grandfather, Hugh Rodham Sr., a factory worker, built a summer home in 1921.

``We just had a great childhood experience being able to run free all day long,'' Clinton said. ``The summers were just idyllic.''

Clinton's experiences here helped instill in her the deep sense of family and the appreciation for working-class values that resonate in her message as a presidential candidate.

``It was a place that meant so much to my father and his family that of course it meant the world to me, because it was all about family,'' she said. ``It was just a big part of my early experiences.''

Clinton is one of the few presidential candidates with ties to Pennsylvania. Fellow Democrat Joseph Biden, a Delaware senator, was born in Scranton. GOP Rep. Ron Paul of Texas was raised in Pittsburgh. And possible Republican candidate Newt Gingrich was born in Harrisburg.

Lake Winola is a small, quiet community in the Pocono Mountains of just a few hundred people, loosely anchored to Scranton by a winding, two-lane road. Pontoon, fishing and small motor boats pepper the docks around the lake. A couple hundred modest homes surround it.

The Rodham's two-story, yellow cabin can be found on a hill -- what seemed like a mountain to Clinton as a kid -- perched above the four-mile road that circles the lake. When Hillary was a youngster, the home had no heat, no bath or shower. To bathe, she would stand below the porch as someone leaned over its rickety fence and dumped a bucket of water on her from above.

The home still belongs to her family and her brothers spend part of every summer here. It's not uncommon to see one of them hitting golf balls on one of the area courses or grabbing a beer at the Blue Pelican bar. But Clinton, 59, has rarely returned in recent years -- her last visit came in May for her niece's baptism -- and few folks remember what she was like as a child.

Charlotte Iori is one person who does. In Scranton, no family was physically closer to the Rodham's than Iori's. Her grandmother, Hazel Church, lived in the duplex opposite the Rodham's on Diamond Avenue and would stitch clothes for Clinton's dolls.

Iori and Clinton were barely toddlers when they were introduced. They became fast friends.

Less than a year apart in age, Iori remembers Clinton as a bookworm who appeared early on to have her sights set on something far more ambitious than Iori.

``She was a smart cookie,'' said Iori, now 60, who lives in nearby Elmhurst with her husband. ``I would be more of the gamester and she was more of the bookster.''

She added with a laugh: ``I told her even when we were young, you just have to marry the kind of person [who is successful], you don't have to be it.''

``Oh, sure, we played together,'' Clinton recalls of the friendship. ``It was playing in the little backyard, all the things kids do. It was following my mother around as she would do chores. Or having a cup of cocoa with my grandfather -- because he was a great cocoa drinker.''

On one occasion, Iori recalls the duo piling into the back of her grandmother's pink and black Plymouth for a trip to Manhattan. Clinton said she vaguely remembers the experience. ``I was just amazed by New York and everything I saw there,'' Clinton said.

But mostly, in Scranton the two would stroll down the working-class block to the corner playground or simply roam around the backyard of their families' homes. ``I used to want to do crazier things, but she was pretty studious,'' Iori said. ``It was really just the two of us.''

Said Clinton: ``I was just a normal kid. I liked to play. I liked to spend time with my family. [I was] kind of a pretty ordinary kid in every respect.''

When summer came around, Iori would occasionally make a trip to the Rodham's lake house. Otherwise, they saw one another other during holidays.

The visits exposed Clinton to a side of life apart from her more upscale suburban Park Ridge neighborhood in Chicago. The family, on at least one occasion, visited Pennsylvania's coal mines at the nearby anthracite fields.

``When I went there as a little girl the culm piles were still burning,'' Clinton recalled, referring to mine waste. ``I watched the effort that was undertaken to try to put those fires down and recover some of the land. I remember how black the Lackawanna River was.''

It wasn't just the coal country that opened Clinton's eyes. ``I met people I never would have encountered in Park Ridge, such as a family my grandfather called `mountain people,' who lived without electricity or a car,'' she wrote in her autobiography.

Carl Bernstein, who recently authored a biography of Clinton, wrote that her father insisted on the visit to the coal mine as a way to educate his family.

``Whatever her discomfort with such gestures at the time, Hillary's later political identification with working-class values and the struggles of average wage-earners was not something acquired at Wellesley or Yale as part of a 1960s countercultural ethos,'' Bernstein wrote in the book ``A Woman in Charge,'' referring to the two schools Clinton would later attend.

Clinton's grandfather had spent his entire career working at Scranton Lace Co. And her father was destined to follow in his footsteps until a friend who was recruited to play football at Penn State convinced the coach to let Hugh Rodham come too. He graduated in 1935 with a physical education degree and he soon hopped on a freight train for Chicago, Clinton recalled in her autobiography.

Year after year, the Rodhams returned to Lake Winola. Perhaps like any youngster, Clinton's willingness to crowd into a car for a long trip apparently waned as she grew older. Bernstein wrote that as time went on Hugh Rodham would allay his daughter's and wife's objections to a lake visit with promises of a shopping spree on the return trip to Chicago.

As a teenager, they'd use the lake house as a base to drive into New York or down to Washington.

But back on the porch overlooking the lake, pinochle dominated her time.

``As a family we would gather on the porch and play cards endlessly,'' Clinton said. She would stand next to her father's chair, watching him take on his brother or one of her father's friends. ``Then he taught me to play,'' she said. ``And then as I got older I got to play with the grown ups.''

Josh Drobnyk reports for the Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., a Tribune Co. newspaper.