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She was a Christian, but she loved to swear. She’d run down a drug dealer to protect her grandson, and when she died, her family found 19 loaded handguns stashed around the house.
If there was one woman who stole the night at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, it was Bonnie Blanton Vance, the late grandmother of the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance.
Up until her death in 2005, the woman known affectionately as “Mamaw” played a pivotal role in Vance’s life. As a boy growing up in the small industrial community of Middletown, Ohio, it was Vance’s grandmother who raised him as his mother struggled with addiction — a painful story that Vance recounts in his best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
“Mamaw was in so many ways a woman of contradictions,” Vance told convention delegates as he accepted his party’s nomination for vice president. “She loved the Lord, ladies and gentleman. She was a woman of very deep Christian faith. But she also loved the F word. I’m not kidding. She could make a sailor blush.”
She was born Bonnie Eloise Blanton in 1933 in Keck, Ky., deep in the heart of central Appalachia. She’d move to Middletown in the late 1940s with the boy who would ultimately become Vance’s grandfather: James Vance. James was 16 at the time and Bonnie was 13 — and pregnant with their first child.
Living in Middletown — where Jim Vance worked in an Armco steel mill — the young couple were what Vance once described as “classic Blue Dog Democrats,” or generally speaking, progressives who are more socially and fiscally conservative. He wrote in his memoir about mamaw’s “affinity for Bill Clinton,” and summed up his grandparents’ political outlook as: “All politicians might be crooks, but if there were any exceptions, they were undoubtedly members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.”
Vance has said that no one in his life had more of an influence on him than his grandmother.
“She really just got me,” Vance told NBC News in a 2017 interview. “She understood when I needed somebody to ride me. She knew when I needed love and comfort. She knew when she needed to just be sympathetic. She was really smart.”
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One part of their bond seems to have been rooted in a shared understanding of substance abuse — and the toll it can take on a family. Vance’s grandmother not only watched his mother struggle with addiction, but also her own husband.
Sometimes, the toll of witnessing a loved one’s addiction would take a violent turn for her. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes about how his grandmother once grew so infuriated by her husband’s alcoholism, that she poured gasoline on him after he had passed out on the couch in a drunken stupor, and then dropped a lit match on him. He would survive the attack.
By all accounts, she could be fiercely protective of her grandchildren.
“She once told me, when she found out that I was spending too much time with a local kid who was known for dealing drugs, that if I ever hung out with that kid again, she would run him over with her car,” Vance told the RNC. “That’s true. And she said, ‘J.D., no one will ever find out about it.’ ”
She was no typical grandma
The story, which Vance recalled with a laugh, is just one of the ways she was no typical grandma. She was feisty and known for a foul mouth.
Writing four years ago in the Dayton Daily News, Bonnie Meibers, a cousin to Vance, remembered once trying to clean up Mamaw’s language by getting her to use a swear jar.
“Twenty-five cents for every bad word. It sat on the windowsill in our kitchen,” Meibers wrote. “One afternoon while she was babysitting the two of us, she pulled out her checkbook and wrote a blank check. ‘Now I can say whatever the (expletive) I want. I’ll fill out the amount later,’ she said.”
At the same time, she had a deeply personal faith, which Vance has described as “a really important part of my life.”
“She really loved the Christian faith. She loved God, and that was an important part of her life,” he told NPR in a 2016 interview.
It was a faith she largely practiced outside of any organized church, however.
“Mamaw just mistrusted a lot of the parts of institutional Christianity as she saw it,” Vance said. “She saw that people were primarily asking for money and weren't actually that interested in the faith. And the other side of it — and I think that this is related — is that Mamaw saw church as increasingly an upper-crust institution.”
Her faith taught her tolerance. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance recounts a story how at a young age, he thought that perhaps he might be gay. “You’re not gay,” his grandmother told him, but even if he was, “God would still love you.”
“Now that I’m older, I recognize the profundity of her sentiment: Gay people, though unfamiliar, threatened nothing about mamaw’s being. There were more important things for a Christian to worry about,” he wrote.
(As a candidate for Senate in 2022, Vance said he would vote against federal protections for gay marriage. But he also said that “gay marriage is the law of the land in this country. And I’m not trying to do anything to change that.”)
A hidden stash of guns
After the success of Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir was adapted for film by director Ron Howard. In the movie, Vance’s grandmother is played by Glenn Close, who wears Mamaw’s actual glasses in the film.
Vance’s grandmother died in 2005, and as he shared in his convention address, when the family would later go through her things, they found almost two dozen guns.
“Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over her house,” he said. “Under her bed, in her closet. In the silverware drawer. And we wondered what was going on, and it occurred to us that towards the end of her life, Mamaw couldn’t get around very well. And so this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arms’ length of whatever she needed to protect her family.”
After she died, the Vance family buried her on a small hillside plot in Kentucky, a short drive from where she was born. Vance has bought more than 100 acres in the area, a buffer of sorts from the outside world for the woman he remembered in his convention address as his “guardian angel.”
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