Quayle’s a Delight to His Wealthy, Whistlin’ ‘Nana’

All lives contain character-shaping epiphanies. Such a formative event for Republican Sen. Dan Quayle, he said during last week’s vice presidential debate, was advice from his 97-year-old grandmother, Martha Pulliam.

“You can do anything you want to if you just set your mind to it and go to work,” the GOP vice presidential candidate recalled Pulliam, a wealthy newspaper publisher, as telling her wealthy grandson.

The anecdote triggered derisive laughter from the intensely partisan audience that filled the Omaha Civic Auditorium for the nationally televised debate. A stung Quayle wagged a hand at the crowd and said: “Dukakis supporters sneer at that, because it’s common sense. They sneer at common sense advice, Midwestern advice, Midwestern advice from a grandmother to a grandson.”

As he said it, Martha Pulliam--a woman whose history shows she takes her own advice--was cheering him on from her nursing home in Franklin, Ind.

Friends and family say it wouldn’t be off the mark to describe the newspaper publisher, whom Quayle and her other grandchildren call Nana, as a small-town, Midwestern version of Margaret Pynchon, the aristocratic publisher on the old “Lou Grant” television show.

Watching Her Grandson

“That’s a pretty accurate description of her,” said Owen Hansen, the managing editor of the Lebanon Reporter, the paper that Pulliam still publishes.

The morning after the debate, Pulliam told the Lebanon Reporter: “Dan beat that What’s-his-name pretty handily,” Hansen said.

Pulliam’s nurse’s aide, Julie Johnson, said that she and Pulliam “just sit in front of the TV half the day waiting for him (Quayle) to come on. Anything relating to him she has her nose right in the TV.”

What did she think of the debate? “Delighted with it,” Pulliam called out to the aide, who was relaying comments to a reporter over the phone.

While Quayle’s maternal grandmother has great difficulty hearing, she is in good health, her family and friends said. “Her only problem now is that her mind comes and goes,” said Hansen, who has known Pulliam since he came to work as city editor of the Reporter 32 years ago. “But really, she is the dearest thing.”

“All I know is that everybody always felt she was one pretty tough and determined (woman), said Mark Helmke, a Republican political consultant and longtime friend of Quayle and his family.

Her marriage to Eugene C. Pulliam, the conservative owner and publisher of newspapers in Arizona and Indiana, was dissolved after a “big, highly publicized divorce,” Helmke said.

According to Dan Quayle’s cousin, Russell Pulliam, the divorce took place in 1941, after his grandfather decided to marry his secretary, Nina Mason.

In his biography of his grandfather, “Publisher Gene Pulliam, Last of the Newspaper Titans,” Russell Pulliam writes that Martha became the matriarch of the family after World War II, despite the divorce. She became the “stable” one whom Pulliam’s 10 grandchildren “turned to for advice and help, especially during some of the their turbulent and confusing teen-age years.”

Presumably, it was at this stage of Quayle’s life that his grandmother told him what he could accomplish if he set his mind to it and went to work.

Earlier, after her divorce, she set her own mind to becoming publisher of the Lebanon Reporter, “buying it from (Gene) Pulliam over a period of years,” her grandson writes.

As a publisher, “She was very soft-spoken. She never was what you’d call dynamic,” Hansen said. But when the situation required it, she made her demands known.

Touchy Editorial

Once, he recalled, he wrote an editorial accusing a children’s home of selfishness for refusing to give a small section of land to its neighbor, a hospital. Mrs. Pulliam happened to be a big benefactor of the children’s home.

The day after the editorial ran, Pulliam came in and said “Owen . . . from now on we will not write editorials against the children’s home, will we?”

He answered: “I don’t think we will, Mrs. Pulliam.”

Her grandson Russell, 39 and a reporter for one of the family newspapers, the Indianapolis News, said she could be strict but was “probably one of the best examples of loving discipline I’ve ever known, along with my parents. We always called her ‘Nana,’ and that sort of expresses” the affection her grandchildren felt, he said.

She never spanked; “she just whistled,” he said. “You know, when you put your fingers in your teeth (and blow). She’d whistle and we all obeyed.” You could hear her whistle all “over the golf course,” he said.

Golf, History, the Bible

Golf was a favorite pastime of hers, he said, and “she liked to read a lot a night. She read history a lot (but) the Bible primarily.”

Russell Pulliam said he doesn’t remember his grandmother giving him the specific kind of advice his cousin Dan recalled during the debate. “I can’t remember one thing that jumps out at me like that. He had time to think about it. He had a debate to do. I don’t have to do that.”

Dan Quayle’s Nana doesn’t specifically remember the advice she gave her grandson when he was young, but “that is the way I feel about it,” she said over the phone.

“That is her philosophy,” her aide interjected for her. “She says, ‘Anything you set your mind to do you can.’ ”

Is Dan Quayle her favorite grandchild?

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Pulliam responded.

“She’s laughing,” the aide said.

“I’ve got some other smart ones,” Pulliam called out.