Little-noticed college student to star politician

Mrs. Heath, 67, once a school secretary, was a quieter influence, considered “the rock of the family” by friends. As an infant, Ms. 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 Ms. 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.”

Ms. 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, Ms. 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 Ms. Palin’s future. Wasilla’s girls’ and boys’ teams traveled together, and on some trips Ms. Palin found herself with a new boy — Todd Palin, the man she would later marry — who had transferred to Wasilla as a 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 mean and clawing at them and stuff,” her father said.

Her team’s successes — Wasilla won the state tournament her senior year — broadened Ms. 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.”

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 Ms. 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.

Ms. 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 Ms. 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 for the one semester 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, Ms. 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.”

Of the 43 fellow journalism, communication and telecommunication majors reached by The Times from the group of 60 in her 1987 graduating class, only five said they recalled much of anything about Ms. Palin. (Two, including Mr. Love, said 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 Ms. 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.”

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In Neely Hall, where Ms. Palin lived, friends remembered her as a bubbly, organized student who made time to work out at a “body shaping” class and attend (and help them wake up for) church. Ana de la Cueva, Ms. 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. Stacia Hagerty said Ms. Palin seemed to be “up on politics and history,” but that Ms. Hagerty brushed past such talk.

And Kim Price recalled her as “just like every other college girl,” swapping clothes and going to parties. She drank, Ms. Price said, but not much. 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.

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