Little-noticed college student to star politician

In the Miss Alaska contest where Ms. Palin won second runner-up and Miss Congeniality, judges were impressed enough by her interview that in their critique of another contestant, they suggested she look to Ms. Palin’s example. (An old program shows that Ms. Palin most likely won $1,075 in scholarship money and gift certificates.)

“She was a very sweet young lady who everybody liked,” said Maryline Blackburn, who won the contest. But Ms. Blackburn said she also saw flashes of Ms. Palin’s emerging ambition.

“She had a look in her eye of determination, kind of a sizing people up even behind the smile,” Ms. Blackburn said. The experience seemed to bring out in her some new sense of her options — a realization, as another contestant put it, that “hey, I can do this, and maybe I can do even better.”

From intern to city council
College degree in hand, Ms. Palin moved back to Alaska and, one afternoon in late 1987, walked into KTUU-Channel 2 in search of work.

John Hernandez, then the sports director, offered her an unpaid internship. By early 1988, Mr. Hernandez asked Ms. Palin to fill in for a sports anchor on his night off. “She was nervous and stiff, pretty much like she was reading off the teleprompter,” Mr. Hernandez recalled, adding that it was nevertheless a respectable debut.

For a few months, Ms. Palin was paid as a substitute anchor, and Mr. Hernandez said he saw in her someone who might have worked her way into bigger markets and who appeared, in a brief time, to have found new confidence.

In August, Todd and Sarah Palin eloped, summoning witnesses from a senior citizens home beside a courthouse. Their families learned of the marriage by looking in their garages, said Jim Palin, Todd’s father, where each family found a clump of flowers and a note.

“They’re just very, very private people,” the elder Mr. Palin said.

The first of their five children, Track, was born about eight months later, and the couple soon moved back to Wasilla. As their family grew, Ms. Palin joined the local PTA.

By 1992, as Wasilla transformed from a tiny frontier town into an exurb of Anchorage, residents were debating whether to impose a sales tax to finance a police force.

One group of leaders, calling itself Watch on Wasilla, thought it might fend off opposition to the police force by recruiting younger candidates to the City Council. Ms. Palin’s name came up.

She did not seem particularly politically minded, recalled Domonic Carney, a member of the group, but no matter. Like the others on their list, she met three criteria: she was not part of the business owners’ crowd, supported the police idea and knew Wasilla’s other young parents. As Mr. Carney remembers it, he or his wife invited her to run.

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It was one more moment, however accidental, when Ms. Palin’s prospects expanded. Until that first term on the Council, Adele Morgan, a childhood friend whom Ms. Palin described in a yearbook inscription as “one of my superest, bestest, funniest cats in Wasilla High,” had never heard her speak of political aspirations.

But years later, as rumors swirled that Ms. Palin might be pondering a run for governor, Ms. Morgan asked whether there was any truth to the talk.

“She said, ‘Yeah, I think that this is really something that I should do,’ ” Ms. Morgan remembered. Ms. Morgan pressed her friend. “Would you ever run for president? I mean, what are you thinking here?”

Ms. Palin smiled her wide smile, then shrugged, Ms. Morgan recalled. “She was, like: ‘Well, I don’t know. We’ll have to see.’ ”

Catrin Einhorn contributed reporting from Chicago, Anna Weaver from Honolulu and Kate Zernike from New York.

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