Proposed Honor Stirs Up a Firebrand’s Hometown (Glenn Beck in the New York Times)

New York Times ^ | September 10, 2009 | WILLIAM YARDLEY

[nickcarraway]

When he is not calling the president a racist or finding some other way to infuriate plenty of Americans, Glenn Beck, the provocative and popular conservative broadcaster, occasionally drifts into reverie.

“I know it’s easy to romanticize the past, especially if you grew up in a small town like I did,” Mr. Beck told listeners of his radio program one day in March 2007. “But it seems to me that my hometown of Mount Vernon was full of leaders.”

Mr. Beck went on, recalling how the whole town seemed to turn out to fill sandbags when the dangerous Skagit River would rise and threaten to flood downtown.

“We were small enough to care about each other,” Mr. Beck said. “We were all in it together. It wasn’t about whose responsibility it was, whose fault it was, who you’d end up owing a favor to. You did it because it was the right thing. In Mount Vernon, you grew up knowing that you always had to do the right thing.”

In a ceremony here on Sept. 26, Mr. Beck is to receive the symbolic key to the city of Mount Vernon, a small logging town when he lived here as a boy and now a Seattle bedroom community of 31,000.

Yet the question many residents here are asking is whether giving Mr. Beck the key — a decision made unilaterally by Mount Vernon’s mayor, Bud Norris — is the right thing to do. It is far from clear that the people of Mount Vernon, where the demographics have shifted since Mr. Beck left as a teenager in the 1970s, are still all in it together.

“Why him?” many people wonder. “Why now?”

[zek157]

I had no idea Glenn was from Mt Vernon. I used to hunt ducks on the Skagit Flats. We used to get out of high school to fill and place sandbags on the Cedar River, so I have no doubt that he did the same on the Skagit. It floods all the time.

[luckymom]

...and I had no idea he graduated from Sehome High School where my three kids went...