What we know about J.D. Vance’s grandmother, “Mamaw,” Bonnie Blanton Vance: NPR

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She was a Christian, but loved to swear, once tracked down a drug dealer to protect her grandchildren, and when she died, her family found 19 loaded handguns hidden throughout the house.

If there was one woman who stole the show at Wednesday’s Republican National Convention, it was Bonnie Blanton Vance, the late grandmother of GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance.

The woman, affectionately known as “Mamaw,” played a pivotal role in Vance’s life until her death in 2005. Growing up in a small industrial area of ​​Middletown, Ohio, Vance was raised by his grandmother while his mother struggled with drug addiction, a harrowing story he recounted in his best-selling 2016 autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy.

“Mamaw was a woman of contradictions in many ways,” Vance told convention delegates as he accepted the party’s vice presidential nomination. “She loved the Lord, ladies and gentlemen. 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 Keck, Kentucky in 1933. She moved to Middletown with her son in the late 1940s. James Vance, who would later become Vance’s grandfather, was 16 years old at the time, and Bonnie was 13 and pregnant with their first child.

The young couple, who lived in Middletown, where Jim Vance worked at the Armco Steel Works, were what Vance once described as “quintessential Blue Dog Democrats.” Or, more generally, a socially and fiscally conservative progressive. In his memoir, he wrote about his grandmother’s “affinity for Bill Clinton” and summarized his grandparents’ politics this way: “All politicians may be bad, but with the exception of the ones who were undoubtedly members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.”

Vance said no one in his life has had a greater impact on him than his grandmother.

“She really understood me,” Vance told NBC News in a 2017 interview. “She understood when I needed support. She knew when I needed love and comfort. She knew when you just needed sympathy. She was a really smart person.”

Part of their bond seems rooted in a shared understanding of drug abuse and the impact it has on families: Vance’s grandmother not only watched his mother struggle with addiction, but her own husband as well.

At times, witnessing a loved one’s addiction led her to violent ends. Hillbilly ElegyVance writes that his grandmother once became so enraged by her husband’s alcoholism that she doused him in gasoline and threw a lit match at him as he lay drunk and unconscious on the couch. He survived the attack.

By all accounts, she was fiercely protective of her grandchildren.

“When she found out I was spending too much time with a local kid known for dealing drugs, she once told me that if I ever hung out with him again, she’d run him over with her car,” Vance told the Republican National Committee. “And she said, ‘J.D., no one’s gonna find out.'”

She wasn’t a typical grandma.

That story, Vance recalled with a laugh, was just one example of why she was not your typical grandma: She was known for her explosive temper and foul mouth.

In a story published in the Dayton Daily News four years ago, Vance’s cousin, Bonnie Mavers, recalled that she once had Mamaw use a jar full of profanities to correct her speech.

“Twenty-five cents for each dirty word. It sat on our kitchen windowsill,” Mavers writes. “One afternoon, while my mother was looking after us, she took out her checkbook and wrote out a blank check. ‘Now you can say any dirty word you want. I’ll write the amount in later,’ she said.”

At the same time, she has a deep personal faith, which Vance describes as “a really important part of my life.”

“She really loved the Christian faith. She loved God. That was an important part of her life,” he told NPR in a 2016 interview.

But it was a faith she practiced primarily outside of the organized church.

“Mamaw distrusted many parts of the Christian institution,” Vance says. “She thought people were mainly after money and not really that interested in faith. And the other aspect, and I think this is related, is that Mamaw saw the church as increasingly an upper-class institution.”

Her faith taught her tolerance. Hillbilly ElegyVance recounts a story about how, as a young boy, he thought he might be gay: “You’re not gay,” his grandmother told him, but even if he was, “God would love you.”

“Now that I’m an adult, I understand the depth of her feelings. Gay people, even if they’re not familiar with them, “Mama’s presence. There are more important things for Christians to worry about,” he wrote.

(As a 2022 Senate candidate, Vance has said he would vote against federal protections for same-sex marriage. But He also said “Same-sex marriage is the law of the land, and I have no intention of changing that.”

Hidden gun cache

After the success of Hillbilly Elegy, The memoir was adapted into a film by director Ron Howard, with Vance’s grandmother played by Glenn Close, who wears Mamaw’s actual glasses in the film.

Vance’s grandmother died in 2005. And as he said in his convention speech, when her family later sorted through her belongings, they found nearly two dozen guns.

“They were actually hidden all over her house,” he said, “under the bed, in the closet, in the silverware drawer. We wondered what was going on, and then we realized that as she got towards the end of her life, Mamaw wasn’t getting around very well, so this frail old woman was trying to keep whatever she needed to protect her family within reach, wherever she was.”

After she died, the Vance family buried her in a small hillside in Kentucky, a short drive from where she was born. Vance purchased more than 100 acres in the area, providing a sort of buffer zone for the woman he called his “guardian angel” in his convention speech.