Hey, everybody, we got a great one today.

You know, for a change, the great Dahlia Lithwick is with us to go through the business before the Supreme Court.

Now, if you're listening to this podcast on the day it comes out, it's Mother's Day.

And for Mother's Day, we're going up to Portland,

Maine, to pay tribute to the matriarch of our family, my wife Franie's mom, Fran. Franny's a junior,

and Fran has turned 102 this week. Now, some of you have heard Fran's story. Franny was her

fourth child, Phyllis, born a little over a year later, was her fifth.

Three months later, Fran's husband died in a one-car crash.

Don Bryson fell asleep at the wheel after doing two shifts at the paper mill and hit a tree.

So Fran became a widow with five kids, ages seven, five, three, one, and three months.

That's Kathy, Carla, Neil, Franny, and Phyllis. Now, as you can imagine, it was tough.

Fran was a young mom with five kids, so she didn't have a job outside the home. They made it

through Social Security survivor benefits. Sometimes they didn't have a job outside the home. They made it through Social Security

survivor benefits. Sometimes they didn't have enough to eat. In the winter, this is, this is

Maine. They sometimes ran out of heating oil. When Phyllis was three, she could go to Catholic

nursery school, so Fran got a job at the produce department of the supermarket in the shopping center

down the street. So now they had all the fruits and vegetables that they needed. Franny got a job

babysitting when she was 10, I think. All the kids worked. When Phyllis went off to first grade,

Fran took out a GI loan to go to college.

She got four loans, graduated, and became a teacher in a Title I elementary school.

A Title I school is a school that receives government funding to support its population of students

in lower income families. All four girls ended up graduating from college on full scholarships.

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