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Central Seattle in the early 1960s was not a land of easy opportunity for Delno and Ida Raines, or for the six children they raised in the house that Delno built from the remains of one the highway department planned to demolish. They named their fourth child Frank Delno, after his uncle and his father, but someone at the hospital misrecorded it on his birth certificate as Franklin Delano Raines, a name he has since come to use formally.
Frank has only hazy memories of the year the bottom fell out. His father was hospitalized, losing his job as a mechanic and forcing Ida to go on welfare. Delno regained his health but never his economic footing. For a while he picked beans at a truck farm on the city outskirts, making little money but guaranteeing that the family would have at least one thing on the table at suppertime. The Raines family ate beans so often "I'm amazed I can still eat them," Frank says now. Ultimately, Delno, who died last August, supervised a maintenance crew for the Seattle Parks Department. Ida scrubbed the bathrooms and corporate offices at Boeing--a company at which her son would one day be appointed to the board.
On Sundays they would pile the family into their secondhand station wagon and gape at the prosperous neighborhoods of Bellevue, Laurelhurst and Washington Park. "They used to drive by nice areas to show us what you would get if you worked hard and went to school," recalls Frank's younger brother Michael, now the regional sales manager for an online service in Southern California. Each of their children attended college; all but one graduated.
As imposing as their stack of disadvantages may have seemed, there was one with which the Raines family did not have to contend. Seattle's inner city was a place where racial integration had evolved naturally and comfortably. It was an environment in which there were few limits on a child blessed with intelligence, self-assurance and drive. "I didn't feel out of place anywhere," Raines says. "It never dawned on me that I shouldn't be able to succeed."
With Delno and Ida working almost all the time, informal supervision of the kids fell to the Filipino war bride who lived across the street and the sharp-eyed Italian grandmothers who had raised their own children on South Elmwood Place. Frank worked for a Jewish grocer from the time he was 8 until he was 14. A year after Raines left, Franklin High School was tight with racial tension, which eventually fueled riots in Seattle's Central Area. But the Class of 1967 was still a harmonious blend of Asians, blacks and whites, and Raines was its star. The yearbook could hardly hold all his honors--student-body president, gifted singer, statewide debate champ and a nearly 4.0 average. Though he was slightly built and wore enormous glasses, Raines was even captain of the football team. "Mr. Everything," the Seattle Times called him when he got a four-year scholarship to Harvard. Five years later, the paper touted the 23-year-old Rhodes scholar as a "super black"--which may help explain why the OMB director bristled the first time his press staff made note of his race in a news release and ordered that it never happen again.