Resume, heritage are key to Richardson

Days before Bill Richardson was due to arrive in the world, his mother, at her husband’s insistence, boarded a train from Mexico City to the United States.

Richardson’s father, who was born on a boat heading to Nicaragua, insisted that there be no ambiguity about his son’s birthright. Thus Bill Richardson was born a U.S. citizen in Pasadena, Calif.

That was the first in a long line of paternal decisions that ultimately would imbue the younger Richardson with determination, an ability to move effortlessly between cultures and a knack for perpetual motion.

”His father expected a lot from Bill,” said Richardson’s wife, Barbara, who was in high school when she began dating the man who became her husband. She remembers Richardson’s father, an American banker some 24 years older than his Mexican-born wife, as “very strict and very demanding.””*

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