Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave a speech to a Scranton, Pennsylvania women's club on St. Patrick's Day

She described watching movies in a neighbor's backyard during childhood trips to Scranton and how her small cottage had a toilet but no shower

Hillary, taking the stage last week before the dinner was served, talked about her grandfather, who left the coal mines in England 'searching for a better life'

But she neglected to mention some of the skeletons in the family closet

Hillary's great-uncle, George Beale Rodham, born in 1889, was a crooked Scranton councilman-at-large who was accused of illegal gambling

Anna May Wittick Rodham, wife of councilman George Rodham's brother, Robert Bell Rodham, was a 'madam' in the city's red-light district

The Rodham family was so poor their home was often flooded and filled with silt when the Susquehanna River overflowed its banks

Jerry Oppenheimer is the author of the New York Times bestseller, State of a Union: Inside The Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Oppenheimer's 14th book. The Kardashians: An American Drama, will be published in September.

In a speech to a Scranton, Pennsylvania women's club on St. Patrick's Day, Hillary Rodham Clinton waxed nostalgic about her childhood visits to the city where her father grew up.

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But the two-time Democratic presidential candidate's glowing picture of the visits is far different from the reality her father's family struggled through.

She made the comments about her childhood trips to Scranton as part of a 'ready to come out of the woods' political speech, suggesting she plans to get back in the political arena, underscoring reports that she may run for mayor of New York City.

Clinton, 69, said that as a young girl she spent summers at the Rodham family's cottage on Scranton's nearby Lake Winola. She fondly recalled watching movies stretched across a bedsheet in a neighbor's yard and told of how the cottage had a toilet but no shower or tub.

'Don't tell anybody this, but we'd go down to the lake,' she revealed.

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In a speech to a Scranton, Pennsylvania women's club on St. Patrick's Day, Hillary Rodham Clinton waxed nostalgic about her childhood visits to Scranton

Clinton, 69, said that as a young girl she spent summers at the Rodham family's cottage on Scranton's nearby Lake Winola.

Clinton, 69, fondly recalled watching movies stretched across a bedsheet in a neighbor’s yard and told of how the cottage had a toilet but no shower or tub. Pictured, Clinton with her father, brother and mother

But the two-time democratic presidential candidate’s glowing picture is far different from the reality her extended family struggled through

While Hillary extolled the virtues of the Rodham family's Lake Winola cabin in her Scranton speech, her father, who inherited the place in the mid-Sixties when it was worth $4,500, felt 'it was a big pain in the neck coming back to see it every summer,' Hillary's mother once told a family friend.

Hugh Rodham, who died in April 1993 at the age of 82, felt the same way about the old family homestead in Scranton, which he also inherited, and later sold to another family friend, Hazel Price.

'Hugh did not take everything out of the attic,' Price told me for my book, State of the Union about the Clintons. 'There were personal letters, and a lot of family photographs…Hugh just said, 'Do whatever you want with that junk up there

Hillary, taking the stage last week before the dinner was served, talked about her grandfather, who came to Scranton with his parents when he was 3, the sixth of an eventual 11 children from a family that left the coal mines in England 'searching for a better life and more opportunity.'

But she neglected to mention some of the skeletons in the family closet.

Clinton may have enjoyed her long ago visits to the Spartan Rodham cottage, but there's a much darker side to Rodham family life in the dreary coal and mill town where they first settled in the late 1800s.

As documented in my book, Hillary had a great-uncle, George Beale Rodham, who became a corrupt political boss in Scranton - a forebear whom she has rarely talked about publicly.

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He was born on November 19, 1889, in the Rodham family's first homestead on U.S. soil - a drab, wood-frame house at 1103 Blair Avenue, near the coal mines and lace factory where immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Poland and Germany worked.

The Rodhams were so poor their home was often flooded and filled with silt when the Susquehanna River overflowed its banks.

George Rodham, the only Rodham in politics before Hillary's political fame, was the 13th child of Hillary's paternal great-grandparents, Isabella and Jonathan Rodham, from Durham, England. Hillary's grandfather, Hugh Simpson Rodham, was the eighth-born.

Their father, Jonathan, was a mineworker who became a beat cop in Scranton's crime-riddled North Scranton Precinct. The Rodham's neighborhood had enforcers, members of the Mafia organization, the 'Black Hand,' resulting in shootings, knifings and dynamitings.

Scranton in the early 20th century was clearly not as bucolic as Hillary's own experiences there.

Hillary Clinton is seen in this family photo sitting next to her mother, Dorothy, one of her brothers and presumably her maternal grandfather

Clinton said that as a young girl she spent summers at the Rodham family's cottage on Scranton's nearby Lake Winola - it has since been renovated

She may have enjoyed her long ago visits to the Spartan Rodham cottage (pictured, the view from the cottage), but there’s a much darker side to Rodham family life in the dreary coal and mill town where they first settled in the late 1800s

Her Rodham predecessor in politics, George, was a heavy drinker, who resembled the actor George Reeves: Superman on TV in the 1950s. Early in his political career, his mentor was powerful Republican ward leader Bernie Harding, once described as a 'black widow spider disguised as a ladybug.'

Rodham served two consecutive four-year terms, from 1942 through 1949, as a boss-like Scranton councilman-at-large, but in his second year in office he became entangled in a political scandal, involving corruption and vice.

A police raid on a private club in Rodham's district uncovered illegal gambling. But George claimed his involvement was simply dirty politics, instigated by the city's mayor who didn't like him.

His son, Donald Rodham, told me that his father ran his political business clandestinely from the backyard of his Scranton home. 'No one, including my mother, or I, was privy…My father would have all kinds of conversations out there...My dad would say to me, 'Go in the house'…that occurred frequently.'

Enter Anna May Wittick Rodham, wife of councilman George Rodham's brother, Robert Bell Rodham, a great uncle of Hillary's, and one of the ne'er-do-well Rodhams - an alcoholic, the tenth of Jonathan and Isabelle Rodham's brood.

With George Rodham's political clout, Anna May – abandoned by her husband – opened a questionable hotel and a beer-and-gin joint in the heart of Scranton's infamous red-light district – Rodham's Hotel, on Franklin Avenue.

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Sources familiar with Scranton's history told me while I was researching my book that Hillary's great-aunt by marriage might have been a madam, offering 'a haven for ladies of the evening and their clientele who needed inexpensive short-term lodging' – in other words Rodham's Hotel was a probable place for a quickie between Johns and hookers, although no formal record existed.

Donald Rodham, Hillary's first-cousin, told me that his father often had private meetings with Anna May who sought his help for various issues dealing with her shady business.

'When you've got that kind of business, you do run into certain types of problem,' he said. 'Sometimes my dad would have to go down and put in a word and get the magistrate to look the other way for a little while. Obviously, once you get a little bit of politics involved, you could straighten anything out.'

The Rodham's Hotel was one of a number of questionable red-light district flea bag hotels, and were popular among Scranton's young bucks – including Hillary's own father, Hugh.

A longtime Rodham family friend told me that Hillary's dad, who would run a small drapery business in Chicago after he married Hillary's mother, often reminisced about losing his virginity in one of Scranton's houses of ill-repute.

'Hugh used to talk on and on about how sexy the girls were and how they taught him everything he knew about women. Hugh said it was the happiest time of his life.

'But Hugh was a big bragger so it's hard to tell whether he was telling the truth or not. He certainly wasn't known as a ladies' man.'

Near Scranton was a major military depot, the city's whorehouses became the soldiers prime source of recreation, and the base commander soon discovered that the venereal disease rate among his troops had reached epidemic proportions.

He made the city off-limits, and soon the whorehouses were closed down.

Anna Rodham's hotel fell on hard times, and began offering furnished rooms. The hotel's bar was run by Hillary's cousin and Anna's son, Robert Rodham Jr., a shell-shocked, alcoholic war veteran, who died of lung cancer and penniless.

A longtime Rodham family friend said that Hillary's dad, who ran a small drapery business in Chicago after he married Hillary's mother, often reminisced about losing his virginity in one of Scranton's houses of ill-repute. He died in 1993 (pictured, Hillary at his funeral)

This visit down memory lane is not the first time Hillary has been to Scranton since her childhood years - she also had a rally there in 2016 with then Vice president Joe Biden

As Donald Rodham told me: 'My dad did what he could to help, and gave advice, but after a while he stayed pretty much clear. There were some people in the Rodham family whom my father did not socialize with or do business with.'

One of the seemingly brightest and most successful of Hillary's uncles was her father's brother, Russell David Rodham, a physician. As Hillary's bother, Tony, told me: 'Uncle Russell was the genius of the family, and he died a terrible death.'

Unlike Hillary's father, Russell was movie-star handsome but he was filled with nervous energy and anxiety, friends told me, and often stuttered.

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He was accepted at Jefferson Medical School, in Philadelphia, and was in a class in which one of the members devised the anti-acid Maalox. Rodham decided to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology, and had what a friend told me was a 'brilliant future.'

But he also had a bit of a corrupt streak.

His roommate for a time and fellow intern, Dr Rudy Hecksher, told me: 'Russell could manipulate things. He was a good operator, a good politician. I pictured him as a U.S. senator, or the next president of the United States.'

State of a Union documents both Hillary's marriage to Bill Clinton and her family's long, checkered history

Members of Rodham's medical circle were shocked when it was discovered that he pretended to be an accident ward doctor and spirited patients into a deserted examining room where he treated and charged them for his clandestine services, which was illegal and unethical.

Jefferson Hospital administrators found out and stopped his private practice of sorts, Hecksher told me.

He eventually set up a practice in Scranton - home of Hillary's fond memories.

But a short-term marriage he had with a nurse soon fell apart, and for years afterwards he battled with bouts of depression, closed his practice, moved to Chicago and often stayed with Hillary's family, beginning when she was about four years old.

'When Uncle Russell went through his depression he came to our house and was taken care of by my father,' Hillary's brother, Tony Rodham, told me.

Russell moved into a tiny apartment on Broadway in a rundown section of the Windy City, a tragic and sad hard-drinking depressive, eking out a living as a bartender in a former Prohibition-era speakeasy, once the hangout for gangster Al Capone.

On the afternoon of September 4, 1962, Rodham fell asleep smoking a cigarette in a frayed easy chair in the basement of his apartment building.

The next day the Chicago Tribune ran a brief story with the headline, 'Bartender Dies in Fire in Broadway flat.' The paper quoted a source as saying that Rodham 'had been ill since receiving anti-rabies shots after being bitten by a dog two months ago.'

Rodham was 44 years old.

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Tony Rodham said, 'It was very sad what happened to Uncle Russell. He had a brilliant future, a hard life, and a tragic end.'