“Normally, you’d go to a senior senator. You’d go to a committee chair or something like that,” Kaine said. “But I went to Ralph.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten where I am if I hadn’t had a little bit of a backbone,” Northam said. “I know how to get where I need to go.”

‘Start off as a Rat’

Born into an old-line Eastern Shore family, Northam grew up on a farm in Onancock, about a mile from the Chesapeake Bay. His father, Wescott B. Northam, was a lawyer who became an elected prosecutor and a judge. His mother, Nancy, was a nurse.

He sold eggs to neighbors from the dozen Rhode Island Red chickens he kept, got into restoring old cars and played basketball and baseball at his then-newly desegregated public high school. From Onancock, he headed to the Virginia Military Institute, the history-steeped military college in Lexington.

“You start off as a Rat. And you come in and they shave your hair and they put you in a pair of fatigues,” said Northam, using the traditional term for first-year cadets. “The goal at VMI is no matter where you came from, no matter who you are, to put everybody down at the same level. And then you have to build your class up and grow together.”