(Photo courtesy of Rutgers Law School.)

Potential vice president.

Scourge of Wall Street.

And....Jersey Girl?

Yes, Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator now mentioned as a possible Democratic vice-presidential candidate, spent eight pivotal years of her life in New Jersey.

From 1970 through 1978, the Oklahoma native lived in a winterized summer home in the White Meadow Lake section of Rockaway Township, steering a series of changes that would foretell her future.

She arrived here the new bride of her hometown sweetheart, with a degree in speech pathology and little in the way of plans beyond teaching a bit before starting a family.

When she left eight years later, she was a lawyer with two small children and the belief that her time at Rutgers Law School had, as she put it later, "opened a thousand doors for me."

The law school at the time was mostly a commuter school, with little in the way of on-campus housing for its students. As a result, classmates knew each other, but typically didn't spend much time together outside class, recalls Edith Payne, the retired Appellate Court judge from Glen Ridge who was also in the school's Class of '76.

Payne remembers "Liz" as wickedly smart in classroom discussions. And whether by habit or necessity, Warren obviously knew how to pinch a penny: She sold offshoots from her spider plant to classmates, Payne said, and for one school potluck, contributed a casserole of chicken gizzards.

"She was clearly an academic star when she was in law school. And I can't say her personality was any different," Payne recalled. "The only real difference was at the time, she was dirt poor. I don't know what her financial circumstance was at the time, but it appeared to be dire."

One Christmas, Warren told classmates all she really wanted was a dishwasher. "And she didn't get it," Payne said. For one summer Warren commuted into Manhattan to work at a fancy law firm; the money, she wrote, paid for a second car and braces for herself.

At the time, according to Warren's autobiography, she and her husband were living on his salary as an engineer at IBM, while she had college loans from the University of Houston to pay off. (She had originally attended George Washington University on a full scholarship for debate, but dropped out after two years to get married.)

The main reason she chose to attend Rutgers instead of Columbia Law School - where she was also admitted - was she couldn't afford Columbia, she said.

(Years later, when she joined the faculty of Harvard Law School, she stood out as the only one to have attended a state law school instead of a private one.)

Rutgers Law School in the 1970s time was a cauldron of activism; students nicknamed it the "People's Electric Law School."

While other schools in that era may have admitted women and minority applicants reluctantly, Payne and others said, Rutgers enthusiastically flung open its doors. As a result, nearly half of Warren's class was female. Many of those women were slightly older, jumping at the chance to embark on a career in law once society had changed and their children were of school age, Payne said.

That meant Warren wasn't all that unusual for having to juggle her roles of law student and mother.

Patricia Nachitgal, of Montclair, recalls hitting it off with Warren on their first day of class in 1973, when they discovered they'd both been teachers.

Warren had taught speech at Riverdale elementary school for one year before becoming pregnant - at a time when it was usually assumed she'd quit working once the baby arrived.

Nachtigal remembers inquiring where her classmate was from, and when she heard the answer, responding with, "Oklahoma! What are you doing in Newark?"

The two became good friends, studying together at Warren's home, and hanging out at school during the rare moments of free time.

"We had a nice group of friends. She was a lot of fun - except she always had to go right back to White Meadow Lake," she said. When the sitter called in sick - this was in the era before day-care centers were common - Warren would bring her preschool daughter, Amelia, along with her to Newark, where her friends would happily babysit her.

Warren was eight months pregnant with her second child at graduation, and years later wrote that she was despondent to think her law career would end before it even started.

While her classmates were interviewing for jobs, she knew that would be pointless, she wrote in her 2014 memoir, "A Fighting Chance." She felt no law firm would hire a pregnant woman.

"Most of us - all of us - had a job, and were going somewhere. And she didn't," Nachtigal said. "She was unsettled. Here she was, about to have a baby. She was probably trying to figure out how she would have a legal career."

Warren's solution was to hang out a shingle - literally - on the lamppost outside her Rockaway home, setting up a fledgling private practice while caring for her new baby, a son.

Then she got a call from Peter Simmons, then the law school dean, who told her they had a last-minute opening for an instructor for class in legal writing. Would she be interested in a bit of teaching?

"I interviewed her and was very impressed," Simmons said recently. "It was clear she was an imaginative, warm, empathetic human being. And very smart - her academic work at the school was exemplary."

That fortuitous phone call from Simmons launched Warren on what would become a lifelong career as a law professor. She left New Jersey when her husband got a job in Texas. Once there, she was hired by the University of Houston Law School on the basis of her Rutgers teaching experience.

She's a loyal alumna of both institutions: When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently accused her on Twitter of using her Cherokee heritage to get into Harvard, where she now teaches, her Tweeted response was, "Get your facts straight, @realDonaldTrump. I didn't even go to Harvard - I'm a graduate of @UHouston and @RutgersU." (She's also called the accusation a lie.)

Warren returned to Rutgers Law School in 2011 to receive an honorary degree. By that time she had a national reputation for her role on the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Although she called herself "Liz" or "Lizzie" when she was a student there 40 years ago, retired Dean Simmons said when he asked her before the ceremony how she wanted to be introduced, she answered, "Elizabeth."

In her speech, she recalled arriving there as "a young mother from Oklahoma who had never met a lawyer," and urged the graduates to use their degrees to "open doors for others."

Nachtigal said that over the years she and her friend stayed in touch, initially through Christmas cards and the like. Now they use email.

Nachtigal recently became a grandmother, and when she let Warren know, the senator sent the baby's mother a copy of the children's classic book, "Make Way for Ducklings."

With the vice-presidential speculation getting hotter every day, the barrage of news makes Nachtigal consider the trajectory of Warren's life that has carried her old friend into a presidential race.

As she watches the news, she said, "I sometimes smile and remember sitting in her living room in White Meadow Lake. I smile, but I'm not surprised."

Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described current housing options for students at Newark Law School. A renovated building on Washington Street now offers housing for law students.

Kathleen O'Brien may be reached at kobrien@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @OBrienLedger. Find NJ.com on Facebook.