By Victor Greto
“I put it up there as a joke,” Jane Castle says, nodding toward a painted portrait of her younger self.
Gazing out from the center of the dining room wall of her home hangs Jane DiSabatino, painted 33 years ago, after the 25-year-old had moved away from Delaware for the first time.
She had moved to Washington DC, tired of living at home and unsure of what she was going to do.
She put it up two years ago to surprise her husband, former Delaware governor and the First State’s 18-year congressional representative Mike Castle, thinking he’d want it taken down.
He didn’t.
The portrait reveals the face of a young woman who looks like she’s ready for anything.
Now, she and her husband are ready to take a new direction in their lives, after a heart-wrenching loss in the Republican Senate primaries that took them and the Republican establishment that had nurtured the Castles for more than two decades by surprise.
She wasn’t really ready for anything then, but she is now, teetering on a life change away from politics. “I’m looking forward to the next chapter,” she says. “There is an element about this that is somewhat freeing.”
Call her a late bloomer, if only because this is what Jane Castle, 57, calls this former incarnation of herself.
In a sense, the portrait is both a glib joke on herself and on another, much older portrait, that hangs centered – about the same spot, actually – on one of the rose-colored walls of an adjoining room
There, with a mounted light to show off its subject in all of his unadorned glory, hangs an original portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Mike’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather on his mother’s (Bache) side.
It’s a pedigree that, Jane says, Mike waves aside. “The gene pool was watered down after the third generation,” she paraphrases.
Jane’s mother often proclaimed their own family pedigree.
“We come from peasants,” Jane says her mother, Consuela (whom everyone called Elsie), repeatedly said
Jane’s father, Arthur, was a contractor, while her mother took care of Jane and her two siblings, Robert (Bob) and Carol.
When your father’s last name is DiSabatino, and your mom’s last name is Calvarese, “I wanted to give you simple names,” Elsie explained to her youngest daughter about their given names.
While Mike, whose father was a DuPont patent lawyer, was raised three houses down from where they live now in a high-end Wilmington neighborhood, Jane came of age in the North Hills section of Wilmington.
She attended St. Helena’s Catholic school and says she had a wonderful childhood, filled with neighbors and kickball games and carnivals that went on till dark.
School was something else. She did fine, but having been born in December, she was a year younger than most of her classmates. She was the last to learn how to drive, and she grew to all of 5 feet 3 inches. (Her husband is 6 feet 4 inches).
“I was just having a good time,” Jane says. She says she had a hard time being serious about much of anything, except friends and family.
One of her lifelong friends from the neighborhood included Joan Tigani.
“The Italian community was close-knit,” Joan says. “Her mother was my godmother. My mother is Jane’s brother’s godmother. Jane is now my daughter’s godmother.”
Although Joan and Jane did not attend school together until college, they shared group birthday parties.
During and after college, Joan says, they grew closer.
“We went to the usual single women turmoil of different boyfriends,” she says. “Probably just the fact that we could confide in each other. We knew that whatever we said would not go further than that.”
Jane attended Mt. Pleasant High School, where she met another friend for life, Clarke Hutchinson, who won her heart when she allowed Jane to share her locker because Jane’s was too far from her classes.
Jane majored in elementary education at UD because, frankly, back then (she earned her degree in 1974) most women either became nurses or teachers.
But jobs were few and far between after college. One day, while dropping off a cousin in downtown Wilmington, she got caught up in the bustle and people and traffic, and said to herself, “This looks like fun.”
She applied at Delaware Trust, a downtown bank, and became a teller for a year.
But she also returned to live at home after graduation. “Mom frowned on me after in my own apartment,” she says, but home was “a little tough. I didn’t want to go against my parents’ wishes. You just don’t leave them.”
She found politics to be her salvation.
Through a friend, Jane first had volunteered for Joe Biden’s first Senate campaign in 1972 when she was a junior at UD.
She left the work she liked so much at the bank in 1975 to become a caseworker for Biden in the new senator’s Wilmington office.
Still, she lived at home, and after working for Biden for two years, she decided “to spread her wings” and change her life – or, at least her location.
“I was trying to figure out myself,” she says. “I looked happy-go-lucky, but I looked in the mirror and asked myself, ‘What do you really want?’”
“I decided to run,” she says, and moved to Washington DC, where her high school and college friend Clarke attended Corcoran College of Art and Design. Jane moved in with her and found a job as a receptionist for Kansas congressman Dan Glickman.
That’s the young woman in the portrait, at 25, who soon grew restless as a receptionist and wanted to casework again – helping constituents with their problems. She got a job with New York congressman Bill Carney, and did casework with him until he decided not to run in 1986, although she was ready to go before he announced.
This, and another long-term relationship that ended, began another time of soul-searching. “I hit a rough spot, got a little down,” Jane says. “I was dating and we talked about marriage – but I wanted to run.”
She also wanted to do something different in her career, and became an administrative supervisor at Ellerbe Becket, one of the country’s largest architectural firms. She supervised a staff of six, impressing her bosses with her political connections. She helped the company double the size of its Washington office in five years. The company eventually created a position for her as business development manager, and she rose to become vice president of business development.
“Everything came together for me at this time,” she says. “It was late, but it happened, finally.”
During all this time in Washington, she visited Delaware often, attending parties with the usual people, including Mike Castle, who was governor and who also had been single all of his life.
He asked her to lunch while he was in Washington and they decided to date.
It was a slow courtship, Jane says. “He wasn’t pushy and there’s nothing judgmental about him. He was cool, a gentleman. That was attractive.”
He visited her family, and during one dinner Elsie served Mike gnocchi and broccoli rabe. Mike had never seen so much food – and the broccoli rabe?
“Anything that tastes that bad should be good for you,” he remarked.
Call it an acquired taste – just like commitment and marriage. During their 7-year courtship, Jane asked for space and time to think about a commitment.
It was important to her to finally live on her own, after Clarke bought a house in Silver Springs, Md. “I wanted to stay in DC,” Jane says, “and I really wanted to live on my own and have my own place before I got married and moved on.”
She rented a 1-bedroom apartment on Connecticut Avenue for about three years.
One time while visiting Mike in Delaware, she had left a bicycle at his house. She was staying with her parents, and told her father, “I ought to call Mike to get that bike.”
“Do you want the bike back, or do you just want to talk to Mike?” her dad asked.
The debate within ended, she says. “This is a good, solid guy,” she told herself.
They married at Holy Cross Church in Dover, on May 23, 1992, just as Mike’s term as governor wound down. “I was the lame duck First Lady,” she says.
He immediately ran for and won the congressional seat he was to hold for 18 years.
They found the house they now live in just after the new couple left the Governor’s Mansion. Jane decided to quit her job.
She soon found herself in the role of caregiver to her parents for ten years after they both grew ill.
Her mother had a heart bypass operation and, two years later, her father had a bypass operation, but had complications, including pneumonia and nearly died.
Jane visited them often in the home in which she grew up and where they never wanted to leave. Her father became chronically depressed, which affected her deeply.
“That’s when I began running,” she says – not running from anything but literally jogging to relieve stress. She joined the board of the Mental Health Association in Delaware.
“I run very slowly,” she says. “I’m not a runner, but a jogger, and for me the exercise component in my life is just wonderful, the quality of my day is much improved.”
She had wanted to return to work. “But after I carved out such a role, I couldn’t turn away from my parents,” she says.
Her father died six years ago at 81. Elsie moved in with the Castles. She died four years ago, at 83. They are losses only softened by time, running, and helping her husband’s biannual campaigns, making calls, fundraising and taking care of the house and her garden – the latter of which she fondly remembers her father helping even while he was ill.
The Castles lost the political fight of their life in September when Mike lost the Republican Senate primary to Christine O’Donnell.
“My life will change in that my husband’s life will change,” Jane says. “When he was in Congress, for 18 years, that created a rhythm. All that will change, but in a good way.”
She wants to visit Italy and find the places where her ancestors came from. She wants to take classes at the Academy of Lifelong Learning, and perhaps take a stab at art.
“I don’t have an artistic bone in my body,” she says, “but I have an interest in knowing what that would be like, to see what kind of talent may lie beneath me. That intrigues me a bit.”
Based on a suggestion, she’d like to sequester herself behind curtains and paint whatever comes to mind.
“I wonder what I would put on that canvas?” she asks.
After decades in politics, Jane has lived the life the 25-year-old woman in the portrait could only have dreamed about.
It’s been our entire married life that he’s been in politics,” Jane says about the next step for her and Mike. “But I’m ready and it’s OK. The choice has been made for us. It’s all about moving on.”
When she looks into her own long-ago eyes, there’s no joke. Only possibilities.