Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail

“The electricity was turned off a lot,” Barnett said. “I remember him running an extension cord down to the basement. He couldn’t pay his bills.”

He worked some as a carpenter, although “he was a shitty carpenter,” Bloch told me. “His carpentry,” Morrisseau said, “was not going to support him, and didn’t.”...

Bernie Sanders was asked to leave a hippie commune in 1971 for “sitting around and talking” about politics instead of working, according to a forthcoming book.

Sanders spent his time at Myrtle Hill in “endless political discussion,” according to Deloz.

Sanders’ idle chatter did not endear him with some of the commune’s residents, who did the backbreaking labor of running the place. Daloz writes that one resident, Craig, “resented feeling like he had to pull others out of Bernie’s orbit if any work was going to get accomplished that day.”