Stories about J.D. Vance's grandmother stole the night at the RNC. Here's who she was

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She was a Christian, but she loved to swear. She’d run down a drug dealer to protect her grandson, and when she died, her family found 19 loaded handguns stashed around the house.

If there was one woman who stole the night at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, it was Bonnie Blanton Vance, the late grandmother of the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance.

Up until her death in 2005, the woman known affectionately as “Mamaw” played a pivotal role in Vance’s life. As a boy growing up in the small industrial community of Middletown, Ohio, it was Vance’s grandmother who raised him as his mother struggled with addiction — a painful story that Vance recounts in his best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

“Mamaw was in so many ways a woman of contradictions,” Vance told convention delegates as he accepted his party’s nomination for vice president. “She loved the Lord, ladies and gentleman. She was a woman of very deep Christian faith. But she also loved the F word. I’m not kidding. She could make a sailor blush.”

She was born Bonnie Eloise Blanton in 1933 in Keck, Ky., deep in the heart of central Appalachia. She’d move to Middletown in the late 1940s with the boywho would ultimately become Vance’s grandfather: James Vance. James was 16 at the time and Bonnie was 13 — and pregnant with their first child.

Living in Middletown — where Jim Vance worked in an Armco steel mill — the young couple were what Vance once described as “classic Blue Dog Democrats,”or generally speaking, progressives who are more