It read: "Real men marry lawyers - Harvard Women's Law Journal."
The year was 1991, and George was just about done with her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago. She was thinking about law school and couldn't help but ask the man on the Stairmaster about the shirt slogan.
The subsequent conversation and those that followed may have been brief but they were life-changing, propelling George down an educational path she never envisioned.
Even then, it took George another year to learn the identity of her gym friend: Barack Obama, whom the university hired in 1992 to teach law.
Sixteen years removed from this chance encounter, George now is a professor of her own, teaching constitutional law at the University of Utah. And for the first time she is getting involved in politics. She is not only an Obama campaign donor but also a member of Utah's delegation to the Democratic National Convention this week in Denver, where she serves as an alternate delegate.
She sums it up this way: "This is someone who extended a belief in me, the least I can do is return that."
George's parents hailed from Louisiana, where they survived the political unrest of the civil rights movement and had the scars to prove it. They moved the family to Chicago, where her mother taught third grade for 35 years and her father worked as a security guard. Her mother pounded into George and her sister one all-encompassing belief: "Education was going to solve everything."
George was working on a political science and economics degree when she first asked Obama about his shirt. He told her he married a Harvard law graduate (Michelle Obama), though he failed to mention that he also went to Harvard or that he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review or that he was a recently hired University of Chicago law professor.
"All he did was talk about his wife," George recalls, "and how wonderful she was."
George mentioned that she was thinking about going to law school, to which he replied: "You should think about Harvard. You can do it."
The statement shocked George, who, worried about the $50 application fees, expected to stay within Illinois. "It never crossed the smallest part of my mind that I could go to Harvard Law School."
From then on, every time Obama saw her on the treadmill he would needle her about going to Harvard, remind her of the approaching application deadlines and tell her she could do it.
"It was just nice to find someone who was a complete stranger from the gym, but who was able to be that encouraging and that sincere," she said. "It is not often that young people of color get that kind of 'you can do it' said as fact and without any doubt."
George did apply and got accepted. After graduating from Harvard in 1996, she worked for Human Rights Watch in New York City, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, before joining the University of Utah's law faculty five years ago.
Through the years, she has followed Obama's political rise from the Illinois Legislature to the U.S. Senate and now within reach of the White House.
When he announced his presidential run, she had her doubts - not about Obama's abilities but voters' perceptions of a black candidate.
"I wasn't wholly confident that the general public would be ready for a person of color as president," she said. George expected a destructive dialogue about race to sink Obama's chances. "But I appear to be wrong."
mcanham@sltrib.com
