WASHINGTON -- President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court spent most of his childhood in Indiana, where he played high school football and graduated at the top of his class from a small Catholic boarding school.

"He has very deep ties to Indiana," said Shannen Coffin, a Washington lawyer who has worked with the nominee, John G. Roberts Jr., and knows his family. "That was home for him. If you ask John where he's from, he says Indiana."

Roberts, an appeals judge for the D.C. Circuit, was born in Buffalo, N.Y., where his father, an electrical engineer, was an executive with Bethlehem Steel. ...