Читать книгу Mayor - Michael A. Nutter - Страница 11
ОглавлениеHow Chemistry 101 and a Disco Changed My Life
I have to confess that if I had visited the University of Pennsylvania campus as many times as a student as I did during my eight-year tenure as mayor of Philadelphia, who knows what my future might have been. I might not have been the best or most diligent student, but I had a big ambition, to be a doctor. I wanted to help people.
I came to the University of Pennsylvania from a high school with only 180 seniors in my class, and I went to my first chemistry class at Penn in a Roman-style classroom, with descending stairs and a professor who seemed very far away, a distant speck. The first class was packed—every seat was taken and there were students sitting on the floor and in the aisles.
But Chemistry 101 changed my life forever because it was pretty clear after failing my first few tests that I probably was not going to be a doctor, and it was time to move on. By midsemester in that class, the jam-packed aisles were only a memory: you could sit anywhere you wanted. There were plenty of seats in that chemistry class, that semester.
I graduated in 1979 from the Wharton School, which is the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. Wharton, founded in 1881, was the first collegiate school of business in the world, and it’s one of the most prestigious. How I got to Wharton, however, was a longer saga that, in some ways, first put me on a path to my political future.
It began with my decision to drop that chemistry class. I had several sound reasons for doing this. First, it was clear to me that I was going to fail that course. Second, I’d never intended to be a practicing doctor. I wanted to be an entrepreneur doctor and learn medicine so that I could open a medical devices company and sell and manufacture new products to and for doctors. But I theorized that I had to know and understand medicine in order to create that business. So, in that first course and first semester, I was trying to protect my GPA, and wanted to withdraw before I got an F for the class. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I remember gazing at the periodic table of elements one day in class and realizing, “I just don’t care enough about this. I’m not going to be a doctor.”
I decided to apply to the Wharton School, on the erroneous assumption that since I was already a student at University of Pennsylvania, I could easily transfer to the business school. My application was rejected, because I hadn’t taken and completed four courses once I withdrew from chemistry. Not only did I not get into Wharton, I attracted unwanted attention from the School of Engineering. They wrote me that they noticed I’d tried to transfer to Wharton, and if I did that again and was rejected, they’d kick me out of the engineering school as well. Welcome to the Ivy League, Mr. Nutter!
When I came back to school in January 1976, I hedged my bets. I applied to Wharton for a second time and also to the School of Arts and Sciences. Wharton rejected me a second time, but the Arts and Sciences school admitted me.
I started taking business and economics courses and decided to be an economics major. But I had a disastrous sophomore year. I had started a job, and was not paying attention or studying nearly enough. I told my mother that college wasn’t going well for me and that I enjoyed work more than school. She said what I thought at the time was a very profound thing: I had swum to the middle of the pool, and I now needed to decide if I would go back to where I started or swim to the other side.
I decided to swim to the other side. I charted out my next few years, and thought about how to get my GPA up and get into Wharton. I was taking six courses a semester to catch up, and also working long hours. By May 1979 I was six courses short of graduation. At this point I’d gotten to know the Wharton School undergraduate dean fairly well and had spent a fair amount of time at the dean’s office. The conversation I now had with the dean was in some respects my first political deal. I proposed to him that I very much wanted to transfer to his school, that I had six courses to complete, and I needed to finish now, in the summer of 1979. I needed special permission from the dean to take three summer courses per semester instead of the maximum of two. The dean agreed—I’d need to get a certain average for all of my summer courses, and if I did, he would approve my transfer to Wharton. I took classes that I needed to take based on the major requirements. I had also calculated for each course what I thought I would or could get grade-wise, estimated any margin of error or slippage, and proceeded to do what I needed to do. I fulfilled the dean’s challenge, our deal was good, and I kept up my part of the bargain.
This meant that almost as I was walking out the door of the University of Pennsylvania, I was finally walking in the door of the Wharton School—from which I did formally graduate, in August 1979.
My collegiate odyssey taught me some valuable lessons, not the least of which concerned persistence and tenacity; knowing, understanding, and playing by the rules; and ways to push the envelope and succeed. Most importantly, I learned how to think, not only through the classroom work, but also through the long, torturous process of figuring out my own path through college and life.
Just as I was switching my focus from pre-med to the business school and navigating my way through the Penn and Wharton requirements, I was also getting lured into politics indirectly, through the front door of a disco. This transformation and transition was occurring at the same time, in 1976 and my sophomore year of college.
I had come to Penn with my best friend from high school, Robert Bynum, while our other great friend from high school, Chris Hannum, went to Amherst College. Both guys are still my best friends today. Robert and I lived in the quad our freshman year, and in our sophomore year we lived in high-rise East, one of the high-rises known only as East, North, and South at the time. They were fairly grim and nondescript. To some, they resembled Eastern European architecture. We moved off campus after our sophomore year, and this begins the story of how I answered the call to public service. The summer between freshman and sophomore year, Robert’s father, Ben Bynum, closed one of his nightclubs, the well-known Cadillac Club. Some of the very best talent of the day had performed there—Billy Paul, Lou Rawls, Aretha Franklin, and many others. Ben Bynum, a music industry innovator, having caught the disco music wave coming from Europe, turned it into a disco. Robert and I worked there starting in the summer of 1976, right after it opened.
The Impulse Discotheque, as the old club was renamed, sat at the corner of Broad and Germantown Streets, in North Philadelphia. This was the first black-owned disco in Philadelphia. It catered to an older, thirty-plus, upscale clientele. It was situated close to Chuck’s Place, Dwight’s Bar-B-Que, Sid Booker’s Stinger La Pointe—with the best fried shrimp in America—and Prince’s Total Exerience Club. The black owners of these bars and clubs employed mostly black people and attracted a mostly black clientele. This was important to me and to my growth and development. The Impulse was one of the hottest clubs in its time and held the top spot for clubs/discos for decades. Many clubs had come and gone during that time, but the Impulse always stayed hot, with great music and DJs, and an upscale clientele.
My first few months of work in the disco coincided with a significant movement toward black empowerment in Philadelphia’s political structure, led by John White Sr. More black candidates were running for office, running and winning, running and losing. They included Charlie Bowser, John White Jr., John Anderson, Marian Tasco, David Richardson, Dwight Evans, Bill Gray, Augusta Clark, and Hardy Williams, to name a few.
In that summer of 1976, and in subsequent years, many elected officials—black and white, but primarily the black establishment—had fundraisers, events, and activities at the Impulse club. I met a lot of people there. After I graduated from Wharton in 1979, I realized that I needed to find a more substantial job and applied to three places: Bell Telephone, Xerox, and IBM. In early 1980 I started at Xerox while I was still working as a DJ known as “Mix Master Mike” and assistant manager at the Impulse—two full-time jobs. Xerox had a wonderful training program, but after twenty-one months I was shocked that they didn’t see the wisdom of catapulting me to a senior vice president position already, and I resigned—but not before I wrote an epic, five-page resignation letter, circulated to all the managers, that detailed all of my thoughts on Xerox’s shortcomings. As a result of this letter I was invited out to regional headquarters to talk about my concerns, and was offered a raise and a promotion to a job three grades higher, but my response was to be shocked that they thought I was only after money, and I rejected their offer. For someone with all of twenty-one months of work experience I had a great deal of confidence and hubris—or, I just didn’t know any better!
I continued my work at the disco instead, and there I was absorbing politics by osmosis, and eavesdropping on the workings and conversations of the emerging black political establishment in Philadelphia. I was curious, and intrigued by what I heard and saw. Eventually, by 1981, Robert and I, who had been initiated into politics informally day in and day out at the Impulse disco, found our way down to city hall, and started going to City Council meetings.
These meetings are free and open to the public, and I had my daytime hours free after my Xerox protest resignation. The most immediate inspiration for going to a City Council meeting was that Robert and I fancied ourselves future real estate moguls, and we had a plan to buy properties at sheriff’s sales, rehab them, and sell them, to develop a portfolio. We thought the council meetings might provide additional useful information about how the city government worked. The sheriff’s sales seemed like a sketchy process, however, so we decided it wasn’t the business for us. But interesting things were happening at the council meetings, nonetheless. I would recommend that citizens try to attend a City Council meeting or two, if they can. In our case, Robert and I recognized a lot of council members from the Impulse club, where they were having fundraisers and parties.
One day I walked into the office of one of the elected officials that I met at the disco, Councilman John White Jr. His father, John White Sr., was a leader of the Black Political Forum.
“This political thing is kind of interesting,” I said, “but I don’t really know that much about it. How would I get involved?”
After we talked for a while he asked me, “Where do you live?”
“The Wynnefield section of Philadelphia,” I responded.
“Oh! Right next door is one of my best friends who lives in Wynnefield and he’s looking to recruit some folks to get involved in his political organization. Go next door, tell him I sent you, and you guys should talk.”
I didn’t know who he was talking about. His name was John C. Anderson, and he was a member at-large in his first term on the City Council. Anderson had a long family history in Philadelphia. His father was a prominent African American Episcopalian priest, and his mother was the matriarch of the family. There were three boys in the family: his younger brother, Louis, had died and his other brother, Jesse, was also a pastor. John C. Anderson was a very articulate, smart, and tremendously handsome man. He was also gay, which was unknown to many at this time in the early 1980s. As progressive as our values are in 2017, that same spirit was not the norm in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. A few people knew about Anderson’s identity but most people did not, and as I started working with him, I would see the strain of holding that secret. From time to time, he was also threatened with outing and blackmail that would have damaged if not ruined his career in that era, so I saw the effects of that coercion, too.
I was a stranger to Anderson, but in December 1981, I knocked on his office door. Others have said that I don’t lack for confidence, but I’m sure I was a bit nervous. Although I didn’t even know what Anderson looked like, I was used to meeting new people and political figures all the time, from my work at the club. Anderson was in; I explained who I was to his staff, and he actually saw me. We chatted and he asked me exactly where I lived. At the time I was living in these wonderful apartments down on Conshohocken Avenue in the Wynnefield Heights neighborhood of Philadelphia. The bilevel apartment was all the rage at the time, and Robert and I lived in one on top of a Chinese restaurant right by a Pathmark supermarket and the ABC Channel 6 TV station. Our building housed a young, up-and-coming crowd, while the other two apartment buildings in the area were largely senior citizens.
After this conversation I started volunteering in Anderson’s office. Anderson was running for ward leader, which is a neighborhood position, and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party each have leaders who comprise the local party leadership. The ward leader is responsible for helping to get out the vote on election day, distributing literature, shuffling a candidate’s volunteers and resources from one location to another as needed, and being a liaison. When it’s not election season, they might do things such as organize neighborhood events or cleanups, or put residents with problems in touch with their City Council member. Philadelphia is divided into sixty-nine wards, and each one has a ward leader. I lived in the Fifty-Second Ward, and Anderson needed ward committee people who were pledged to his candidacy and would support him. The committee person is the lowest elected office in the city. The ward committee is mostly responsible for voter registration and turnout in the ward, and choosing the ward leader. I happened to live in a division where they were looking for someone. So I ran for committee person to help my new friend, the councilman, become ward leader.
At this point, Marian Tasco became something of a “political mother” to me, as she has to so many other aspiring political candidates. I can think of no stronger, more politically astute and enjoyable political figure. Marian supported me early on when I was starting out as a committee person, and played a major role in my subsequent campaigns, including my candidacy for City Council in 1987 and beyond. No single person in Philadelphia, perhaps with the exception of Congressman Bill Gray, has helped, supported, encouraged, advised, and more forcefully supported more candidates for office than Marian Tasco.
I ran against an older woman, Lillian Levinski, who had been in office for probably about twenty years, in a division where many of the people on the voter registration records had dates of birth such as February 3, 1898, or March 20, 1901. In other words, it was a slightly older population—and I was just about to turn twenty-five in 1982, about a month after the election. I figured I had some challenges. But I worked hard and I campaigned.
Ms. Levinski beat me by 282 to 48, or somewhere in that neighborhood. But this was a first run. I ran again, and I did a little better. And then I deployed some of my Penn training and knowledge: I created this complex chart and regression analysis and figured out that if I kept running, I could beat her in about forty years at the pace I was going.
So I made maybe my first important political decision: I moved.
