Mayor. Michael A. Nutter
to make a path for the seniors and elderly. I’d help carry groceries or assist older neighbors across the street—we all did that. It was that kind of neighborhood.
The value of respect was very important. This was still an era when any adult on the block was fully empowered and authorized to tell any child to stop doing something. Everybody knew everybody, so there was no running or hiding. My mother had always told me not to walk in the street. One day, when a neighbor was sweeping the sidewalk, I walked in the street to avoid her sweeping, and I got a good talking to when I returned home because one of the neighbors had immediately told my mother what I had done!
The basic rule from my mother did not require that I have a watch, a sundial, or a smartphone: Catalina’s rule was that we had to be on the steps when the street lights come on— and it didn’t necessarily have to be our own steps, but the steps of somebody she knew.
My mom worked for Bell Telephone and my father, Basil, worked for pharmaceutical companies, or sometimes was a plumber, or sometimes didn’t work at all. I have a younger sister, Renee, and my grandmother Edythe lived with us. My mother is a twin, and her sister was married to a fireman, from Engine 11 in South Philly, who worked at the only station where African Americans could work at the time. Her brother Bill, my uncle, went into the military, so my mother was the last one out of the house, and her mother was apparently part of the marriage package.
Politics was not my family business. We were not a deeply political family, and there wasn’t a great deal of political discussion at the dinner table. Parents in the neighborhood were very focused on school and education. Certainly, though, there was some degree of talk about current events and what was going on with this or that elected official in the city.
Although politics was not our family’s stock and trade, I loved American history and government. I had an incredible history teacher at St. Joe’s Prep, Mr. Jerry Taylor, and I always liked the subject. The Watergate hearings were going on one summer during my teens, and I probably knew more about Watergate than any adult around. I watched them as much as I could on our new color television in the living room. I’m not sure why the hearings fascinated me so much. These hearings just seemed to make government, politics, and American history come to life. I was also a little nervous about the Vietnam War draft at this time, too, although the war was winding down, and I remember the barrel and the balls for the draft lottery going around and around. But I found Richard Nixon to be an intriguing character for some reason—such a tangled story of his attempt to cover up shady activity and his lack of honesty with the American public. This made an indelible impression on me about honesty and transparency in government. I had learned about US history in school, and then this drama and slice of history was playing out on television. I think you’d have to go back to the McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee trials in the 1950s for something comparably riveting, and I don’t think in our times we’ve seen that level of focus, dedication, and indefatigable commitment of elected public officials to our democracy, on either side of the aisle. It captivated me. I knew this was serious.
Many Philadelphians attend their neighborhood high school, but I went to St. Joseph’s Preparatory High School at Seventeenth and Girard, in North Philadelphia. It is the Jesuit high school in Philadelphia, and one of our best schools still today. I had friends in both public and private schools, and we didn’t distinguish much between them. I’d developed an interest in going to military school, partly because I enjoyed a television show on Sundays about kids at a military school, and the back pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine in my childhood would advertise schools such as the Valley Forge and Bordentown military academies. I’d interviewed at both of those schools when my seventh grade teacher, Sister Maureen James, said, “You don’t really want to go to a military school, you want to go to St. Joe’s.” I’d never heard of the Prep, but Sister Maureen was very convincing, and my parents agreed. So I took the summer prep courses and the admissions test, and was admitted for high school.
To get to St. Josephs from my home at Fifty-Fifth and Larchwood, I had to take three different forms of transportation on SEPTA to North Philadelphia—the #56 bus, the El, and either the #2 bus from Center City on Sixteenth Street, or the Broad Street Subway. I was not on the track team, but there was a lot of gang war activity in Philadelphia in the 1970s, and in those years I would ask myself every day, “How fast do I feel I can run?” whether from Broad Street or from Sixteenth Street, to get to Seventeenth and Girard. Frank Rizzo was mayor of Philadelphia at this time, and there were a lot of police–community relations issues in addition to the gang activity. Gangs were identified by streets—the Moon gang, the Barbary Coast, Stiles, or Seybert Street gangs, and so on. There was a lot of concern about traveling and getting around, and navigating gang turf, but mostly no one really bothered the prep school guys wearing jackets and ties.
One of the things I learned early on and firsthand is that the resident of the White House at any given moment makes a huge difference in a city and in our lives. After the 1976 election, Jimmy Carter was president. Actually, he was the first presidential candidate I ever voted for, as I turned eighteen in 1975. President Carter appointed a National Commission on Student Financial Assistance and made college access and affordability a priority. The Middle Income Assistance Acts expanded what we know as the Pell Grant program and subsidized interest on guaranteed student loans. As a consequence of priorities in the White House and legislation in Washington, DC, financial aid skyrocketed for young Americans in my community and all others. My recollection is that every year there was more aid, and colleges had more students of color.
In the aftermath of the riots and other civil rights movements of the 1960s, colleges and universities were also actively, aggressively looking for African American, Latino, and other minority students. All of the parents on Larchwood Avenue were focused on their children going to college, although pretty much none of our parents had gone to college themselves. This was their almost single-minded goal and commitment. The message, reinforced from parents to neighbors to nuns in the schools, was to keep your record clean and stay out of trouble, because then you can go to college. And college was the gateway to a better life. That happened for my cohort of friends, those my age and anyone maybe three or four years older. These older kids we referred to as our “oldheads,” the ones that we looked up to and were occasionally invited to hang out or play in a game with. They were also often our informal mentors.
Virtually everyone on my block in the 1970s went to college. After the 1980 election and the change in presidency to Ronald Reagan, there was a precipitous drop in financial aid for students and especially for students of color, and a precipitous drop in the number of African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities going to college. But in 1975, minorities were highly recruited, and financial aid forged a path for first-generation and lower-income students. That year, I was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania as a biomedical engineering student in the School of Engineering.
How 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.
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