The more things change…

Down memory Lane with the Welcomat
 
Even though I’ve lived, fairly consciously, in Philly for over 30 years, even taught among Main Liners at Penn for four years and read Digby Baltzell when my father’s widow gave me a Christmas copy of his big one in 1964, I’ve never understood why the best and brightest of Philly were such lousy leaders until I read Mary Wickham Bond’s book, Ninety Years “At Home” in Philadelphia (Dorrance and Company, $12.95).
 
I must say I was set up for comprehending the memoir of a Silk Stocking Democrat from Chestnut Hill by hearing Dennis Clark develop his theory of the reform movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s at a day-long seminar at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
 
He chided the golden oldies there, preening in their own reflected glories, by saying that in addition to the princes of the Clark/Richardson axis, you had to factor in the pretzels (ethnicism, slightly twisted, a little salty) and the pigmented (a great surge of the 150,000 new black and brown Phillies), not to forget the displaced Phillies (here Clark shrewdly pairs those who fled to the Main Line after their industrial prowess made post-Civil War Center City unsavory with those lower muddles who fled to Leave-it-Town, lily-whitedly).