C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, JULY 28 , 2020
Scranton, even if it takes a while.
The city’s new marketing initia-
tive is “Work from Here,” selling
Scranton as a relatively affordable
city to stake a home office, two
hours from New York and Phila-
delphia. Handsome houses sell for
$200,000; mansions — should you
want a mansion — for less than
half a million.
“We’re not the dying Rust Belt
city that Trump described,” Cog-
netti says. “Scranton is an inland
destination for people priced out
of a bigger city.”
Durkin mentions the city’s
proximity to mountains, outdoor
activities, major highways — ev-
eryone mentions the proximity to
the highways. It’s also easy for
politicians to get to for the evening
news, a short zig off the elite coast.
When I mention I was trying to
reach Biden’s old friend, Tom Bell,
Durkin says, “I’m playing golf with
his brother at 4:30. I’ll ask him.”
Two degrees of separation.T
om Bell, 77 — “Tommy” in
Biden’s storytelling — has
become, by default, the cus-
todian of Biden’s childhood as
members of the old guard have
died or are in failing health. A few
Sundays ago, Bell says, Biden
called to help him recall a story
from their youth in Green Ridge
and at St. Paul School.
“He’s a very loyal, emotional
guy on certain things. He was a
wily, tough kid. He was a real risk
taker,” says Bell, who works in
insurance and has lived here all
his life. “He would do anything. He
was a chancey guy, holy Christ.” He
tells stories of when Biden pulled
the electric power line off the trol-
ley, the time he jumped on a burn-
ing culm bank for a bet, the time
he was asked to beat up a bully to
“straighten him out” — and did.
“It’s a different town altogether.
It’s matured. It’s seasoned,” he
says.
Scranton “means a lot to Joe. It’s
a nice town, homey,” he says. “The
true values of life are seeded in
Scranton more than other places.”
During this election season,
Scranton is a stand-in for appeal-
ing to working-class America, and
not only for Biden. Trump held a
Fox News town hall here in early
March.
Character, that’s what Biden is
promoting, and that’s what Scran-
ton offers. For Biden, it represents
authenticity and identity. With
Pennsylvania being a battle-
ground state, Americans are likely
to hear a lot more about Scranton
and all that it represents to its
most famous 77-year-old kid.
“Every single person, my dad
used to say, is entitled to be treated
with dignity,” Biden said at an
October rally here. “Dignity — a
word I think is used more here in
Scranton, at least in my experi-
ence, than anywhere.”
Outsiders remain astonished at
the city’s national image. “For
such a small city, it has such a large
presence in people’s imagina-
tions,” says University of Scranton
sociologist Meghan Rich. But “it’s
hard to break into the community
if you’re not local.” She didn’t. Rich
moved to Baltimore and com-
mutes.
“It is one of the most relaxing
places to live,” says McGuigan, the
county official, which would make
it the opposite of its popular per-
ception. People revel in how
quickly they can leave their offices
and get to the mountains, the riv-
ers, the links. And, at 4 p.m. on a
recent Wednesday, the parking lot
at Pine Hills Country Club ap-
peared filled.
[email protected]kid was 65. Scranton is a constant
in his speeches, a conceit in his
memoir and a perennial cam-
paign pit stop. Earlier this month,
Biden visited nearby Dunmore to
unveil his economic plan before
making the requisite drive-by
photo op at the dove gray, three-
story homestead on North Wash-
ington Avenue.
Scranton was a cornerstone of
Clinton’s biography in her 2016
presidential bid, though she was
born and raised in the Chicago
area. She spoke of her grandfather
and father’s years here in a neigh-
borhood known as The Plot, of
their jobs at the nearby Scranton
Lace Company, now shuttered with
yellowed curtains, and of her sum-
mer visits to nearby Lake Winola.
The Rodham home i s more mod-
est, and in a more working-class
neighborhood, than the Biden
home in leafy Green Ridge, blocks
from historic mansions. But Scran-
tonians more often mention the
two former governors who were
longtime residents — Republican
Bill Scranton and Democrat Robert
P. Casey Sr. — or that Pennsylvania’s
senior senator, Robert P. Casey Jr.,
still lives here.
Scranton is the setting of nine
seasons of “The Office,” the be-
loved sitcom that may well flour-
ish forever in streaming and syn-
dication. The city serves as a cen-
tral character as imagined by a
gaggle of Hollywood writers, rep-
resenting small-city life slightly
past its sell date and immune to
cool. “I didn’t know very much
about Scranton,” Greg Daniels,
creator of the American adapta-
tion, said in 2013 about picking it
as the show’s location. “I just kind
of knew it had a heyday maybe
more in the past than the present.”
The “Office”-ized Scranton is “a
place nobody would ever really
want to live in for any particular
reason,” says Mayor Paige Geb-
hardt Cognetti, who took office in
January. Yet Scrantonians love the
show.
Scranton, Biden likes to say, de-
fines him. “Home is where your
character is stamped, where it’s
stamped into your soul, where
your values are set,” Biden said
here in 2016. He rarely fails to
mention “the grit, courage and
determination of people who nev-
er, ever give up.” Last fall, Biden
launched not one but two cam-
paign videos: “Scranton Values”
and “A Kid from Scranton.”
In 1953, the Bidens became part
of Scranton’s leading export, mov-
ing to Claymont, Del., a Wilmington
suburb known for not much at all.
Young Joe returned to Scranton of-
ten to visit his Finnegan grandpar-
ents and extended family. Later, he
moved to Wilmington, his home to
this day, a city known as a corporate
tax haven in a state that barely
registers on the map. Scranton is
essential in telling voters who he is.
So is winning Pennsylvania’s prized
20 electoral votes.
“If I was from Delaware, I’d be
very upset with Biden going on
about Scranton,” says Paul Catala-
no, sitting in his Italian market,
where the hoagies sell out by early
afternoon and the political talk
goes all day. “He represented that
state for 36 years and has lived
there most of his life.”
Catalano, it should be noted, is
the two-time former chairman of
the county Republican Party. He
sits below a photo of himself with
Eric Trump. (The Biden campaign
did not return a request for com-
ment on this story.)
Lackawanna County is a Demo-
cratic stronghold, surrounded
largely by a sea of red. Pennsylva-
nia’s sixth-largest city also lends
itself to political stagecraft for
presidential candidates who don’t
have family ties here, sometimes
to spite those who do. Donald
Trump stumped here the day
Biden addressed the 2016 Demo-
cratic National Convention and
returned on election eve while
Clinton campaigned in Philadel-
phia. He vowed, “We are going to
put the miners back to work, the
steelworkers back to work,”
though the anthracite coal mines
closed in the ’60s and the iron-
works last fired in 1902.
“Not only do we not want coal
mining, it’s not possible,” Durkin
says. The coal has been mined out.
Trump was selling a story of Scran-
ton so long gone few remember it.
He narrowly lost Lackawanna
County but won the state, the first
Republican to do so since 1988.“W
e’ve come a long way
from when we were
considered as ‘the
Armpit of America,’ ” McGuigan
says.
The publication that consid-
ered Scranton as a contender for
the title happens to be The Wash-
ington Post. “Wilkes-Barre, Pa.,
may be awful, but next-door
neighbor Scranton is awfuler,”
Gene Weingarten wrote in 2001,
“and Scranton has a certain lik-
able pugnacity that comes from
knowing you are famously crum-
my and not giving two hoots.”
He bestowed the title on Battle
Mountain, Nev., but Scrantonians
have long memories, especially
about Scranton. They give at leastSCRANTON FROM C1
Scrantonhas ties to
big names
in politics
In Dunmore, Pa.,
near Scranton,
presumptive
Democratic
presidential
nominee Joe Biden
announces his
economic plan this
month. Biden, seen
touring his old
neighborhood, lived
in Scranton until he
was 10.CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESSBELOW: Hillary
Clinton and Biden
stand in Biden’s
childhood home in- Clinton’s
father and
grandfather held
jobs at the S cranton
Lace Company.
Well, except for politics. North-
eastern Pennsylvania — NEPA —
gained notoriety as a nexus of
political corruption. Last year, for-
mer mayor Bill Courtright plead-
ed guilty to charges of bribery,
conspiracy and an attempt to ob-
struct commerce by extortion.
Two former county commission-
ers were convicted of bribery, con-
spiracy, racketeering and tax
fraud.
“There hasn’t been a lot of polit-
ical will to do things that were
supposed to be done over the
years,” says Cognetti, the mayor, a
registered independent. “This city
needed a jolt.”
Scranton has been under Penn-
sylvania’s Act 47, which assists
economically distressed munici-
palities, since 1992. The median
annual income is around $40,000.
The pandemic hasn’t helped.
Still, residents are hopeful. Cog-
netti, 39, is Scranton’s first female
mayor. She has an MBA from Har-
vard and served in the Obama
administration. She is also the
first mayor born outside the city,
having moved here four years ago
after she married a Scrantonian.
After Courtright’s ignominy, resi-
dents appear as elated by her out-
sider status as they are about her
gender. They’re quick to point out
that women now represent the
overwhelming majority on the
school board, the city council in-
cludes its first openly gay member
and, yes, change can come to“We don’t have whatever other
cities had, including their prob-
lems,” Moran-Savakinus says. “We
didn’t grow that way. Our industry
just left.” Iron, steel, coal, lace,
garment manufacturing and, yes,
paper. And with them, jobs and
residents. Some new industry ar-
rived — Biden visited a metal
works to announce his economic
plan — but never again on the
same scale.
Scranton, a city of neighbor-
hoods marked by churches and
hoagie shops, became political
shorthand for industrial and grit-
ty. Yet it’s neither. Scranton’s big-
gest employers are largely eds and
meds — it added a medical school
in 2008 — as well as local, county
and federal government. Down-
town is spotless. The end of coal
meant a cleaner, more verdant
Scranton.
There’s a vegan restaurant, a
hipster barber shop. The former
Stoehr & Fister department store
is being converted into loft apart-
ments. Scranton has a Fringe arts
festival.
“People born and raised here,
they think it’s the center of the
universe, and you can’t change
their minds about it,” says Joshua
Mast, who owns two restaurants
with his partner. (“There is a gay
community,” he says, “but it’s not
an organized gay community.”) He
also notes: “Scranton doesn’t have
those highs, it doesn’t have those
lows. It just hums along.”one hoot. And there are many
ways in which it was never an
armpit.
Urban renewal never came to
Scranton, a city of hilly neighbor-
hoods cradled in the Lackawanna
Valley. No one was in any hurry to
tear down stuff to make way for
something shiny and new. Down-
town is composed of majestic late
19th-century and early 20th-cen-
tury buildings and the spectacular
“Scranton: The Electric City” sign,
now illuminated with LED lights.
They’re monuments to a richer,
busier city that reached its popula-
tion zenith on the cusp of the
Depression, at almost twice the
size it is today. “They’re emblemat-
ic of our onetime greatness,” says
Keating, the unofficial historian,
offering a tour around Courthouse
Square. Scranton’s tallest build-
ing, the 14-story Bank Towers, is
more than a century old.
T he city’s moniker, the Electric
City, is qualified, Keating says.
Scranton wasn’t home to the first
electrified trolley system; it was
home to “the first successful, con-
tinuously operating electrified
trolley system.” Today, the trolleys
are in a museum. So is the coal.
The iron furnaces are a state heri-
tage site. The sumptuous 1908
Lackawanna train station is a
Radisson hotel.
Scranton is a historic stage set,
picture perfect for political rallies.
There’s a cruel irony that “The
Office” chose not to film here.TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESSPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES