Posted: Monday, 21 July 2008 11:23AM
Lou's Movin' On Up
Steve Corbett Reporting
Monday, July 21, 2008
So what makes an award-winning mayor, anyway?
Charm?
Charm’s nice.
Good looks?
A strong chin helps.
Brains?
Oh yeah.
Manners are always beneficial as well.
When I left Wilkes-Barre for California in 2002, I was worried that the moving van drivers wouldn’t find the several parking spaces they would need in front of my South River Street home. The day before the move, Mayor Tom McGroarty showed up at my front door with a big grin on his face and an armful of “No Parking” signs.
I’m not sure I even called him. In some ways the guy was supernatural.
You’d see him driving the snow plow. And I swear he stood on the Market Street Bridge with his hands extended below to the rising waters of the Susquehanna River commanding the swirling water to rise no further.
Of course the water stopped.
And I saw him corral then presidential candidate Al Gore at the airport one night where he bent the vice-president’s ear and refused to let anybody else talk to him or allow Gore to board his campaign plane.
With all that aplomb, many people despised McGroarty. I was one of his biggest critics, but I liked him personally and admired his brash energy that bordered on maniacal. Even when he rode off into the sunset, I knew he could look himself in the mirror and know he did the absolute best he could because he loved his city with all his heart.
For that alone McGroarty will go down in history as one of Wilkes-Barre’s most memorable mayors.
Replacement Mayor Tom Leighton will not be nearly as memorable. Some people have already forgotten him even though he remains at the helm of the city government. His only accomplishment is the “I Believe” slogan that amounts to little more than bureaucratic graffiti in a town that needs far more than a lame jingle to get the town jangling toward a better future.
Leighton is a real estate agent turned public official who was better off selling abandoned buildings than trying to fill them with business people or tenants.
Scranton’s Republican and Democratic mayors are another story.
They have been more capable and include lovable character Jimmy Connors, Vietnam veteran Dave Wentzel, carnival barker Jim McNulty, capable manager Gene Peters, and current business leader Chris Doherty, whose connections to powerbrokers on a state and national level will secure a continuing place in the sun for Scranton.
None of these mayors have secured higher office because Scranton and Wilkes-Barre are good enough for them.
Then came Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta whose campaign yard signs all but scream out “LOU” in big block letters as he runs in his second bid for Congress against longtime incumbent Paul Kanjorski.
In many circles, Lou’s the man, smiling his way through the 11th Congressional District like the king of the coal fields. Few people seem to care that a federal judge in Scranton ruled his proposed local immigration reform policy to be unconstitutional.
I ran into a friend the other night who told me that big feeling Republican Lou even had the gall to crash Democrat state Sen. Bob Mellow’s notorious fundraising picnic last week, where he rubbed elbows with Democrats who might even be impressed.
Kanjorski was likely there as well. But he was supposed to be there. Lou was a surprise. Lou’s loaded with surprises.
He even pulled down an award over the weekend from a Pennsylvania mayors’ group calling him the state’s best mayor.
Nervy, yet polite, Lou is on the move.
So while Hazleton loses Latino residents to Scranton, where Doherty, to his credit, welcomes them, Lou becomes a poster boy holdout for hard-line close-the-border advocates who sometimes carry guns.
We’ll see if his bluster helps make him a congressman.
If not, he’ll still be the mayor – an award-wining mayor in his changing hometown, an old-fashioned place where the old-timers buy what he sells and are proud of it.
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Corbett
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