Mr. Mawby You've Been On My Mind

This column originally appeared on July 18, 2010

Tredyffrin has been on my mind of late, and with Tredyffrin, Cincinnati.

Allow me to explain.

Some thirty years ago this month I was getting ready to pack up my 1971 Dodge Dart with almost every possession I had acquired to date and drive over the Allegheny mountains to Chester County, where friends from college offered a worldly paradise and the possibility of gainful employment in the news business.

I had been living the past year in Union County, Ky., in a town called Sturgis. If you Google Sturgis now, you will get a lot of websites that deal with motorcycles, but few that deal with the pork and coal capital of western Kentucky. Sturgis is where I got my start in the news dodge, and it prepared me for a lot of odd details of government life that have served me well.

First, the paper required me to refer to the town mayor as “Dr.” So-and-so, even though the man was not an actual holder of a medical doctor’s license but rather a chiropractor. Second, the mayor’s brother was a county judge, but not a judge in the legal sense. County judges are more like Kentucky’s version of our county commissioners. It escapes me what they called their Common Pleas court judges; they might have been magistrates or justices for all I can recall. Lastly, the mayor’s brother’s first name was Durwood, and he raised pigs. I have never met another person named Durwood, and I have never forgotten the smell of his farm on a hot July afternoon.

I digress.

After moving to Pennsylvania and finding an apartment in Devon at the old Sugartown Mews apartment complex (where the roaches checked in and never checked out), I hooked on at the Suburban and Wayne Times, a venerable weekly newspaper whose editor made friends with his readers by showing no sympathy at the death of John Lennon. The managing editor who hired me sent me to Tredyffrin, a township on the Upper Main Line outside Philadelphia, to cover the Board of Supervisors on the basis that I knew what the difference was between a “zoning variance” and a “special exception.” I have since forgotten what that difference is, and would not like to be reminded, thank you very much.

Tredyffrin was a change from covering the city council in Sturgis, primarily because of the nature of the people who lived there -- preppy lawyers rather than coal miners -- and the place that it found itself demographically in 1980. The stories I covered included innumerable requests for approval of the housing developments that are now populated by people who consider any new subdivision an infringement on their rights to a quiet suburban existence; the coming of a cable television franchise to the township (anybody remember Harron Cable TV?) and the ordinance that went with it; and the debate over whether the township should take the offer of free library space at the Chesterbrook Shopping Center. For some reason, the Pulitzer Committee did not take notice.

In the center off all this whirling hoopla was Tredyffrin’s township manager, a clever and occasionally approachable fellow named Norman Mawby, who answered my questions about special exceptions and variances with a patience that could have been undeserved. There are many things that stick out in my mind about Mr. Mawby, but I will tell you three things that won’t embarrass him. First, he continually wore what I came to refer to as the Main Line Uniform – button-down blue dress shirt, dress khakis, tweed sport coat, unassuming tie, brown loafers. Sometimes the coat was a blue blazer, but not often. Second, he was not a chiropractor. Third, his brother, if he had one, was not a pig farmer.

I lost touch with Mr. Mawby when I started covering West Chester, but reconnected with him recently when he wrote a book about the people behind the scenes at Citizens Bank Park after the Phillies had won the 2008 World Series, and I interview him about it. I recognized his voice right away on the phone, although I cannot vouch for whether his wardrobe has changed.

I thought of Tredyffrin and Mr. Mawby on Friday when an envelope appeared underneath my door at the Chester County Justice Center. In it, I found a thank you card in a starling shade of lime green. I opened it, and saw the line scores of the weekend series from the visit my hometown Cincinnati Reds paid to Citizens Bank Park last weekend. They read, “July 8 PHL 4 CIN 3; July 9 PHL 9 CIN 7; July 10 PHL 1 CIN 0; July 11 PHL 1 CIN 0. Thanks for the favor. Norm.”

You are welcome, Mr. Mawby. Or, should I say, Durwood.