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Interview with Norman Berson February 8, 1979 Trying to describe how I first got interested in the political problems in Philadelphia takes a little bit of telling. We were married I guess in '55 and lived in Center City ever since Lenore and I were married. It became clear, I guess, at the end of when Dick Dilworth resigned to run for Governor and Jim Tate became mayor that the kind of government that we were having -- that we had in Philadelphia under Clark and Dilworth was not going to continue. I don't remember what year it was that you ran in the primary against Jim Tate — '63? At that time we participated in some small way in your primary election. There was a slate of candidates for Council at that time running with you. In my recollection there was Joy Takiff, Judge Takiff's wife; Dave Savitt, who is now the administrative judge of the Common Pleas Court; there were a couple of others who I can't recall who were on that Councilmanic slate, who all ran that year and we did a little fundraising for that councilmanic slate and we got interested at that point. Then I guess it was a year or so later that Tom McBride, a very distinguished Philadelphia lawyer, had been appointed to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. He would then have to run for a full term. I guess Governor Leader had appointed him. And -the regular Democratic organization selected the man who is now the present Chief Justice of Pennsylvania in preference to McBride. Several of us met with McBride and finally prevailed on him to go into a primary race for the seat on the Supreme Court, but McBride lost. We had sort of been peripherally involved up until the formation out of that McBride thing and out of your campaign grew the Central Philadelphia Reform Democrats — that was a group of people who had been involved in the Walter Phillips campaign for mayor in the primary election in '63. Gordon Cavenaugh, who is now the head of the Farmer's Home Loan Administration in the Carter administration. Gordon was the prime mover in forming the reform democrats. Gordon lived up here on Woodstock Street just off Race and he was one of the prime movers. I got involved — Libby Goldstein, there were several others. Cathleen Mulhearn, who owns the Garden Restaurant, was involved. There were a whole group of people. We could see we were getting regularly beaten because of the ward organization that had 2. been created in the city and what we thought we would do is start at the bottom level and try and create -- take some of these committeemen's jobs and take over some of these wards and get some voice in the politics of Philadelphia — particularly Democratic politics because it seemed at that point that it was a hopelessly Democratic city. It was just no way it was going to change back — at least not for a long time. And in '64, I guess, we ran a slate of candidates in what was then the old 7th ward and in the 8th ward — fewer candidates in the 8th, many more in the 7th. Those have all now since been amalgated into the 8th ward. And while we did fairly well in the 7th ward, after a number of law suits and shooting and hollering, in the 8th ward I was the only one that was able to get elected committeeman in '64 and again in '66. Now in '66 I ran again and at that time all of these small center city wards had been amalgamated into — we had a bunch of what we called rotten borroughs — wards that were just a couple of blocks long and a couple of blocks wide. And there was a ward realignment and all of them were amalgamated into one — all the Center City wards west of Broad Street from the Parkway down to Lombard were amalgamated into one big 8th ward. I guess it was basically Gordon Cavenaugh who got me interested in this, although we had worked in the McBride campaign and in your campaign even before the Reform Democrats were formed and I guess it was Gordon basically who formed it and who got me interested. Gordon had been a classmate of mine at Penn law school, as had Dave Savitt and we had known each other for a good many years and were good friends. We — the Reform Democrats have attempted to reform the policies of not only city government but as it has developed since the days of Clark and Dilworth. But also we have never been able to work in very close harmony -- or any kind of harmony — with the regular organization. We have tried from time to time to get them to slate the kind of people we think they ought to slate, but we have been rarely successful. I first ran for the state legislature in 1966 as a result of one man, one vote decision of the Supreme Court. They realigned all of the legislative districts to make them equal in population and it then became clear that they had carved out a kind of new district in Center City and I ran for that in an election where the organization used every method under the sun to try and defeat me and I just barely won that. They tried again to defeat me two years later in a primary and they tried two years after that, so I have fought three very difficult primary elections with the organization.' I think I was able to win because my 3. wife's a better politician than they are and we just worked harder and we had basically the kind of approach that appeals to people in Center City, which is government officials who are accountable and who are responsible and have some sense of honesty and integrity and don't serve their own interests but serve the interests of the voters. (WMP: You had a complete organization of committeemen, I guess.) What happened with that was by the third time that they had run candidates against me in the primary election I decided that it was really very important that I not have to go through the job of recruiting poll workers every two years and that it would be so much better if we just took over the regular ward structure in the 8th ward and what we did in 1970 was to run a slate of committeemen in every division in the ward against the regular organization committeemen, except in those few divisions where we already had people. (WMP: How many divisions were there?) There are 29 divisions and we ran 58 candidates. We started a year before — one solid year before — to recruit people to run. It took a year to find the 58 candidates in every division. We were looking primarily for people who had their roots, who lived in the divisions, who had lived there, who weren't transients, who had their roots in the divisions and knew people in those divisions so we could get votes on election day. And sure enough we were successful and we elected the overwhelming majority of the committeemen in the ward. Fortunately for us the ward leader at that time was State Senator Benjamin Donolow, who was a very convenient target to shoot at because Donolow didn't live in the ward. He was a non-resident and treated Center City as a sort of political plantation. (WMP: He was sort of a shady character.) I don't know. He. was -- Philadelphia magazine once described him as a connoisseur of the unsavory. I'll rest with that description of him. I'm told that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead so we'll just let it go at that. But he was a convenient target to shoot at. He was an absentee. He wasn't a very pleasant personality and people in Center City couldn't for the life of them — paying the high rents and enjoying the neighborhood as they do — understand why a man who represented the area in Harrisburg and was the ward 4. leader wouldn't want to live there. But he didn't. He lived out in Overbrook Park out in Montgomery County and didn't make very much of a real hard attempt to conceal it. It was rather brazen. His car was registered out there and his children, if you looked at their school records it showed that that was their home address. He really didn't make any terrific effort. People in Center City just have to watch who is walking through Rittenhouse Square each day on their way to work to know who really lives in the area and who doesn't and it's not hard. It's a neighborhood. More cosmopolitan than most, but people know. (WMP: How did Donolow get into that position?) He got in on the first swing that took Joe Clark into the mayor's office. A bunch of these characters rode in with him, like Morrie Osser, and Benny Donolow, and some of these others. (WMP: I'm amazed because I thought Jim Finnegan, who was running the party at that time, wouldn't have gone for them.) I get the impression that they never really felt that they could oust the incumbent Republicans who had been there for a hundred years. And they just let people run and lo and behold Clark swept in and he took everybody in with him.

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