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December 5, 1976 My Name Is Thacher Longstreth. I'm 57 Years

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December 5, 1976 My Name Is Thacher Longstreth. I'm 57 Years Interview with Thacher Longstreth December 5, 1976 My name is Thacher Longstreth. I'm 57 years old. I live at thecorner of 300 West Highland Ave with my wife, Nancy. I'm the father of four children, all adults, and 11 grandchildren in the process of becoming adults. I've resided in Chestnut Hill since September of 1950, when I returned;after four years with Life magazine in Detroit. I was born and brought up in Haverford and my family has lived in the Philadelphia area ever since Bartholomew Longstreth came here with William Penn in the late 1600's. We are ninth generation Quakers and have been closely affiliated with many aspects of Philadelphia life for a long, long time. I was educated at the Haverford School in Haverford, where my father had also graduated and was the first Longstreth in four generations to not go on to Haverford College. Traditionally the family had always gone on to Haverford. I had illusions of athletic grandeur, which were never realized, but I wanted a forum that was slightly larger than that of a small Quaker college in which to strut my stuff, so I ended up in Princeton where I played three major sports and where I enjoyed the advantages of a scholarship which enabled me to go through Princeton at a time when my family had no money whatsoever and where I was involved in a great deal of student employment to make that education possible. I sold sandwiches. I waited on table. I was involved in a number of campus agencies, both from a management and from a sales standpoint. I spent my time fairly evenly between that work necessary to raise the money to go through college, pursuing my present wife, who at that time was a young lady of considerable talents and great beauty, and engaging in a very strenuous athletic career and occasionally doing something from the academic standpoint I had to maintain a B average to maintain my scholarship and I did that, but little more. I majored in the classics - Latin and Greek — and ended up with a relatively successful athletic career. I got letters in several sports and was honorable mention on the All-American football team in the fall of 1939. I held the Princeton record in the high hurdles for about 20 years and enjoyed a number of extra­ curricular activities, including being Chairman of the Honor Committee at Princeton, Chairman of the Undergraduate Council, and President of the Senior class. 2. I was graduated in 1941 and went to work for a short time with the Insurance Company of North America before going on to four years in the U.S. Navy, about half of which was spent on board various aircraft carriers in the Pacific. I was in Torpedo Squadron 14 on the Wasp for about a year and then was Assistant Operations Officer on the staff of Admiral John Sydney McCain for an additional year and we flew our flag on four different carriers during that period. I went to work for Life magazine immediately following the war and stayed with Life from 1946 until June of '53 when I joined Geare-Marston advertising agency here in Philadelphia. I was with them for about a year before taking a year's hiatus to run for Mayor of Philadelphia against Dick Dilworth — a campaign which I lost. I went back into the advertising agency business with Atkin Kynett and spent approximately 8 1/2 years with them. I left in the middle of 1964 to become the Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, and I've been there ever since. You ask "what were your earliest political activities and interests and how did they lead up to your becoming a candidate for Mayor in 1955?" In 1952, after no previous interest of involvement in politics whatsoever, I was asked by Tom Wood to become a speaker for Citizens for Eisenhower and I spent several months moving around the city on a sound truck, speaking for Eisenhower. And there's an interesting tale there because I think it points out how frequently you have to really fight your way into a political campaign. Citizens for Eisenhower had headquarters on Walnut St. and there was appropriate fanfare, Signs, banners, etc., urging people to come in and work. And so one day I came in and said I wanted to work. I was greeted with great enthusiasm by a lady at the desk who put my name on a card in the file and said I would be hearing shortly. That was in the early summer of '52. Nothing happened. So I went back again about a month later. There was a different lady at the desk this time. I said I would like to volunteer to help General Eisenhower and she said I should fill out a card. I said I already had and she said well I would be hearing from them shortly. Another month went by. So I went back again. There was a third lady at the desk. I told her I really wanted to work and didn't want to go on filling out cards till the election was over. So finally, more or less in desperation, she said if you are all that anxious to work, the warehouse where we keep all our materials is out in back of our headquarters and is in terrible shape. How about going out there and cleaning it up? I guess she figured she was calling my bluff. So I went out into the warehouse, which really looked like the Agean stables. I took one look at things, and I knew that it was far beyond my powers, but 4. when I was asked by Phillips T. Sharpless, who was the Chairman of the Republican Finance Committee of Pennsylvania to assist him in setting up a fund-raising division of the Finance Committee to cover advertising agencies, printers, publications, and other media in the 1954 gubernatorial campaign which was backing up the efforts of Lloyd Wood, an undistinguished Republican candidate for Governor. So I worked for the Finance Committee during that campaign and raised a surprisingly large amount of money, which didn't do much good because George Leader beat Lloyd Wood for the second Democratic gubernatorial victory in this century. However, once again I got a chance to become involved in a political campaign and this time instead of being in a very active, vociferous, speech-making kind of activity I was engaged in the behind-the-scenes role of raising money and got some feel of the role that finances play in a political campaign. In 1955 my involvement in the campaign with Dilworth was so extraordinarily accidental that I wonder sometime if it really happened that way, but it did. One day a number of young Republican leaders, particularly John Pomeroy and Frank McGlinn, who were active in the Republican Finance committee of Pennsylvania at that time from staff positions, were in the Racquet Club discussing whom they were going to run against Dilworth for Mayor in the 1955 race. At that time the Republican City Committee had indicated that they were going to run organization politician Wilbur Hamilton for Mayor. They had run a Protestant minister named Dan Poling against Joe Clark in 1951. Poling had been dragged out of nowhere and thrust into a very tough situation and then had disappeared back into nowhere when the campaign was over. City Committee apparently felt that Wilbur had a chance of winning and apparently Sheriff Meehan, who was one of the four leading powers within the Republican party then, had committed himself to Wilbur Hamilton. The Republicans were still relatively powerful though they had been beaten in '49 and '50 and '51 in Philadelphia by the upsurging Democrats. The Republicans had won an upset in 1953, the Republican organization was still fairly strong and they had four men — Sheriff Austin Meehan, Bill Meade, Bill Hamilton, who was Wilbur's brother, and Mort Witkin. These four men were the principal architects of Republican policy and they directed the Republican activities. Dave Watson was the head of the 22nd ward, which was one of the two largest wards in the city. Watson was essentially a field commander and the strategy and the direction of the party was being dictated by those four, with Meade in control of the River Wards, the Downtown wards; Hamilton with very strong control of the 21st ward; and Sheriff Meehan with the enormous 35th ward, which was practically the entire Northeast area. Witkin didn't have big numbers in the 20th 5. ward, but he was the smartest of the four and I think his position of influence was based on the fact that he had a Machiavellian mind, was constantly coming up with good ideas of campaigning and was the King of Dirty Tricks, which was an important part of big city politics in those days. The good government Republicans had responded to the Clark-Dilworth victory in '51 with an effort to set up a reform movement of their own, within the structure of tie Republican party and this was called the Republican Assembly. It had been put together with much encouragement from Jim Duff, who was then United States Senator and Congressman Hugh Scott, who was the only congressman still representing a congressional district in Philadelphia -- and the last one, I might add — when he left the Congress to run for the Senate in 1958. There have been no Philadelphia .
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