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Jewish World Review August 2, 2000 / 29 Tamuz, 5760

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Welcome to Philadelphia --- we had the first...


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- I REMEMBER the high-ranking fireman who visited St. Christopher's grade school back in the 1950s.

He had come to our new little school in northeast Philadelphia with two missions: to give us some safety rules and to buck up our spirits.

New York might have the biggest of everything, he said looking out on our hopeful little faces, but we in Philadelphia had the first.

And then he started the familiar Philly litany: the first fire department, the first free public library, the first zoo, the first...

This is the great fall-back position of the millions of us who grew up in the city that God cruelly placed in the shadow of the greatest metropolis ever known.

The worst thing was the TV commercials. No matter what was being sold, it was as if Philadelphia didn't exist.

In New York, in Chicago, in Cleveland, in Detroit, in Cincinnati, some '50s housewife was using and loving some dish soap or laundry detergent. Philadelphia? We never got so much as a mention.

This week, Philadelphia is stepping briefly from the shadows. The Republicans are coming, and with them every reporter and TV camera in the country. There will be jokes, of course, many of them mimicking W.C. Fields' epitaph about preferring the city only to the grave. Talk about damning with faint praise.

But there will also be that Holy Grail of every Philadelphian: recognition.

We loved Rocky being from Philadelphia. What better metaphor for our town than the club fighter finally getting his title shot? We loved "Sixth Sense" being shot on our streets. What better city to have a young kid being able to see dead people? We even loved watching that bad cop played by Danny Glover in "Witness" trying to find the scared Amish kid in that row of men's toilets at the 30th Street train station.

For Philadelphia, this coming week will be a return to the glory days. We were, after all, the country's first convention city. Philly is where a get-together of politicians signed the Declaration of Independence, where they drafted the Constitution and agreed to the Bill of Rights.

It didn't stop there. Teddy Roosevelt was nominated for vice president in Philadelphia a century ago. Why? Because the Republican boss in New York wanted to get this John McCain-type maverick out of the governor's chair.

FDR gave his "rendezvous with destiny" speech, accepting re-nomination in 1936, in Philadelphia. Four years later, a long-time Democrat named Wendell Willkie won the Republican nomination on the 6th ballot. That's quite a feat given that he ran third the first time the delegates voted.

In 1948, Philadelphia hosted both conventions — one for the Republicans to nominate the heavy favorite, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and the other convention to nominate the odds-on underdog, Harry Truman. Truman surprised everybody, especially the rival Republicans, by demanding that the GOP-controlled Congress reconvene and pass the platform it had adopted in the same convention hall.

This week, all that history and recognition will come tumbling home to the city that's often been overshadowed and skipped over.

It was a New Yorker, Woody Allen, who said that 90 percent of life is showing up. It takes a Philadelphian to understand how true that is.



JWR contributor Chris Matthews is the author of Hardball. and hosts a CNBC show of the same name. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

Up

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