Ed Rendell
East Falls Historical Society Oral History Interview
Interviewee: Edward Rendell (ER)
Interviewers: Wendy Moody (WM) and Rich Lampert (RL)
Interview: March 7, 2025
Transcribed by: Wendy Moody, EFHS
WM: It’s March 7th, 2025. Rich Lampert and Wendy Moody are in the home of Ed Rendell on Netherfield Road, doing oral history interview. Thank you, Ed.
ER: My pleasure.
WM: We want to focus on your life here in East Falls, but, first, can you tell us when and where you were born and a little bit about your siblings, parents. and schooling?
ER: I was born in New York City on January 5th, 1944. We moved into an apartment building, about a month before my mother delivered me. It was a beautiful apartment on the 11th floor of 90 Riverside Drive – that was the address: Riverside Drive and 81st Street. The reason why that’s important is Riverside Drive has a park on it called Riverside Park. It runs from 72nd Street all the way up to about 115th Street so I grew up looking out the window at beautiful parkland, different fields, the river, and New Jersey. And there was a lacquered Spry billboard – an electric Spry sign on the Jersey side – and it flashed at night – not all the time, but it came on about ten times a minute. And I’ll never forget looking out the window, because when there was snow predicted for that night, my brother and I always went to the windows looking out over the park to see what the sky looked like and see if it had started to snow. And, of course, we always looked for the Spry sign, and when we couldn’t see the Spry sign, then we had a chance of not going to school! (laughter)
WM: And what was your school?
ER: I went to public school until the 4th grade. Then my parents took me out of public school and sent me to private school – Riverdale Country School in Riverdale, New York. Very fine school, I’d say. Probably one of the best – one of the two or three best in the city.
WM: Is that where Carly Simon went?
ER: Carly Simon was my friend.
WM: What was she like?
ER: She was very nice. Everyone liked her, but nobody got to know her much because she was a beatnik. She dressed a little oddly, not like the child of a publisher, Simon & Schuster. And she constantly had a guitar around her neck so she could walk in from class to play the guitar. We all thought that was ridiculous and she looked so foolish. At our tenth reunion, there were 58 of us, and Carly gave the school a bigger gift than the other 57 of us put together!
WM: So she knew way back when she wanted. You mentioned your brother – do you have one brother?
ER: I have one more Carly story to tell you. I was out in LA trying to convince this entrepreneur to bring a theme bar – they’re associated with Disney, and the bars had a Disney theme – different in each place – Chicago had one. I was trying to get one in Philadelphia. But anyway, I went out to see him in LA – I flew in the night before and went to meet him the next day at 10am in his office. His office was on the third floor of the building. The bar was on the first and second and basement floor. And we finished our discussion, and he was walking me out, and he said “What are you doing tonight? Are you staying in LA?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m staying in LA one more night.” He said “Why do you come to our show tonight?” And I said, “Well, who’s playing?” He said “Carly Simon.” I hadn’t seen Carly Simon since we graduated. And I said, “Geez, I’d love to come, but I won’t be finished with my speech until 9:00 o’clock. And he said “Well, if people drive you in, we’ll get there around 9:30. She’s only going on at 9:00, so she’ll be in the middle of her act. I said “Fine, I’d love to see her.” So I came in, and she had left a message for me to tell the usher to get word to her that I was in the audience. Then she comes to her break – she didn’t take it off the stage. She took a five-minute break, and she tells the audience “Before we finish, I want to introduce you to Ed Rendell, the Mayor of Philadelphia. He and I went to high school together, and he played football, and I played in the band. He was a very close friend of mine,” intimating that we had a relationship (laughter) But, later on, I said, “It was a good thing no one from Philadelphia was here – number one. And, secondly, it’s a good thing that it was back then – later on, it would have been a big deal. Later on, she played at a campaign concert for me, when I was running for re-election.
WM: Oh, did she? That’s a great story. Who is this? (looking at the dog)
ER: My seventh Golden (Retriever). See those pictures on the wall? That’s a picture collage for my 80th birthday – Midge collected all the pictures of her different Goldens.
WM: And who’s this one?
ER: JC. We didn’t name her. The first one was born naturally; all the others were rescues. But JC. was rescued on the beach in Houston after the hurricane they had. I think it was 2018 – she was a little puppy wandering around without any identification. And they held her for a while, because she was so well groomed – they held her for about two weeks, and no one showed up to claim her. And then no one was adopting dogs in Houston, so the guy knew the people who run the shelter here and sent him up to them. He knew that I just lost one of my dogs – I had two at a time – and I was looking for a replacement. JC is half Golden, half Cocker Spaniel.
RL: That explains the eyes.
WM: She’s very gentle and sweet.
ER: She was bred deliberately to see if that breed would catch. So it turns out, she has a chip in her, and when we went to the vet, the vet read the chip: She is one of the first – there are only 20 Golden Cocker Spaniels in America. And she was worth, at that time, $3400. And I said, “If you act up, we’re selling you!” (laughter). But she’s a great dog.
WM: Well, going back to your youth, what did your dad do?
ER: He was a Converter in the textile industry. A Converter is a person who takes – let’s assume you’re a department store. You want to buy – you want to produce, say, Stella Sloane, my aunt, was a famous designer. Suppose you wanted 20 Sloane skirts, all in lime green. Now you place the order with us – with Sloane – it’s the manufacturer’s responsibility to dye them to your specification. So we had a dying place and did certain colors – sometimes they didn’t do all the colors. We sent them out to be dyed, got them back, sent them to the store, so that we converted them from pure fabric, cut them to specification, and had them dyed. After my dad died, I went to work in my mom’s family’s dress factory, so I got to know colors. I was in shipping, so I knew every women’s department store – every fine, top end department store – in the United States. I knew the Blum Store before I came to Philadelphia, and Nan Duskin.
WM: And your dad died young?
ER: When I was 14. I’d had breakfast with him, and I left to go to school. He left half an hour later to hail a cab. He hailed the cab, but he collapsed as he was getting in the cab.
WM: Oh my. How old was he?
ER: 58.
WM: How sad. So you went from Riverdale to Penn and then to Villanova? Is that what got you to Philly?
ER: Yeah, I went to Penn. I applied to two schools, Princeton, where my brother had gone to – I have an older brother who’s still alive. I applied to Princeton, where I wanted to go, but I got turned down, so I went to Penn, and it worked out just fine, and I had a great time at Penn. Plus, I met Midge there.
WM: And then got your law degree at…
ER: Villanova.
WM: Why don’t we move on to East Falls.
ER: I’ll tell you a story about Penn and Villanova. When I started getting written up and making appearances – I got written up in the New York Times saying that I’d gone to Penn – so that people knew that. And when Villanova was in the NCAA Final Four – one of the championships they won – the program had facts about the school, and they always had “Famous Graduates.” I was the only political person mentioned in Sports Illustrated. (laughter)
WM: That’s great. So what made you move to East Falls? You were living downtown – tell us about your journey here and why you chose it.
ER: When I got into law school, into Villanova, I didn’t want to live out there because all my friends were still in town, so I got another apartment in town – a smaller apartment than the one I had, and I took the train out to Villanova every day. I used to say, “It was me and the maids going out to the Main Line.” (laughter)
WM: So you were commuting out to Villanova with the maids, but then you decided to move to East Falls at some point?
ER: Midge was an undergraduate when I met her, and we went out during the time she was an undergraduate. In my third year in law school, she gets into law school – she gets into Penn and Georgetown, and she goes to Georgetown, ostensibly to get away from me, because I was harassing her. We had broken up at the time and I was harassing her (laughter). She went down to Washington in September, and I had sort of given up, but then I saw a thing posted on the DA’s bulletin board looking for an Assistant DA to go down and interview candidates at Georgetown. And I had an idea! (laughter). I called her and said “Look, no big deal. I’m coming down to Georgetown. I finish interviewing at 6:00. Do you want to go out to dinner?” She said “Yes” and by the end of dinner, she asked me to marry her. I asked her to marry me earlier, and she said “No.”
And then she finished out the first year at Georgetown. She made Law Review. And this is a funny story – not germane to what we’re talking about – but obviously she had to come back to Philadelphia to be with me. And she transferred. Her first thought was to transfer to Penn. Penn had accepted her because she was Phi Beta Kappa as a Penn undergraduate. Penn Law School had accepted her, but she didn’t go – she chose to go to Georgetown. Penn declined to take her, even though she made Law Review at Georgetown. Georgetown is a very fine school. They said the reason was that they “just didn’t have another chair.” I mean, there wasn’t room. So after she graduated from Villanova, Penn asked us for money. I said send them a note that says “We will only give you money if you buy an additional chair!” (laughter)
WM: Love it! So you married in Philly?
ER: Yes. We lived in the apartment I had. Midge was going to law school; I mean, she didn’t have money to add to the mix or anything. And we stayed there until – that was 1971 – I think in 1976 or ‘77 we decided we wanted to move out of the city. We didn’t have Jesse at the time. We were going to try to have children. And our friends, Mike and Leslie Stiles, had married and lived in Center City, but then moved out to East Falls. We had been to their house for Christmas parties and thought the neighborhood was great, and, luckily, we found a house on their same block that was being sold by a lawyer who I knew.
WM: Who was that?
ER: Bob Brobyn. And he was selling it himself; he didn’t go through a broker, so we saved some money and got a good deal on the house. The house was on Warden Drive, and we remained in that house for more than 30 years.
WM: What was the house number?
ER: 3425 Warden Drive. We sold it to a nice young family. It’s a lovely house with a great backyard. The only thing was that it was next to the girls’ dorms at Textile, and the kids didn’t have air conditioning in those days, so they opened the windows wide, and in the spring they played rock music. Fortunately, we had air conditioning, so our windows were closed.
WM: You sold your house to Emily Dolan, didn’t you?
ER: Yeah, Fran Dolan’s daughter.
WM: Did you look at other houses?
ER: No, this was the first one.
WM: So tell us about life on Warden Drive.
ER: Life on Warden Drive was funny because shortly after moving there, I was elected District Attorney. That started a 43-year period of my life when I was in public office – all but about six years. As a result, I worked extremely hard. I wasn’t home much at night. The only time I would come home at night was if Jesse was in a football game or a basketball game and I’d make it my business to be there to see him. I didn’t get home much at all, so I didn’t get quite as integrated in the neighborhood as Midge. Midge knew everyone, was active at the library, and she knew more people. And I, I mean, I knew some.
WM: Were there any annual events, like a picnic, or any communal things on Warden Drive?
ER: The only thing we used to do, when we were very young, we’d go out caroling.
WM: Oh really?
ER: Yes, with the carolers. I thought that was nice. Center City in those days didn’t get very decorated. But East Falls – I used to love, three or four nights before Christmas, to take the car out by myself, and I’d look forward to seeing it all decorated in the neighborhood, because there was nothing like that in Center City. That’s very nice. East Falls was a really nice place to live. People left you alone. People respected boundaries. There was some sense of neighborhood, but it wasn’t overdone. And it was also a mixed neighborhood, racially. We had black families. We had Hispanic families. We had some of the staff from the various countries of the Counselor Corps – we had the Representative from Denmark. Whatever. And we’d have some professors, of course, because of Textiles.
WM: I always felt lucky working in the Falls Library because it was a cross section of a lot of different people.
ER: Lower-class economic whites, middle class whites, a few upper-class whites – not many. And then some middle-class blacks, some poor blacks, some middle-class Latins. It was a very mixed neighborhood; it was great.
WM: You mentioned Textile – the music, but was there any other interaction, or friction, between Textile and the neighbors, especially when they were building, or they were good neighbors?
ER: No friction. In fact, those dorms were built after we bought our house, and the neighbors were all upset. “Oh, they’re going to build dorms here! We’re going to lose our beautiful setting.” And I was DA at the time, or may have been Mayor, and I said to the neighbors at the meeting, I said “Listen, these issues – you can’t gauge it by what they’re going to build, gauge it by what’s going to be built if we turn them down. Much can be built.” And I said, “You see the sketches; they’re going to build a tiny hall at the top of the hill. The residents are at this side of the hill, and they’ve decided to build on the other. That’s all they’re going to build – a hall. We’re going to be the family right next to the residence. I’m in favor of doing it, because if this gets turned down, they’ll sell it to a developer. See our beautiful hill? They’ll put eighty townhouses on the hill. There’ll be no more sledding in East Falls. No more playing baseball in East Falls. We will lose the hill.
WM: Good foresight.
ER: My way swayed the crowd. Plus, it turned out to be true. You still celebrate sledding.
RL: Absolutely.
WM: Your neighbors, when you were Mayor, were there any advantages or disadvantages for them?
ER: My neighbors were very upset because Arlen Specter lived in East Falls. When he was DA, he had a police car in his driveway all night, so it was very safe because he had the police car. The neighbors were upset when they saw that I didn’t have any police car. (laughter) Like they asked me – they wanted the police car …
WM: They wanted extra protection.
ER: And I said, “Jesus, we tried it. We didn’t try having a police car stay in my driveway, but we let one of the patrol cars go around, stop, and bring a dog up and they would sniff around and make sure everything was OK. So they would come up twice – two or three times – during the eight hours at night. But that even had to stop because our dogs could sense the other dog. They would bark like crazy. (laughter). So the neighbors were upset that we didn’t have a police car. But the only time it affected the neighbors was demonstrations. Some groups were angry at me or wanted me to change a decision and would demonstrate outside. Police were very good. We lived at the top of a driveway – our house was elevated a little bit from Warden Drive, so they never got really near enough to throw a snowball at the house. And when we drove out, the police would make sure that no one was blocking the driveway.
WM: I know that happened at Arlen Specter’s house; I didn’t realize it happened to you.
ER: So it didn’t really bother me. In fact, sometimes I would stop and engage the demonstrators in conversation.
WM: Good for you. Were there any perks for the people on the street – like did you get plowed early or potholes filled?
ER: I’ll tell you a story I never told anyone. The first time there was a big snowfall, I called my Managing Director early in the morning and said “Have the Sanitation people shovel my driveway first, because our driveway was long, and if there was slightest bit of ice, it was like a sheet of ice. And so they shoveled my driveway first. Someone reported that to David Cohen, and David said, “You can’t do that.” “What do you mean? Of course I can do that.” “Why do you think you can do that?” he said. “Well, I’m the Mayor – it’s important that I get down to City Hall to talk about all the decisions. It’s important that I get into town as early as possible.” He said, “That’s correct, but none of the decisions you’re going to make need to be made 15 minutes early, so go back into the regular rotation.” So what I did was, I got a closed-circuit TV and I made the decisions from home. The problem is, if you go in during rush hour when it snows, it takes an hour to get in. Especially going down the hill; that was always a challenge.
WM: Was Joe Tolstoy your driver back then?
ER: No, Joe started driving me a little bit on weekends when he wasn’t working, but he didn’t come to work with me full time until 2011, when I was no longer Governor. Joe and his mother, Mary, are great people.
WM: You mentioned the sledding hill. So when we were preparing for this interview, everyone had an Ed Rendell story. Somebody said, “Oh, I sold him lighting.” And someone said “We have the same hairdresser” and a lot of people mentioned you walking your dog. Can you tell us about your relationship with the neighborhood and its dogs?
ER: Well, I have a good relationship with my neighbors. We always had dogs, and my dogs always were trained to accept voice command. And so we’d go at nighttime – we would go down the driveway – small driveway, turn right and go into the bottom of the field, and I would throw the ball to them so they would get exercise. So I got to know all the dog walkers who did the same thing – throw the ball, et cetera. We were like a little club. I got to know a lot of them very, very well. And the dogs were unbelievable. I could even let them out the door – one night, it was so cold, our first dog, Woofie, we could let her out the door, she’d go down the driveway, turn right, go into the field, do her stuff, visit with her dog friends, and 25 minutes later, she’d scratch at the door, and we’d open the door and let her in.
WM Good training (laughter).
ER: We were like a little community of dog walkers.
WM: Tell us about Woofie plaque.
ER: That’s interesting. When I was Mayor, sometime in my second term, it would have been – so it would have been 1995,1996, 1997, or 1998, neighbors came to me and said “We want to put a plaque up in your honor. We want to do something in your honor in the park. I thought they wanted to rename it, and I said “No, no, McMichael was a Mayor; it shouldn’t be renamed from him.” They said “No, that’s not what we had planned. We want to put a plaque up saying that you were the first Mayor to live in East Falls.” Now I had a general rule – in fact, in the book that I wrote, there was a chapter called “Please, Please Don’t Honor Me.” So I didn’t want to be honored. I didn’t want things to be named after me, because once you say yes to one, you’re going to have to say yes to everybody and it becomes a burden. It looks like you’re a narcissist, if you let too many things be named after you. By the time 10-15 years roll around, nobody remembers who you are, anyway. I thought it was sort of silly, and I also thought if people needed my name on a sign to remind them of what I did, I would be a pretty poor Mayor.
So I declined everything. But my neighbors were so earnest. They told me they were going to put a plaque on a tree, saying, “In honor of Edward G. Rendell, the First Mayor to live in East Falls, etc. etc.” So, I said “Go ahead; put the plaque up.” So I went to the opening of the unveiling of the plaque and there were about 100 people there. It was a lovely plaque; it almost looked like it was pewter I don’t think it was real pewter, maybe pewter and bronze. I thought it was a beautiful plaque. It was right down at the base of the tree. It looked great and I thanked them.
We never walked up to the park – we always walked to the field, which is down on Warden Drive, but one Saturday I had a little time, and I said to the dogs, “Why don’t we go up to McMichael Park?” So I leashed them both up, and walked up three blocks, and as we were getting close, I noticed at the tree which had the plaque, there was a line of dogs – about eight or nine dogs – lined up single file. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. We got up to the tree, and it turns out these dogs were in a queue to get their turn to urinate on my plaque. (laughter) What had happened was, sometime earlier, maybe a week before, one dog had accidentally urinated on the plaque and that left a smell. In fact, the other dogs did the same thing. So in a time span of less than three weeks, the plaque had gone from this beautiful pewter to a pale faded pink.
WM: Oh my God.
ER: I contacted the folks who placed it, and they took it back, they reshined it – maybe it took a little work – and they put it up about six feet high. (laughter)
WM: That’s a tupelo tree, isn’t it?
ER: Yeah; they said it was the biggest tree in the park.
WM: Rich here is the Head of McMichael Park.
RL: Well, I was.
WM: But what about the other plaque? Someone said there was a Woofie plaque at the sledding hill.
ER: The building trades guys knew that I was very attached to Woofie, because they would come over to the house, and Woofie would be there. They read that Woofie had died and they said “We’d like to do a little memorial for Woofie.” I said “I don’t want you to do that; it would look pretty silly.” They say, “Is there anything we can do to remind you of Woofie? Midge didn’t want Woofie buried in the backyard, and I didn’t want that either. In fact, Woofie had passed a while before they came to me. So I thought of a little plaque where she entered the park to go run every night. And it’s still there!
WM: I haven’t seen it; I’ll have to look for that.
ER: It usually gets covered up by leaves or grass, but it’s a beautiful plaque – a Woofie plaque.
WM: So you didn’t really have a dog walking route, you just pretty much went to the sledding hill?
ER: Yeah, well, what I would do is, if I had time, I would go up to the hill – it’s at the side closest to Midvale – and we’d stand on top of that hill and look at cars passing from up top. I would throw the ball down and they would retrieve it and bring it up. Then we’d go down that hill and we’d go up the hill that went to the residence dorm. And we’d go up that hill, go down that hill, and throw the ball, et cetera.
WM: So you had a little routine there. People had said that you were always working – that you would bring a chair there sometimes and work?
ER: Yes, on Saturdays! On weekends, if I didn’t have anywhere to go, I’d go there for a couple of hours on Saturday. I’d bring a chair and some work, and I could leave the dogs off the leash there – they were fine. And we sat out there, and I bought a little water for them, and we sat there for an hour and a half at a time.
WM: And a good way to connect with the neighbors. What about Jesse going to Penn Charter. How did you choose Penn Charter and what was your impression of the school?
ER: One of the reasons we moved out to East Falls, in addition to wanting a little space and a little greenery, was because we were always intent on sending Jesse to private school, and I heard from so many people in East Falls that Penn Charter was the best place to go. So I looked into it, and they had great academics, they had great athletic opportunities, and they were fairly diverse for a private school, so that fit the bill.
RL: Did Jesse play sports there?
ER: Oh yeah. Many great stories. In fact, there’s a chapter in my book, after we settled a strike, I had a press conference at 3:00 in the afternoon, and I’d come home because Jesse was playing in a football game. He was in 6th grade. When I walked towards the field, all the neighbors were there to see the game, and were congratulating me – settling the strike was a big plus for the city. I stayed there and accepted the kind words, but then I decided I wanted to be alone to concentrate on Jesse playing, so I walked down to the 20-yard line, and I watched the rest of the game from the 20-yard line. But it was nice, and Jesse participated in East Falls teams at the park. What was the park called?
WM: McDevitt.
ER: McDevitt.
WM: Did he go there, too?
ER: Yeah. In fact, one of the kids who played on the team with Jesse, Red Dog, you guys know Red Dog? Tommy Nicholas. He was a kid who played – he was Jesse’s age. On his own, he got into the Recreation Department as a Playground Assistant. When I became Mayor, he was second or third in command in charge of the playgrounds. I wanted to make sure he was put in charge of the playgrounds, and he’s been running them for 25 years. He’s done a fabulous job.
WM: So Penn Charter turned out to be a good choice for Jesse. You must have seen a lot of development there over the years.
ER: Unbelievable. Penn Charter has better athletic facilities than most colleges in the Ivy League.
WM: Someone asked us to ask you, who were your most notable guests who came to your house in East Falls?
ER: Bill Clinton. I had a fundraiser for him. I had one for Walter Mondale.
WM: Was your impression of Bill Clinton?
ER: Oh, I liked him from the get-go. He’s incredibly bright, incredibly. But we didn’t use the house – we didn’t have many parties. We had one party – a New Year’s Eve party for the DA’s office when I was District Attorney – it was a drunken brawl, so we stopped doing that. (laughter)
WM: Did you interact much with Arlen Specter?
ER: Of course I worked for Arlen, so we got along very well.
RL: After Arlen went to the Senate and you went on to other offices, well, there may have been some political interactions, but were there any neighborhood interactions?
ER: He was very helpful for whatever we needed for the city. Very helpful. And he would always plug me when I was running against a Republican. But Arlen was a strange guy. He wasn’t known for being overly nice, but if he liked you – and he thought you were sort of one of his proteges – he would do some unusually brave things to help you get along in your career. He was a pretty good guy.
WM: So in your years here in East Falls, you’ve lived in three different houses – Midvale, Warden Drive, and Netherfield. Did you get a different perspective of East Falls living in these different houses?
ER: No, pretty much the same. The neighbors are the same. The mix is the same everywhere. The only thing is that the house on Midvale was much less private because it faced Midvale, and Midvale has buses galore until 1 o’clock at night. This (i.e. Netherfield) is probably the most private of all, only because it’s set back from the street. But I didn’t choose it for that. I chose it because it’s next to Jesse. They had bought the house five or six years before, and I had known that this house was vacant. We found the guy who owned it, and he said he didn’t want to sell it, so I came back two years later and asked again. He had grown up in the house and had some visions of saving it for his kids. They were here a long time.
But the thing is, this is a great house, because the bones of the house are incredible. This house was built in 1930 or something. The bones of the house are unbelievable. The walls needed very little touching up. They’re so thick that we don’t hear thunder. It has to be the loudest, straight-on thunder. My dogs would always react terribly to thunder, but they didn’t hear thunder here. In the summertime, this is air conditioned, of course, but you almost don’t have to air condition it. It stays cool. In the wintertime, it almost always stays warm. It has incredible bones, but the interior needed work, so we spent a sum of money – this was a closed-in kitchen, but we broke through there and broke through there – we made two separate rooms out of the kitchen. And we made this into one big (living) room. We expanded the fireplace. We put two rooms – big rooms – back there and a second bathroom back there. You know, it’s great. Of course I needed it, by that time. I needed a house where I didn’t need to go upstairs and this was perfect.
RL: And so a complete change of subject. I read Ray Didinger’s memoirs not too long ago. Now, he mentions both you and he were on the Eagles post-game shows for years and he mentioned driving to some of those shows with you. Did that happen often?
ER: Often. He would take me home from every night game because night games ran up at 1:00am and I wouldn’t have my driver wait around, so Ray would take me home. I would go to dinner at Ray’s house, and he would come here. I got to know all of Ray’s dogs. He was a great dog lover, but bulldogs. And, to this day, on the fourth Friday of the month, Ray Didinger, Angelo Cataldi, Michael Barkann, and Jim Gardner come up here for lunch.
RL: Oh nice. So in the car, did you just keep talking about the Eagles game or?
ER: Mostly. Ray is funny. We would get food brought in by a local restaurant, Le Bus. And I have to tell you, they always brought in food that Ray didn’t like. Ray is somewhat of a simple eater. So he would get a corned beef sandwich. My dog loved corned beef, and he would give the corned beef sandwich to my dog. Every game.
WM: Did you use a lot of the local restaurants?
ER: Both in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, we always ate locally, maybe going to town, but our favorite restaurants in East Falls were, to start off I’d say – the pizza shop at the bottom of Midvale.
WM: Slices? Golden Crust?
ER: It used to be called Golden Slices, but now it became …
RL: Golden Crust, I think?
ER: No, Golden Crust is on Midvale.
WM: Oh, you mean the one on Ridge. Slices. The one the Williamsons owned?
ER: They may have for a while, but now a Chinese family owns it. It’s very good. Terrific food. We liked In Riva and the little Italian place…
WM: Fiorino?
ER: Yes, Fiorino’s. Great food, but tough to get in. Golden Crust actually has very good pizza. Surprisingly good. Some of their stuff is very good.
WM: Billy Murphy’s?
ER: No, but Jesse spent a lot of money at Billy Murphy’s. Of course we spent a ton of money at Dalessandro’s.
WM: Oh, right.
ER: In fact, when the Democratic Convention was coming here in 2016, I did a bit with the CBS Eagles pregame show showing them how popular Dalassandro’s was, and I got there before it opened, and we showed them the actual food. It was fun.
WM: It is amazing, with the other two sub shops right there, that the line is always at Dalessandro’s.
ER: Unbelievable. But now you can’t eat inside anymore.
WM: What do you think about the development happening now in East Falls and how do you feel we can protect our neighborhood?
ER: In what regard?
RL: The newish apartment buildings – a couple on Midvale, those on Ridge.
ER: I don’t mind them, because they’re basically not in what I would consider the residential part of East Falls. That is certainly a mixed-use area. There’s residential, there’s retail, there’s educational. They’re a mix. And it doesn’t bother me that they’re coming on the mix, and they’re good opportunities for younger people who don’t have the money to buy a house to live in the Falls and, in fact, they’ll probably graduate to buy a house in East Falls. So as long as it’s confined and it doesn’t spoil the basically residential view of the Falls, it’s great. Because I used to torment my friends from Chestnut Hill, saying that “East Falls is the 3/5th Chestnut Hill, because it’s 3/5 less to buy a house in East Falls. If we bought the same house in Chestnut Hill, it would cost us five/thirds times as much, and the only thing we’d forego would be about 20 yards of grass. And we get to work in Center City 25 minutes faster than you!”
WM: It’s true, I used to live there, and when I moved here, it was much more a sense of community.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about your career. So – District Attorney, Mayor, Governor, DNC Chair – when you think back at those, how would you rate them in terms of challenges and achievements? Can you talk a little bit about that?
ER: Sure. I think in each of the three major offices that I held, I confronted enterprises that needed change, that needed improvement. I think in the DA’s office we probably made the most dramatic improvement because we ran it as a professional law office. I never asked anybody what political party they were in; we never would even think about adjusting the case because some Ward Leader or some elected official had a cousin who was arrested. We took all of that out of it and we became very results- oriented.
It was a very good office that had the capability of doing long-term investigations, significant things, and we became a real force for change in the city. So, I was proud of what we did. I would give that maybe an “A” for change. But for overall impact in making the city better, it’s only a “C” or “C+” because the Justice System, unfortunately, deals with problems after they occur, and we can tell by putting bad guys in prison for long periods of time, so they don’t get out and prey on the city.
But in terms of stopping crime, you’re never going to stop crime by just putting people in prison. The only way you’re going to stop crime – the best way to stop crime is to have full employment. Good jobs. Because I used to say, when I was an Assistant DA, we would get these files, and in the files were these reports about the incident. There were background checks that the Probation Department had done on each. And I never found a defendant, unless it was a crime of passion, like somebody shooting his wife because he found her cheating – leaving aside a crime of passion, I never found a defendant for a serious crime who had a good job.
WM: That’s an interesting observation.
ER: That was something we needed to do better. So I said to myself, this is something I got to remember, if I do get elected.
WM: And then when you were Mayor, you did a lot for that, like revitalizing tourism.
ER: Well, the Mayor was the job I enjoyed the most. It was the most hands-on. I could make change happen by the force of my personality, because I was on TV almost every night, three or four times a night, while as Governor, you can’t do the same indoctrination of your ideas, salesmanship of your ideas, as much as you could when you were Mayor.
The problems are greater, but your ability to effectuate the problems was also much greater. And we have a very strong Mayor-form of government – like the Council can pass any budget they want, but I don’t have to spend the money. I can’t spend it on something else, but I don’t have to spend the money. So if they wanted to build more prisons, they passed budgets for building more prisons, but I didn’t want to do it, so I just let the money sit there. So I enjoyed it, and I got to know the people in the city much better than I got to know the people in the State, because there were so many different areas.
WM: Well, you had an amazing schedule as Mayor. I mean, you had so many events a day…
ER: Well, I tried to do that as Governor. And I did – I remember when I ran the first time as Governor, Pennsylvania had 67 counties, and in the General Election, I carried 12. My opponent, Mike Fisher, the Republican nominee, carried 55. They carried the big counties. When I ran for reelection as Governor, I carried 33 counties. I missed by one, carrying the majority of the counties. And I remember there was one county, Warren County. Warren is right up near Erie; it’s a small county. It’s mostly rural. It has a lumber industry, and the Warren paper endorsed me over the Republican. They said “This is the first time we’ve endorsed a Democrat. The reason we’ve done it is because Governor Rendell visited Warren County seven times in four years.” He totaled up his five predecessors and they visited six times in 28 years! So I got rewarded for being everywhere. But you can’t understand – they can write up very detailed development sheets – if they’re talking about development in some county – but if you haven’t been there, it’s not the same.
RL: So doubling back to Philadelphia for a minute, you were all over the city. Was there a part of the city that sort of surprised you when you got to know it in terms of the kind of people or what the concerns were there, or anything like that?
ER: I was surprised, pleasantly surprised, in the poorest parts of the city – poor white, poor black, poor Hispanic. There were many people who can’t give up – who are fighting with everything they had to make their neighborhoods better. Cleaner. I found that people responded if we cleaned up a street, people worked very hard to keep it clean. And so the stuff we did in those areas really stayed around and rendered benefits.
And so I was always trying to – one of my great regrets was that I could never get enough money into education to fix up all the schools. Because when I was Governor, I gave New Castle, which is in Lawrence County, out in the west – it’s the County Seat – an extra amount of money in their capital budget to rebuild their high school. And they did an incredible job. An incredible job. They put out their own money in there too. Incredible job. Then all of a sudden, the price for admission to the high school went from a thousand dollars to $4500. People didn’t go to private schools out there, but what they would do was, they would enroll their kids in the suburbs. If you give kids a good school … kids are not dumb. When they go to school and see a dirty school with rundown equipment, they know that we’re delivering them a message – the message is “You don’t count. You don’t count as much as other kids.” But when they see a brand-new spanking gym, that’s as nice as any gym in the city, all of a sudden, they’re into it.
RL: Interesting.
ER: One of the things I did – I walked a tightrope – when I was running the first time, my opponents always said “You don’t want to elect him. He’ll give all the money to Philadelphia.” Well, in fact Philadelphia doesn’t get all the money. We were very assiduous in counting every dime that we spent in Philadelphia, in Allegheny, and in other counties, and we found that Philadelphia got the least amount of money in proportion to the income.
WM: Is there anything else you want to add?
ER: No. The only thing I’d say is, I missed a lot of things by being in public life all my life. I missed a lot of things with family. I missed a lot of things with friends. I missed going to places – I’ve been to very few places in the world, and even when I went to places, I went there quickly – I’m the only guy who went to Italy for a day. So, in a sense, I feel that I missed something and I sacrificed something, but I don’t regret it because I’ve lived most of my adult life – all of my adult life – being in a position to help people. And there is no chapel, no art museum, no wonderful Grand Canyon, no beautiful sight, no ocean, that having seen it and visited it, would give me half the satisfaction as seeing a school that I helped rebuild, and create a good, safe place for kids to learn. The satisfaction!
I have missed things, no doubt about it. I’ve had to sacrifice, but I’ve had power to do things that are amazingly gratifying that I’ve had a part in doing. And the greatest thing is – it’s wonderful to get people coming up and saying “Thank you for this. Thank you for that.” “Thank you for being my neighbor.” It’s all gratifying, but the best thing is when I walk around today, I know there are tons of people out there who either never knew that I had something to do with improving things, or knew I did, but never got the chance to thank me. That’s reward enough.
WM: That’s so beautifully put. You really have made a difference. Thank you.
ER: And I didn’t emphasize the role of Midge in all of this. Midge was not only a terrific wife, but she was a terrific First Lady. She did things. She helped revamp the economy by developing the Avenue of the Arts. I basically gave that to her. That was a catalyst for a lot of the rebirth of Philadelphia. She did things in the State, and now, even after we ceased to be Governor and First Lady, we developed a project called The Rendell Center for Civics and Civic Engagement. We focus not on high school, but we focus on fourth and fifth grade because we think if you give kids an idea of what citizenship is all about, they will never forget that, and you should come and see. We have contests and stuff. The kids are on fire. They’re on fire as if you’re asking them to rank rock ‘n roll groups. So it’s amazing what you can do by treating people – our kids can take in a lot of stuff that we say they’re too young for.
WM: Does that have a physical location – the Rendell Center?
ER: It’s in a little office down at Penn.
WM: You had an event down at the Constitution Center?
ER: Oh yes. We use the Constitution Center for events when we need an audience. Yeah. My favorite event: We ask a question about the Constitution, and we have schoolchildren respond in writing – fourth and fifth graders. Then we review them, and we pick the best ten. Those ten come down and present in person to us: myself, the Judge, usually one or two guest judges. And then we rate them and give out prizes and certificates. Penn Charter had two contestants this year.
WM: Can anyone go to that?
ER: Oh yeah.
WM: We should go to that next time, Rich. Thank you very much, Ed.
