(Editor: The following was written as part of the forthcoming “Six Decades of PA’s Governors, AGs, and Republicans: Part Two” but instead is posted here as a stand alone article.)
Gov. Bob Casey had a long trek from Scranton to the governor’s office. Casey’s story does not only involve the politics and histories of the interactions of men. That’s only half the story, I’ve come to see. In fact, it’s not even half the story. It’s only about 49 percent of the story.
There’s mitochondrial DNA in the story. My mother, and many other women in Scranton, liked and admired Bob Casey, I realized after recently talking with my mother. This was a large part of Casey’s electoral success.
My mother grew up in a gritty Scranton neighborhood called Dunmore, on Potter Street, a few blocks away from the bustle and bright lights of busy Dunmore Corners.
My mother explains that Bob Casey’s future wife, Ellen Harding, was a friend with Marie Gilligan Cummings, who lived next door to my mother’s family. On occasion, in the 1950s, before any of us kids were born, Ellen would arrive at Marie Gilligan’s house with her handsome and well-spoken beau, young Bob Casey.
The females in my mother’s family, it seems, thought the world of Bob and Ellen Casey. They thought they made a nice couple, and admired the way Bob treated Ellen.
A decade or so later, my mother and some ladies were visiting relatives who lived a few doors away from the Caseys in Scranton. My mother for years afterward would talk about how the ladies of Scranton watched Bob help Ellen fix dinner for the growing Casey family.
“He was helping Ellen fix dinner, and helping to get their kids ready to eat,” my mother relates. The Casey kids would grow to accomplish things of their own. One of them, Bob’s namesake, is our current United States senator.
It would be nice to say that this family dinner described by my mother was an outdoor cook out. But I get the idea the ladies of Scranton were admiring Bob Casey from a distance, across the yards, through his kitchen window. This after all is Scranton we’re talking about. In Scranton, you can run, but you can’t hide.
Point is, Bob Casey was not only popular with, and liked by, men who knew and worked him in his hometown.
For the women of Scranton, Bob Casey was the gold standard.
Over the decades several of my family members helped Bob Casey with his political campaigns.
When Bob was running for re-election as state auditor general in 1972, my mother’s parents, Joe and Marian Sample, taped a television commercial with him. In the spot they were sitting out on their front porch on Potter Street in Scranton, talking with a concerned Bob Casey about things that mattered to them. And Bob was listening.
My grandparents wanted to shoot this Casey political ad because they thought other Pennsylvanians should know about the Bob Casey they knew, trusted and liked.
In another television spot for the same campaign, Bob walked around Italian Lake in Harrisburg with my then three-year-old sister, Kelly.
“I remember very little, and I’ve never gotten a copy of the commercial (though I would love to have it),” my sister Kelly remembers. “I think he held my hand as we walked around the lake. After the shoot, Casey said he would take me and mom to lunch anywhere I wanted, and I chose McDonalds, which disappointed mom. He got me a Hamburger doll. That’s about all I remember, except that I thought he was a nice man.”
A few days after shooting the commercial Bob thoughtfully showed up at my parents’ house to thank my little sister. He brought her a doll. For years, my sister affectionately called her doll “Kelly Casey.”
This is the long way around to make a simple point: Bob Casey was all about family.
