Profile: The Gray Revolution

THAT'S A LOVELY sentiment, Joe. I don’t doubt your sincerity. But I, too, adore Michael Nutter, and you won’t find me within 10 miles of a zoning hearing. Besides, you already gave Michael Nutter your pound of flesh. You helped raise money for his mayoral campaign. One of Nutter’s closest advisors, Dick Hayden, remembers you at the phone banks the Saturday before the primary. You brought along your 94-year-old mother! She was dialing for dollars with you!

Then, last winter, after Nutter was elected, you helped out on the transition team. You chaired the committee that recommended hundreds of people to fill all the volunteer spots on the city’s 51 boards and commissions. You got to be the Thankless Job Czar, finding people for all the other thankless jobs. Hopefully you filled a few of those vacancies with people like yourself: empty nesters moving back to the city who have expertise that could do it a world of good.

We’ll give the other empty nesters a couple of years to get acclimated. Hopefully, by the end of the decade this will be a full-blown trend: Suburbanites to the rescue! But you …

You moved from Bala Cynwyd to your lovely new condo in Center City in November, then literally put down your boxes and jumped into Philadelphia politics. You had been the longest-serving commissioner in Lower Merion before resigning in 2006. That wasn’t enough public service for you? Apparently not: You joined the Fairmount Park Commission six months before you moved. “I’m doing it again,” you say, somewhat bewildered. “I moved out and I got rid of all the things I used to do, and all of a sudden I’m into something that is actually consuming more of my time.”

Most people would stop to unpack first.

So what gives? Why knock yourself out two days a week on the zoning board? Even you admit, “God, if I only had nine days a week instead of seven, there’d be no problem.” To get the real answer, we have to go back further than last year’s mayoral race. Let’s go back seven decades, to a different Philadelphia in a different America. The year is 1939.


"JOE WAS BORN fully awake,” says his mother, Vivian. “He was looking around the room as if to say, ‘What can I do now?’” The Mankos lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Logan, downstairs from Isadore and Helen Bellis. (Izzy would later become a city councilman and be indicted in the Abscam scandal of 1980.) In 1940, Vivian, Helen and four other young mothers in the building started a little grassroots charity project. They visited local institutions like the Home for Incurables (now Inglis House) and old-age homes in Center City and South Philadelphia. They always came bearing gifts, and called themselves Happiness Incorporated. This was a simpler age, before nannies and playdates, so Vivian did what any mother would do. “She took me along,” recalls Joe, “and I saw how much joy they would bring to people who were much less fortunate.” By the time Joe started school, he was helping his mother raise money. “He would go around the neighborhood making collections in his little wagon,” Vivian recalls. “He got his little friends to help, too.”

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