Profile: The Gray Revolution

By the spring of 1948, the Manko family moved to Bala Cynwyd, where the bright-but-bored kid got some traction, ending up third in his class at Lower Merion High. In 1957 he went off to Yale, then to Harvard Law with a full scholarship. When he returned to Harvard for a second year, it was with something else: a wife. He’d met Lynn Kimmelman two years before, when she was a junior at Harriton High. (Cradle robber!) That summer, 1962, they got married, and had their wedding reception at the Warwick.

After law school, Joe and Lynn moved back home, to Bala Cynwyd, where they rented an apartment off City Avenue. Once their first son, Joe Jr., was born, they bought a place on Levering Mill Road. Then son Glenn and daughter Wendy came along. And for the rest of the 1960s and ’70s, Joe was the quintessential family man; he coached Little League, taught classes and took on leadership roles at his synagogue, Beth David. Oh, yeah: and he built a law practice at WolfBlock (excepting the two years he spent as regional counsel to the federal Environmental Protection Agency).

It wasn’t until he was 40 that he waded into local politics. Back then, in 1979, the township of Lower Merion was GOP country; two-thirds of registered voters were Republicans. Joe was a Democrat. He ran anyway, for the Ward 9 seat on the Lower Merion board of commissioners. He ran an exhaustive door-to-door campaign; most nights, nine-year-old Wendy went with him. In the election that November, he won 63 percent of the vote, an upset so amazing that it earned a banner headline in the Main Line Times. He was the only Democrat to win a seat on the 14-member board that year. And with that victory, Joe Manko’s First Act — his 27-year career in suburban politics — was launched.


THE YOUNGER YOU ARE, the less you can relate to Joe Manko. I’m not being flip or dismissive. It’s just not 1940 anymore. What young mother these days would organize hospital visits? And call it Happiness Incorporated? And take her kids along? Sorry: The Escalade is running, and she’s off to Pilates. Can she write you a check?

Joe Manko was born at the tail end of what Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam, in his classic work Bowling Alone, calls “the long civic generation.” Americans born between 1910 and 1940 are substantially more engaged in community affairs than more recent generations. By any measure — voting, reading the local newspaper, trusting neighbors, joining clubs, attending church, signing a petition, running for office, giving of their time — they are the champions of civic engagement. They were shaped in part by the zeitgeist of World War II, a time of national unity and patriotism that was recaptured only fleetingly after 9/11, and all too soon squandered.

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