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The Real Tom Knox
By Robert Huber
Then someone asks a question about pensions, and he’s off: “The Philadelphia pension plan has 4.6 billion dollars in it — that was a month ago, now it’s got 4.3 billion dollars in it. … Last year, we earned 11.4 percent on the pension. But everybody else was earning 15.2 percent. It cost 161 million dollars last year. … In the last seven before that, we missed our benchmark every year, and it cost us 120 million dollars on average, and I’m just comparing Philadelphia against four colleges in the area, what they earn. I’m comparing it to Villanova, Penn, Temple and Drexel. They earn 7.6 percent, we earn 3.78 percent, which is a 2.98 difference. Call it three percent — three percent of four billion dollars is another 20 million dollars. ... ”
It’s eerie, almost — Knox seems to slip into a private bubble, speaking faster, smoother, oblivious to the silent crowd. No wonder his staff doesn’t want him to talk numbers.
But as his younger son Brandon says, numbers are magic to Knox. Numbers were his escape; they brought him far.
After a hitch in the Navy, Knox went from selling insurance door-to-door in South Philly — during the first quarter he worked for Metropolitan, at the age of 21 in 1962, he sold 93 policies, more than the 16 other sales reps in the office combined — to an understanding of how tax codes and insurance regulations and policies are all about the magic of what numbers can do for you, if you control them. Knox would come home at night and plow through mounds of paperwork, working the numbers. It led to buying and selling some 15 companies; his net worth, Knox says, “could be a lot more than $100 million.” Magic. But there’s a limitation, too: Numbers guys — John Street is one, as was Wilson Goode, and Ed Rendell is not — tend to focus on minutiae at the expense of the big picture. At Knox campaign headquarters, you have to get permission to use the color copier; Knox pores over every bill that comes into the office. Numbers.
People, though, even people in the world he once knew so well, are a different story.
In Mayfair, after Knox takes questions from the audience, the event is over, but a group encircles him. A short, middle-aged woman goes on and on passionately. Her concerns are two-fold, and as she talks, Knox stares at her. She’s excited, a little on the edge. Her first issue is that our children reach the eighth grade and can’t read The Cat In the Hat. How is this possible? Immediately, she leaps into her next concern, which is more personal. Her daughter was let out of the mental hospital, and when she came home, she broke down the woman’s fence “and then came after me with an ax.” How can there be, the woman wants to know, mental hospitals that let out people who are crazy? It’s wrong. It’s terrible. It’s insane.
Finally, the woman stops talking.
Knox is still staring at her, his face blank. “Keep trying,” he says. Then he turns to the next person in the circle around him.
THERE IS BOB Brady, and then there is Tom Knox. Brady is the neighborhood guy who never left the neighborhood, which is patently clear one day in court in late March when he sets the mother tongue back a couple centuries as Paul Rosen, Tom Knox’s lawyer, grills him about pensions and filling out forms and complying with election law. Wearing another sharp suit, Knox has a ringside seat, and carefully files his nails as he listens. It’s classic hardball politics: Knox is trying to steamroll Brady off the ballot.
With this one, Knox’s money fails to bring victory, and so Knox and Brady remain as the two white mayoral candidates, both claiming to be men of the people. But after watching Knox in Mayfair, it’s clear that he has run as far from his own humble past — despite its usefulness in his ads — as fabulous wealth, a Rittenhouse Square address, a vacation home in Rehoboth, a taste for fine wine and dining (Knox is head of the Philadelphia chapter of the Confrèrie de la Chaîne des Rôtisseurs), and carefully filed nails can get you. Mayfair demonstrated not his closeness to working-class folks, but the distance from his past he still seems driven to widen.
It’s eerie, almost — Knox seems to slip into a private bubble, speaking faster, smoother, oblivious to the silent crowd. No wonder his staff doesn’t want him to talk numbers.
But as his younger son Brandon says, numbers are magic to Knox. Numbers were his escape; they brought him far.
After a hitch in the Navy, Knox went from selling insurance door-to-door in South Philly — during the first quarter he worked for Metropolitan, at the age of 21 in 1962, he sold 93 policies, more than the 16 other sales reps in the office combined — to an understanding of how tax codes and insurance regulations and policies are all about the magic of what numbers can do for you, if you control them. Knox would come home at night and plow through mounds of paperwork, working the numbers. It led to buying and selling some 15 companies; his net worth, Knox says, “could be a lot more than $100 million.” Magic. But there’s a limitation, too: Numbers guys — John Street is one, as was Wilson Goode, and Ed Rendell is not — tend to focus on minutiae at the expense of the big picture. At Knox campaign headquarters, you have to get permission to use the color copier; Knox pores over every bill that comes into the office. Numbers.
People, though, even people in the world he once knew so well, are a different story.
In Mayfair, after Knox takes questions from the audience, the event is over, but a group encircles him. A short, middle-aged woman goes on and on passionately. Her concerns are two-fold, and as she talks, Knox stares at her. She’s excited, a little on the edge. Her first issue is that our children reach the eighth grade and can’t read The Cat In the Hat. How is this possible? Immediately, she leaps into her next concern, which is more personal. Her daughter was let out of the mental hospital, and when she came home, she broke down the woman’s fence “and then came after me with an ax.” How can there be, the woman wants to know, mental hospitals that let out people who are crazy? It’s wrong. It’s terrible. It’s insane.
Finally, the woman stops talking.
Knox is still staring at her, his face blank. “Keep trying,” he says. Then he turns to the next person in the circle around him.
THERE IS BOB Brady, and then there is Tom Knox. Brady is the neighborhood guy who never left the neighborhood, which is patently clear one day in court in late March when he sets the mother tongue back a couple centuries as Paul Rosen, Tom Knox’s lawyer, grills him about pensions and filling out forms and complying with election law. Wearing another sharp suit, Knox has a ringside seat, and carefully files his nails as he listens. It’s classic hardball politics: Knox is trying to steamroll Brady off the ballot.
With this one, Knox’s money fails to bring victory, and so Knox and Brady remain as the two white mayoral candidates, both claiming to be men of the people. But after watching Knox in Mayfair, it’s clear that he has run as far from his own humble past — despite its usefulness in his ads — as fabulous wealth, a Rittenhouse Square address, a vacation home in Rehoboth, a taste for fine wine and dining (Knox is head of the Philadelphia chapter of the Confrèrie de la Chaîne des Rôtisseurs), and carefully filed nails can get you. Mayfair demonstrated not his closeness to working-class folks, but the distance from his past he still seems driven to widen.
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