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In their bloody battle, both Scranton and Dilworth tend to make each other out as the worst sort of political brigand. Yet neither is anything of the sort, and indeed they have much in common. Both have deep family roots in Pennsylvania. Both were born to wealth. Both are highly educated—and their training includes graduate degrees in the hard school of Pennsylvania politics. Finally, both Dilworth and Scranton are deeply concerned about their state's situation.
Diversify or Die. The Scrantons first came to the state in 1840, when two brothers built an iron foundry in the northeastern Wyoming Valley, turned out rails for the Erie Railroad. Their growing community became known as Scranton. The most prominent of the early Scrantons was Bill's great-grandfather, Joseph. He managed the foundry, started a spur that became the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, organized the Lackawanna Iron & Coal Co., founded a bank and headed the local gasworks and waterworks. The Scrantons grew wealthy, but not complacent. Bill's grandfather, William Walker, as early as 1873 was warning that the town must diversify or die.
Bill's father, Worthington, heeded the warning, made expansion of Scranton's industrial base his life's main work. He had helped create the Scranton Industrial Development Co. with his father (who contributed $50,000) to attract new industry in 1914. After World War II he was the leading figure in developing the "Scranton Plan." Still widely copied, it is a self-help program in which a community buys or builds industrial facilities, then leases them to firms willing to move to the city. The plan eventually drew more than 50 plants and 10,000 new jobs to Scranton.
Summers at the Beach. Bill was born to Worthington and Marion Margery Scranton on July 19, 1917, in their beach home in Madison, Conn. He spent most of his boyhood summers there, overcoming an asthmatic condition by constant exercise in the sun. With his three older sisters,* he enjoyed a huge, century-old house at 300 Monroe Avenue in Scranton, later moved into a great stone mansion atop a hill in suburban Dalton, complete with indoor swimming pool. Father Scranton tended to business and did right well: he and his partners sold the gas and water firm for $18 million in 1928.
But Mother was the political personage in the family. She first picketed for women's suffrage—and took full advantage of it when it came. For more than 20 years she was the dominant woman in Pennsylvania Republican politics and one of the grande dames of the national G.O.P. Always wearing the latest fashions set off with orchids and diamonds, she was affectionately known as "The Duchess." And she liked her politics as up to date as her clothes. "As a party," she told Republicans in 1940, "we've got to be more modern. The party needs a new dress. I don't wear last year's dress when I want to feel fashionable."