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Ahead of Her Time. The Duchess was an internationalist even before it was fashionable. She warned in the 19203 that the U.S. would have to fight Germany again. She was Pennsylvania National Committeewoman from 1928 until 1951, vice chairman of the National Committee from 1940 until 1944, and official hostess to the 1940 and 1948 National Republican Conventions in Philadelphia. She was a supporter, before convention time, of Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower.
For young Bill, politics thus became a personal thing. By the age of nine, he was taking his mother's political calls, knew the names of the county chairmen. He also learned something that he finds handy today: "My parents taught me the necessity of organization. No matter what you might like to do, you can't win elections without it."
After the proper prep schools (Fessenden and Hotchkiss), Scranton majored in history at Yale. There, as a columnist for the Yale Daily News, he commented confidently on most of the world's great problems, demonstrated his penchant for plain talk. "A hick from Vermont has been rais ing a lot of comment lately," he wrote. "Governor Aiken [now a Republican Senator] is obviously a perfectly good second-rate politician who thinks he ought to get the publicity of a first-rate one and is getting it through sensational but ridiculous statements."
In these years, shortly before World War II, Scranton dated Jack Kennedy's sister Kathleen, whom he sometimes visited at Hyannisport. There he met Jack, liked him, found him "quiet and diffident." In Scranton's mind, however, no one matched Mary Chamberlin, a vivacious, charming girl he had long known back home in Scranton. They were married in 1942 when he was in the Army Air Forces.
Upside Down. Scranton had earned a private pilot's license before the war, by getting up mornings at 4:30 to take lessons in Piper Cubs. Despite this advantage, he barely survived his Army Air Forces training. Flying blithely alone over Georgia one warm day, he unfastened his safety belt, slipped off his parachute and shirt to bask in the warm sun. Absentmindedly, he slipped his trainer into a slow roll with the cockpit open—and had to hang on by his elbows and knees to keep from falling out. As an Air Transport Command pilot, he flew such VIPs as General George Marshall and Senator Harry Truman on defense missions. He later ferried combat planes from Brazil and North Africa into fighting areas.
Back in Scranton after getting his Yale law degree in 1946, he continued his father's crusade to stave off indus trial decline. Even before graduation, he had publicly assailed local bankers for building "a monument to myopia" by their hesitancy to join a drive to keep a defense plant in town. Traveling for the local chamber of commerce, he helped land a $900,000 Trane Co. plant, a $500,000 Maxson Electronics Corp. branch and a $1,000,000 Chrysler facility for the city.
He also became a skilled troubleshooter for ailing local firms, nursing them back to health with deft management. In so doing, he also helped himself, adding to his sizable estate. With the inheritances from his parents, Scranton estimates that he is now worth around $8,000,000.