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Brainy Swarthmore is out to be the region’s most progressive borough.
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Swarthmore may have the country’s only mayor—Eck Gerner—who can literally draw blood with his hearty handshake.
“He’s trying to get blood out of me all the time,” jests Brian Craig, the borough’s police chief.
Spend a day in Swarthmore, however, and there’s certainly no blood-letting at the parking meter. A quarter gets you five hours outside Borough Hall, a building shared with Swarthmore’s public library on Park Avenue. Nearby are streets with academically themed names like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth.
So what’s so smart about Swarthmore? Is it the street names? Is it that 46 percent of its residents have post-graduate degrees (according to the last Census)? Or that it’s home to world-class Swarthmore College, with its own arboretum?
Or is it the local library’s stat sheet? Director Sharon Ford says her branch has the highest per capita borrowing figure in the tri-county area (12.5), and that 25 percent of all books loaned each year—120,000—go to those outside the community. “We are a draw,” Ford concludes.
Swarthmore is at the tail end of a 10-year town vitalization—as opposed to revitalization—plan. After all, the borough was vital even before the Swarthmore Town Center, Inc. task force formed in 1999. Of the more than 30 “action areas,” many have been implemented, while
others are moving forward.
Borough manager Jane Billings, a grant-writer extraordinaire, says it’s smart for a small town to be progressive, to plan for an ever-changing future, to always do your homework and ask questions. As an aside, she admits that she completes the Philadelphia Inquirer’s crossword puzzle every day. “Does that make me smart?” she asks.
Billings grew up in Berkeley, Calif., which has a reputation for its brains, too. But she says it lacked the sense of community that spills over in Swarthmore. “For a lot of people, this is their first suburban stop,” says Billings.
Craig, a Roxborough native, retired as a Philadelphia police captain to take the Swarthmore position. He has a master’s degree. The eight officers in his department are smart, too. The last two hires, John Stilwell and Anthony Aloi, have bachelor’s degrees to start. Sgt. Bill Thomas is a Swarthmore history buff.
The fire department has two full-time employees but 85 to 90 volunteers, including 30 Swarthmore College students. When they graduate, they ride in a truck from the firehouse to the ceremony.
Larry Luder has been president of the fire company for the past 30 years. Like the mayor, he was born and raised in Swarthmore. “Everything about this town is special,” Luder says. “It’s the way we interact, the community’s self-esteem, the college. When I married, I brought my wife here.”
Gerner told his wife she could live anywhere she wanted. “But I was going to live here,” says the two-time councilman, whose second four-year mayoral term ends in January.
