How Chemistry 101 and a Disco Changed My Life
I have to confess that if I had visited the University of Pennsylvania campus as many times as a student as I did during my eight-year tenure as mayor of Philadelphia, who knows what my future might have been. I might not have been the best or most diligent student, but I had a big ambition, to be a doctor. I wanted to help people.
I came to the University of Pennsylvania from a high school with only 180 seniors in my class, and I went to my first chemistry class at Penn in a Roman-style classroom, with descending stairs and a professor who seemed very far away, a distant speck. The first class was packed—every seat was taken and there were students sitting on the floor and in the aisles.
But Chemistry 101 changed my life forever because it was pretty clear after failing my first few tests that I probably was not going to be a doctor, and it was time to move on. By midsemester in that class, the jam-packed aisles were only a memory: you could sit anywhere you wanted. There were plenty of seats in that chemistry class, that semester.
I graduated in 1979 from the Wharton School, which is the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. Wharton, founded in 1881, was the first collegiate school of business in the world, and it’s one of the most prestigious. How I got to Wharton, however, was a longer saga that, in some ways, first put me on a path to my political future.
It began with my decision to drop that chemistry class. I had several sound reasons for doing this. First, it was clear to me that I was going to fail that course. Second, I’d never intended to be a practicing doctor. I wanted to be an entrepreneur doctor and learn medicine so that I could open a medical devices company and sell and manufacture new products to and for doctors. But I theorized that I had to know and understand medicine in order to create that business. So, in that first course and first semester, I was trying to protect my GPA, and wanted to withdraw before I got an F for the class. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I remember gazing at the periodic table of elements one day in class and realizing, “I just don’t care enough about this. I’m not going to be a doctor.”
I decided to apply to the Wharton School, on the erroneous assumption that since I was already a student at University of Pennsylvania, I could easily transfer to the business school. My application was rejected, because I hadn’t taken and completed four courses once I withdrew from chemistry. Not only did I not get into Wharton, I attracted unwanted attention from the School of Engineering. They wrote me that they noticed I’d tried to transfer to Wharton, and if I did that again and was rejected, they’d kick me out of the engineering school as well. Welcome to the Ivy League, Mr. Nutter!
When I came back to school in January 1976, I hedged my bets. I applied to Wharton for a second time and also to the School of Arts and Sciences. Wharton rejected me a second time, but the Arts and Sciences school admitted me.
I started taking business and economics courses and decided to be an economics major. But I had a disastrous sophomore year. I had started a job, and was not paying attention or studying nearly enough. I told my mother that college wasn’t going well for me and that I enjoyed work more than school. She said what I thought at the time was a very profound thing: I had swum to the middle of the pool, and I now needed to decide if I would go back to where I started or swim to the other side.
I decided to swim to the other side. I charted out my next few years, and thought about how to get my GPA up and get into Wharton. I was taking six courses a semester to catch up, and also working long hours. By May 1979 I was six courses short of graduation. At this point I’d gotten to know the Wharton School undergraduate dean fairly well and had spent a fair amount of time at the dean’s office. The conversation I now had with the dean was in some respects my first political deal. I proposed to him that I very much wanted to transfer to his school, that I had six courses to complete, and I needed to finish now, in the summer of 1979. I needed special permission from the dean to take three summer courses per semester instead of the maximum of two. The dean agreed—I’d need to get a certain average for all of my summer courses, and if I did, he would approve my transfer to Wharton. I took classes that I needed to take based on the major requirements. I had also calculated for each course what I thought I would or could get grade-wise, estimated any margin of error or slippage, and proceeded to do what I needed to do. I fulfilled the dean’s challenge, our deal was good, and I kept up my part of the bargain.
This meant that almost as I was walking out the door of the University of Pennsylvania, I was finally walking in the door of the Wharton School—from which I did formally graduate, in August 1979.
My collegiate odyssey taught me some valuable lessons, not the least of which concerned persistence and tenacity; knowing, understanding, and playing by the rules; and ways to push the envelope and succeed. Most importantly, I learned how to think, not only through the classroom work, but also through the long, torturous process of figuring out my own path through college and life.
Just as I was switching my focus from pre-med to the business school and navigating my way through the Penn and Wharton requirements, I was also getting lured into politics indirectly, through the front door of a disco. This transformation and transition was occurring at the same time, in 1976 and my sophomore year of college.
I had come to Penn with my best friend from high school, Robert Bynum, while our other great friend from high school, Chris Hannum, went to Amherst College. Both guys are still my best friends today. Robert and I lived in the quad our freshman year, and in our sophomore year we lived in high-rise East, one of the high-rises known only as East, North, and South at the time. They were fairly grim and nondescript. To some, they resembled Eastern European architecture. We moved off campus after our sophomore year, and this begins the story of how I answered the call to public service. The summer between freshman and sophomore year, Robert’s father, Ben Bynum, closed one of his nightclubs, the well-known Cadillac Club. Some of the very best talent of the day had performed there—Billy Paul, Lou Rawls, Aretha Franklin, and many others. Ben Bynum, a music industry innovator, having caught the disco music wave coming from Europe, turned it into a disco. Robert and I worked there starting in the summer of 1976, right after it opened.
The Impulse Discotheque, as the old club was renamed, sat at the corner of Broad and Germantown Streets, in North Philadelphia. This was the first black-owned disco in Philadelphia. It catered to an older, thirty-plus, upscale clientele. It was situated close to Chuck’s Place, Dwight’s Bar-B-Que, Sid Booker’s Stinger La Pointe—with the best fried shrimp in America—and Prince’s Total Exerience Club. The black owners of these bars and clubs employed mostly black people and attracted a mostly black clientele. This was important to me and to my growth and development. The Impulse was one of the hottest clubs in its time and held the top spot for clubs/discos for decades. Many clubs had come and gone during that time, but the Impulse always stayed hot, with great music and DJs, and an upscale clientele.
My first few months of work in the disco coincided with a significant movement toward black empowerment in Philadelphia’s political structure, led by John White Sr. More black candidates were running for office, running and winning, running and losing. They included Charlie Bowser, John White Jr., John Anderson, Marian Tasco, David Richardson, Dwight Evans, Bill Gray, Augusta Clark, and Hardy Williams, to name a few.
In that summer of 1976, and in subsequent years, many elected officials—black and white, but primarily the black establishment—had fundraisers, events, and activities at the Impulse club. I met a lot of people there. After I graduated from Wharton in 1979, I realized that I needed to find a more substantial job and applied to three
