And a class trip via a van he drove one Saturday morning bypassed the Betsy Ross House and Liberty Bell in favor of a stop at Laurel Hill Cemetery to read tombstones of prominent Philadelphia families. Lunch was at the Famous 4th Street Delicatessen, where, in a second-floor room, proprietor David Auspitz was our guest lecturer about the city’s modern political scene. (My later friendship with Auspitz is something else for which I thank Amidon.)
“I feel like a spectator now,” Amidon said from his hospital bed last Saturday. “I can’t stir things up the way I used to.”
He’d done plenty of that. Amidon himself had a personal political transformation from a Frisbee-throwing ’60s leftist to a 1980s conservative. I knew him only in the latter stage. In a freshman seminar (“Paleo and Neo Conservatives”), he had us reading William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty while studying the Laffer curve. I know we haven’t voted the same way in the last two presidential elections and told him I suspected that disappointed him. He would hear none of it.
“I’m disappointed that you would think I would be disappointed,” he assured me.
We had a few laughs, shared our concerns about Syria, and found common ground in the foreign-policy edicts of Ron Paul. Both of us fear foreign entanglements and worry that our interventions make us less safe.
Amidon was secretary of the Lehigh faculty when I graduated in 1984, and in that role, he signed my diploma. How appropriate.
“This was a lift,” he said when, after more than an hour, I stood to leave. He was speaking for both of us.
AFTERWORD
Sadly, Professor Amidon passed on September 23, 2016, at age 81. When Lehigh distributed word of Amidon’s passing, an alumni publication noted that, in 1977, he’d been recognized with the university’s Stabler Award for excellence in teaching and how his out-of-the-way office “overflowed with books and often with students who came to arrange files or to ask advice on school, career and life.”
I enjoyed sharing memories of him with his wife, Ann, and his four children at a luncheon/reception held after his funeral service at the Hotel Bethlehem, not far from the Lehigh campus. Many in attendance told me they remembered the column and when an open mic was made available for mourners to share memories, I went first and was pleased to read it aloud. Several of the other speakers did a tremendous job eulogizing Professor Amidon with fond remembrances and humor. I particularly liked the story a Methodist minister named Barbara Lee shared. She’d enrolled in one of Amidon’s freshman seminars not knowing of his conservative political bent. After two lectures, she felt compelled to seek him out to voice her displeasure. “By then he had offended all of my feminist sensibilities,” she said. After patiently listening to her ideological complaints, Amidon responded simply, “You’ve been duped.” A conversation ensued, and before she left his company, she’d been offered a job in his office—and she accepted. “I haven’t changed my opinions, but I’ve had to think about things more deeply,” she told the crowd, many of whom nodded in acknowledgment.
When I noted his passing via social media, I received many warm responses. One stands out: “@jenylnham We’ve lost an icon @LehighAlumni. In memoriam: David C. Amidon, Lehigh urban legend.” He’d have liked that—the one-man Department of Urban Studies was indeed an urban legend.
UNPAID BUT RICHLY REWARDING
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, June 23, 2013
WHEN A FEDERAL JUDGE sided recently with two unpaid interns who later sought compensation, he worsened an already bleak employment picture for young Americans.
U.S. district judge William H. Pauley III ruled in favor of two men who worked on the movie Black Swan and then sued Fox Searchlight Pictures for wages. He ruled that it wasn’t enough that the two interns received some benefits, “such as resumé listings, job references, and an understanding of how a production office works,” because “those benefits were incidental to working in the office like any other employee and were not the result of internships intentionally structured to benefit them.”
His decision came just as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that teen unemployment was at 24.5 percent in May, more than triple the national jobless rate. Teens are competing with young adults in a search for full-time jobs, and if Pauley’s decision eliminates unpaid internships, there will be fewer unpaid opportunities for those who can’t find paid summer positions.
That would be a shame for the likes of Joshua Belfer, Benjamin Haney, Alexandra Smith, Anthony Mazzarelli, and other talented people who have interned for me over the years without pay.
Pauley might accuse me of violating child-labor laws given that Josh first worked for me when he was entering ninth grade at what is now Barrack Hebrew Academy, née Akiba. His father used to drop him off at my radio studio or sometimes wait in the car. I knew immediately that Josh was wise and mature beyond his years. In no time, I had him archiving old radio shows and fact checking newspaper columns.
We were together six years, giving me plenty of fodder to write my most sincere recommendation ever when he applied to Penn, from where he has since graduated and gone on to Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Now Josh worries that forcing companies to pay all their interns could rob others of opportunities like the one he had. He told me:
I highly doubt you would have brought me on as a high school freshman if you were forced to pay me. It would’ve made no sense. And thus I would have not received one of the best learning experiences of my life.
He’s right: I could not have paid him—in which case we would both have missed out.
Ben Haney agrees. Ben came to me after graduating from St. Joe’s Prep and stayed two summers while attending Notre Dame. He’s smart, ethical, and earnest.
When Ronald Reagan lay in state at the Capitol, Ben jumped in his car and drove down I-95 to pay his respects, providing my radio audience and me with reports all along. Today he’s a real estate developer and part owner of Mac’s Tavern in Old City. In his spare time, he does advance work for GOP candidates. I’m hoping he’ll run for office.
Like Josh, he finds the ruling ridiculous. He said:
A lot of the relationships I’ve made in business and politics exist because of connections I made during the internship. In nearly every situation I encounter, I draw on my experiences.
Alexandra Smith told me she has mixed feelings about the recent ruling. Just two weeks ago, I was thrilled to see her chatting with Bill O’Reilly on television as the chairwoman of the College Republican National Committee. Years ago, she was invaluable to me when I was writing a book. She said to me:
You allowed me to participate in meetings and tasks I’m not even sure I would entrust to someone my age today. You bet big on my competence and abilities as a teenager, and it became my number-one priority to try to exceed your expectations every time.
Alex knows a thing or two about internships: She worked in nine of them during four years at Catholic University. She said:
In the course of eight semesters and three summers, I only took two internships that were unpaid, because I felt that their value far outweighed whatever small compensation I could receive elsewhere. Still, both of these internships were tough decisions for me financially. I had to plan far in advance in terms of my own personal savings and contributions from family to make them happen.
Then there’s “Mazz.” Anthony Mazzarelli is the senior vice president of operations and deputy chief medical officer at Cooper University Health Care. But back in 2000, he was a 25-year-old medical student at Robert Wood Johnson and a law student at Penn. He wanted to intern in my law practice. I wanted him involved in radio. Our compromise? Both. Like the others, he has many memories.
I remember the first time you had me on the air. There was a press conference about a local fire department that was getting heat for having a woman pose on a fire truck. I went to the press conference with my school backpack but asked questions along with the press corps. Yo
u were very happy with me because my questions cornered the guy a bit, and I remember the pride you had in me for pulling it off. I was hooked at that point.
Josh, Ben, Alex, and Mazz all told me they were grateful, but I was quick to disabuse them of any notion that I’m responsible for their success. After all, they came to me unsolicited, as strangers. My role was simply to channel their ambition and compensate them with the currency of experience. That served us all well.
When I asked Mazz to remind me of the span of his internship, he quickly e-mailed:
I started in the fall of 2000 or the spring of 2001. . . . As far as an end date, does it ever end? . . . None of your former interns will ever stop being your interns, nor will you stop mentoring them.
True—but now as friends and equals.
AFTERWORD
I’ve changed my mind. A year after publishing this column, I rethought the issue and decided to start paying my interns. No one is getting rich working for me (what I pay is more beer money than salary), but it no longer felt right to have students spend weeks or months working for experience alone. Maybe I was shamed into my about-face. One of our sons worked one summer in Hollywood for the legendary television producer Mike Robin on the set of Major Crimes, and even though my son offered to work for free, the show paid him, providing him with a greater sense of self-worth. My radio studio is a skeletal operation consisting of just the producer, TC, and me, and while it costs the show a few bucks, I like the new order. I find that the interns now feel better about their contribution, and I like the added responsibility that’s imposed by a paid arrangement. I no longer feel that I’m asking for a favor when I give an assignment; instead, I’m handing someone a task for which I have a certain (high) expectation. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not advocating for any hard-and-fast rule when it comes to paying interns. I’m sure there are many situations where experience is the only form of payment available, but my small shop is not one of them.
PENNSBURY GRAD
MAKES A SPLASH IN D.C.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, October 27, 2013
WHEN IN THE MIDST of the government shutdown President Barack Obama decided to summon leading conservative journalists to an off-the-record White House meeting, he gathered the usual suspects: Fox News contributor and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, Washington Examiner columnist Byron York, and Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal. And sitting directly to the president’s right in the Roosevelt Room for the 90-minute exchange was a 27-year-old Bucks County native, Robert Costa.
Costa is Washington editor of the National Review and a contributor to CNBC. But just 10 years ago, he was a suburban public school class president and architect of one our area’s most celebrated rites of passage: the Pennsbury prom. Recently he explained to me:
So many proms today become these almost antiseptic affairs in a hotel ballroom and just kind of bland and boring and corporate, but Pennsbury has it in the gym, and this school has been around since the ’60s. A lot of people joke it looks like a prison, but it’s our prison, and in Levittown, Pennsylvania, the whole community comes together and puts up posters and puts up decorations and makes the whole school transform.
So rich is the tradition that Sports Illustrated senior writer Michael Bamberger used the event as the backdrop for his 2004 American Graffiti-esque work of nonfiction: Wonderland: A Year in the Life of an American High School. And Costa, who as junior class president was charged with coordinating the senior prom, was one of Bamberger’s favorite subjects.
Wonderland is replete with Costa tales of ambition, ranging from his pursuit of John Mayer to perform at the prom to corralling a parking space at school despite his lack of both car and license. Ten years ago, Bamberger wrote of Costa that he was “well-connected and unusually sharp. . . . He always seemed a step ahead of everybody else.” Today, they’re saying the same thing on Capitol Hill. Last week Bamberger told me:
Bob was a force of nature then, and remains so. But you’d never know it, so unassuming is he. Bob is everything I think a reporter should be, most notably a good listener. I don’t think of him as a “conservative journalist.” I think of him as a good reporter. One who could wind up doing anything.
Costa, a music aficionado, began his journalism career writing reviews of local concerts for the Bucks County Courier Times. By day, he would read daily announcements over the PA system and appear on student-run television (PHS-TV). By night, he would attend shows in the Philadelphia area. When his attempts at landing Mayer for the 2003 prom didn’t pan out, he “settled” for Mayer’s then opening act, Maroon 5. The Los Angeles band was just on the cusp of national stardom.
Post-Pennsbury, Costa attended Notre Dame, where he ran the school TV station and wrote for the campus newspaper. He then landed a fellowship at the Wall Street Journal editorial page before leaving for Cambridge, where he obtained a master’s degree studying Winston Churchill.
After Cambridge, it was the National Review, where he has worked for the past four years. In high school, he might have been voted least likely to end up working for a leading conservative outlet.
In Wonderland, Bamberger recounts how Costa traveled to Ed Rendell’s inauguration in Harrisburg amid a busload of Revolutionary War reenactors, whereupon he buttonholed the new governor and offered his own blessing: “Make us proud, Ed.” But his real hero, wrote Bamberger, was President Bill Clinton, whom Costa traveled to Trenton to meet the day after the prom, using his PHS-TV press credential for admittance.
“Mr. President, I’m Bob Costa from Pennsbury High,” he said, adding, “I’m a young Democrat.” To which the president replied, “That’s what you should be.”
Costa told me recently the prospect of his classmates going off to war in Iraq and Afghanistan affected his views.
“That experience unsettled me,” he said, “and for a few years, my politics drifted to the left.”
Costa credits Representative Mike Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.), for whom he interned when Fitzpatrick was a county commissioner, with his interest in conservatism and registration as a Republican. He said:
These days, I’m a reporter first and last, and keep my opinions to myself. I don’t have an agenda. Temperamentally and personally, sure, I’m conservative. But that’s not what drives me. I love covering politics and talking politics, and I’m happy to leave the editorializing to the columnists and bloggers.
When Obama was sworn in for his second term in January, Costa was in the front row, sporting a National Review credential. Nearby? None other than John Mayer, on the arm of Katy Perry. Costa was quick to reintroduce himself to the music superstar as “Bob Costa, Pennsbury High.”
See, though Costa’s efforts to land Mayer at Pennsbury in his junior year hadn’t panned out, he did persuade Mayer to play at his senior prom the following year.
Which explains Mayer’s response at the inauguration: “I’m not surprised to see you here.”
Neither, I’m sure, is anyone from Pennsbury High, Class of 2004.
AFTERWORD
I didn’t put it in the initial column, but I get a real kick out of the fact that, according to Costa, his father used to drive him to school listening to me doing morning radio in Philadelphia, before syndication and SiriusXM. I’d like to think that some of his appetite for current-events discourse was shaped on those rides. Since I wrote this column, he has left the National Review and joined the Washington Post. He also makes frequent television appearances through his affiliations with NBC and MSNBC and is a regular on Meet the Press. Today, Robert Costa is one of the most influential political journalists in America, as evidenced by the role he played in the 2016 presidential race.
Costa’s name was in the byline of any number of front-page stories for the Post that evidenced his unparalleled access to the critical players. Two months out from Election Day, on September 15, he wrote a prominent story revealing that Donald Trump remained “unwilling to say th
at President Obama was born in the United States.” This revelation came in an interview Costa conducted aboard Trump’s private jet while it idled on a tarmac in Canton, Ohio. When, one month before Election Day, the now infamous Billy Bush/Access Hollywood (“grab them by the p——y”) tape surfaced, whom did Trump talk to on October 8 to announce he was staying in the race? Costa, of course. “I’d never withdraw. I’ve never withdrawn in my life. . . . No, I’m not quitting this race,” Trump told the Pennsbury grad.
Just two days before Election Day, the Post gave great prominence to a lengthy Costa piece detailing his 350-mile trek across his native Pennsylvania. And finally, on election night, via his Twitter feed (@Costareports) that then reached around 150,000, Costa gave unique insight into what was transpiring inside the Trump Tower:
On the phone w/ Giuliani. He just left Trump’s apt. Said Trump is “watching everything even tho I’m telling him not to.” Drinking Diet Coke.
And:
Giuliani thought about bringing platters of Italian food but decided against it. “He always sticks with the hamburgers anyway.”
For anyone else, writing front-page stories for the Washington Post about a presidential election or detailing the inner workings of a president-elect’s suite would cap a long career. But for the barely 31-year-old Costa, it’s still just the beginning.
In 2017, Costa was named the new moderator of PBS’s Washington Week, succeeding Gwen Ifill, who had passed away the previous November.
NIGHTMARE ON HEALTH SITE
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, December 1, 2013
I’M IN HEALTH CARE PURGATORY. Since sunrise on the day of the launch, October 1, I’ve attempted to shop for health insurance at health care.gov. Almost eight weeks later, I still haven’t been successful in accessing quotes online for insurance.
My experience has been a Kafkaesque nightmare of Internet denial and telephone roadblocks. And this is not some journalistic folly. I’m in the market for health insurance and have been optimistic about my ability to get a competitive rate as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Here’s the most frustrating part: Apparently, there is a competitive rate for my family and me, but I haven’t been able to examine it.
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right Page 29