Pretty good for a kid from Wiles Hill who had dropped out of high school to join up.
Frank Scafella was all ten-hut and squared away in his dress blues, as he stood guard over the U.S. Embassy at Benghazi, Libya, in 1958.
He had to enlist another two years in the U.S. Marine Corps to garner the plum assignment, but it was worth it for the adventure.
The year before, he held the same posting at the embassy in Casablanca, which, for a townie who took in 50-cent matinees at the Warner back home, couldn’t help but conjure noir images of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Berman.
Scafella liked the pomp of embassy duty, he admits, but it was that sense of purpose — the heady, international weight attached — that moved him most of all.
Not that he was necessarily thinking about all that when he enlisted in 1954.
His father died in a coal mining accident when he was a little boy. The Marine and future mayor was like a lot of young guys, in that he was in it for the moment, at the time.
Even so, Europe and Japan were still in the rubble of World War II when Scafella took his oath.
The Korean conflict had just ended and Dwight Eisenhower was already wondering about Vietnam, while the U.S. and USSR daily tried to out-alpha each other on the big stage.
It didn’t take long for Scafella to start fashioning his own world view.
He earned his high school graduate equivalency diploma while on active duty and happily discovered he could keep acquiring the book smarts to survive and thrive in college, if that’s what he wanted.
Some 40 years later, he was back in Morgantown, with a master’s and doctorate in religion and literature.
And this time, he wasn’t standing guard.
He was wading in.
The WVU professor-turned-Morgantown councilor-turned-city mayor found himself getting feisty on the record — not all the time, but enough times — as he and everyone else worked to bring the scruffy, funky college town into the 21st century.
There was the one session, with the one attorney, already tall and imposing, who drew himself to his full height and said, with stentorian menace, “If you rezone the riverfront, we will sue you. And beat you.”
There was the righteous, rascally Milton Cohen, a businessman and community activist who was in his 90s and still getting booted — reluctantly, by Scafella — from council meetings, from time to time.
The mayor would give Cohen the microphone and podium until the occasional profanity and personal insults would creep in, along with the 15-minute mark, as the citizen was holding the elected officials to task.
“I’d say, ‘Mr. Cohen, are we going to have to do this again?’ ” Scafella remembered, with a warm chortle.
“The thing was, Milt and I got along great when we weren’t at council. He was a good guy and he really cared about Morgantown.”
Scafella served on city council from 1991-2007, and sat in the mayor’s chair for four of those years, from 1998-2002.
He encountered lots of other good people during that tenure who cared just as much about Morgantown as Cohen.
He, and them, were players in the proceedings that made Morgantown the city we know today, with its vibrant neighborhoods and bustling commercial districts.
That’s why he wrote his book.
City on the Hill
“Well, I wanted to write something,” he said.
“To me, a memoir was an autobiography, which I could have written, but I have zero-name recognition, except for the people who might still be around who know me in Morgantown.”
“I’m going on 88,” he said. “I wanted to tell a story while I still had time.”
So he told a story that everyone knows — but doesn’t.
He told the story of his hometown during his time on council: Successes, setbacks, public embraces, public arguments, public policy and all.
“Building on Trust: Reinventing Morgantown,” will be out soon by way of Amazon, the online bookseller.
Scafella had shopped it around to a couple of publishing houses that expressed interest, but decided in the end to self-publish, with the help of Morgantown’s Populore Publishing.
The company on Canfield Street helped with production services for the book.
First, though, it had to get written.
A burgeoning memoir writer was trying to get his arms around the core of it all, when former city manager Dan Boroff, who served during Scafella’s tenure, suggested the subject.
The two are friends — even if Boroff still addresses Scafella as “Mayor” — and they were talking about the idea of such a book when the city manager said it.
It all came down to simply looking over, Boroff said, when he was driving past the Wharf District one day.
Scafella still remembers what his friend said: “You know, Mayor, this wasn’t always here. These things don’t just happen. You have to bring people together. You have to build trust.”
Thus, a subject, and a title, all at once.
A soon-to-be author laughed — out loud, out of delight.
“Yeah, there it was. It was about building trust. This book belongs to Dan Boroff, too.”
Straight talk
During his academic life and times, Scafella became a scholar and authority on the works of Ernest Hemingway, the American author known for his tales of love and war, told in unadorned prose.
In 1988, in fact, the professor chaired an international conference in Austria on Hemingway’s life and work.
Here’s what Hemingway famously told fellow author F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Write the best story you can and write it as straight as you can” — which was Scafella’s mantra during the telling of his Morgantown story.
He delves into budgets and zoning wars and ordinances of every stripe in the book, but it’s more real-world, than for policy wonks.
Eight chapters, 138 pages, all told in episodic, vignette style.
Scafella recounts Sunnyside revisioning, Morgantown Utility Board wranglings and his experience as a first-time homeowner in the city in 1969.
They weren’t all kumbaya moments, he said, but they were productive ones with a cast of kindred spirits.
“We brought people in who wanted to do good, positive things,” Scafella said.
“And that’s what happened. It got done.”
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