Delco

Delco is having a minute.  If you are wondering what a Delco is, that is short for Delaware County and is one of the 4 collar counties surrounding the city of Philadelphia.

The other three counties are Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks.

And these 4 places couldn’t be more different.

Chester County.  Think landed gentry and people dressed like English nobility hunting fox in the rolling hills and woods on their noble steeds and their pack of hounds.

Bucks County. Think Bradley Cooper and Gigi Hadid and their 7 million dollar farmhouse.  Also think Washington’s crossing, more farmhouses, and museums.  And as much a suburb of New York as Philly.

Montgomery County. Think nothing too exciting.  Mix of suburban and rural. While Bucks County has the site where Washington crossed the Delaware to raid the Hessians in Trenton, Montgomery County has Valley Forge, where the Continental Army spent that really awful winter of 1776. There’s also a nice little zoo.

But Delco? Well, Delco has an edge to it.  It’s a little hardscrabble, a little rough and tumble.  Working class and proud of it.  A lot of immigrants when I was growing up there in the ‘60’s and 70’s. Today, it is still ranked highest in racial and ethnic diversity vs the other 3 counties.  

I am from Delco.  I know of which I speak.  Some refer to Havertown, where I grew up, as the 33rd county of Ireland. You, yourself, weren’t off the boat (as we used to say back in the day),  but either your parents were or your grandparents were.

There is a small slice of Delco that sits on the Main Line.  What’s a Main Line, you ask? That’s where the Hoity Toity live.  When the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age decided they needed large homes outside of Philly, they built a railroad, the Main Line, that took  them back and forth from their suburban estates to the city.  Towns like Haverford (please do not confuse it with Havertown, those of us from Havertown do not want to be accused of trying to pass for rich), Bryn Mawr, Villanova, and Radnor. 

But they do not typify most of Delco.  What does, you ask? Well, of all the counties, only Delco is the place where a woman, in a moment of road rage, gets out of her car to poop on the hood of the car of the driver she was pissed at (although no pissing was involved, only pooping).  She is now called the Delco Pooper.  She proclaimed afterward, with more than a little pride, that it was a “clean poop.” 

But believe it or not, the Delco Pooper is not what has put Delco on the map.

It started with one of our earliest most famous Delco-ites, Tina Fey.  Eating Pica’s Pizza on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.  Creating a couple of Delco Suburban Mom characters that were undecided voters during the 2016 election and talking about it on Weekend Update. 

That’s when the Delco accent was introduced. Which is really the Philly accent.  But for whatever reason, while the other counties seem to have escaped it mostly, Delco-ites speak Philly.  So there’s Tina Fey and Amy Poehler saying words like “wooder” (water), “arenge” (orange), “farhead” (forehead) and the rest of the country going, ‘what are they saying?’

So, Tina softened the ground for us.  Got it a little warmed up.

And then, Delco’s moment in the sun hit full volume when another now famous Delco-ite named Brad Ingelsby, made a little show called Mare of Easttown and he chose Delco as the setting.  Kate Winslet, the lead actress, went all Meryl Streep on us, worked with a dialect coach, and pretty darn well nailed the accent.

Mare of Easttown blew up.  It was a great show.  And all of a sudden everyone is talking about Delco and that Delco accent.  SNL did a skit on it where Kate McKinnon hilariously killed it. You know you’ve made it when they make fun of you on SNL.

And those of us from Delco? We are standing a little taller these days.  Some of us are even going back to the accent we tried so hard to expunge over the years.  Wahter, which we practiced saying for years can now go back to wooder.  We want to show our Delco cred.  We earned those stripes and now Brad Ingelsby and Kate Winslet have made it cool. And frankly, most Delco-ites never even bothered to try and correct their accent.  They are like, accent? Whut accent? Whutchewsayin’? Get outta hereyuh.

Mare of Easttown came out in 2021. And just in time, before our Delco minute could fade into oblivion, Brad did it again, giving us Task, with Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey.  And boom! Delco reaches even greater heights.  Another fantastic show.  Another slice of Delco come to life, and every one of us Delco-ites parsing every bit of dialog while watching the show, waiting for the actors to slip up and make a mistake. 

They nailed it.  I only detected one slip up.  One of the characters referred to the town of Lancaster as LAN-caster. Uh, no.  That is not how we Delco-ites pronounce it.  It’s LANK-astir. 

The only other ‘no way could that be possible moment’, is when the one character , Anthony Grasso, who was shot, drives out to Elverson from Aston. That’s an hour and 8 minute drive.  He’d have bled out before he got there.

But, who are we to quibble?  Delco is having its minute and it’s been pretty darn fun.

To Brad Inglesby, keep it coming!  Task Season 2 was announced this past November. 

Looks like Delco is going to have more than a minute in the sun.

Grab yourself a hoagie from WaWa, pour yourself a glass of wooder, or better yet, a Yeungling, sit back, and bask in the glory.