Hot on the Trail / The mayoral race

Author, newspaper publisher, ex-con, and consummate Philadelphia politician Jimmy Tayoun walked candidate John Street through a South Philadelphia meet-and-greet the other day and revealed this nugget:

Sam Katz lost the race months ago.

But since they're going to hold the election anyway, Tayoun took his fellow Democrat from St. Rita's Senior Center at Broad and Ellsworth Streets down to the nearby Melrose Diner and other mandatory stumping spots. Tayoun greeted a high percentage of the passersby by name.

Tayoun, 69, was a state representative and later City Council member who was convicted in 1991 of bribe-taking. He took what he learned in his three-year prison sentence and turned it into a how-to book for those facing a federal stretch. And he has just started a bi-weekly newspaper, the Public Record, devoted to his first love, Philadelphia politics.

Tayoun, of course, loves Street. Tayoun said that, exactly 50 days before the Nov. 2 election, Street had observed that he had 800 hours left to campaign - 50 days at 16 hours each.

"He's laser-focused," Tayoun said.

Why is it over for Katz? Tayoun said the Republicans doomed themselves by not having a primary contest. Until now, the Katz camp considered one of its greatest coups to be persuading former candidate George Bochetto to drop out a year ago, leaving a clear field.

"They blew it in the primary," Tayoun said, saying that a primary battle would have gotten Republican voters energized in the race. "You got to have a primary bloodletting, a primary fight."

Katz capitalizes on his Democratic roots

Latest case in point: A $250-a-head fund-raiser last week in the Society Hill home of Dick and Mary Doran. Dick Doran, a lifelong Democrat, is a vice president at Independence Blue Cross, but in the 1970s and early 1980s, he was an aide to Gov. Milton Shapp and Mayor Bill Green.

"Sam and I go back 25 years," Doran said, having met while Doran toiled for the governor and Katz was a researcher for Democrats in the legislature. The two worked together on Green's unsuccessful 1976 try for U.S. Senate.

Doran's support is based on more than friendship. A political junkie with a reputation for knowing his numbers, Doran went over the ward-by-ward data after the May primary and concluded that Katz would win in November.

- Tom Ferrick

To Sir, With Love: The Prequel

About 30 public and private school students got a chance to question Street in a 90-minute session taped at WHYY-TV (Channel 12). (Katz goes before the camera Friday.)

One student asked Street what he would do to curb school violence - the question coincidentally coming just as a studio television tuned to another channel that was breaking news of the Bartram High School shooting. None of the WHYY audience appeared to notice.

Street said he supported tighter school security and talked about lessening violence generally, then offered his personal war story.

"When I graduated from Oakwood College in 1966, I didn't want to be a lawyer, I didn't want to be a politician - I wanted to be a teacher," Street said.

Oakwood is a Seventh-Day Adventist school in Alabama; Street was an English major.

So recent graduate Street applied to be a substitute teacher and was sent to Germantown High. Among his first group of students was a young thug with a decided attitude problem.

"He said to me, basically, 'You're not going to do any teaching today,' " Street said. When he repeated the threat, Street packed him off to the principal's office.

"About 10 minutes later, the student came back. I couldn't believe it," Street said, adding that somehow the tyro teacher "muddled through my first day."

Next day, the thug was back, and "he cursed me out again. He didn't care. He knew they couldn't do anything to him."

The lack of support for classroom discipline prompted him to call it quits, he said.

"That was an environment I couldn't live with, and I had to get out of there," he said. "I would have been a great teacher in the public school system, and I might not be sitting here today."

The students at WHYY were easier to deal with, asking prescreened questions without follow-ups. Gary Hodges, a senior at Strawberry Mansion High, asked him what he would do to try to lessen the negative impact of welfare reform.

Street responded by criticizing the state for enacting the reform, without getting specific on what he would do about it.

"He really kind of strayed away from it," Hodges said.

But no matter. Hodges will not be of voting age Nov. 2. He plans to get his mother to vote for Street.

It's not an endorsement till I say so

Mondesire, head of the Philadelphia NAACP and publisher of the Sun newspaper, said in an interview aired last week on WHYY-FM (90.9) that Republican Katz would make "a wonderful mayor," while Democrat Street "turns people off."

Yesterday, Mondesire issued a statement criticizing unspecified reporters for characterizing that as an endorsement.

Mondesire noted that NAACP bylaws prohibit endorsements. And he said that neither he nor his newspaper had endorsed anyone.

"My only endorsement in this race will be to urge every Philadelphia voter to make his choice on Nov. 2," he said.