Wedged between a funeral home and the state store on North Broad, with only a photocopied piece of paper for a sign, is Safe and Sound, a children's advocacy and violence-intervention program. The pilot project is headed by Naomi M. Post, who works long hours for little glory and less attention, a situation that may quickly change.

If John Street is elected Nov. 2, Post will be in the unprecedented position of being the mayor's employee and his wife.

The eight-year program, funded by a $10 million Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, receives $200,000 a year from the city and is seeking an additional $300,000 for a $1.5 million media campaign. "I think what I'm doing is important and I hope it will be embraced by the next mayor," said Post, who reports to Recreation Commissioner Michael DiBerardinis. "But it's awkward to work for your husband."

She has every intention of keeping the job.

Petite, pretty and intensely private, Post worked 16 years in the juvenile justice system, including 10 years for the courts, with colleagues knowing little about her personal life. On this day, she wears a smart black suit, tiny gold earrings but no wedding ring. "My staff was astounded to find out that she was married to John," says Robert Schwartz, Juvenile Law Center executive director.

"I really wanted to know if she was up for this," Street recalls of his decision to run. "I knew it would be intense and the scrutiny would be unbelievable. I still think I underestimated the scrutiny. She said, 'Look, if this is what you think you want, go for it.' "

As a city employee, Post is barred from campaigning. The restriction suits her. "The other night I passed up a chance to meet Hillary Clinton due to work," Post says with a shrug. "When you have a job, a family, two Great Danes, two cats, a kid and three stepchildren, a lot comes first."

Looking ahead, the 45-year-old attorney says, "I don't view myself as being in the role of first lady in the traditional sense." Street says, "She's going to keep doing what she does, but I think she'll have an agenda for charitable works and it's children. She'll always be active in children's issues."

Like her husband, Post is reserved and guarded around people who are not intimates. Post took four weeks to consent to an interview, the first lengthy one she has done. She is still smarting from articles about her appointment last year as the $85,000-a-year head of Safe and Sound, which focused on the selection process more than her extensive work with the courts, prison system, and the labyrinth of children services. The $20,000 national search was conducted by Gans, Gans & Associates, headed by Street ally and contributor Simone Gans Barefield. The final selection was made by a Rendell-appointed committee.

Initially, Post refuses to speak of her almost 12-year marriage or even mention her child by name. But slowly, very slowly, the thaw begins. She smiles. She talks about her remarkable upbringing, her husband and her son, now a seventh grader at Masterman. And soon, as mothers are prone to do, she cannot stop talking about Akeem. The family jokes that she didn't put the boy down for the first year of his life.

"People criticized my husband for taking the summer off. He was working hard but he took a block of time off to be with Akeem and his family," Post volunteers. No matter what their schedules, their son has been paramount: "When Akeem was younger, he was afraid of monsters and John was the only person who could scare them away with the monster dance. We'd page him at Akeem's bedtime, John would come home and do the monster dance, and then go back to work."

Post is Street's third wife; he has three children, the youngest in college, from his second marriage who are close with Post. The couple met 16 years ago in a rainstorm. Post was waiting for a bus early one morning - it would have to be early, the candidate rises around 4 a.m. - and he was in the car of a mutual friend who stopped to give her a ride. "Not the most auspicious beginning," she laughs.

He later showed up at her house and announced his serious interest. Says her eldest sister Deborah: "John is a man who knows what he wants. He's nothing if not persistent."

The four Post sisters were born in five years - Naomi is the youngest - and their father, a steelworker often out on long strikes, died when she was 6. Her first childhood home in Auburn, N.Y., located between Syracuse and Binghamton, had no hot running water. Their mother worked in a laundry and cleaned houses on the weekend. After suffering from Alzheimer's disease for years, she died during Post's first year of law school.

"My mother was a Baptist and my father was basically a Jew and that was odd because he was black and she was white," says Post, who is now a Seventh Day Adventist, her husband's faith. Her father was raised in a small church that believed that just as Jesus never abandoned the Jewish faith, neither should Christians. Stars of David adorned the house, as well as Judaic calendars, and the Sabbath was observed Saturdays. "They married in the 1940s, when people were not particularly tolerant of interracial marriages," says Post, and the family faced considerable prejudice in a predominantly white upstate town.

Four decades later, Post shudders at the memories, which she is reluctant to share.

"Our parents were always very strict about two things," Deborah Post says. "They were ferocious about doing well in school and they never said: 'When you grow up and get married . . . .' There was always the sense that you were going to have to get a job and a profession."

After graduating from the State University of New York at Binghamton, Post went to Cornell Law School. Deborah Post, a graduate of Harvard Law School, teaches law. Cindy works as a Philadelphia school administrator. Leola is a nurse in upstate New York. While Post earns a handsome salary, she has never worked a day in the lucrative private sector, beginning with her first job in legal services.

"When you have been very poor, you can go one of two ways. You're either driven to make money or you are trying to address the circumstances so that nobody has to live this way," says Deborah Post. "What's surprised me about all of us is that we're all workaholics."

All her life, Post has been a member of a distinct minority - in Auburn, at Cornell Law School, during her three years working for rural legal service in Milaca, Minn., "being the only person of color in five counties." Though content, Post found it a lousy place for a social life. A law school classmate suggested Philadelphia even though Post had tried briefly living in New York City and Washington, D.C., and wasn't taken with either.

Post's approach is to make herself essential in situations where she might feel apart. "Naomi is quiet, in part, because she listens so well," says the Juvenile Law Center's Schwartz, who has worked with Post since 1982. "The court system is predominantly male and the city administration is predominantly male, but she can be very forceful." John Delaney, deputy district attorney of the juvenile division, says of his work with Post at the courts: "Our office and the courts are often at loggerheads, and Naomi and I don't agree on everything, but it's never gotten in the way of working on things we do agree on. That's not a trait everyone has."

Working in juvenile justice is relentless, and less cloaked in glory than other divisions. "Our work is like second marriages," says Schwartz, "a triumph of hope over experience." Within juvenile justice, Post often dealt with the hardest cases: sex offenders, addicts, alcoholics, the abused, the mentally and emotionally disabled. Of her current job, Post says: "This was a natural progression of what we were doing in the courts. When you're working with abused and neglected kids, trying to salvage their lives, you realize we need to be promoting a system of reform and developing strategies before they get into the system."

Even though Street says his wife can "take your run-of-the-mill, 45-hour-a-week job and turn it into an 80-hour-a-week mission," Post has other interests. She sits on the board of the planned Regional Performing Arts Center, not so much for her love of music but "as a wonderful opportunity for the city to have a tremendous impact on young people." She has taken up horseback riding. She rollerblades with her son. When Akeem took up downhill skiing, Post learned, too.

Given her druthers, "I would travel more to Europe and Africa. I told John that, after the election, I would take him anywhere on a vacation. He wants to go to Miami to see my Aunt Naomi," she says. He loves to pitch a tent, something she did in her youth but no longer. "I'm less thrilled about camping. I want to go in an air-conditioned trailer."

Street is a fitness enthusiast, his wife less so. "John's much more health conscious," though he's the one routinely found at the Fountain Restaurant and the Palm. "I run a mile. He runs a marathon," Post says. "If anyone cooks, it's probably him," though she prepares the holiday meals at their brick rowhouse in the city's Yorktown section.

She gardens. They share the bookkeeping. He's responsible for the motor vehicles; he prefers trucks. She pays the utilities. Street does the laundry. Her office, decorated with posters of garden paintings, is immaculate. "She has a constant struggle with Street. He kind of spreads out over things, and she tries to contain him," her sister says.

Though Nov. 2 is fast approaching, the future appears unclear. "We don't talk a lot about what will happen after he is elected. My intention is to stay here," Post says with her customary reserve. But she does suggest that she has thought about it, mentioning the the possibility of creating an independent advisory board as a buffer between her organization and the city government.

"I don't think I could play a ceremonial role or a partnership role with the mayor," she says. "It's a delicate position. I haven't figured it all out."