Diamond Dust | Page 4

theory that "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem," this book is my effort to communicate.
K. Kay Shearin Elsmere, Delaware June 1992
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CHAPTER I
. The lay of the land
1: Paragraph 1 Delaware is the opposite of the old cliche: not much to visit, but a great place to live. To Amtrak passengers in the northeast corridor, it's a station between Baltimore and Philadelphia; to drivers on Interstate 95, it's not even a wide place in the road between Washington and New York; to its residents, it's one of the best-kept secrets around -- a pearl not to be cast before swinish outsiders.
1: Paragraph 2 As nearly as anyone knows, the state's population is somewhere around 700,000. Although it's the second smallest state in area and has only three counties, there is a marked polarity between the relatively urbanized northern tip of the state, where most of the population is concentrated in Wilmington, and what they often call "slower Delaware," usually defined as "below the [Chesapeake & Delaware] canal."
1: Paragraph 3 Someone seeking a symbol of Wilmington to put on souvenirs -- in case anyone would ever want a souvenir of Wilmington -- would probably pick the equestrian statue of Declaration of Independence signer Caesar Rodney that usually stands in Rodney Square, a grassy one-block plaza in the middle of town. He was the hero who had gone home to die but returned to Independence Hall to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Delaware delegation in favor of the Declaration; we're still arguing about whether he died of cancer or syphilis.
1: Paragraph 4 They took his statue down a year or so ago to fix it, and its massive plinth looks like a ruin standing across the street from the Hotel du Pont that takes up most of the block on the west of the Square. The block east of the Square is occupied by the Public Building housing the state trial courts for the county. Facing the Square on its south is the public library, and on its north is the headquarters of Wilmington Trust Company, the favorite bank of the duPont family and E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, Inc. Standing in Rodney Square, you're physically less than five miles from New Jersey, ten from Pennsylvania, and fifteen from Maryland, but in most ways you're in a different world.
1: Paragraph 5 Until about two decades ago the duPonts ran Delaware as a company town, and they ran a tight ship. For example, once upon a time du Pont wanted to hire a high-level executive; a candidate and his family passed muster, and he was offered the position. He said the only problem with moving to Delaware was that his daughter was taking ice skating lessons and hoped someday to qualify for the Olympics, and there was no teacher of that caliber in Delaware. Today there are, at the two Olympic-sized rinks down the road from Wilmington in Newark; one is where Calla Urbanski and Rocky Marvel trained for the 1992 Winter Olympics.
1: Paragraph 6 I heard that story in 1974 from the people who interviewed me for a job on the professional staff of the University of Delaware, whose main campus is in Newark. Their theme was that Delaware was, and would remain, the kind of place where I would want to be, because du Pont would always exert its influence to insure that Delaware was the kind of place the kind of people it wanted to attract would want to live.
1: Paragraph 7 They also explained to me that U. of D. was a private, not a public, school because if it were public it would be subject to the federal anti-segregation laws, and nobody wanted that. So in an arrangement that may be unique, and which is often called "semi-private," instead of making the school the state university and having the legislature appropriate money from the general treasury for it, each year the General Assembly votes for a voluntary donation to the private school, on behalf of the taxpayers of Delaware, out of the treasury.
1: Paragraph 8 Partly because of its small size, and partly because of du Pont's historic paternalism, Delaware in general, and Wilmington in particular, don't suffer today from the problems that plague so many parts of our country, especially the major cities. And the problems Delaware does have are largely the result of du Pont's abdication of that r le, leaving the kind of power vacuum that inevitably attracts scoundrels to public office.
1: Paragraph 9 Delaware's economy is, of course, the product of that political situation. Du Pont is by far the greatest economic power in the state, but Hercules Incorporated and ICI Americas Inc. are players, too, especially in Wilmington. Downstate is agricultural, except for the