The one thing we can agree on in these fractured times is that we don't agree on much. We live in a polarized world, and when that happens, all sorts of generalizations about people tend to follow. "You like this, so therefore you like that." I'm guilty of it myself; making all sorts of assumptions about people based on, let's say, the way they voted in the Presidential Election.
I'd be willing to bet that few people in the Lehigh Valley are as subject to false generalizations as one Charles Marcon, an octogenarian Bethlehem native who has been confounding people for quite a while now.
Charlie retired recently, but for 40 years, he was President and then CEO of the construction business Duggan and Marcon, which he helped grow into one of the area's most successful commercial construction companies. Charlie was a star athlete at Bethlehem High, now Liberty, a scholarship basketball player at Davidson College, a member of the ROTC, and then an officer in the United States Army before he joined the family business. What some would say are the predictable spoils of financial success followed him — spots on so many boards that it would take my four minutes of time just to list them, and membership at Saucon Valley Country Club, where he remains a ferocious competitor on the golf course.
We add it all up and we know, or we think we know, Charlie Marcon. He voted for Donald Trump, he stays on the conservative side of every issue, and he believes in nothing more than the power of trickle down economics.
But that's not Charlie. Before we grabbed coffee a while back, the last two times I had seen Charlie were at Planned Parenthood events that he himself had hosted, along with his wife of 57 years, Ruth, who he met at the Tallyho just down the street from where I'm recording this, by the way. In 2021, he donated a gift of $2.5 million to create the Marcon Institute at Lehigh, hoping to provide a dialogue on racial injustice in America.
Charlie and his wife spent the first two decades of their marriage on opposite sides of the political spectrum; Ruth a Democrat from a working-class Allentown family, Charlie a rock-ribbed Republican until early in the century when he changed affiliations. But even when he was a Republican, Charlie said he accepted her strong beliefs about women's issues. "We never ever argued about those things," he says now, "Because I was always sympathetic to her. And I became more and more sympathetic as time went on."
There is a general assumption that the political divide became much more extreme during the age of Donald Trump, but I agree with something Charlie believes; that it actually goes back a couple decades. Maybe it was an outgrowth of 9/11. People on different sides of the political spectrum not only stopped talking to each other, they stopped respecting each other. "I remember when there was bipartisanship," Charlie said, "You give me this, I give you this. Compromise. But that stopped, and that's what we're living with today."
Charlie lives with it more than most. "A couple years ago, I told one of my friends I should probably drop out of Saucon Valley because of the political differences," Charlie told me. "And he said, 'Why would you do that? You go there, you play golf, you enjoy it.'" He's careful to stay out of political discussions, but if you challenge him, expect pushback. "No one's going to intimidate me because I think I've got the right view. I'm convinced of it, so I don't have any problems dealing with people."
Does he have hope that one day we'll live in a more, well, understanding world? He does. "I'm a great believer in what Martin Luther King said: 'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' I think ultimately, all these things are going to get worked out, and maybe there's going to be less hatred."
I hope he's right, but these ex-jocks, successful businessmen are all the same. All they talk about is the moral arc of the universe, right?
