A reporter and a politician behind the scenes in Bucks

Nearly 40 years ago I stood along River Road in Point Pleasant, watching as hundreds of environmental activists demonstrated against construction of the Point Pleasant water project. Dozens of activists were arrested that day, many eventually going to jail.
Amid the chaos, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned my head. It was the owner of the home behind me. He very angrily told me to get off his lawn. I looked down and saw my feet were planted on his grass, no more than a few inches off the berm of River Road.
“Sorry,” I said. I took a step forward and resumed observing, for my newspaper’s readers, one of the pivotal moments in the history of Bucks County. Sometimes, the memories you carry with you over the decades are kind of weird – such as a homeowner barking at me for standing on his lawn while a civil war erupted just a few feet away.
A few months later, on the hottest of summer days, Bucks County Commissioner Andy Warren was at work in his office on the fifth floor of the courthouse in Doylestown when the most rancid of odors permeated through the brick walls of the county administration building. It seemed that one of the Point Pleasant activists had dumped a truckload of pig manure onto Main Street in Doylestown. Again, another memory that remains with you for decades – this time burned not only into the brain but the olfactory nerve as well.
These stories and many others are recounted by Andy and me in a new book titled “Notes on Bucks County: Reflections on Politics in Pennsylvania’s Most Curious and Captivating Collar County.”
The book examines the evolution of politics in Bucks County over the past 75 years, focusing on the transition of the county from a farming community into a sprawling suburb; the fight over the Point Pleasant water project; the landmark separation of powers case known as Beckert v. Warren; the decades-long war between former members of Congress Pete Kostmayer and Jim Greenwood; the influence of “outsiders” on county politics, among them cable TV pundit Michael Smerconish and current gubernatorial candidate Charlie Gerow; the ascent into statewide office of two local political leaders, Mark Schweiker and Jim Cawley; and the 2019 and 2020 elections.
In preparing the book, we interviewed more than 20 current and former county political leaders, including Charles Meredith, who served as a county commissioner back in the 1960s and was, until his death in 2020, writing a weekly column for the Bucks County Herald.

We dove into boxes of public records and culled through hundreds of newspaper stories, some dating back a century. And what we learned from this research is that Bucks County is perhaps Pennsylvania’s most unique county.
The county’s population of more than 600,000 citizens makes it a serious player in regional, state and national politics – indeed, in the closing days of the 2020 election both Donald Trump and Joe Biden felt compelled to make campaign stops in Bucks County. Moreover, Bucks remains one of Pennsylvania’s most purple of counties. Even as Philadelphia remains staunchly Democratic and the other three collar counties – Chester, Delaware and Montgomery – have trended Democratic in recent years, Bucks is a county very much in play in each election.
And that means the politics here can be two-fisted. Among the battle royals our book covers are the long-standing feud between Ed Howard, a longtime Republican state senator from Doylestown, and Herb Barness, for many years Bucks County’s most influential developer and GOP powerbroker.
We look at the rogue campaign waged by Republican Commissioner Rob Loughery to overcome bottom ballot position to save his seat in the fall 2019 election – his strategy didn’t work, but it almost did. And we reveal that in the turmoil of the Point Pleasant protests of the 1980s, proponents of the project actually planted John le Carré-style spies within the environmental organization Del-AWARE in an attempt to garner intelligence on the group’s plans.
Readers will also learn how stale hamburger rolls were once employed to sway the electorate; how lieutenant governor candidate Mark Schweiker was once attacked by a trunkful of angry pretzels; how First Lady Barbara Bush responded when a local journalist (not me) spilled a glass of water on her; how Sandy Miller, who would go on to a long career in Bucks County elective office, got her start in politics as a young girl, wearing campaign signs on the back of her Halloween costume as she went trick-or-treating in Levittown, and how Oscar Hammerstein, perhaps Broadway’s most famous librettist, may have been greatly influenced by a weathervane erected by the local Republican organization.
The stories in our book illustrate how Bucks County has evolved into a center of power and influence, but mostly as a center of uncertainty – a place where no electoral outcome is guaranteed, thanks to the ever-changing political atmosphere that has made Bucks County truly a place that is both curious and captivating.
Hal Marcovitz spent 30 years as reporter and columnist, assigned for most of his career to covering politics and government in Bucks County. Andy Warren has been active in Bucks County politics since the 1970s, serving as a county commissioner for 15 years. Learn more about their book at notesonbuckscounty.com.

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