John Fetterman: Unconventional in Size and Rise
By: Gary Rotstein (Originally published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on January 8, 2019)
Before a December sunrise, an unusually large man clad in gym shorts despite the 32-degree temperature is walking a few miles on the Great Allegheny Passage trail near the Waterfront.
On most such days, he’d be alone in the dark, immersed in the late 20th-century grunge or heavy metal rock pumping through his headphones — the same music he enjoyed when a young man on track to succeed in an insurance office or other business setting.
But this morning, a month before his inauguration as lieutenant governor, 49-year-old John Fetterman was reflecting upon one of the more uncommon journeys taken by any Pennsylvanian elected to statewide office. Mr. Fetterman, who spent 13 years as mayor of Braddock, is about to rise from leadership of a striving-to-revitalize borough of barely 2,000 residents to a position serving 12.8 million citizens.
The daily pre-dawn walk — part of a healthier lifestyle that over the past 14 months has shed some 150 pounds from the still-imposing Mr. Fetterman’s 6-foot-8 frame — served for one of a series of interviews in which he traced the most influential events of his life.
Those include a best friend’s death in his 20s; mentoring an orphaned, disadvantaged youth to manhood; performing social work with young people in blighted communities he’d never visited; winning his first election by one vote; attracting an outsized amount of media attention for a small-town official; and marrying a Brazilian immigrant who learned of Mr. Fetterman from 2,000 miles away by reading an article in an obscure magazine.
Add those up, and Mr. Fetterman acknowledges with a shrug that his ascent to Pennsylvania’s №2 elected office still defies easy explanation. And if fate had changed any one of those prior aspects — e.g., a different young match in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, a Braddock voter who couldn’t make it to the polls in 2005, another publication catching the eye of his future wife — he doubts he’d be preparing for swearing-in at the state Capitol Tuesday as Gov. Tom Wolf’s second-in-command.
“I’m as mystified as anybody at the way it’s worked out,” said the man who is presumably America’s tallest statewide office-holder with a shaved head, whether a left-wing Democrat like him, a mainstream Republican like his parents or something else.
Mr. Fetterman’s unconventional appearance, including symbolic arm tattoos and a casual wardrobe like that of few elected officials, has been widely noted in national newspaper and magazine profiles. But what’s readily visible is just one uncommon aspect of a man who pronounces himself happy to spend the next four years assisting Mr. Wolf’s agenda — one that largely mirrors his — but who clearly hopes to have greater impact of his own beyond that.
