AKIRA SUWA / Staff Photographer
Michael Untermeyer gets a word from deputy campaign manager Andre Watson. Untermeyer,a former Democrat, is the sole Republican district-attorney candidate in tomorrow's primary.
Primary 2009
GOP candidate for Phila. district attorney is driven
Last of six profiles of candidates for Philadelphia district attorney.
Five years ago, Michael Untermeyer, the lone Republican candidate for Philadelphia district attorney, crashed a single-engine plane he was piloting over Martha's Vineyard.
The next morning, he rented another plane and took off again before fear grounded him. In his wallet was a prescription written by an emergency-room doctor who had treated him for minor injuries from the crash. It read simply:
"Wake up every day and remember how lucky you are to be alive."
"I don't have a death wish," said Untermeyer, 58, a lawyer and real estate developer. "I just have a wish to push."
A Republican running for district attorney in this city would need that kind of drive come November, when Untermeyer will face the winner of tomorrow's primary fracas among five Democrats.
Untermeyer is not among the city's better-known figures. But loyal friends are eager to fill in details, describing the trim, 5-foot-11 divorced (no kids) Old City resident as a charismatic nerd with money, moxie, and a fast-firing brain.
He was a Philadelphia assistant district attorney for four years and a Pennsylvania deputy attorney general for 11 years, with a specialty in prosecuting drug cases. "There's something about narcotics," he said, "an element of danger. And you're dealing with bad characters."
Taking on the drug guys appealed to what friends call Untermeyer's adrenaline need.
"He's an intellectual genius, but he's also a daredevil," said lawyer and pal Rania Major-Trunfio, who likes to tell the plane-crash story and the oft-repeated tale that Untermeyer was, at 18, the youngest ambulance driver in the history of New York City.
He grew up privileged in Manhattan, the son of two novelists. (His father also was vice president of a securities corporation.) As a youngster, he attended the prestigious Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, Gov. Rendell's alma mater.
But Untermeyer had an innate need to rev the engine of his life, and he used the ambulance job to experience the urban frontier outside the predictable gentility of New York's tony precincts.
"Drive an ambulance in Spanish Harlem and you see a lot of life," he said. "Car wrecks, gun violence, people on drugs."
Untermeyer went on to graduate from Sarah Lawrence College, "an artsy school. My parents said I could do whatever I wanted."
His mother, Patricia Aks, wrote 27 novels for teenage girls, some of them best-sellers. His father, Walter, penned two novels and did some writing for the Wall Street Journal.
'A passion for doing'
But the life of an artist wasn't for Untermeyer, and he went on to the Rutgers University School of Law, enamored of the romance attached to trial law.
He also got into buying and selling real estate, which proved lucrative but didn't feed his soul.
"There's not much skill or talent in real estate," he said. "It's about being methodical, patient, and having a good work ethic."
Through the years, Untermeyer tried to stay close to life's edges, the memory of a screaming ambulance never far away.
