A solemn Mayor Nutter recalled his father yesterday as a resourceful jack-of-all-trades who instilled good diction, manners, and sportsmanship, and was due to join the mayor for Thanksgiving dinner but was found dead 24 hours earlier at his senior living complex in South Jersey.
Basil D. Nutter Jr., 76, was raised near 22d and Montrose Streets, attended South Philadelphia High School, and served three years with the Army's 82d Airborne Division. He was pronounced dead Wednesday of natural causes.
"I can still hear his voice ringing in my ears. He would say, 'Enunciate. Enunciate,' " said the mayor, a refined speaker who took the lesson to heart.
"He and my mother moved to West Philadelphia with my [maternal] grandmother in 1956. I was born in '57," said Nutter. "He taught me to ride a two-wheeler bike, to throw a football."
In a neighborhood where gang activity was not uncommon, the father also went out of his way to protect Nutter and his sister, Renee, by driving them and their friends around in his station wagon.
"He was always in the middle of what was going on. He was always talking to the guys about going to school and staying in school," said the mayor. "He would organize dances at our house on Larchwood Street to keep the guys together, focused, and out of trouble with gangs."
He was among the first members of the Catholic laity to read from the pulpit at Transfiguration of Our Lord Catholic Church, at 55th and Cedar Streets in West Philadelphia, after the Vatican, in the early 1960s, said the privilege of reading aloud in front of the congregation was no longer restricted to priests, his son said.
"When he spoke, you were not wondering what he was saying," said Nutter. "Both his volume and his meaning came through loud and clear."
Professionally, he moved around. For a time, he was a salesman for Mead Johnson & Co., and a few other big companies. For a time in the 1960s, he supervised a route of carriers for The Inquirer.
"From time to time, for whatever reason, he was laid off, or quit, or moved to another company," said Nutter. "In the in-between time, if he wasn't working, he'd do plumbing."
The son would sometimes accompany the father to plumbing jobs as his helper, "but no one is ever going to hire me to put in a faucet," said Nutter, who said he never got much beyond handing wrenches to his dad.
The newspaper-delivery job came with an unexpected bonus.
One day, a stray puppy followed a deliveryman back to the office, where Basil Nutter took it under his wing and brought it home for his children. It was a cross between a Dalmatian and other breeds. The future mayor was about 7 at the time.
"I called him Poochie," said Nutter. "My sister called him Buttons."
Michael Nutter went to St. Joseph's Preparatory School, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and served on City Council for nearly 15 years before being elected mayor in 2007.
His sister, Renee Messina, has worked in the insurance field and is raising her children, alone now since she was widowed last year.
Basil Nutter and his former wife, Catalina Bargas, divorced after the children were grown. At various times after that, he lived in Sicklerville, Pennsville, and Hopewell Township, N.J.
"Almost unfortunately for anyone who met him, my father could not contain his pride in both of his children," said Nutter, but because Michael had "such a public job," the focus often fell on him.
Once, when Nutter was still a councilman, he recalled, he drove to Atlantic City to speak at a meeting of judges and lawyers.
"I got to the toll booth. . . . I was trying to get my money together. And the lady in the toll booth says, 'Is your name Nutter?' I said, 'Yes.' She said, 'You must be Basil's kid. He talks about you all the time.' "
Because "politics was not the family business," said Nutter, his father "always kept a certain amount of pride and amazement in his heart" that his son was elected to the city's highest office.
A Memorial Mass will be said at 11 a.m. next Saturday at St. Teresa of Avila Catholic Church, 46 Central Ave., Bridgeton, N.J.
The family requests that anyone wishing to express condolences do so through cards and letters directed to the Mayor's Office, Room 215, City Hall, Philadelphia 19107.
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