We’re going to hear a lot about Scranton, Pa., in coming weeks, as Delaware’s Joe Biden portrays himself as a son of coal country and Trump counters by holding rallies there. Most Americans know Scranton, if they know it at all, as the setting for “The Office,” but anyone who remembers this 1974 story song by Harry Chapin has another reason to snicker. Though Chapin’s best-known songs are mawkishly serious, he turned this tragic tale into a comic concert staple.
It’s based on a real-life 1965 truck crash that killed the driver, who was hailed for preventing a worse catastrophe by staying with the vehicle to the end. So why did Chapin, who penned a three-hankie weeper of a tune about a cabbie picking up an old flame, play this one for laughs? I suppose partly it’s the bananas, but I think it’s partly the setting — it wouldn’t seem half as funny if it happened in Altoona.
Chapin claimed he really did hear the story while riding a bus from Cornell University to New York City by way of Scranton. He should have taken the bus more often — Chapin, acknowledged by all who knew him as a terrible driver, died in a 1981 crash on the Long Island Expressway. He was 39.