This morning's Inquirer reads like a warped version of Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City". Or a tabloid like The New York Post. Why?

Because in the ever widening gap between the haves and have nots....in Lower Merion....we have more tales of "Money Doesn't Know Who Owns It", "Agree With Me or You're Fired", "I Can Beat You: You're Just "The Help"".

Yes, this is who developers and to an extent, some in government are pandering to....this is who we are building all these McMansions, Condos, Taj Mahal Schools, "Upscale Shopping", and new urbanist inspired Disneylands with Stepfordesque matching awnings in place of our transit oriented by history small towns. We are losing our history of our once rich fabric of genteel behavior and generosity of spirit, fabulous architecture, wide swaths of open space for what?

Wow, it is pretty darn embarrassing to admit you are from the Main Line these days....Philadelphia is trying to steal the Barnes, "heiresses" are making front page news for beating their help again, and beloved teachers are being fired because why after 22 years?

Oh read it and weep...and next time someone asks you where you are from, you might just want to say "Southeastern Pennsylvania"

Main Line nannies tell tales of terror
By Kathy Boccella
Inquirer Staff Writer

They still dream about Susan Tabas Tepper. And their dreams aren't sweet.
"I can't get her out of my head," said a nanny who worked for the volatile Main Line socialite for many years. "It was like a war zone, and you think, 'Did we all really go through this?' It was awful."

Like most of the eight former employees who agreed to talk about the convicted nanny-beater, charged May 23 with assaulting a second employee, the woman requested anonymity.

Many at Tepper's seven-acre Villanova estate are illegal immigrants who worry she will report them to authorities. Others get paid under the table and don't want trouble from the IRS.

They all describe Tepper, 44, as a temperamental woman who could be funny and generous, but also demanding and explosive. They say she berated, bullied and pushed around the hired help, especially the immigrants who cleaned her house and cared for her four children, ages 2 through 13.

Why did they stay? Money. The banking heiress paid up to $100 an hour, thousands of dollars for overnight stays or to lure back those who quit or were fired in a fit of pique, say former employee Xiomara D. Salinas and others. Some housekeepers earned $100,000 a year.

....The former president of the Philadelphia Polo Club, who has enjoyed Donald Trump's hospitality at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., was sentenced in February to a year's probation and other penalties, including anger-management classes.

But three months later, on May 20, Tepper allegedly attacked another worker, Urszula Kordzior, known as Ula, when she tried to flee her roiling boss. Tepper, charged with two counts of simple assault and harassment and violating probation, is in Montgomery County Prison awaiting a hearing Wednesday.

....Stacy Leshner said she had witnessed Tepper's fury.

"Oh, my God, she was so mean to Ula," said the Pennsylvania State University student, who worked for Tepper last summer and last month. "When Ula was there, I was really, really happy because I wouldn't get yelled at. Ula was taking all the heat."

Kordzior, who is Polish, was fired and rehired repeatedly over 10 years, ex-workers said.

"She told me, 'I hate Ula. I can't stand her,' " said the longtime nanny, who still has flashbacks. "She would say to her kids, 'Isn't Ula ugly? Tell her she's ugly.' "

....Tepper did not respond to a letter sent to prison requesting an interview. Kordzior could not be reached.

Tony Fercos, Tepper's boyfriend, was present at the blow-up...."I don't know why it got so far that she's in jail," he said.

Former employees said Tepper treated foreigners worst.

....Shanin Specter, 49, a lawyer from Gladwyne and a friend of 20 years, said Tepper was a decent woman who had had problems, including a child treated for cancer last year.

"Her husband is gone. Her support systems are minimal," Specter wrote to The Inquirer in an e-mail in which he criticized the paper's characterization of Tepper.

...With Tepper's life in chaos, Fercos said he was taking care of his son Baron, who will accompany him to the Dollywood amusement park in Tennessee, where the act is booked this summer. The other children are with their father.

Fercos talks to Tepper in prison daily, he said. She is reading, exercising and, perhaps, rethinking her management style.

"She might realize the world cannot be so perfect the way she wants and not to argue with people," he said. "She's already a different person right now. Sometimes jail is good for you."

And.....

High stakes in teacher-parent clash
By Martha Woodall
Inquirer Staff Writer

Officials at the Baldwin School thought so highly of Patricia Tollin's teaching, they regularly took prospective school parents to observe her second-grade classroom.
But Wednesday was her last day at the prestigious, private girls' school in Bryn Mawr, where yearly high school tuition tops $23,000. After 22 years, Tollin's annual contract was not renewed.

In a blistering 37-page complaint filed in Montgomery County Court last week, Tollin, 67, contends that Baldwin's new head of school decided to side with a wealthy Gladwyne family and end the career of a respected teacher rather than risk losing a multimillion-dollar gift for a new athletic facility.

In addition to the school, Tollin's complaint names Michael and Sheryl Pouls, whose daughter transferred from Tollin's class to another second-grade class at Baldwin in February.

....The school-year saga began with the Poulses' concerns about other children calling their daughter fat and later encompassed accounts of marital woes, a classroom tirade, and the censoring of an ad in the school's annual program book.

Tollin's complaint says Baldwin officials bent over backward to meet the escalating demands of the Poulses, whose daughter was unhappy and said the veteran teacher had yelled at and humiliated her. The Poulses had threatened to pull the child and her 11-year-old sister out of Baldwin.

The school was eager to appease Michael Pouls, the complaint says, because he had promised to donate millions of dollars "for the construction of a new athletic facility which would carry the Pouls family name. Because the facility had not yet been constructed," the Poulses "could possibly revoke their financial pledge."

......Lisanne L. Mikula, one of Tollin's attorneys, said the record would show that overwhelmingly, Tollin had been loved and respected at Baldwin.

Tollin's attorneys have told her not to discuss the case.

According to the suit, Tollin was often taken out of her class this school year to meet with administrators to discuss appeasing the Poulses. She says Baldwin circulated letters to parents and staff with false information. Her suit also alleges that Sheryl Pouls engaged in a profanity-laced tirade during a parents' meeting that prompted one terrified student to hide in a locker.

All the troubles began, the lawsuit says, with a discussion about lunch.

Sheryl Pouls called Tollin in October to complain that some classmates had called her daughter "fat," and she wanted Tollin to monitor what the child ate at lunch....According to the suit, relations grew strained in November when Sheryl Pouls allegedly visited Tollin's classroom to ask her to intervene in the Poulses' marital problems....Days later, the complaint says, Michael Pouls complained that Tollin was singling out his daughter by focusing on what she ate at lunch. He told Tollin that he was the child's main caregiver, the suit says, and that she should take orders about her only from him.

"Tollin then realized she was in the middle of a domestic-relations dispute," the complaint says.

These articles are well worth a complete read....how embarrassing it is to say you are from Lower Merion today.....not that Lower Merion is the only Main Line Township with all these "special needs" millionaires, now are they?