Biography|Stuart Graham — The Square That Drowned When the Levee Gave Way

People treat a contractor's rise as a sequence of promotions.

The event that bent Stuart Graham's early career was a river coming over a wall.

Tropical Storm Agnes stalled over the mid-Atlantic in June 1972.

On 23 June the Susquehanna poured over the levee on Riverside Drive in Wilkes-Barre.

By the next evening the river had crested at 40.91 feet.

Public Square, the old town plot at the center of Wilkes-Barre, stood under an estimated fourteen feet of water.

Sordoni Construction's tribute after Graham's death is the local record of what he did next.

He had come to the firm just before the flood, already opening an Allentown office.

The emergency work pulled him back to Forty Fort.

He spent the cleanup as a field man turned executive on disaster relief across the Wyoming Valley.

The published record does not give a single jobsite address for those weeks.

This square is the place a visitor can still stand and see the civic center the water covered.

Sordoni dates his presidency to 1979, seven years after the flood.

The interval is the point.

A man with an economics degree from Holy Cross learned the trade by putting a drowned valley back together, then ran the firm that had sent him into it.

The National Weather Service photograph of downtown Wilkes-Barre that week is federal work, public domain.

The square was rebuilt in the downtown urban-renewal program that followed.

The marker on the northwest corner still names 23 June 1972.

Photo: National Weather Service, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons