ROHRER, AFTER HIS OTHER SETBACKS, IS STILL THE MAYOR
Author: Tim Weiner, Inquirer Trenton Bureau
It was about six months ago that the fortunes of William G. Rohrer - mayor of Haddon Township, banker and businessman - began to fall apart.
On Dec. 3, his wife, Mimi, was indicted on charges of killing the couple's 2-year-old adopted son in 1975. Then, on April 29, he was removed as chief executive officer of First Peoples Bank of South Jersey, the bank he founded in 1956.
But yesterday, after months of speculation that this might be the year that he would lose a township election, voters decided to continue the remarkable mayoral reign of Rohrer, 73, who has led the government of this Camden County community since 1948.
To be sure, any history of the post-World War II era in this region would have to devote a section to Rohrer, a key figure in the region's economic expansion and in its politics.
Born in Williamsport, Pa., in 1909, he worked at his father's grocery and, in the late 1920s, started selling cars at his father's dealership in Pottsville, Pa. In 1929, his father moved the dealership to Camden - "because of his keen judgment and vision for the future for this area," Rohrer wrote years later.
By 1947, the younger Rohrer was proprietor of the biggest Chevrolet agency in South Jersey and an unopposed Republican candidate for Haddon Township committee. He was toasted at testimonials and honored as a community leader. Hundreds of newspaper clippings attest to his civic virtues in the decade after the war, a period in which Rohrer and his first wife, Floretta, raised four daughters.
In 1951, he sponsored a referendum question that converted Haddon Township's government to a three-member commission. That year, upon his re- election, he became the town's first and, so far, only mayor.
The folksy appeal he had for his constituents was exemplified in the summer of 1952, when a local taxpayers' association balked at paying for air conditioning at the township's municipal offices. Rohrer picked up the $1,275 tab.
In 1955, Rohrer suffered his first political defeat, losing a race for state senator by fewer than 300 votes to Democrat Joseph Cowgill. It was a bitter campaign, and afterward, Rohrer filed unsuccessful lawsuits to have the election results overturned. A state Senate committee investigation found ''a great many instances of voting irregularities" but "insufficient evidence of voting fraud" to warrant Cowgill's ouster.
Rohrer then channeled his frustrated ambition into banking. If he could not be very powerful - and he was never to win a higher office - at least he would be very rich.
Throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, Rohrer consolidated his political power and expanded his financial power. He took over a small bank with $2.9 million in deposits in 1956. By 1981, with 46 branches and assets of more than $1 billion, First Peoples was South Jersey's largest banking institution.
"I didn't run for (higher) office again because it would mean I would have to give up the bank," Rohrer said in a 1971 interview. "Besides, the only thing you won for (being elected to) the legislature was prestige - and what can be more prestigious than being president of a bank?"
But, Rohrer added in that interview, "No matter who you are in life, anything can happen."
In late January 1975, Rohrer, then 66, and his second wife, Mimi, then 34,
went to the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, El Salvador, in an effort to adopt two Salvadoran children: a boy named Pepe, 2 1/2, and a girl named Ana Cecelia, 2.
Frustrated by red tape, Rohrer later said, he telephoned Clifford P. Case, then the senior U.S. senator from New Jersey. In a few days, a telegram signed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger arrived at the embassy, asking that ''all appropriate courtesies" be shown to the Rohrers. Soon afterward, immigration visas for the two children were approved; the Rohrers renamed the boy Billy.
On the morning of May 28, 1975, Billy Rohrer died. An autopsy showed widespread brain hemorrhages and body bruises. The county medical examiner's office ruled that the death had resulted from "self-inflicted and accidental" injuries. By evening, the Haddon Township police department
closed the case and turned its evidence over to the Camden County Prosecutor's Office.
In 1976, the State Commission of Investigation began looking at how the county prosecutor had handled Billy Rohrer's death. In November 1979, the
commission concluded that the death appeared to be a case of murder or manslaughter.
Mimi Rohrer is scheduled to stand trial on murder charges later this year.
And even as Rohrer's personal troubles mounted, his bank was coming under
financial fire.
First Peoples, faced with an order by federal banking regulators to overhaul its loan practices, disclosed on April 11 that in 1982, it had lost $9.5 million, written off $17 million in bad loans and was carrying nearly $70 million in delinquent or rescheduled loans.
Insiders at the bank reported that Rohrer, though the bank's chief executive officer, had exercised little authority in recent months. Twelve days ago, Rohrer sat quietly before angry First Peoples shareholders as the bank's board of directors voted to strip him of his title.
And through it all, Rohrer found himself facing the first serious challenge to his political leadership in more than a decade. Though his opponents denied that they were running because of Rohrer's personal troubles - and those troubles were not debated publicly - it was clear that the mayor was more vulnerable in this race than ever before.
Vulnerable or not, however, Rohrer won - again.