Delaware County Council Vice Chair Monica Taylor learns to be ‘superwoman’ during the coronavirus pandemic | Maria Panaritis

It was supposed to be a part-time job. A tough one filled with challenges. But not the bucking bronco ride that guiding one of Pennsylvania’s largest counties through a once-in-a-generation pandemic has proven to be.

This is why I called Dr. Monica Taylor a month or so ago with a request: Could I have in-person time with the Delaware County Council vice chair? Since a few weeks after her inauguration in January 2020, she had been in charge of helping form a Health Department and responding to the coronavirus disaster — all while learning to be a government executive for the very first time.

I had been fascinated. How had she, and so many other relative political newcomers who swept to power across suburban Philadelphia as Democrats in late 2019, managed this crash course in public service? Here they were, living through a yearlong crisis-management frenzy.

Taylor, 38, was all the more fascinating for her role in a county that counted itself the largest in the country without a Health Department. Also, she had a full plate while taking on this herculean task: a professor with a doctorate in exercise physiology and a leadership post at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia; a mother of three with a home in Drexel Hill into which the North Wilmington native moved in 2016 with her husband and children and that had become a pandemic office; a onetime overseas professional basketball player who then pivoted toward what she thought would be a life of ambition in academia.

Taylor and her four Democratic colleagues came to power pledging to form a Health Department and institute other reforms in this former Republican stronghold of more than half a million people. She had had just two years on a local school board before winning a Council seat.

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Her party assumed control in a 2019 county office sweep fueled by anti-Donald-Trump furor. They took over a place run by Republicans since the Civil War.

“Can I finish my superwoman spiel?” county spokesperson Adrienne Marofsky asked as she, Taylor, and I huddled inside the county government center in Media on Wednesday.

Taylor, she said, was the superwoman.

The pair were together on March 6, 2020, when word of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Delaware County came through. Taylor was reading a Dr. Seuss book to children at Bywood Elementary School in Upper Darby. Her then-preschool-aged daughter was in tow.

“Monica finished the book,” Marofsky recalled, “and I said, ‘We have to go back to the office.’”

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“Yep,” Taylor said, laughing in a way that seems more like a sanity recharge than an indulgence in frivolity. “Fox in Socks,” she said, was the book in question. Again, with a laugh.

Thus began a frantic, nonstop year. Oh — and she gave birth during it all to her third daughter. And taught her university students. And helped tutor her two slightly older daughters after the pandemic forced closure of in-class instruction for months in Upper Darby Township public schools.

Endless mornings, endless nights?

“It’s been the norm for the last year,” Taylor said. “This situation has been changing so much and evolving every day. ... It’s been every day talking to Adrienne, talking to [COVID-19 director] Rosemarie [Halt] at all hours to figure out what we were doing the next day. ... It’s the same now, especially with the vaccine, because it changes so often.”

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Taylor and her Council colleagues managed not just a COVID-19 response but also to get plans for a Health Department off the ground. They recently opened what will eventually be a central location, in Yeadon.

“We’ve had to learn to be able to pivot a massive program very quickly,” Taylor continued, “hour by hour.”

Taylor says her time playing basketball in Ireland, and all through her youth, has been good training. You learn to collaborate even if you’re playing with people you might not love.

She was a “3 guard” in hoops.

Ah. Of course she was. The one of five people on a court typically seen as most nimble. Most versatile. Most fluid.

I met Taylor two weeks ago at the tiered parking lot of Delaware County Community College. A Johnson & Johnson, single-shot, mini mass-vaccination site was almost ready to open there. Joining us were Lori Devlin, Intercommunity Health coordinator, and Halt, whom Taylor and Council tapped last March as COVID director. Halt had advocated for years to form a Health Department and was advising Council on how to do so when the coronavirus arrived.

“I reached out to Rosemarie the second day of the pandemic,” Taylor said.

Since then, not a day has gone by where the two have not spoken.

“I begin the day and end the day talking to Monica,” Halt said, as they recalled those early days of battle. “Every day of the last year.”

They were standing near tents where J&J vaccine shots would be administered to thousands of people starting on Saturday, April 10.

A few days later, just this past Tuesday, federal government officials announced a pause in use of J&J owing to safety concerns. Yet another crisis.

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Taylor was driving to a funeral. A three-hour drive to Chambersburg, starting at the crack of dawn. Her phone lit up as she and fellow Council members rushed yet again into action. Officials had just started using the J&J vaccines to finally start to supercharge vaccinations for her home county of some 560,000 people. Now what?

“The group had a meeting at 9:50,” Taylor recalled as we talked in her office the next day. “I called Rose between the funeral and driving to the cemetery to talk about the meeting. And went to the cemetery. And then finished that and called Rose again.”

Taylor was attending the burial of her godmother’s father. Someone she had not seen “because COVID,” she said. “We hadn’t seen them in person for a year and a half.”

So, yes. A peek under the hood of one of our region’s shiny new politicians. But this wasn’t just an overheating engine. This was a baptism by fire.