It wasn’t long after movies became ubiquitous in America that movie fan magazine appeared.  Eventually there would be more than 20 of them.    Gladys Hall had a stellar reputation as a “safe” interviewer who could be depended on to tell a good story without any scandal.  Her interview with Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi is one of the strangest things you could imagine.    She was married to glamour photographer Russell Ball, remembered today for his classic portraits of Louise Brooks, Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, and Gloria Swanson, who used Ball as her private ph ..read more

Henry Walter “Slick” Schlichter started as a bantamweight and a boxing promoter who became a sportswriter and then partnered with Black baseball pioneer Sol White to organize the best Negro league team in the country at the turn of the 20th century.    Cub Stricker was a good fielding 2nd baseman with a hot temper who was arrested on the field to avoid fan rioting when he struck a heckler with a thrown ball.   Jack McFetridge was the best amateur pitcher in Philadelphia for years; when he finally went pro, he wasn’t that good.    Pete Childs was a fine 2nd baseman and ..read more

Grayce Nottage-Nicholas was an older sister of Civil Rights activist C. Delores Tucker, but she made a name for herself as a teacher, parole officer, police detective, and beauty queen at a time when women of color were not welcomed to traditional beauty pageants.    In this episode I tell you about the evolution of beauty pageants, how pigmentocracy and straight hair defined beauty from a white perspective, how African American women created their own standards of beauty and started their own beauty pageants, and much more on this Women’s History Month Broadcast of Biographical Byte ..read more

Woman have played a major but underrecognized role in our Nation’s history since its inception.    *London-born Esther DeBerdt Reed married a man who became George Washington’s right-hand man and switched her Tory allegiance to become a radial patriot; the organization she founded to provide some relief to the soldiers fighting for her freedom didn’t quite go the way that she had planned.    *Elizabeth Duane Gillespie came from a politically active family; she was the chief fundraiser and organizer for the Sanitary Fair of 1864, which put her in the position to lead the way ..read more

In 1985, the City of Philadelphia did something unheard of in the United States – it dropped a bomb on one of its neighborhoods.  The resulting fire killed 6 adult and 5 child members of a radical primitivist environmental anarchic group called MOVE.  The fire spread along Osage Avenue, destroyed more than 60 homes, and left 250 men, women, and children homeless.  Former MOVE members are interred in Nature’s Sanctuary, the green natural burial section at Laurel Hill West.  Louise Leaphart James and LaVerne Leaphart Sims were sisters to the acknowledged group leader John Afr ..read more

Several multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies got their starts in Philadelphia as neighborhood drug stores.  Weightman, Powers, and Rosengarten made their money by selling quinine to the US government.  James Smith and Clayton French did not know each and both started as neighborhood druggists; but family and business partners kept their businesses going and their names prominent long after their deaths.  The Wyeth Brothers invented a machine that standardized the size of pills and tablets, and William Warner learned how to sugarcoat them.  Warner’s pharmacopeia was ..read more

Anna Weightman Penfield, the only daughter of quinine king William Weightman, became the richest woman in the world when her father died.  In 1929 when she was in her 80s, she decided that she wanted to produce a Broadway musical featuring songs by two young friends.  She even managed to convince impresario Earl Carroll, the so-called “troubadour of the nude”, to write the book and produce it.  He called it “Fioretta”.  Carroll used it as a vehicle for his current girlfriend Dorothy Knapp, a chorus girl who could not sing, act, or dance.  Despite the casting of vaudevi ..read more

Jack Rose was an old soul guitarist who took John Fahey and other fingerpickers as role models.  Born in Virginia in 1971, Rose moved to Philadelphia in 1998, where he became part of the alternative music scene.  As he taught himself the primitive styles of Blind Blake, Charlie Patton, and others, he took on the name “Dr. Ragtime”.  His album “Raag Manifesto” was named one of the top 50 records of the year by British music magazine “The Wire”.  Davendra Banhart included one of his songs in the compilation “Golden Apples of the Sun”.  His fourth recording, “Kensington B ..read more

There are hundreds of people buried at Laurel Hill East and Laurel Hill West who were the victims of personal violence – accidental, intentional, and self-inflicted.  This month’s episode tells you of nine people who were killed by others.    Author / historian Tom Keels will read you a chapter from his book “Wicked Philadelphia” that tells the amazing story of Singleton Mercer and Mahlon Hutchinson Heberton.    I will tell you of * Mine supervisor George K. Smith who was purportedly killed by the Irish terrorist group the Molly Maguires * Businessman George Haas, shot ..read more

Isidor Schwaner Ravdin was a second-generation American and a fourth-generation physician who combined research with surgery and completely changed the fields of both.  During his 40+ years at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Ravdin rose to become Chief of Surgery and Director of Research.    During World War II, he ran what Vinegar Joe Stillwell called “the best g**d*** hospital in the Army” during the China Burma India campaign.  When President Eisenhower was struck with a bowel obstruction in 1956, Ravdin was summoned to Washington to perform the surgery ..read more