All Episodes

ABC:LHS #035-2   Dennie Hoggard, Jr. went to Penn State where he played football.  The team was good enough that they qualified for Cotton Bowl in the very segregated city of Dallas, Texas.  Dennie made the best of it ... and the Nittany Lions came thiiiis close to winning the game. 

ABC:LHS #035-1   Ira de Augustine Reid, PhD...
...spent the bulk of his career at Haverford College during the days of "separate but equal".  His studies of the Great Migration were admired by all who read them, but his progressive outlook attracted the attention of the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

ABC:LHS #035   Black History Month 2022 features...
Ira de Augustine Reid, PhD was one of the top sociologists in the country in the late 1940s, but because of his scholarship, he got swept up in the “Red Scare” of the mid-20th century. 
Dennie Hoggard, Jr. of West Philadelphia was a tight end at Penn State who helped to integrate the Cotton Bowl in Dallas on New Year’s Day of 1948. 
Marion Stokes had an obsession – to videotape every cable news program on television, and she did so for almost 35 years, amassing a treasure-trove of history. 
Joseph Beam could not find any literature by Black gay men like himself, so he put together a best-selling anthology.  
These four found their final resting place at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd.  I will tell their stories in this month’s edition of “All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories – Four Black Trailblazers.”

BBB:LHWS #004   Theodore Presser...
...got a late start in his career, but he ended up making millions of dollars from publishing a magazine for music teachers around the world, and then by selling them sheet music.  And then he gave away much of his money in his lifetime and the endowments he left continue to aid music students across the country.  His story is inspiring and his legacy is huge.  

ABC:LHS #034-6   Bill Clothier II was the son of a Hall of Fame player and was personally steeped in tennis, but after the War he was recruited for the CIA.  He spent the rest of his career promoting the sport and spying.  

ABC:LHS #034-5   Howard Head...
...found out he was a lousy skier, so he invented Head Skis. He wasn't very good at tennis either, so he invented the Prince racket with the "banjo" head.  Anyone who used it got better - including Howard.

ABC:LHS #034-4   William Clothier...
...was the son of department store founder Isaac Clothier and took up tennis at an early age.  He was good enough to be ranked in the top ten for more than a dozen years, and is in the Tennis Hall of Fam

ABC:LHS #034-3 Frederick Winslow Taylor is mostly remembered today for his theories of Scientific Management. But he was an excellent tennis player - see Clarence Clark - and his golf skills were enough to get him into the 1900 Olympics.

ABC:LHS #034-2   Clarence Clark...
...and his next-door neighbor Frederick Winslow Taylor played tennis very chance they had on their private court. It paid off when they won the first US Open Doubles match in Newport, where Clarence is also enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

ABC:LHS #034-1   Tennis...
...has been around for hundreds of years.  Here's how it got started and how it came to the Americas.

ABC:LHS #034
Tennis came to the United States in the 1870s and was quickly taken up by the East Coast upper crust, the nouveau riche of the Gilded Age. 
Germantown’s Clarence Clark became one of its primary organizers, and his good friend and neighbor Frederick Winslow Taylor joined him as a doubles partner. 
William Clothier was the son of department store magnate Isaac Clothier and played his way into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. 
Howard Head found that he was not a very good tennis player, so he changed the equipment to improve his game, just as he had done for skiing. 
William Clothier Jr. hobnobbed with the likes of Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe while also serving as a spy for the CIA.  
All five of these men are interred at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd.  

BBB:LHWS #003
This is the story of a woman who was so beautiful that she turned down more than 50 marriage proposals before she wed a newspaperman who became the United States’ first ambassador to the Soviet Union, and who then had an affair with one of the most famous illustrators of the 20th century, and who married a second time to a famed opera composer, and who then spent World War II as a radio propagandist pushing for the rights of women, and then spent years in New York City running one of the most exclusive weekly salons in the city. Welcome to the wonderful story of Aimee Ernesta Drinker Bullitt Beaux Barlow, aka "Commando Mary."

ABC:LHS #033-4   Coleman Sellers II...
...was a nationally renowned mechanical engineer for whom photography was a hobby, yet he managed to produce what is now acknowledged as the first motion picture.

ABC:LHS #033-3   Mathew Carey Lea...
...was a bit of a recluse after an early laboratory accident, but he helped photography make giant strides forward through his knowledge of photochemistry. He then invented an entirely new branch of chemistry almost through serendipity. 

ABC:LHS #033-2   Frederick Gutekunst opened a studio on Arch Stret and people flocked to have their picture taken; some of his shots are still considered the definitive representations of the subject.