Podcast
All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories
Hosted by Joe Lex · EN
Brief biographies of permanent residents of Laurel Hill East in Philadelphia and Laurel Hill West in Bala Cywnyd, Pennsylvania. Often educational, always entertaining.
46episodes
Episodes
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Rudolph Hennig: There's Always Room for Cello
Yesterday00:18:42Tap to summarizeBBB:LHWS #057-1 Rudolph Hennig... ...was a German born master of the cello who was the Philaldelphia Orchestra's first cello soloist after he had already been painted by Thomas Eakins. A century after his death, his portrait was again in the news.
Transcribe →Three More Musicians from Laurel Hill West
2d ago01:07:14Tap to summarizeBBB:LHWS #057 Three More LHW Musicians Rudolph Hennig was the first cello soloist for the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1901; a few years earlier, Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins had represented him in oils as The Cello Player, which was used as a bargaining chip more than a century later. Winston Samuels McGinnis was a moderately successful Jamaican ska and rocksteady performer who sang backup in one of reggae's first worldwide hits "Israelites" by Desmond Dekker. Jeffrey Lee Johnson, or simply JEF was the session guitarist who could apparently sound like anyone but was at his best when he sounded like Jef Johnson. The two usual comparisons are Lonnie Johnson ... and Jimi Hendrix.
Transcribe →Rev William Smith: Penn's Forgotten Founder
2w ago00:27:42Tap to summarizeABC:LHS #087-5 Rev. William Smith... ...was a Scottish-born Anglican who impressed Benjamin Franklin with his ideas about higher education and set up the skeleton and backbone of what became the University of Pennsylvania today, but he made few friends and is little remembered today
Transcribe →Hilery Baker: Philadelphia's First "Officer Down"
2w ago00:26:11Tap to summarizeABC:LHS #087-4 Hilery Baker... ...was a German immigrant who became two-term mayor during the time when the city was also the nation's capital. He established the first city police force and was the first "Officer Down" in the city's history.
Transcribe →Alexander Murray: A Forgotten Commodore
2w ago00:21:49Tap to summarizeABC:LHS #087-3 Alexander Murray... ... came from a family that was part of the Scottish diaspora to the New World after the Jacobite Rebellion in the early 1700s. Born in Maryland, he was a ship's captain before he was out of his teens and rose to become a Commodore in the Navy. By the time he retired, he was a battle-hardened veteran with years at sea.
Transcribe →Thomas Godfrey: A New Way to See the Horizon
2w ago00:24:54Tap to summarizeABC:LHS #087-2 Thomas Godfrey... ...was one of the New World's first native inventors. While working as a glazier, he was intrigued by the reflection and refraction of light through a shard of glass. This led to his invention that made life on the seas easier and safer, and saved thousands of lives in the process.
Transcribe →Invitation to an Exhumation
2w ago00:18:52Tap to summarizeABC:LHS #087-1 The concept of "celebrity corpses" to attract customers to a cemetery was nothing new. People had been digging up other people for years for legal, political, religious, scientific, and other reasons, so why not for commerce? Many transportable cadavers have made interesting journeys to their final resting places.
Transcribe →Mobile Corpses from the 18th Century
2w ago02:21:43Tap to summarizeABC:LHS #087 Even in death, some people don’t rest easy. Someone always wants to dig them up and move them. Though Laurel Hill East opened in 1836, several of its 18th-century dead were buried elsewhere first. First, I trace the many reasons people exhume the dead. And there are plenty. Thomas Godfrey invented a lifesaving navigational instrument. Buried first on a Germantown farm, he was later pursued by Laurel Hill as one of its earliest celebrity corpses. Commodore Alexander Murray was as important a sailor as Isaac Hull or Stephen Decatur, but without the headline-grabbing legend. Mayor Hilary Baker served when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital and crossed paths daily with the signers of the Declaration and Constitution. He died in office. Rev. William Smith deserves recognition alongside Benjamin Franklin as a cofounder of the University of Pennsylvania, yet Franklin is celebrated while Smith is largely forgotten. I had a blast making this one. I think you’ll have fun listening.
Transcribe →George Gerbner: The Man Who Counted Fear
3w ago01:18:00Tap to summarizeBBB:LHWS #056 George Gerbner... ...was a Hungarian refugee and combat survivor who grew up through the start of European Fascism during the 1930s. His discovered that the power lay with those who controlled the narrative and tell the stories. He used violence as an example to spread his message, but a deeper reading shows that his concerns were that American media were starting to resemble the prefascist state he had known in his youth. Needless to say, he was a controversial figure for many years.
Transcribe →Take Me to the River: A Virtual Tour
May 1401:26:41Tap to summarizeRiver Section starts at the BODE plot Join me on an audio guided tour of the River Section of Laurel Hill West, one of the original four segments when the cemetery opened in 1869. You won't miss and of the fancy mausoleums or Tiffany studio stained glass, since they came later. You will meet the Father of Scientific Management and the Mother of Mother's Day, the man who literally changed two sports and his sister who wrote for The New Yorker, a man who decorated several rooms in City Hall and Masonic Temple, and a woman whose work is primarily at The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the first doctor to take care of Phineas Gage after the tamping bar incident (it wasn't a crowbar), and a bride who wore her dress for the first time in her coffin. Plus ... oh, I don't know, maybe a couple of dozen more. I promise you at least two or three stories you will want to tell others.
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