All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories Joe Lex

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 photographer. 
 
Gladys Hall and Russell Ball are interred in an unmarked grave in the Lansdowne Section of Laurel Hill East.  If you like watching movies, you’ll love this podcast about their early days – the mid-April 2024 edition of Biographical Bytes from Bala: Laurel Hill West Stories #031 – Glamourizing Early Hollywood. 

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 served in the role for the 1902 Phillies.  It was while serving as player-manager for an Ohio League team that he pulled the unfathomable feat of throwing one pitch as a reliever and getting three out.
 
These four men were born in a ten-year span, three are interred at LHW and one at LHE.  They are featured in this month’s episode of All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories #061 for April 2024 – Play Ball!, Part Three – Four More Laurel Hill Baseball Pioneers. 
 

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 Bytes from Bala: Laurel Hill West Stories – Black Is Beautiful. 

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 for the Centennial Exposition of 1876. 
 
*Anna Justina Magee was the last of seven siblings who lived together their entire lives.  Her legacy for the family was a hospital designed for people who were convalescing from injury – The Magee Rehabilitation Hospital. 
 
These three women are featured in this month’s episode of All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories #060 for March 2024 – Three More Women Who Changed Philadelphia. 
 

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 Africa but left the organization before the conflagration.  To tell their story, I must tell the story of John Africa, the formation of MOVE, and its frequent confrontations with neighbors and city officials in this month’s episode of Biographical Bytes from Bala #029: MOVE and Laurel Hill. 

The Black population of Philadelphia dates to Colonial times but expanded tremendously during the so-called Great Migration that started around 1910. 
Sarah A. Anderson came from an educated family – her father was the first Black dentist in Florida and her husband was a politically active podiatrist.  Sarah served 17 years in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and quietly changed life for the better for thousands of Pennsylvanians, Black and white. 
Samuel L. Evans was also from Florida and saw five lynchings before he was 10 years old.  Through machinations that people are still pondering, he managed to make himself the “Godfather of Black Philadelphia” despite never being elected to public office.  His wake was in City Hall.
Winifred Harris was the woman you wanted as your next-door neighbor.  She rescued abandoned properties in West Philadelphia and converted them into vegetable gardens for the neighborhood, while planting more than 1000 trees for the city.  Her shocking death at the hands of a home intruder was mourned by all who knew her. 
For Black history month, learn about these three lesser-known heroes of Black Philadelphia in the February 2024 episode of “All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories – Three More Black Pioneers”.