Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania
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Pennsylvania women made major strides during the 1930s. Here are three who logged impressive “firsts.”
Ann Brancato Wood
Notable for . . . being the first woman elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature (1932).
Hometown: Philadelphia
Helen Richey
Notable for . . . being the first woman to pilot a commercial airliner (1934).
Hometown: McKeesport
Crystal Bird Fauset
Notable for . . . being the first African American woman elected to a state’s house of representatives (1938). Hometown: Fauset was born in Maryland in 1894, but moved to Pennsylvania in 1918. She lived in Philadelphia until she died in 1965.
King of Malls
It’s the largest shopping mall on the East Coast and the second largest in the United States. But just how big is the King of Prussia Mall?
It’s so big that . . .
•The amount of soda served every year at the King of Prussia Mall could fill five Olympic swimming pools.
•There are 13,376 parking spaces available for shoppers and employees.
•Walking every indoor hallway and aisle would cover a distance of about 13 miles . . . the same as the entire length of Manhattan.
•There are 11 ATMs, 65 places to get something to eat and drink, and 386 stores.
•The mall uses more than 500,000 lights for its annual Christmas display.
•Its interior encompasses about 3 million square feet—as much as two Louisiana Superdomes.
•All of its electrical wires, if laid end to end, would reach about 115 miles . . . or from New York City to Hartford, Connecticut.
What’s in a Name?
The King of Prussia Mall was named after the Montgomery County town it’s in, which got its name from an 18th-century tavern. The town’s first name was Reesville, for the Rees family who were among the first settlers to the area and who owned the tavern. Most historians agree that the family named their tavern “King of Prussia” for Frederick the Great (Prussia’s king from 1740 to 1786), but no one seems sure why. One theory says it was to honor Prussia’s support of the colonists before and during the American Revolution. Another claims the name was a way to attract Prussian soldiers (stationed at Valley Forge) to the business. Either way, the town took its name from the tavern, and the post office made it official in 1850.
Did You Know?
In the 1850s, religious zealots Peter and Hannah Armstrong purchased four square miles of land in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. They advertised in Philadelphia newspapers for people to come and live in the town, which Armstrong called “Celesta”—where they would await the return of Jesus. In the 1860s, the Pennsylvanian government began demanding taxes from the Armstrongs, who owned all the community’s land. They refused to pay and, in 1864—in order to avoid prosecution—turned over ownership of the land to “Creator and God of heaven and earth, and to His heirs in Jesus Messiah, for their proper use and behoof forever.” Celesta was legally owned by God until Armstrong’s death in 1892, when the government confiscated and sold it for back taxes.
Let Freedom Ring
Just how well do you know the Liberty Bell?
In 1751, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania’s constitution, which laid out citizens’ rights and freedoms, the Pennsylvania Assembly ordered a 2,000-pound bell from the Whitechapel Foundry in England to hang in the steeple of the State House (now Independence Hall). The assembly had it inscribed with a verse from the Bible’s book of Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
Over the last 250 years, the Liberty Bell’s history has been clouded in myth . . . until now. See if you can decipher fact from legend.
1. Fact or legend: The Liberty Bell came to America on a slave ship called the Myrtilla.
2. Fact or legend: The Liberty Bell cracked the first time it was rung on the Fourth of July.
3. Fact or legend: It took three bells to make the Liberty Bell we know today.
4. Fact or legend: The Liberty Bell rang on July 4, 1776, for the reading of the Declaration of Independence.
5. Fact or legend: During the Revolutionary War, the Liberty Bell was hidden so the British troops couldn’t capture it.
6. Fact or legend: The Liberty Bell was rung to signal the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
7. Fact or legend: The Liberty Bell was given its name by patriots during the American Revolution.
8. Fact or legend: The Liberty Bell has been in a train crash.
9. Fact or legend: The Liberty Bell got its famous crack in 1835 when it was rung for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s funeral.
10. Fact or legend: Taco Bell bought the Liberty Bell to help reduce the national debt.
Answers on page 298.
Did You Know?
Thousands of Americans refused to fight in the Civil War for religious reasons, and most of them were from Pennsylvania. That’s because the Keystone State was home to so many people whose faith forbade them to use violence, such as Quakers and Shakers. Both the Union and Con federate armies made provisions for objectors to either serve in a nonmilitary capacity or pay a tax to avoid duty altogether. The number of conscientious objectors from Pennsylvania: about 4,000.
Batter Up!
This is one of our favorite stories, and it’s appeared in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader before. But it’s so important to Pennsylvania that we couldn’t leave it out. If you’ve ever played Little League baseball (or cheered on someone who has), you have a Pennsylvanian to thank for the game.
Happy Accident
One afternoon in 1938, Carl Stotz went out into his Williamsport, Pennsylvania, yard to play catch with his two nephews. They would have preferred to swing at some balls, but the yard was too small to use a bat. So they just played catch. On one throw, a nephew tossed the ball so far that Stotz “had to move to the neighbors’ side of the yard,” as he recalled years later. “As I stretched to catch the ball, I stepped into the cut-off stems of a lilac bush that were projecting several inches above the ground. A sharp stub tore through my sock and scraped my ankle. The pain was intense.”
As Stotz sat nursing his ankle, he was suddenly reminded that he had played on the same kind of rough turf when he was a kid . . . and he remembered a promise he’d made to himself when he was young. Back then, equipment was scarce—he and his friends hit balls with sticks when they didn’t have any bats, and used baseballs until the threads unraveled and the skins came off. Then they patched them up with tape and used them until there wasn’t anything left to tape back together. Some of his friends had even played barefoot because they didn’t have any shoes. Stotz explained: “I remembered thinking to myself, ‘When I grow up, I’m gonna have a baseball team for boys, complete with uniforms and equipment. They’ll play on a real field like the big guys, with cheering crowds at every game.”
Downsizing
Stotz didn’t have any sons of his own, but he decided to fulfill his promise by organizing the neighborhood boys into baseball teams. That way, they could experience the thrill of playing real games on real fields, wearing real uniforms—not just playing stickball in open fields and abandoned lots.
He spent the next few months organizing teams and rounding up sponsors to pay for the equipment. At the same time, he set about “shrinking” the game of baseball so that kids from eight to twelve years old could really play. “When I was nine, nothing was geared to children,” Stotz explained in his book A Promise Kept. Take bats, for example: “We’d step up to the plate with a bat that was both too heavy and too long. Choking up on the bat merely changed the problem. The handle would then bang us in the stomach when we lunged at the ball. We didn’t have the strength or leverage for a smooth, controlled swing.”
Trial and Error
Stotz finally found child-sized bats and equipment for his teams, and at every team practice he adjusted the distances between the bases and be
tween the pitcher’s mound and home plate, trying to find the ideal size for a field. The goal was to come up with distances that were fair for the outfielders (how far a child could actually throw), and for the runners—how fast could they realistically run to beat the throw. After much experimentation, he settled on 60 feet between bases (as opposed to 90 feet in the big leagues) and 40 feet between the pitcher’s mound and home plate (60 feet, 6 inches in the bigs). (The distance from mound to plate later changed to 46 feet and remains that today.)
The only thing Stotz didn’t change was the baseball itself. That way, he figured, kids could practice with the balls they already had.
Sponsors
Shrinking the game turned out to be a lot easier than finding sponsors willing to pay for uniforms and equipment for the three teams in the league. Two and a half months after he’d started, Stotz had been turned down by 56 companies. But when he made his 57th sales pitch, he finally landed his first sponsor—the Lycoming Dairy Farm chipped in $30.
Stotz used that money to buy uniforms and set the date of the league’s first game for June 6, 1939. He also paid a visit to the offices of Grit, Williamsport’s Sunday paper, and asked them to mention the league’s first game in the paper. Sports editor Bill Kehoe asked Stotz what the league was called, but Stotz didn’t have a name yet. He’d considered calling it the Junior Baseball League, but that was too similar to a women’s group called the Junior League. Also, because he’d modeled his kids’ league after the big leagues, he’d considered calling it either the Little Boys’ League or the Little League, but he couldn’t decide between the two. He didn’t like the sound of “Little Boys’ League,” but was worried that people would think the “Little League” meant the size of the league, not the size of the boys. In the end, he let Kehoe choose—Little League it was.
For the rest of the story, turn to page 153.
Colonial Philly
The long answers reveal three facts about the early days in the City of Brotherly Love. (Answers on page 302.)
Across
1 Worms, frequently
5 Fed G-9 Cut a rug
14 Tone down
15 Broccoli ___ (turnip cousin)
16 Neighborhoods
17 City near Provo
18 The ___ Reader
19 Photographer’s word
20 Philadelphia building that hosted the First Continental Congress
23 Longshoreman, e.g.
24 Sawbuck
25 Pact
28 Not kidding
32 Tiff
33 Director Vittorio de ___
35 Meas. of an economy’s income
36 Philadelphia’s nickname in colonial times, because of its rich cultural life
40 River, in Reynosa
41 Fox’s den
42 Rand of fan dancing fame
43 Capitol figure
46 Julia of The Bourne Ultimatum
47 Director Peckinpah
48 Playwright Fugard
50 On-and-off Philadelphia role in Revolutionary days
56 Big shot
57 Cake decorator
58 When repeated, Mork’s phrase
59 “And ___ grow on!”
60 Longest river
61 Sandpaper surface
62 Tyra Banks is one
63 Isn’t well
64 Shopper’s come-on
Down
1 College VIP
2 Kind of glow around one
3 Roman road
4 Pattern used to create documents
5 Solomon of nursery rhyme
6 Photo finish
7 Daisy Mae’s love
8 At no time, poetically
9 One of Santa’s reindeer
10 Designer Giorgio
11 Moon walker Armstrong
12 “Don’t ___ us, we’ll . . .”
13 U-turn from WNW
21 Big name in stationery
22 Word with iron or engine
25 Winter Palace residents
26 Knot again
27 Hawke of Dead Poets Society
28 Battle memento
29 Darby ___ and the Little People (1959 Sean Connery film)
30 “I give!”
31 Fixes, in a way
33 Glide like a hawk
34 “Don’t mind ___ do!”
37 Replay feature, for short
38 Prevent legally
39 Banisters, e.g.
44 Quick on the uptake
45 One skilled in alterations
46 Doesn’t hog
48 ___ art (text graphics)
49 Immune system component
50 Dessert, say, to a dieter
51 Gets older
52 Name hidden in caricatures
53 Figure skater Lipinski
54 Blue dye
55 Mandolin cousin
56 Wash, as a floor
Fabulous Firsts
Pennsylvania has a long list of firsts in the United States, and even in the world. Here are a few.
•The first public protest against slavery took place in Germantown in 1688.
•Jacob’s Creek Bridge—the nation’s first suspension bridge—was built in 1801 to connect Uniontown and Greensburg. It was 70 feet long and 12 feet wide, and was designed by Uniontown engineer James Finley, often called the “father of the modern suspension bridge.”
•The Philadelphia Zoo—the first zoo in the country—opened on July 1, 1874. In 1937, the owners added a children’s zoo, the first in the Western Hemisphere.
•The first concrete-and-steel baseball stadium in the United States—Forbes Field—was built for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1909.
•The first gas station in the country opened at Baum Boulevard and St. Clair Street in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood in December 1913.
•The first pulltabs on cans were used by the Iron City Brewery in Pittsburgh in 1962.
•The first Big Mac was sold in Pittsburgh at the Uniontown McDonalds in 1967.
•The first “Mr. Yuk” sticker—the “yucky” face put on containers to show that the contents are toxic—was made at the Poison Center at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in 1971. (The previously used skull-and-crossbones image proved too attractive to kids, who associated it with pirates and thought it must mean something fun.)
•The first documented use of an emoticon—the smiley face—was at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University in 1982.
•The first simultaneous heart, liver, and kidney transplant was performed at Presbyterian-University Hospital in Pittsburgh in 1989.
•Timothy Heidler of Duncansville, Pennsylvania, suffered a crushed larynx (voicebox) in a 1978 motorcycle accident. In 1998, he had the first successful larynx transplant in the world (at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio). After recovering from the operation, he was able to speak normally for the first time in two decades.
•The first license plates displaying a Web site address—www.state.pa.us—were issued in Pennsylvania in 2000.
Did You Know?
From the United States’ earliest days, Philadelphia’s abolitionists were a thorn in the side of slaveholders. In fact, one famous slave master (none other than George Washington) complained that while he was on a trip to Philadelphia, a Quaker “stole” one of his slaves in order to free him.
Dynasty, Philadelphia Style
Scandals, shipwrecks, affairs—sound like a soap opera? Actually, it’s all part of the life of Louisa Lane Drew, who settled in Pennsylvania in the 19th century and made a name for herself . . . first in the theater, and then for raising a show-business dynasty that became known as the Barrymores.
Louisa Lane Drew wasn’t a native Pennsylvanian—she was born in London in 1820—but she moved to Philadelphia with her mother when she was just seven years old. Both quickly got involved in the city’s thriving theater community. In 1827, Louisa made her American theatrical debut in Richard III at the Walnut Theatre and later performed in Washington, D.C., and New York City, ult
imately earning high praise as Little Pickle in the Bowery Theatre’s The Spoiled Child.
A Traveling Show
In 1830, Louisa and her family formed a traveling theater company. But on a trip to the Caribbean, their ship hit a rock near Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and they all had to jump overboard. In her autobiography, Louisa wrote, “We were 40 miles from any settlement, and the captain and one other would have to go the city of San [Santo] Domingo and obtain a brig to get us off. To haul by land was impossible. We were there six weeks.” By the time they were able to set sail again, Louisa’s stepfather and her youngest sister had died of yellow fever.
The rest of the family (Louisa, her mother, and two more sisters) returned to the United States briefly, but then joined another traveling troupe. This time they all headed to the Bahamas. When a night storm drove their ship into a sandbar, they found themselves shipwrecked yet again. This time, when rescue came, Louisa’s mother decided to take her daughters home to Pennsylvania and leave the high seas to the sailors.
Husbands #1, #2, and #3
When she was 16, Louisa married her first husband, a middle-aged English actor named Henry Blaine Hunt. The couple toured with many U.S. theater companies, including one that starred Junius Brutus Booth (John Wilkes Booth’s father). It was during this time that Louisa established a solid reputation as an actress, playing opposite some of the most popular actors of the day—Tyrone Power (great-grandfather of the 20th-century actor) and Edwin Booth (John Wilkes Booth’s brother). She also earned $20 a week, the highest salary paid to a leading lady at that time.
After 11 years of marriage, though, the Hunts divorced—a scandalous act for the mid-1800s. Louisa quickly married another actor, George Mossop, but Mossop was a heavy drinker and died just five months later.