The Real Philadelphia Occupiers: Deadbeat Tenants

THE FOLLOWING BLOG IS INCOMPLETE. IT WILL BE FINISHED IN JANUARY, 2012. AS OF NOVEMBER 30, 2011, THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS 1,975 WORDS.

The infamous Occupy Wall Street group in Philadelphia was forcibly ordered to vacate its City Hall encampment November 30, about 50 days after the tent erections started (double entendre intentional).

This is an article, however, about the ones who are occupiers much longer than the Occupy group, and in far greater numbers.

It is close to crushing to be a landlord in Philadelphia. City Council has created a bomb of a Landlord and Tenant law; tenants are enjoying a 95% edge over the 5% landlords. It has been going on since the 1970′s. Each evicted tenant moves out owing thousands of dollars to the landlord. It is City Council’s fault. Reform is absolutely necessary.

Perhaps only landlords will care. We, the landlords, truly are victims. However, City Council considers the landlords the bad guys. It is absurd.

City Council makes it very rough, inconvenient and especially costly for a landlord to evict a deadbeat.

There may not be doubt that tenants had drawn the short straws going back more than 35 years. Some of their situations cried out for reform. However, City Council since then tipped the scales so far in the other direction, it is necessary that Philadelphia finally right one of its wrongs.

If a landlord wants to evict a tenant, the tenant still wins for much longer than is fair, logical and justifiable. City Council makes it possible for the tenant to keep living in the apartment and not paying rent, money the tenant will use eventually toward the rental of a new apartment from an unsuspecting and trusting landlord, someone who gambles to rent to this new tenant. The tenant does not write “I am a deadbeat” on the apartment application. So, yes, for the landlord, every tenant is a gamble.

In 1968, the Northwest Tenants Organization (in northwest Philadelphia) was founded as a rent strike-oriented militant group. In a couple of years, the movement grew and evolved into the Tenant Action Group, which developed as a political action and lobbying organization.

By 1974, the TAG had persuaded City Councilperson Ethel Allen, a nice lady, to introduce rent control legislation. Over the next decade, TAG successfully showed that Philadelphia had a lot of slumlords. But in the fashion of its grandiose lack of wisdom, City Council went entirely overboard. Ever since, landlords have been getting the hell beat out of them.

This is not to say that there aren’t any slumlords anymore. However, good landlords are taken advantage of by the 17-member City Council (by the way, why do we need that many Council members?). Over the years, the City Council legislation has been on the warpath through both its ordinances on the eviction of tenants and the regulations in the Department of Licenses and Inspections. The procedures regarding each, today, serve as a months-long Christmas present to unlawful tenants facing eviction and a big body blow to landlords at the mercy of so many regulations. Electrical contractors, plumbers, fire alarm companies and so on make sure the rental facility is safe. In itself, that is fine. But when you consider that many tenants trash their rooms, and their electrical switches, and faucets, the glass in the windows, and the walls and ceilings, and so on, you wonder just why they do that, and you wonder why City Council lets them virtually completely off the hook, and the landlord must spend, yes, thousands of dollars, to bring the rental property back to Code, and suitable for the next move-in.

This blog will concentrate on the eviction of tenants, but the reader should recognize that City Council has added entirely too much costly and time-consuming glob with its Department of Licenses and Inspections regulations.

The City tells you that if a tenant fails to pay his rent on time, you should, at once, proceed to the eviction process. However, the eviction process is a real doozy. When you ask the tenant for the rent, prepare yourself to hear Lie Number One (in early June). If the tenant is good-natured and seemingly reasonable, you think of the tedium in front of you if you go for eviction, and instead you roll the dice and figure the tenant is a truth-teller. You hope the rent will be forthcoming “soon”.

This process can repeat itself. The landlord is hanging on every word, and allows the tenant to skate (read this “continue to lie”). That is the easier of the alternatives for the busy and/or retired landlord.

In my case this year, the tenant showed me his H & R Block receipts showing the three IRS tax refunds (about $7,000 altogether) he was to receive “in four to eight weeks”.

After four weeks, and then in two-week intervals, you are told that the tenant’s mother is going to call him as soon as she receives the refund envelope. You wonder why the refunds are not coming to your rental property, but you mostly hope the IRS is timely.

After you have heard, say, Lie Number Eight, you realize how you have been swindled and played for a fool, and you realize you have but one avenue remaining.

Eviction, you know, is the really hard part.

First, you must send, by registered letter (in my case, the letter was just going upstairs), a notice of eviction. The tenant can think this over for 10 days.

I have yet to see a tenant move out on an eviction letter sent by registered mail.

So, after 10 days, you must go to Philadelphia Municipal Court, 34 South 11th Street, and apply for a Landlord and Tenant Complaint. In this document is listed the rental owed by the tenant, including amounts for utilities listed separately.

You pay the City of Philadelphia $100.00 for today’s action.

The complaint serves to schedule your court hearing. In my case, the hearing date is 42 days away! Six weeks! All during the 42 days, you are losing additional rental and utility payments, and you know you must provide adequate heat for the fall season, for which you will not receive one penny. Your tenant is living in your apartment for free!

You calculate that your tenant is now at a more than $5,000 swindle, but soon to be closer to $7,000. And you cannot do a thing about it. City Council made it this way. And, your tenant continues to live in your rental unit.

On the day of your hearing, you are in the courtroom of Judge Barbara S. Gilbert. But actually, because of subsequent developments, you will not appear before her. With the Judge not in the courtroom, two clerk-types call off the names, case by case. Some people did not show up; some agree to arbitration in the next room, and some are to await talking with the Judge.

My name is called and an attorney stands before the bench to tell the clerks he requests a meeting with me in the arbitration room. The attorney tells me that his client, who on the complaint owes $3,800, will move out in 50 days if I will agree to waive all rentals and utility amounts owed. He explains that if I do not agree, the tenant still can stay in the apartment for more than 35 days through law-required periods of time, additional lost money time for the landlord.

I replied that as of that day, the amount owed had grown to more than $5,000. I said I would split the difference in the number of days between what the City already afforded him vs. the 50 days. We compromised on 40 days, i.e., December 18th. The key aspect here for the attorney was to achieve an agreement in which I would waive any trip to Small Claims Court to get a judgment for the $5,000, or whatever the tenant now owes. You should understand that Small Claims judgments are often ignored. Hence, the landlord gets nothing but presumed satisfaction that the tenant’s good credit rating (if he/she has one!) is torpedoed.

The tenant’s attorney then went on a computer in the arbitration office to write a “Judgment by Agreement” that would list all of the specifications of the move-out. This document was to assure me that the tenant would vacate not later than December 18th. Actually, the agreement said: “No lockout prior to 12/18/11.”

Other clauses said: Tenant shall leave the property in clean broom-swept condition and return keys to landlord. AND: Landlord waives rent, any rent that might be owed and tenant waives security deposit.

In the meantime, I must obtain a Writ of Possession. This is a court order I could file for 11 days later advising the tenant he/she has 11 days to move out.

The Writ of Possession was served on my tenant Saturday, November 28th. Cost for this was $95.00, payable to Robert H. Messerman, “Landlord and Tenant Officer” of the Philadelphia Municipal Court. Before I went to the Messerman office (ninth floor, 21 South 12th Street, around the corner from the court filing location), I had to go there (34 South 11th Street, fifth floor) to start the process and pay $4.40 for “paperwork”. For the record, the Messerman office states it will serve the Writ of Possession “no later than one week” from the day payment is received for the Writ.

Eleven days after paying for the Writ of Possession, you may apply for an Alias Writ (costs $35.00, payable to Robert Messerman) which takes care of the padlocking on Eviction Day because, believe it or not (IMK), some tenants refuse to vacate even after receiving service of the Writ of Possession. In such cases, you need a Sheriff’s deputy to padlock the apartment entrance. In such case, you as the landlord must meet the deputy outside the apartment at a specific time on lockout day. You also have to have a locksmith there to change the keying. And you sign the Alias Writ to take possession.

In its infinite wisdom, City Council requires the landlord to hold and preserve the tenant’s goods “for at least 30 days”. If the tenant does not call for the goods within 30 days, “it’s still possible that you may be responsible for them”, so says Mr. Messerman.

The wonderful City Council, always protecting the deadbeat tenants, says you don’t have to leave the tenant’s goods on the premises after the eviction…… “you may move them to storage or wherever you wish, but you are still responsible for them”. Isn’t that nice of City Council?

These latter rules, in fact, may be procedures put in place by the Landlord and Tenant Officer, but still are under the aegis of City Council. Regardless of authorship, it still is another phase of the process which favors the tenant.

The landlord who is forced to hold onto the goods, by now, is beyond furious, and only wants to trash all of the tenant’s belongings. Why shouldn’t the tenant be obligated for his/her own goods?

So, for the tenant situation of 2011, it cost $100.00 + $4.40 + $95.00 + $35.00. TOTAL: $234.40.

That does not describe everything. Each trip downtown takes three to four hours. As time is money, those hours, in effect, add to the landlord’s cost.

About a decade ago, another landlord-tenant dispute arose at my place. After the apartment was padlocked, the tenant returned with a crowbar (as they say, I am not making this up). It was amazing. The attempted break-in prompted an immediate call to 911. Three Philadelphia police cars were on the scene in what seemed like two minutes. The “former” tenant immediately was stopped in his tracks. Police ordered him to honor the court order and never come back. (He didn’t.)

One of the police officers told me: “We see this all the time. Tenants get enough money to move in, perhaps paying for both the first month and last month, plus security, and never pay again. When the first 30 days is up, they pay nothing more. That means….in this city……they have a home for free for the next four to six months. Happens all the time!”

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President Obama and the Tea Party

President Barack Obama promised the people “hope” and “change”.

It all is in the process of being exposed as a hoax.

His campaign slogan next year should be: No We Cannot.

When he was a Presidential candidate in 2007-2008, he was advancing his own brand of snake oil. A majority of voters purchased the new brand, not recognizing the product as nothing but a medicinal quick fix.

Today, it clearly is a hoax, yet many of “the people” who have that snake oil on their shelves are just getting to the point of realizing it. Unfortunately, it will take a while for “the people” to admit they made a mistake. It is concerning that we ponder more than a year ahead of the election whether “the people” not only will admit their mistake but put their vote where their hearts and minds are or should be.

Emerging simultaneously with the Obama Hoax is the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party is going to win; there is no question about that. The people in the Tea Party will be in the forefront of exposing the hoax. But they still have a big task ahead. Their opponents will be employing tactics the left has been famous for, what Author Ann Coulter calls “outright thuggery”. The Tea Party must expand forces nationally to turn back the left, and answer the liberals, Obama et al, as a response to any mob thuggery.

Liberals cannot stand the Tea Party movement. Until FOX News came along, liberals had free rein on news bias. Only one side of the news was published or broadcast. Of course, that’s still a highly manipulated situation among most of the “mainstream media”.

Liberals are especially bothered because little by little, a few members of the media are coming around. Not the liberal media. But a minority of true journalists in the media. This is a critical issue for the Tea Party: developing a fair and balanced media.

You hear various people decrying the fact that there is such a “divide” in this country. What is emerging is the fact that the Tea Party is getting in the face of liberals. Liberals (and most Democrats) go bonkers nowadays when they hear “Tea Party”. Get used to it. The battle is just starting.

The members of the Tea Party are not evil; they are not crazy; they are not racists. They are good people who see President Obama as a hoax.

The hoax really has not been exposed yet. Maybe this blog will help you.

Part of the story is the FACT that Obama knows exactly what he is doing, just like the snake oil salesman. “The people” are having some difficulty with this. Some liberals, in defending the President, insist that he is brilliant, a genius and so on.

Aside from his alleged brilliance, the cold fact is that he is a conniver. And clever as such.

Did you skip over that sentence above: “…….Obama knows exactly what he is doing.” Ignore it at your peril.

It is necessary to prove that here. The Tea Party cannot survive and succeed unless and until it proves that Obama is a clever conniver. Much of his “plan” already is in motion; you just don’t hear about it from “the mainstream media”.

He has not pulled the wool over the eyes of the Tea Party people. But he has done an effective job with his friends, the liberals, and the radicals, and many independents. That many independents must take a new look at Obama is a sober given, however difficult that may be for them.

Before we get to the facts about Barack Obama, let us bring up the big phony issue, the elephant in the room: racism. This always has been a major crutch of liberals, the big haymaker that never has failed to score, or so liberals think. If there is a black person involved in a controversy, it obviously is agreed: cry racism. That’ll scare the hell out of them! Those Tea Party people are all racists, for example.

The Tea Party, of course, does not accept this critical canard. However, it must fight back and demonstrate that racism is NOT Obama’s defender, but rather a canard. Just to clarify: what is a canard? Merriam-Webster defines it as a false or unfounded report or story; especially : a fabricated report and “a groundless rumor or belief”.

That is what most racism of today is.

Of course, a small minority of whites are racist. But this means a great, great majority are not. And members of the Tea Party are not racists.

If we want to start a fight here, all we need do is point out that many of the black people who voted for Obama in 2008 are racists. They voted for him because he is black. In their eyes, he can do no wrong. They will stick with him through all of his foibles. They will eat from his hand, no matter what. Many blacks never read or hear anything negative about Obama. He is their Community Organizer (a noble term for all-day agitator).

It is black racism.

They are blind to his all-day, full-court ego. Most blacks have no idea of the Obama hoax, which is described in detail below. (It is unfortunate, for example, that a black conservative can hardly get his/her foot in the door, due to national villification by liberals, liberal blacks and the liberal media.) Black conservatives (there, in fact, are some!) are brilliant and unique in their perspectives, so much so that liberal blacks go out of their way to discredit them.

Blacks have been promised since the days of LBJ (“The Great Society” it wasn’t, for most blacks) that government will see to it that their lives and livelihoods will be improved. Of course, there are millions of both whites and blacks on welfare, some of them undeserving, but the sober fact remains: you likely will not become middle class on welfare. The War on Poverty was a scam.

But we must get to the crux of all of this: the Obama Hoax.

You, my reader, are sitting on the sidelines watching Obama mostly covertly demonstrate that he is the top student in the world …… of Saul Alinsky.

The media should have told you about Saul Alinsky in the 2008 campaign. But the media almost totally kept most Obama negatives out of print and off the air/cable.

This is the critical issue. This is why we should state, every day, that we as a nation have been standing idly by as Obama tries to tear this nation apart. And we certainly cannot be standing idly by. Obama is doing this while reading and re-reading Saul Alinsky.

From his grave, Saul Alinsky has exacerbated a disturbingly increasing national debt. The current debt is a staggering amount, one that is over the heads of most Americans, unfortunately. They have no idea what a trillion dollars is.

We ought to have every school student each day write the following dollar amount: $14,748,803,094,463. That was the National Debt on the afternoon of Wednesday, September 21, 2011, more than 13 months in advance of the November, 2012, election. (Of course, that won’t happen. For one thing, many school teachers, especially college professors, are liberal, and some arrogantly advance their own liberal agendas in the classrooms.)

So maybe students can learn to write the day’s ever-increasing national debt amount. Maybe they can eventually realize what a trillion dollars is. Or 14 trillion.

Before discussing Obama and Alinsky, which is at the core of this nation’s daily problem/dilemma, you need to take a break from reading this happy blog. Go to http://www.usdebtclock.org and see all of that money increasing and increasing and increasing and increasing.

Look at all of those red and green figures changing and changing and increasing and increasing. It is a sobering experience to do this. So just don’t sit there; do it ! http://www.usdebtclock.org

(FOR THE RECORD, THE TOTAL DEBT PASSED $15,000,000,000,000.00 in mid-November, 2011.)

Not long after the earthquake in Haiti, Rush Limbaugh commended actor George Clooney for leading the multi-network fund-raising telethon. Do you remember it? It was on all the major networks for two hours, a Friday night, not long after the quake. George and everybody else taking part raised $66,000,000. Certainly, a million dollars is alot of money. Too, $66,000,000 is alot more money.

I will update Rush’s illustration to the $14,748,803,094,463 figure listed above. Rush asked his national radio audience if they had any idea how long it would take George Clooney et al to raise the total of the national debt (now $14,748,803,094,463 for our illustration) if they raised $66,000,000 daily. Every day including Thanksgiving and Christmas each year. How long would it take to do that?

‘Twould take 612 years!

It would take a staggering 223,466 George Clooney telethons! So, the ultimate question for you: do you have any idea how much a trillion dollars is? Or $14,000,000,000,000?

That’s 612 years to … every day … raise $66,000,000 (did I mention you have to do this every day??) to reach the total amount of the national debt. That $66,000,000 is a distant share of a mere 1% of the national debt, something like 0.0000044749394 of the national debt. Scary. No. Very scary. Remember, we concluded $66,000,000 is alot of money! Give Obama identification for nearly one-third of all of the $14,000,000,000,000+.! And he did his part in 32 months!

Want another sobering statistic? First, the figure: $4,200,000,000. That’s $4.2 billion. That’s 4,200 MILLION DOLLARS. The government of the United States, on a DAILY BASIS, spends $4,200,000,000 more than it takes in. That’s every day, podnuh. This is exactly what President Obama wants. He wants us to spend ourselves into oblivion……. into socialism. He must be stopped.

On that usdebtclock.org website, you will get the latest figures for debt per citizen (more than $47,000), number of taxpayers (112,000), “official” unemployed (14,000,000), “actual” unemployed (25,000,000), federal employees (4,300,000), and so on and so on and so on, concluding with bankruptcies (1,589,000 so far this year) and foreclosures (982,678), and so on and so on. Some suggest the number of bankruptcies should be increased by one: the United States of America!

By the way, if you are keeping score, the national debt on the day President Obama was inaugurated was $10,626,877,048,913.08. (Yep, even eight cents.) Since Obama became President, the national debt has been increasing at a rate of more than 15 per cent each year. President George Bush has been blamed as somewhat of a big spender, and he was in the White House when the rate was 8% per year.

Many Bush defenders say he was a big spender because of what Congress sent his way. But Obama has come along to DOUBLE the sins of the Bush years.

So, OK, what about the hoax. The hoax that is Obama.

President Barack Hussein Obama is hellbent on tearing down the structures of the United States of America. He purports to do this feigning innocence and good intentions while continually reading his speeches off the teleprompter. He is the nation’s Community Organizer, but he is being found out, one day at a time.

Saul Alinksy (1909-1972) of Chicago has been called the “first” Community Organizer. His claim to fame was his “Rules for Radicals” (available on the Internet; search for “The Twelve Rules for Radicals”). Obama is a “disciple” of Saul Alinsky; he even taught workshops on Alinsky’s tactics.

Alinsky said the community organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people and fan the hostilities to the point of overt expression.

The key to power for radicals, said Alinsky, is to teach hatred for the majority. But, said Alinsky, you cannot hate millions of people. To do that effectively, he contended, you need a one-person scapegoat to focus your hatred on. “Pick the target,” he said, some say quoting Lenin, “freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” That is the politics of personal destruction.

Mob thuggery is doing this on a daily basis.

Obama, a follower of Alinsky, came along to say: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” That is the Chicago-style language of gang war. Alinsky called ordinary Americans “the enemy”. Normal people do not declare war on all of society. But that is what Obama is doing.

And there is no question, absolutely no question, that Obama is following Alinsky.

Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have. Power is derived from two main sources: money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood. That was Rule #1.

Number 2 says: Never go outside the expertise of your people. It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy. Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.

You owe it to yourself and your education to read all of them, all 12 Alinsky rules.

Another says “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”.

The American people must understand these rules before November, 2012. The liberal media did not find it comfortable to expose them before the 2008 election. In fact, the media did its best to “cover” for Obama’s arrogance and radicalism, and his love of Alinsky and his rules.

Remember Joe the Plumber?

On Sunday, October 12, 2008, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher was playing catch with a football at his home near Toledo, Ohio. Presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigned on his street, prompting Joe the Plumber to ask Obama about his tax proposals affecting small businesses. Obama replied in part: “I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you that they’ve got a chance at success, too.” Then, he added his infamous line that the liberal media, and everybody else, for that matter, cringed on: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Spread the wealth around. Income redistribution.

There was widespread media coverage about Joe the Plumber but because they (the media) are overwhelmingly in the tank for Obama, they threw curve balls all over the place. They made Joe the Plumber the issue to the point that three state officials in Ohio, without authority, “investigated” Joe, using the taxpayer-supported government to attack him.

Income redistribution was the key peg of the campaign but more than 50 per cent of the people didn’t let that bother them. They voted for that hope and change. They need to read a certain document (see below).

And the fact remains, however, that this is a key example for charges that Obama is a socialist. He wants to spread the wealth around.

And he wants to run your life without caring what the U-S Constitution says. Some liberals call the Constitution “a living, breathing document”, which is why some members of the U. S. Supreme Court think they have been given an appointment to amend the document. Only the people may and can amend.

Want an example of the Saul Alinsky techniques?

The longest-serving (nine terms) U. S. Senator in history (Democrat Robert Byrd) did not get much publicity but he, on more than one occasion, blasted the President for his appointments of Presidential Czars. Do you know what and who they are? There are 41 of them, or at least that was the last known count.

The czars answer only to the President, despite what some of them allege; they have been given enormous (unilateral) power to regulate and control the American economy and government without any sort of oversight.

According to the late Senator Byrd, the czars manage crucial areas of national policy in violation of the constitutional system of checks and balances and its separation of powers. Senator Byrd called Obama’s “czar strategy” an unprecedented power grab centralizing authority for this nation solely in the White House.

Obama has appointed czars to oversee everything from healthcare to energy, science, terrorism, education, diversity, AIDS, Medicare, technology and cyberspace, among others, 41 in all.

What do those in the “mainstream media” report about the czars? Little.

Hope and change? What hope has President Obama given us? What change has he given the nation’s poor? (Recent news reports have disclosed that we have more poor people in the U. S. since Obama took office. Where is the hope/change emerging?)

The poverty rate here in Philadelphia JUMPED (says the Philadelphia Inquirer) nearly two percentage points from 2009 to 2010, according to a federal report.

What change has President Obama given us? Certainly the answer is not $14,748,803,094,463.

The hope he has given us is vaporized mystique, spun right out of his teleprompter. The change he has given us is adding each of us to the bankruptcy tabulations, even though they are not counted on usdebtclock.org.

Obama’s bankruptcy plan, in the wake of Saul Alinsky, is designed to cripple the people, and introduce a kind of socialistic euphoria. Such has been tried over the years; it never worked. It won’t work. Success stories do not exist.

Several months ago, I started attending meetings of the Northeast Philadelphia Tea Party. It is a small group. Many of those on the “e-mail list” do not attend the meetings, at least not this year. Attendance likely will increase in 2012 when Obama is raising his campaign millions (he says he needs a billion, as in $1,000,000,000!!!!).

That’s alot of money, but to keep things in perspective vs. the national debt, what he seeks for his campaign is a “mere” 0.00006780211205 of the national debt.

These various figures are intended to demonstrate the enormous magnitude of the national debt.

Each Northeast Philadelphia Tea Party meeting starts with recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, a radical expression of patriotism. Eh????? (as they say in Canada). However, the Northeast Philadelphia group and all the other Tea Parties are not the least bit radical; they are not “far right” (the favorite appellation of the liberal left); they are not evil.

The Director of the Northeast Philadelphia group is Edith V. (Eydie) Rodebaugh. She retired three years ago from her long-time job as School Teacher. She taught history (American History, especially) and economics and political science. Today, as part of her busy schedule, she teaches piano. She is assisted in Tea Party work by her husband, William F. (Bill) Rodebaugh, Jr.

The Tea Party Patriots organized because it saw the dangers of excessive government spending and taxation. In their Mission Statement, the Tea Party Patriots state that they aim to attract, educate, organize and mobilize citizens to secure public policy consistent with three core values: fiscal responsibility, Constitutionally limited government and free markets.

The Tea Parties, for one thing, represent the answer to the need for good journalism. Liberals are going ballistic because Fox News has some commentators who are hitting them between the eyes. For decades, liberals never heard or read anything that opposed their views. Biased reporting was easy for the liberal left. Not anymore. The Tea Parties’ goal must include nationwide efforts to expose the liberal media. Stick to the facts; it is an easy task.

In Philadelphia, the Tea Party has a difficult task amidst a sea of east coast liberalism. Both Philadelphia newspapers, the Inquirer and the Daily News, are overwhelmingly biased in their political coverages. The liberalism is blaring and glaring. The editorial cartoonists for both papers are liberals sometimes bordering on radicalism. Nearly all of their employed columnists are liberal. A majority of the readership of the papers is registered Democrat. Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-1 inside the city. The City Council has been overwhelmingly Democrat for the past 60 years. Fourteen of the (it is too many!) 17 Council members are Democrat.

The Tea Party on a national basis must expose the liberals for what they are.

Critically, unlike the liberals, the Tea Parties have a rock foundation: the U-S Constitution. At the September meeting, Eydie Rodebaugh distributed copies of the Constitution to all in attendance. As a demonstration of Tea Party dedication, we recited the introductory sentence of the Constitution:

“WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence (sic), promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

At this writing, President Obama is urging passage of his latest brilliance: the Jobs Bill. He went before Congress earlier this month, ala the State of the Union, and proposed a new bill to spend $450,000,000,000 to create jobs. (By the way, the reader should think about changing the way we gloss over these dollar amounts. Years ago, newspapers found it convenient to write a figure like that as $450 billion. You don’t have nearly as much understanding of $450 billion as when you write it as $450,000,000,000.)

I never thought I would write something “favorable” quoting President Bill Clinton, but he obviously does not dig Obama’s socialist spending. Newsmax.com asked him this week about the Obama economic proposals. He replied a rather funny: “This whole thing is a little confusing.”

Imagine Bill Clinton being confused! He told Newsmax.com new taxes and spending should be delayed until the economy gets out of the doldrums.

He said the nation first must start with resolving the home-mortgage crisis (see “foreclosures”, above).

The former President called for a bipartisan approach to dealing with the nation’s economic woes: “I don’t think you can tax or cut taxes, I don’t think you can spend or not spend enough to get America back to a full employment economy until we flush that debt.”

By the way, as is typical of the liberal media, that criticism of Obama appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in a short item on Page 6A.

I will close with comments received in an e-mail this week from Ann Coulter.

Ann drives liberals crazy. Liberals cannot handle blows to their noses. She is a conservative who does not cloud her words.

“Did your blood boil as you watched the violent spectacles in Wisconsin staged by Democrat-led public-sector unions?”

“If so,” she wrote, “brace yourself for what’s ahead. As the 2012 election draws nearer, I fear sickening scenes like this will become as frequent as Nancy Pelosi’s Botox appointments. Heck, some blunt-speaking Democrats already admit they’re going to get rough.”

She quoted Democratic pollster Paul Maslin as saying: “It’s not going to be 2008 ‘Yes We Can’ anymore. I think it’s going to be slash-and-burn.”

“You see,” said Ann, “in 2008 (AKA “the Year of the Second Coming” to liberals), Barack Obama had no record to run on. He was free to campaign with vague promises of ‘hope and change’ while counting on foolish independents and naive young people to project their own wishes upon him like a blank screen.”

But Ann says in 2012, Obama will have no such luxury. We know who he is now. He can’t hide behind hope. Or change.

Which is why, says Ann Coulter, Democrats will use the same vile “Wisconsin Strategy” to frighten conservatives and independents and make them fearful of daring to unelect the first African-American president of the United States.

The Tea Parties are ready to respond with unified national emphasis: Hope and Change ….. a Hoax.

No kidding! We are related to …… both …… Abraham Lincoln and …… Daniel Boone

SO LONG AS YOU SEE THIS MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY BELOW THE SUBJECT HEADING, THIS PARTICULAR BLOG ENTRY IS UNFINISHED. Therefore, you know that at some time in the future, I will edit it, adding to the total summary, which is quite a project. I am putting it on the Internet ahead of time as a convenience for my sister, Joan, who is 1,700 miles away but who knows the most about this. She will tell me when I have made an error or left something out, and so on. Once you no longer see this preface, you will know the project is finished, at least insofar as Joan and I THINK IT IS!!!

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My family on my Mother’s side is related to President Abraham Lincoln and frontiersman Daniel Boone.

President Abraham Lincoln’s step-great-great uncle (also an “Abraham Lincoln”) was my great-great-great-great grandfather! President Lincoln’s great-great-grandfather was our family’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (Mordecai Lincoln). The latter represents our blood line to the 16th President.

During a visit to the Berks County (Pennsylvania) Genealogical Society in March, 2011, I spoke with Ann Balderrama, Vice President. I asked her what relation am I to President Lincoln. She wrote the names of several ancestors on a piece of paper, and concluded: President Lincoln was your third cousin, three times removed.

Abraham Lincoln (the one who was our great-great-great-great-grandfather) was married to our great-great-great-great-grandmother, Anne Boone Lincoln, Daniel Boone’s first cousin! Through Anne Boone Lincoln, we have the direct blood line to Daniel Boone. By the way Ann Balderrama figured my relationship to President Lincoln, I charted the same involving Daniel Boone. If I am correct, Daniel Boone was my first cousin, six times removed.

For my sisters’ and my children, Anne Boone was their great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. Anne Boone still was a first cousin of Daniel Boone, and her husband still was the step-great-great-uncle of President Lincoln. President Lincoln was their third cousin, four times removed. Daniel Boone was their first cousin, seven times removed.

For our children’s children, Anne Boone was their six-great-grandmother, and she still was a first cousin of the trailblazer. And her husband still was the step-great-great-uncle of Abe, who was their third cousin, five times removed. And Daniel Boone was their first cousin, eight times removed.

For my sisters’ and my great-grandchildren, Anne Boone was their seven-great-grandmother, and still Daniel’s first cousin. And her husband still was the step-great-great uncle of Abe. Also, President Lincoln was their third cousin, six times removed. Daniel Boone was their first cousin, nine times removed.

It should be mentioned here that President Lincoln and our four-great-grandfather were, in fact, blood relatives through Mordecai Lincoln (the elder Abraham’s father), who was the President’s great-great-grandfather. And our family is related to President Lincoln through Mordecai Lincoln, our five-great-grandfather!

Daniel Boone was 75 years old when President Lincoln was born (in 1809). They were not related by blood but rather by three marriages (including, of course, that of Abraham Lincoln, the elder, through the blood line of Mordecai Lincoln, and Anne Boone, my sisters’ and my great-great-great-great-grandmother).

In the following, you will meet Samuel Lincoln and George Boone III, both of whom figuratively sit at the pinnacle of their respective family trees. Both brought England to America. For my sisters and me, George Boone III was our six-great-grandfather! Samuel Lincoln was our seven-great-grandfather!

These Lincoln and Boone relationships are not “new” to us. My sister, Joan (her name is pronounced JOH-ANN), has worked on this for almost 40 years as part of her genealogy work for both of our parents’ family trees. We are getting down to where we think we have all relationships involving Abe and Daniel Boone confirmed and accurate.

This all starts in the 16th century.

The Lincolns and the Boones were in the forefront of the early history of the New World. One Lincoln disinherited his children. One was murdered by an Indian. Many early settlers were in provincial religions which shunned anyone who married outside the faith. Of course, you know that one Lincoln became perhaps the most famous President of the United States. There have been frequent intermarriages between the Lincolns and the Boones. The combined family trees suggest miles of spaghetti, intertwined. One very prominent couple (at least to my sisters and me) eloped because my great-great-grandmother’s parents opposed their love. The most famous of the Boones, Daniel, led a fascinating life, described in detail in the 700-page family tree book I acquired in January, 2011, in Birdsboro, PA (“The Boone Family”).

The following account devotes more descriptive lines to Daniel Boone than to President Lincoln on the assumption that you know more about Abe, and know you easily can access additional information about him.

In the 16th century, the known “greatest” Lincoln grandfather was Robert Lincoln, of Hingham County, Norfolk, England. His will, dated 1540, was probated September 3, 1543. He married a woman by the name of Johan Cowper (last name uncertain). This is where we start with Lincoln and Boone.

The Robert Lincolns named their first son Robert. He was identified as living in Hingham and Thetford, England. His will (the son’s) was dated January 14, 1556, and probated 15 days later. This information comes from “The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln” by James Henry Lea and Robert Hutchinson (1909).

Robert Lincoln (the son) married Margaret Alberye.

Their eldest son was Richard Lincoln, of Hingham, Swanton Morley and Great Witchingham, England. Richard married Elizabeth Remching, who died soon after their marriage in about 1574, leaving one son, Edward Lincoln, born in about 1575. The timing is unclear as Edward was the second son, the first having died before becoming heir to Richard.

Edward and his wife (name undisclosed) left a son, Samuel Lincoln, whose recorded personal history is much more extensive than his father’s or those who preceded them.

Samuel was baptised August 24, 1622, in Hingham, Norfolk (England), date of birth unknown. He died in Hingham, Massachusetts, May 26, 1690. Samuel was great-great-great-great-grandfather of the 16th President of the United States. Because Samuel Lincoln’s ancestry is known for several generations, he is considered father of the most prominent branch of Lincolns in America, of whom there are thousands.

Samuel Lincoln was progenitor of many notable United States political figures, not just Abe. Included were Maine Governor Enoch Lincoln, Massachusetts state representatives Levi, Sr., and Levi Lincoln, Jr., who both later served as Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts.

In England, Samuel grew up in meager circumstances due to a family squabble as revealed in his grandfather’s will. His grandfather, Richard, who was married three more times after the death of the mother of Edward Lincoln (see above), disinherited his earlier children, including Samuel.

Samuel became an apprentice weaver under Francis Lawes of Norwich, England, not far from Hingham. Sam’s father (Edward) also was cut out of HIS father’s (Richard’s) will. He had abandoned his home at Swanton Morley near Hingham after being cut out of the will, and relocated to small acreage at Hingham. So Samuel Lincoln as a boy until his early teen years lived in Hingham, England.

These early years in Lincoln history were reported in the 1924-published book “ABRAHAM LINCOLN & HIS ANCESTORS”, by Ida M. Tarbell (once titled “In the Footsteps of the Lincolns”). She was born in 1857 in Erie, Pennsylvania, and died in 1944.

When you were apprenticed as an indentured servant as Samuel Lincoln was, you left your family and became a member of your master’s family. You had more to do than to learn to weave. Mr. Lawes was under contract to teach Samuel the trade and to give him his keep, and a small, probably a very small, weekly or monthly wage. In turn, Samuel was obliged to obey Mr. Lawes, and that meant not only that he must learn to weave, but he must wait on the Lawes family. In not so nice a description, he was a slave of those times.

Thus, in 1637, Sam left with the Lawes family for the New World on a ship named “John & Dorothy”. Although it appears he was just 15 at the time, he apparently misrepresented his age to be allowed to make the voyage. Sam’s brother Thomas already had been living in (New) Hingham, Massachusetts (near the Atlantic Ocean southeast of Boston), for two years. He was known as “Thomas Lincoln the Weaver” to distinguish him from several other unrelated Thomas Lincolns. (He left a great deal of his property to Samuel upon his death.)

It also should be noted that Sam’s father, Edward, remained in Hingham, England, and died about three years (February 11, 1640) after Sam left for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Edward was buried in a graveyard of St. Andrews Church, Hingham, England. This was the last European phase of the Lincoln ancestry.

When he was in his late 20′s, no longer under the control of Mr. Lawes, Samuel Lincoln married Martha Lyford of Ireland (around 1649). They had 11 children, three of whom died in infancy; three other children lived into their 80′s. The eldest son also was named Samuel, born August 25, 1650.

The fourth son was the ancestor of President Abraham Lincoln. He was Mordecai Lincoln. Mordecai became a blacksmith. He was the great-great-great grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln. (Additional below.)

Genealogists have noted the common and repeated use of certain Biblical names in the Lincoln family, especially Abraham, Samuel, Isaac, Jacob and Mordecai. This was a common practice among early Puritan settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Before proceeding with the first Mordecai Lincoln’s story, we should point out that the Samuel Lincoln House in Hingham, Massachusetts, has a historical marker outside, which reads: “1630 – 1930 SAMUEL LINCOLN HOUSE Samuel Lincoln, ancestor of President Abraham Lincoln, and one of the eight early settlers of Hingham bearing that name, purchased this land in 1649. Seven generations of Lincoln descendants lived here.”

In 1937, the 300th anniversary of Samuel Lincoln’s arrival in Massachusetts was commemorated with the dedication of a tablet at the Old Ship Church in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Great-great-great-grandfather Mordecai Lincoln was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, June 14, 1657. He lived there until 1700 when he moved to Scituate, Massachusetts, south of Hingham. He was married twice, first to Sarah Jones of Scituate, who probably died not long afterward. Mordecai subequently married a second time. Mary Gannett lived to age 79 (died April 19, 1745). On a family tree distributed by the Boone Family, her name is given as Mary Chapin.

Her husband, Mordecai, died suddenly “of an apploplexy” (sic) November 8, 1727, in his 71st year.

Mordecai had six children, the eldest of whom he named Mordecai, born April 24, 1686, at Hingham. The younger Mordecai died “before” October 18, 1736, (I found a source declaring that Mordecai died May 12, 1736) at age 50. It was this Mordecai who carried the continuing blood line to President Lincoln and also to the Gabriels of Ohio. He was the great-great-grandfather of President Lincoln; he also had a son with his second wife (his ninth child, Abraham, see below) who married into The Boone Family. But that has to be held for later. Around 1714, Mordecai married Hannah Salter, of Freehold, New Jersey. Before that time, he had moved to Monmouth County, New Jersey, with his brother Abraham (a different Abraham, of course), where he acquired 500 to 600 acres of land.

Mordecai later moved to Coventry (which is near present-day Pottstown), just a few miles from the Douglassville, Pennsylvania, home (“Boonecroft”) from where Thomas Gabriel and Anna (Nancy) Jones (granddaughter of Anne Boone) eloped in 1817. But again, that’s for later, too. Here’s a tease: my grandfather was Ezra Gabriel of Edgerton, Ohio. Thomas Gabriel was HIS grandfather.

Mordecai’s and Hannah’s first child was John, born May 3, 1711. (The Boone Family story lists his date of birth as 1716.) He was great-grandfather of President Lincoln. When John was about 57, he moved to Virginia and settled in the Shenandoah Valley in Augusta County (if you’re writing all of this down, it now is part of Rockingham County!), a few miles north of the present town of Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he probably died sometime after 1773.

John Lincoln, one of nine children, was himself father of nine children. He was married to Rebecca (Flowers) Morris. John and Rebecca’s first son, Abraham, grandfather of President Lincoln, was born July 16, 1739, in Pennsylvania; he died tragically in 1785 in Kentucky. He was shot to death in an Indian ambush. Before he died at about age 46 (some records suggest he was 48), he was married twice, first to Mary Shipley of Lunenburg County, Virginia, and then to Bathsheba (Herring) Lincoln, of Bridgewater, now Rockingham County, Virginia.

“Captain” Abraham Lincoln (the President’s grandfather and another namesake) apparently had three children with Mary Shipley and two with Bathsheba Herring, including Thomas Lincoln, father of the 16th President. Thomas was Abraham’s third son (his first son was another Mordecai, age 59, born in 1771, died in 1830).

Thomas Lincoln, father of President Lincoln, was born January 20, 1780. He lived to age 71 (died January 17, 1851). He married twice, including Nancy Hanks, Abe’s Mother (she was born February 5, 1784). Nancy Hanks Lincoln died in Gentryville, Spencer County, Indiana, October 5, 1818.

The writer of this blog realizes your head is already spinning but hang in there. As noted above, the great-great-grandfather of President Lincoln, Mordecai (1686-1736), son of Mordecai (1657-1727), moved from Monmouth County, New Jersey (see above), to Coventry, Chester County, Pennsylvania, now in the vicinity of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The significance of this is that this move not only served to initiate the connection with the Boones but also brought the Lincolns to Pennsylvania not far from this writer’s home (in Philadelphia).

For example, as noted near the start of this blog, we mentioned that while President Lincoln was not related by blood to Daniel Boone, he was “related” through three marriages of Lincolns and Boones. One of these marriages was Sarah Lincoln’s to William Boone. Sarah Lincoln, one of Mordecai’s and his first wife Hannah Salter Lincoln’s daughters, was born about April, 1727, and died at age 83 on April 21, 1810. She married William Boone April 26, 1748.

William Boone and Sarah Lincoln Boone in 1767 moved to Fairfax Meeting, Virginia. For a time they lived in Frederick County, Maryland, where William and his son Mordecai both died. The widow (Sarah Lincoln Boone) and the other six children then returned to Exeter Meeting (Oley Township, near Boonecroft).

The second marriage also connects to Mordecai Lincoln and his wife Hannah Salter Lincoln (see above; in some documents, her first name is spelled without the second “h”). You already know they had a daughter named Sarah. They also had a daughter Anne (or Ann), born March 8, 1725, probably in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and she died December 22, about 1812, on her farm near Harrisonburg, Virginia. She was the second wife of William Tallman, who was born March 25, 1720, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and he died February 13, 1791, on his farm near Harrisonburg.

William Tallman was an innkeeper and farmer, and he moved to Berks County, Pennsylvania, where he bought some of the Lincoln land. He owned property in Reading, Pennsylvania.

He married Anne Lincoln October 20, 1740. They had a son, Benjamin Tallman, born January 9, 1745, in Berks County (he died June 4, 1820, near Canal Winchester, Ohio).

Benjamin Tallman married Dinah Boone November 9, 1764, in Berks County. Benjamin was grandson of Mordecai Lincoln, our family’s five-great-grandfather. Dinah Boone was born May 10, 1749, in Berks County (and died July 25, 1824, near Canal Winchester, Ohio) Dinah was George Boone III’s granddaughter. So these two had grandfathers Lincoln and Boone, who carried the blood lines through to today.

Benjamin Boone, Dinah’s father (and son of George III) was an interesting chap in his own right. He was a Quaker, of course, and his first wife, Ann Farmer, also a Quaker. His second wife, Susannah (surname unknown), apparently wasn’t. It appears Benjamin Boone married this time out of the Quaker fold, possibly about 1736. In the minutes of the Gwynedd Meeting February 27, 1736, it was written that “Benjamin Boone has not been spoken to since last Meeting”. The Boone family book assumes that the disfavor seems to have been dropped, as there was no further mention of it in any records.

The year before he married Susannah, Benjamin Boone, with Mordecai Lincoln and four other men, was appointed by the court of Philadelphia to lay out one of the first roads in Exeter Township. Upon the establishment of Oley Township in 1741, fifty families were not included. This was protested by Benjamin Boone and also by James, John and Squire Boone. Eventually, the dispute was resolved and Benjamin obtained 300 acres in the area, probably in Exeter Township, near the other Boones. Benjamin also was one of the state representatives in Harrisburg from Berks County.

So Dinah Boone and Benjamin Tallman were the second marriage connecting the Lincolns to the Boones, even though President Lincoln was not actually a blood relative to the Boones. The third marriage tying him to the Boones was the one involving our family’s four-great-grandparents, described at length elsewhere in thishere tome.

Back to Coventry and Mordecai Lincoln’s earlier days in Pennsylvania (the Coventry name remains prominent in the Pottstown area today) …… Mordecai Lincoln entered into a partnership with Samuel Nutt in the business of mining and forging iron, a business he had learned from his father (and you know the father also was a Mordecai Lincoln!). In 1725, he sold his interest in the business. In 1727, with Benjamin Boone and others, he was appointed viewer of the Tulpehocken Road from the Schuylkill River to Oley (Oley is an earlier name for the “Boonecroft” area, centered at Douglassville, Pennsylvania! This is about six miles west of Coventry/Pottstown).

Eventually, Mordecai moved to Amity (at that time it was Philadelphia County, now it is Berks County, Pennsylvania, which was just east of Oley), where he died (as noted above, in May, 1736).

He married for a second time to Mary Robeson in July, 1729. That makes her President Lincoln’s step-great-great-grandmother! Mary Robeson was born in about 1705 and died “before” March 25, 1783, in Amity.

Mary Robeson Lincoln, with Mordecai, had three children, namely, another Mordecai (1730-1812), Thomas (1732-1775) and aha! as mentioned above . . . Abraham Lincoln (1736-1806), our four-great-grandfather. Mary Robeson was pregnant with Abraham when (her husband) Mordecai died (1736). Her stepson John Lincoln (President Lincoln’s great-grandfather) was 21 years old at the time, and her four stepdaughters were only ages nine to twelve. Her other two sons with Mordecai were four and six when Mordecai died.

To try to clarify this further, Mordecai Lincoln and his first wife, Hannah Salter, were parents of John Lincoln, great-grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln. Mordecai Lincoln’s second wife Mary Robeson, widowed during pregnancy, was mother of Abraham Lincoln, President Lincoln’s step-great-great uncle, husband of Anne Boone, my sisters’ and my great-great-great-great-grandmother. .

Mary Robeson Lincoln later married Roger Rogers (in about 1742), who lived to December, 1758. Mary Robeson Lincoln Rogers died in Amity, Pennsylvania, before March 25, 1783, at age (about) 78. The Lincoln family still had many Pennsylvania residents after some of the descendents had moved to Virginia and Kentucky and elsewhere.

The Berks County Historical Society has this writeup about President Lincoln’s grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great grandfather. There were three generations of Lincolns, ancestors of the President, who lived in Berks County: Mordecai, the great-great-grandfather; John, the great-grandfather; and Abraham, the grandfather:

“MORDECAI THE GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN

“Mordecai was the earliest direct Lincoln ancestor of the President to settle in Pennsylvania. With him came his brother, Abraham, the first of the Lincoln clan to bear that name (Abraham Lincoln). They were the sons of Mordecai Lincoln of Scituate, Massachusetts, and the grandsons of Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, the first Lincoln progenitor of the President to settle in America.

“Both Mordecai and his brother Abraham lived in New Jersey about seven years before migrating to Pennsylvania. While residing in New Jersey, Mordecai married Hannah Saltar, to which union there were born one son, John, and five daughters. One of the daughters died in infancy and lies buried in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

“Mordecai and Hannah Lincoln and their family settled at ‘Scoolkill’ (a quaint spelling of today’s Schuylkill River and perhaps even more famous, the much-feared Schuylkill Expressway that slices all through Philadelphia from Valley Forge). Scoolkill later was called Coventry Township, in Chester County. Here Mordecai in partnership with Samuel Nutt and William Branson operated a forge on French Creek; just how long Mordecai remained here it is difficult to determine. There is some indication that he intended to return to New Jersey as he sold his (the Mordecai Lincoln Home interest in the forge) for five hundred pounds on December 14, 1726, and five months later he bought of Richard Saltar, a tract of land in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Apparently it was about the time of the New Jersey land purchase in 1727, that his wife, Hannah, passed away and left him with five children, the oldest but eleven, and the youngest, an infant born shortly before the mother’s death.

“About two years after Hannah’s death, Mordecai married in the summer of 1729, Mary Robeson, daughter of Andrew Robeson of Amity, Philadelphia County. He had located in Amity Township as early as May 15, 1728, at which time he was appointed a commissioner for the defense of the community against the Indians. The same year as his second marriage, he first leased and later purchased the land on which he built a brick dwelling in 1733. He did not live long enough to enjoy the new house as three years later he passed away, at forty-nine years of age, and left his second wife, not only with five children by his first marriage, but with three more children by his later marriage, one of them born after the father’s death (the reader of this blog should know who that was!!!). Although all were under twenty-one, the older children were approaching maturity.

“Berks County was not formed until 1752, out of Philadelphia, Lancaster and Chester counties, sixteen years after Mordecai’s death. In reality he never lived in the county which was later to embrace the land where his old house stands. Furthermore, most of the descendants of Mordecai Lincoln bearing the Lincoln name are the offspring of Mordecai Jr., Thomas, and Abraham, children by his second wife, and it is with this group that the Amity or Exeter home, as it is now called, is more definitely associated. Mordecai Lincoln, great-great-grandfather of the President, lived in Pennsylvania at Coventry eight years and at Amity eight years, a total of sixteen years in Pennsylvania.

“JOHN LINCOLN-GREAT-GRANDFATHER OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN

“The only son of Mordecai Lincoln by his first wife was named John and he was born in New Jersey on May 3, 1716. He was four years old when his parents moved to Pennsylvania and settled in the Coventry home. When the family with the stepmother moved to Amity, John was twelve years old. He had reached the age of twenty when his father died.

“The next seven years of John’s life are almost a blank as there appears to be no record referring to him during this period. There is a tradition extant that he returned to New Jersey where he had inherited some land from his father in Middlesex County. During this period, however, wherever he may have been, he learned the weaver’s trade, and in his land transactions later on he is designated as weaver.

“From the time Berks County was established in 1752, the name of John Lincoln often appears in the public records, especially in the deed books where his many land purchases are recorded. He sold all his Pennsylvania lands in 1765 and moved the family to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. The Pennsylvania residence of John Lincoln included eight years at Coventry, eight years at Amity, seven years at some undetermined location, and nineteen years at Caernarvon.

“The first home site of John Lincoln we are able to identify is established by a land warrant assigned to John Lincoln on October 9, 1746. It is for a tract of fifty acres located in Caernarvon Township, Lancaster County, and the assignment indicates that John Lincoln was then living in the township. Two years later he purchased a tract of 150 acres adjacent to the above land and bordering on the Schuylkill River for about one third of a mile. It fell within Robeson Township of Lancaster County.

“The first record on John Lincoln thus far discovered is the date of his marriage which occurred on July 5, 1743. His wife was Rebecca Flowers Morris, the widow of James Morris, by whom she had one son. Her parents were Enoch and Rebecca Flowers who lived in Caernarvon Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Little is known about the Flowers family, except for the fact that Enoch was a Justice of the Peace in Caernarvon Township, where he must have resided. The fact that he and his wife are direct ancestors of President Lincoln would make any information about them important. John Lincoln named his first three sons Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Two other sons, John and Thomas, and four daughters, Hannah, Lydia, Sarah, and Rebecca, made up the family.

“ABRAHAM LINCOLN-GRANDFATHER OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN

“One of the most important historical projects which might be undertaken by the Historical Society of Berks County is the locating and marking of the site of the home where the President’s grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, was born. It was this grandfather for whom the more illustrious Abraham Lincoln was named. It was the story of this grandfather’s massacre by the Indians that the President remembered more vividly than any other story told him in boyhood days by his father. To put it in the President’s own words: ‘The story of his death by the Indians, and of Uncle Mordecai, then fourteen years old, killing one of the Indians, is the legend more strongly than all others imprinted on my mind and memory. I am the son of grandfather’s youngest son, Thomas.’

“The massacre took place in the month of May 1786, at Hughes Station in Kentucky about twenty miles east of Louisville. The pioneer was but forty-two years of age at the time of his death and he left a widow and five small children in the wilderness.

“The parents of the Pennsylvania Abraham were married on July 5, 1743, and he was born the following year. It is known that on Oct. 9, 1746, when Abraham was two years old, his father bought the fifty-acre tract in Caernarvon Township, in Lancaster County. and settled his family there. However, the exact place of Abraham’s parents’ residence at the time of his birth, has not been definitely established. Possibly John Lincoln may have gained possession of this fifty-acre tract at the time of his marriage. If this be so then the President’s grandfather lived the twenty-one years he resided in Pennsylvania in one location. The fifty-acre tract is located about one-half mile east of the present town of Birdsboro.”

The above paragraphs originally appeared in the April 1949 issue of the Historical Review of Berks County.

This summary will return to the marriage of Abraham Lincoln (the step-great-great uncle of the President) and Anne Boone, but first we will include the Boone branches of the tree that preceded this.

The history of the Boone family has its foundation in the brief genealogical data brought from England, preserved by John Boone, son of George Boone III. John gave the information to his nephew James Boone, who was applauded years afterward for recording the data both accurately and beautifully (“James Boone Genealogy”).

Upon their arrivals in the New World, the Boones quickly became part and parcel of Colonial America. As the story goes, never faltering, never failing, the Boones pressed onward with the western frontiers of civilization which then swept in successive waves across the continent. Of course, Daniel was the family’s most famous trailblazer.

It is known that the first George Boone was born in England. His second son, George, was born in 1666 in Stoak, England, a village near the City of Exeter in Devonshire, England. He was a blacksmith. He died at 60.

His son, George Boone III, is the progenitor in the fashion of Samuel Lincoln. As mentioned above, he was my sisters’ and my six-great-grandfather. He’s the most prominent Boone to move to the New World although three of his children made the journey across the ocean four years before their father. Part of George Boone III’s story is vintage Internet, as follows:

“George Boone III generally has been identified as a weaver, but he apparently had a blacksmith shop in Bradninch. Since his father was a blacksmith in Stoke Canon, George III must have been familiar with the trade and perhaps he operated a smithy in conjunction with his weaving business. George III probably became a weaver due to the growing importance of cloth manufacture in Devonshire during his childhood. He must have served his apprenticeship as a weaver in Bradninch because that town had a law that only those who apprenticed there could be employed in the community. The cloth made in Bradninch was a kind of serge called duroy.

“Early in 1717, before he left for America, George Boone III made a written admission to the Quakers that he was guilty of drunkenness and adultery : ‘Dear Friends, being duly sensible of my transgressions and sins against God, I do therefore after a long time make my humble confession … From this my wickedness – which was the keeping of wild company and drinking by which I sometimes became guilty of drunkenness – I fell into another gross evil, by which the honour due unto marriage was lost, for the marriage bed was defiled. Oh, what shall I say, Lord, wash me and cleanse me, I beseech thee.’ ”

That summer, George III and Mary must have patched things up and, with their six remaining children, traveled the 70 miles to Bristol on foot and bought passage to Pennsylvania. The six full fares and two half-fares cost them thirty-five pounds for a voyage that would leave at the “next good wind and weather.” Their ship sailed on August 17, 1717.

After their arrival in Pennsylvania on September 19, 1717 OS (i.e., Old Style), George III and Mary went to Abingdon (later spelling was changed to Abington), where their married son George lived; they apparently did not join the Quakers in Abingdon. After about a month at Abingdon, the family moved to North Wales Township in Philadelphia County where George Boone III applied for membership at Gwynedd Monthly Meeting:

“10-31-1717, George Boone Sr. produced a certificate of his good life and conversation from the Monthly at Callumpton in Great Britain which was read and well received.”

By 1720, the Boones had moved again; George III was described as a resident of Gwynedd when he received a warrant for 400 acres of land in Oley Township on December 20, 1718. The amount of vacant land surrounding the tract suggests that he was among the earliest settlers in the area. Later George III apparently acquired the vacant land surrounding his original tract and his sons obtained land near to or adjoining him in Oley Township.

The Boone farm in Oley Township in Philadelphia County was included in Exeter Township when it was set-off from Oley in 1741; the land was located in the part of Philadelphia County which became Lancaster County when Lancaster and Berks Counties were created in 1752. Being from near Exeter, England, perhaps the Boones influenced the selection of the name Exeter for the new township in which their land was located. The family attended Gwynedd Meeting until August 25, 1737 OS, when a new church was organized as Oley Monthly Meeting on May 27, 1742 OS, and later re-named Exeter Monthly Meeting.

In May, 1728, trouble arose in the Boone neighborhood between the white settlers and a band of Shawnee Indians from Illinois. A Shawnee brave was wounded in a dispute over some meat and panic swept through the district on a wave of rumors about Indian retaliation. George Boone, who was a justice of the peace, had to intervene when some whites threatened to kill two Indian girls.

He sent an urgent call for help to the Governor in Philadelphia: “Our Condition at Present looks with a bad Vizard .. . our Inhabitants are Generally fled (and) there remains about 20 men with me to guard my mill … we are resolved to defend ourselves to ye last Extremity. Wherefore I desire ye Governor & Counsel to Take our Cause into Consideration; And speedily send some Messengers to ye Indians, And some arms and ammunition to us, with some strength also, otherwise we shall undoubtedly perish and our province laid desolate and destroyed. ” REFERENCE HERE TO THE RESULTS OF THE CONTACT WITH THE GOVERNOR. X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

The homestead of George Boone III, on Monocacy Creek, is now an historical site. It is “Boonecroft”. Having chosen what is now, and no doubt was then, a most beautiful piece of fertile, rolling land, George III built a log house upon it in 1720. Thirteen years later, having prospered, he erected a larger house of stone nearby, which is still standing south of where the log cabin once stood.

Women of this era were always industrious and generally clothed their families by their own handicraft. Bread, milk and pie usually composed the frugal morning meal with good pork or bacon and a wheat flour pudding or dumplings with butter or molasses served for dinner. The evening meal was comprised of milk, butter and honey with mush or hominy.

Chocolate was a rarity but sweetening was done with maple sugar. Venison and wild turkey were served in season. Only the wealthiest of farmers had a wagon to go to market.

Having built the new house, George III refused for some reason to live in it himself, but turned it over to his children and continued to reside in the log house until his death. It is quite possible that some of his married children were then living at home with young families, and that George III and Mary preferred the quiet of the smaller home for themselves. When George III died, it is said that his remains were carried into the stone house and from there to his burial in the Friends burying ground at Exeter Meeting House. An old family Bible records the fact that ” when Grandfather died he left 8 children, 52 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren living, in all 70, being as many persons as the house of Jacob which came into Egypt.” The latter is copied in the book “The Boone Family”. (NOTE: After the Susanna Cox story below, there is a story on a fire at Exeter Meeting House Sunday, March 20, 2011.)

In accordance with the custom of the Friends Society, no stones mark the graves of George Boone III and his wife, Mary, but a far greater memorial is found in the thousands of descendants who unite in honoring their memory. The cemetery just appears as an open field perhaps 150 feet from the Meeting House.

The George Boone III homestead (“Boonecroft”) is a short distance south of the Oley Line/Limekiln Post Office on a road between highways 73 and 562. The Squire Boone homestead is about two miles directly south on Owatin Creek, a tributary of Monocacy Creek. Monocacy Creek enters the Schuylkill River about a mile south of Squire Boone’s homestead, east of Birdsboro. Exeter Friends Meeting House is between the homes of George and Squire and slightly to the east on a parallel local road, on land purchased from George Boone IV. The address is 191 Meetinghouse Road, Exeter Township.

Some of the above will be repeated below, inasmuch as the several paragraphs above about George Boone III were lifted from an Internet story.

It is generally agreed that George Boone had a friend, William Penn, who persuaded him to emigrate to the New World. The fact that both were Quakers had much to do with the decision to sail.

George Boone III and wife Mary (Maugridge) had been members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Callumpton, Devonshire, from which they took a letter of recommendation to the Society of Friends in America. As noted above, on August 17, 1717, the Boones with six of their children went to Bristol, England, to leave for the new land. They arrived in Philadelphia September 29 (Old Style calendar) or October 10 (New Style). This date is in conflict with other accounts of their travel.

The Boone children already in Pennsylvania (George IV, Squire and Sarah) already were living comfortably, so to speak, in Abington (once known as Abingdon), 14 miles north of Philadelphia, and encouraged their parents to stay in Abington for a short time. (Today, Abington is a suburb of Philadelphia.) George IV had married in Abington in 1713. After a few months, George III and most of the family moved to North Wales, not far from Abington. After two years there, they made the move that had greater bearing on future Boone-related generations: in 1720, they moved to Oley Township in Philadelphia County (now Berks County), the area that eventually became Douglassville and environs, including Exeter Township, attached thereto (named Exeter because of their affection for their English homes in Exeter, England).

In that first year, George Boone III got an early taste of Quaker provincialism. He was called on the carpet, so to speak, for allowing the courthship between his daughter Mary and her boyfriend John Webb. George III ate crow according to the minutes of the meeting: “George Boone has openly acknowledged in the meeting his forwardness in giving his consent to John Webb to keep company with his daughter in order to marry, contrary to ye established order amongst us.” Later, John Webb joined the Meeting and everybody was back-slapping.

He bought 400 acres of land in the Birdsboro/Oley area in 1720. The site of the original log house is marked by a boulder placed there by the Historical Society of Berks County. The boulder is marked with this inscription: “House built in 1733 by GEORGE BOONE, grandfather of DANIEL BOONE . . . . . Site of Geo. (sic) Boone’s log house, built about 1720. Historical Society of Berks County.”

Thirteen years later, he built the larger house of stone nearby, which, as noted above, is still standing today. It is about three miles from the Daniel Boone Homestead, which also is a state historical site (although last month, January, 2011, you could not visit the grounds except on your own, not recommended, due to a five-inch snowstorm).

For some reason, George III refused to live in the new house himself, turning it over to his children. He lived in the log house till his death in 1744 (age 78). It has been reported, as noted above, that his remains were carried into the stone (his childrens’) house and from there to his burial in the Friends’ burying-ground at Exeter Meeting House. An old family Bible records the fact that “when Grandfather died, he left 8 children, 52 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, 70 in all, being as many persons as the home of Jacob, which came into Egypt.”

In accordance with the custom of the Friends Society, no stones mark the graves of George Boone III and his wife Mary, but a far greater memorial is found in the thousands of descendants who unite in honoring their memory.

While my sister and I also are interested in James Boone, the first son of George III that we need to talk about here is Squire Boone, one of the three children who preceded George III in coming to the New World, and yes, Squire was his given name. He was born November 25, 1696 (Old Style) or December 6 (New Style) in Devonshire, England. He died in Rowan County, North Carolina, January 2, 1765.

The “Old Style” time was used in many early records, especially those of the Society of Friends, dating to prior to 1752. That was the so-called Julian Time. After that time, by adding 11 days to a date given in Old Style provides the date corresponding to our current calendar.

Squire Boone was married to Sarah Morgan September 23, 1720. He was 23. He was the “father of the intrepid Kentucky pioneer, Daniel Boone,” according to a newspaper clipping sent to the author of “The Boone Family”. The “compiler”, as he called himself, said he could not tell where the newspaper clipping came from. It describes how Squire and Sarah settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1730. More specifically, they moved to a home overlooking the Upper Neshaminy (river), apparently the Schuylkill River of today, in New Britain Township, Bucks County, but also known as Oley Township. At least three of Daniel Boone’s brothers and sisters were born here.

Daniel was born here October 22, 1734 (Old Style) or November 2 (New Style). He was the sixth of eleven children. The GPS address of the Daniel Boone Homestead is 400 Daniel Boone Road, Birdsboro, PA 19508 phone number 610-582-4900. For the record and for visitors to the Daniel Boone Homestead of today, the George Boone home of that era was about three miles from the Daniel Boone Homestead. The George Boone Homestead “Boonecroft” is now just a chimney and a fireplace, marked by a large stone marker on Oley Line Road, now located on what’s called “Hidden Valley Farm”, about one-half mile west of Limekiln Road. This is about seven miles north of U. S. 422 East. Across the street is a smaller monument identifying the Boone Log Cabin, where George III lived till his death. The large Boonecroft home built in 1733 still stands.

The present stone Daniel Boone Homestead, it is generally accepted, was built by a later owner, but it encloses the spring and the original hearth (which was “turned around” by creating an opening on the opposite side). The floor boards of “random” width (meaning uneven width, as they came from the primeval forest) are the very same on which Daniel Boone sat, cleaning his first rifle.

The rest of the Daniel Boone Homestead, including the barn, blacksmith shop, and log cabin, has been interestingly furnished with the household utensils, furniture, looms, blacksmithing tools-all of the type used when Daniel Boone was young. Indian scouts and woodsmen traveled light, so they did not gather collector’s items for posterity. But if Daniel Boone were to revisit his birthplace today, he would revisit the spring, the open hearth, and the broad floor boards.

Of indoor schooling, “booklarning,” Daniel had very little. Whether he ever attended a school is still disputed. And scores of letters and documents and reports he wrote show that he never mastered spelling. An inscription he carved on a tree in Tennessee “D. Boon cilled A. Bar on tree in the year 1760,” shows the experimental nature of his spelling. Another (also in Tennessee), “D. Boon killa bar on this tree 1773,” shows little improvement in thirteen years. But the interesting point about these inscriptions is the woodcraft knowledge displayed by Boone. He usually carved his inscriptions on beech trees, which grow so slowly that the expansion of the bark does not distort the lettering for many years. The 1760 inscription was still clear enough to be photographed a hundred years later.

At the Daniel Boone Homestead, a large stone monument says: GEORGE BOONE LOG HOUSE ERECTED 1729 BY GEORGE 3RD AND MARY MILTON (MAUGRIDE) {sic} BOONE. RAZED BY THE ELEMENTS (EXCEPT FIREPLACE AND CHIMNEY) IN 1924. GEORGE BOONE 3RD BORN NEAR EXETER DEVONSHIRE ENGLAND IN 1666. SQUIRE BOONE, HIS SON, WAS BORN IN BRADNINCH DEVONSHIRE ENGLAND NOV 25TH 1696. SETTLED ON A FARM 3 MILES SOUTH OF HERE WHERE HIS SON DANIEL BOONE — THE KENTUCKY PIONEER — WAS BORN NOV 2, 1734. STONE HOUSE ON THIS TRACT WAS BUILT BY GEORGE BOONE AND HIS WIFE MARY, 1733.

A historian writing for the Berks County Historical Society, although not a perfect speller (“effect” instead of “affect”), penned a stuffy account of the Boone family lifestyle amidst the prime existence…. a religious life:

“At first glance the place and circumstance of Daniel’s birth does not seem of any positive, formative influence but like many other casual events of history this one must be viewed in its proper light. The danger with these correlations lies in the fact that when once suspected the historian is apt to give them undue weight. The influences of Oley-if they did effect (sic) Daniel’s character-were positive and during the first half of the eighteenth century the dominating one was religious.

“Here religion was vital. It was the be-all and the end-all of life. Nothing supplanted it. Pietism dominated, but a Pietism distrustful of legalism, discontented with rationality, and disgusted with dogmatic theology. Rooted as they were in a positive mysticism there were only two possible ways for these people of Oley to go – there was asceticism as later manifested by a small movement to Ephrata, and then there was hedonism which never was followed at all.

“The Oley way of life was simple: it was based on the Greek notion of moderation and upon the Teutonic instinct of frugality. The age-old antagonism between legalism and libertinism was here dissolved and in the white-hot crucible of a new land the elements of these differing sects were fused into a mass already alloyed with continental mysticism. Instead of a Hebraistic strictness of conscience, instead of Hellenistic spontaneity of consciousness, these people possessed the conception of conscience and of consciousness wholly dependent upon God. It was here that Daniel Boone was born on November 2, 1734, according to the new style of reckoning.”

Yes, ’twas a mite stuffy.

There is another article about incidents in Daniel’s life related to Oley Township:

“Squire Boone at one time became part owner of a shad fishery on the nearby Schuylkill River. There is a tale that Daniel went to the river with his mother one warm spring day to help clean some fish to bring home. The boy was left asleep near the fish with his hat over his face, while his mother went to a neighbor’s house to offer a share of the catch. The neighbor accepted and sent her daughters after the fish. When they saw a pail containing fish entrails near the sleeping boy, they dashed the contents in the boy’s face, whereupon he gave them both a sound beating. Their mother then ran to Mrs. Boone in complaint. Mrs. Boone was ordinarily a calm, gentle woman, but she could be spirited when occasion warranted. She retorted: ‘If thee has not brought up thy daughters to better behavior it is high time they were taught better manners. And if Daniel has given them a lesson, I hope, for my part, that it will in the end do them no harm, and I have only to add, that I bid thee good day.’

“It is said that Daniel was fond of practical jokes, and that once, with his friend Henry Miller, he was guilty of taking some neighbors’ wagons apart and tying the wheels and other parts up in the trees.

“In his father’s blacksmith shop Daniel became skilled in metal work. When he was twenty-one years old he enlisted as a blacksmith and wagoner in Braddock’s ill-fated expedition and was lucky to escape from the Indians on one of Braddock’s horses at the time of the disastrous defeat. His blacksmith’s skill served him well later in life in repairing his rifle and those of his pioneer friends and, when a prisoner, those of the Indians.

“Daniel was sixteen years old when his father sold his Oley Valley property and migrated to North Carolina. Squire Boone was in bad odor with the Exeter Meeting, by which he had been rebuked and ‘disowned’ because some of his children had ‘married out of meeting.’ The Boones could never endure regimentation. His migration was also probably motivated by his having exhausted the soil of his land. The pioneers knew little of rotation of crops and fertilization of the soil. When the land was worked out, they moved. The family lived near Winchester, Va., for over a year, near their friend John Lincoln, Abraham’s grandfather (NOTE: John, in fact, was President Lincoln’s great-grandfather), before eventually migrating to Yadkin Valley, North Carolina.

“Daniel is said to have been five feet ten inches in height, sturdily built, and of remarkable strength. He had fair skin, sandy hair and eyebrows, blue eyes, a large mouth, thin lips and a Roman nose. The Indians of Kentucky called him ‘wide mouth.’

“It was not until he was forty-seven years old that he returned to his birthplace. His Uncle James wrote in his Bible ’1781 Oct. 20. Then Daniel came to see us for the first time.’ Two years before, the old cabin had been torn down and, on the stone foundation was built the rest of the stone house which now stands.

“Again in 1788 Daniel returned to Pennsylvania, with his wife, a daughter and two sons. James Boone then recorded in his Bible: ’1788, Feb. 12, Then Daniel (with Rebecca his wife, and their son Nathan) came to see us.’ It is reported that he placed his hand on the big timber over the fire-place and said to his son Nathan, ‘Just so tall was your dad when we left here.’ The timber is still there and is just five feet ten inches from the level of the original floor, as shown by the old stone foundation of the cabin. Never again did Daniel Boone return to Oley Valley.

“Daniel Boone’s love of the wilderness continued to the end of his life. He never settled down for any length of time, but was ever away on a hunting expedition or exploring unsettled country. His skill in the woods and with the Indians was so outstanding that he became the most famous pioneer of his time, and he has remained to this day, our national ideal of a ‘pioneer.’ ”

For purposes of this still-in-the-editing stage summary, the writer needs to point out that he is aware of the confusions over the several houses due to the variances in descriptions.

Squire Boone, son of George III, father of Daniel, lived in the children’s house ????? (as a farmer, a weaver and a blacksmith) with his family until April 11, 1750 (20 years) when they moved to North Carolina. Apparently nothing about Daniel is known for about the next five years (in his last teenaged years). In 1755, the British General Edward Braddock (with George Washington on his staff) tried to drive the French and Indians from Fort Duquesne in Pennsylvania. In the army under Braddock was a company of North Carolina frontiersmen, including 21-year-old Daniel Boone, who was a wagoner and blacksmith.

Books have been written about Daniel Boone. There are many Internet links describing his life. So we will leave the frontiersman, the one generally regarded as the trailblazer for the eventual state of Kentucky, and proceed below with what became my sisters and my part, and our families, of the Gabriel family (of Ohio). Kentucky was not one of the original 13 states. It attained statehood soon after the birth of the nation (June 1, 1792).

Next, we will conclude with further information about Daniel’s father and also his uncle. Squire and Sarah Boone, his parents, lived in their only North Carolina home and died there (Squire, see above, died in 1765 at age 68 and Sarah in 1777 at age 77).

For purposes of the Gabriel family, we are interested in Squire’s brother, James, who was 12 years younger than Squire, having been born July 18, 1709, in Devonshire, England, and who died September 1, 1785, at age 74. James was Daniel Boone’s uncle. James’ children, including Anne Boone Lincoln (our Gabriel connection, our great-great-great-great grandmother), were cousins of Daniel.

The book “The Boone Family” re-prints the James Boone will, an extensive document, as for example, the eighth provision:

“8thly, I give and bequeath unto my four Daughters, Anne Lincoln, Mary Lee, Martha Hughes and Rachel Wilcockson, each the Sum of five Shillings they having received part of their Portions of me in Land already, as by Several Deeds delivered to their husbands may appear, and I do hereby acquit and forever Discharge them and their Husbands of all Money Goods and Creatures that they already had of me, and Stand Charged with in my Book of Accounts.” (Punctuation and capitalization were verbatim.)

As noted above, Anne Boone, cousin of Daniel Boone, was married to Abraham Lincoln, step-great-great-uncle of President Lincoln. Anne Boone was born April 14, 1737, and died April 4, 1807, at age 70. She was buried in the Friends’ Burying Ground in Exeter Township, not far from what is today called the Daniel Boone Homestead inasmuch as he (Daniel) lived there with his brothers and sisters. It was the home built by their father, Squire. ?????? (Not certain of this.)

Abraham Lincoln (our great-great-great-great-grandfather) and Anne Boone were married July 10, 1760. He actually was the half-brother of John, great-grandfather of President Lincoln. The blood lines of Mordecai Lincoln (1686-1736) flowed in each of their bodies, and in my sisters and me. Abraham, our four-great-grandfather and John’s half brother, was 23 years, 8 months and 11 days old and she was 23 years, 2 months and 26 days, “he being 5 months, 15 days and 22 hours older than she”. (They knew the proper grammar between “she” and “her” in those days!) The detail, down to the hours, was found in an old family Bible. Upon her death, it was reported that our four-great-grandmother lived 69 years, 11 months, 21 days, 14 hours and 10 minutes!

The Lincolns were Congregationalists and the Boones Quakers. Consequently, Anne Boone’s marriage to Abraham Lincoln was “out of Meeting” and was considered a disorderly act (many marriages of the era were “out of meeting” and considered disorderly). For her disorder our great-great-great-great-grandmother was disciplined by the Exeter Monthly Meeting, and she acknowledged her error to the Meeting August 27, 1761.

Abraham and Anne had 10 children, six sons and four daughters, including Phoebe Lincoln, born January 22, 1773.

Phoebe was our great-great-great-grandmother. She lived to age 77 (died June 12, 1852).

When she was about 19, she married David Jones (born May 26, 1766), age about 26.

We probably would need to borrow that IBM computer “Watson” to ferret all the relationships, past and future, including our grandmother and grandfather, who married a sister and brother, prompting my Mother to identify them as “double cousins”.

And in those days, they surely liked to name the children after the parents and others in the family. You have seen that with Mordecai et al but there is more to come.

Phoebe’s husband, David Jones (see above), was a son of Caleb Jones (1744-1809) and his wife Hannah Samuels (Jones). And Caleb Jones was a son of David Jones (1709-1784) and his wife Elizabeth Davies (1714-1782). (You think this is easy ???)

Phoebe and David had six children, including our great-great-grandmother Anna (Nancy) Jones (born February 27, 1796, and who died June 30, 1876). When she was 21, she eloped with Thomas Gabriel, our grandfather’s grandfather (January 26, 1817). Well, it’s about time we get around to a Gabriel!!! It also should be noted that Anna (Nancy) Jones was 13 years old, in 1809, when the infamous Susanna Cox story unfolded, as described in this blog in great detail below. Anna (Nancy) lived about three-fourths of a mile from Susanna Cox.

But back to David Jones. In 1778 in England, when he was 12 years old, he stowed away on a merchant ship. Yes, he was 12. He ran away from home because he could not get along with his stepmother.

For the record, this was included in a somewhat convoluted writeup that appeared in the Bryan, Ohio, Times newspaper. Included in the report on David Jones was the statement that one of his descendants moved to Paola, Kansas, and became a millionaire. This was said to be Henry Clay Jones. Today, he would have to become a billionaire to make it into a centuries-long family tree scenario!

The writeup appeared in the Bryan Times either in 1976 or 1982, depending on which account you favor. We do know it was our Aunt Norma (Starck) who gave the writeup to my sister Joan on or about Monday, March 21, 1982.

One of the anecdotes had to do with a teaspoon and a teapot. Lois Kerr Perkins (wife of Robert W. Perkins) of Pulaski had written the following: “This past summer, we were privileged to visit some cousins in Apple Creek, Ohio: Mrs. Mabel Tucker and Mrs. Ella Manson.” The account continued to explain that Mrs. Manson had, with her, a pewter teaspoon and a china teapot that belonged to the mother of President Lincoln. Information from Mrs. Manson and Mrs. Tucker, together with a genealogy compiled by the late Dorothy Baker Perkins, wife of Lynden Perkins, supplied names and dates necessary to verify the relationship of the Gabriel family to President Lincoln and Daniel Boone (and also to the Perkins family).

But again, back to David Jones, the 12-year-old English stowaway. And wife Phoebe Lincoln Jones. And their daughter, our great-great-grandmother Anna (Nancy) Jones. Thomas Gabriel already was mentioned above, but now we’re getting to the touchdowns in the fourth quarter.

Thomas Gabriel was from Ohio. His parents, Thomas and Elizabeth Gabriel (which also was our Mother’s maiden name!), had migrated to Moreland (Wayne County), Ohio, to homestead a farm. Moreland is located south of Cleveland about mid-way between Akron and Mansfield.

Thomas Gabriel was visiting relatives in Reading, Pennsylvania, about 14 miles from Oley Township, when he met Anne (Nancy) Jones. He was described as a tall, dark-haired, handsome young man.

Thomas and Anna (Nancy) fell in love, much to the chagrin of her parents. They (David and Phoebe Lincoln Jones) refused to give the young lovers permission to get married.

The couple decided to elope. And they did so from Anna’s maternal grandparents’ home, named “Boonecroft”. (The maternal grandparents no longer were living at the time.) If you have not fallen asleep and have taken copious notes, you now realize that Boonecroft was the home of Abraham Lincoln and Anne Boone Lincoln, grandparents of Anna (Nancy) Jones! This Abraham Lincoln was related to the 16th President through his father, Mordecai Lincoln; his wife, Anne Boone, was related to the Kentucky frontiersman; Daniel Boone was her first cousin. By the way, in its earlier days, “Boonecroft” was spelled without the “e” because many Boones in the earlier days spelled their last name without the “e”.

“Boonecroft” is identifiable today. It’s on Oley Line Road in Douglassville, Pennsylvania. My sister and I visited there in 1993, and I returned last month, but the snow was still too deep for further exploration. The home is a historical site. The window at the back of the home near where Thomas placed the ladder for her exit had been marked with a plaque, but on my return visit March 22, 2011, it was not there. Near the side/rear door is a plaque today identifying Boonecroft as a historical site.

Anna and Tom left after dark to begin their journey by buckboard wagon back to Tom’s Ohio home. When they arrived at his parents’ home near Moreland (it had been a 415-mile trip), they hid the buckboard in a cowshed at the back of the house.

Not long thereafter, her parents forgave them, and they returned to Berks County, Pennsylvania, to live where nine of their fourteen children (!!) were born.

The nine children born in Pennsylvania were as follows: James Flavius Gabriel (1817-1854), a carpenter; David Jones Gabriel (1818-1895), a gunsmith; Jacob Gabriel (1820-1855), a cooper (traditionally, a cooper is someone who makes wooden staved vessels of a conical form, of greater length than breadth, bound together with hoops and possessing flat ends or heads. Examples of a cooper’s work include but are not limited to casks, barrels, buckets, tubs, butter churns, hogsheads, firkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, pins and breakers); Phebe Gabriel (1822-??); Margaret Gabriel (1824-1865); John Quincy Gabriel (1825-1892); the seventh child, our great-grandfather, Caleb Jones Gabriel (1827- ), a farmer; Anne Gabriel (1828- ) and Elizabeth (or Elisabeth) Gabriel (1830- ).

Their other five children born in Ohio were Martha Lincoln Gabriel (1832- ); Joseph Gabriel (1833- ); Mary Ann Gabriel (1835- ), Jane Good Gabriel (1836- ) and Amanda Gabriel (1838- ). Thomas Gabriel and Anna (Nancy) Jones Gabriel had children at the rate of approximately one every 18 months.

They moved to the Gabriel (Ohio) homestead in 1832 after the death of Tom’s father to farm the land and help his mother manage the farm. Tom and Anna lived the remainder of their lives on the farm near Moreland, Ohio, which has been the home of a Gabriel clan since it was a homestead.

As you can see, with 14 children born to Tom and Anna Gabriel, that suggests many, many more descendants of Abe and Daniel. And we can name some of them from the family of Caleb Jones Gabriel, seventh son of Thomas and Anna. The eldest was Elsie Gabriel (born in or near 1858); Thomas Gabriel (born in or near 1860); Ezra (we know he was born in 1862 !);
Sarah A. Gabriel (born in or near 1865); Eliza J. Gabriel (born in or near 1868); Leander Gabriel (born in or near 1870); Emma M. Gabriel (born in or near 1872); Orpha M. Gabriel (born in or near 1874), and Royal O. Gabriel (born in or near 1879). The correct year for each of them is known as a result of the 1880 United States Federal Census, from which these names were obtained. So here we had another large Gabriel family, with many descendants of Abe and the frontiersman.

Our grandmother Gabriel was the sister of the great grandson of the man who also was active in northwest Ohio at the time. His name was Judge John Perkins. In the spring of 1833, he became the first settler of the town of Pulaski, Ohio, which later became the birthplace of our Grandmother Gabriel. Pulaski is about 15 miles somewhat northeast of Edgerton, Ohio, where our Grandmother and Grandfather Gabriel lived for many years. It is three miles northeast of Bryan, 15 miles east of Edgerton. It should be understood that the Ohio Gabriel homestead of Thomas Gabriel, our great-great-great-great-grandfather, was 170 miles from Pulaski.

Judge Perkins came to the (Pulaski) area to survey what now are Defiance and Williams Counties for the State of Ohio. He received a section of land in the Pulaski area as payment. Born May 18, 1776, Judge Perkins was in his middle 50′s when he arrived there with two of his sons, Isaac and Garrett, and five other men. How he selected the town itself is remarkable.

The story was that away back before calendars were invented, when time was measured by the moon and directions were determined by the moss on the trees, there were but two main-traveled thoroughfares through Williams County, and they crossed each other at what was to become Pulaski, Ohio. One of the trails was from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Detroit, and the other led from Columbus past Fort Defiance through Pulaski into Michigan. It was said that Judge Perkins was so impressed with the possibilities of Pulaski because of the intersection of the two trails that he concluded he would lay out the townsite there and it would become the metropolis of the northwest.

Alas, Pulaski today remains a small town.

Judge Perkins remained in the Pulaski area until his death at age 72 September 13, 1848. The Judge was married three times and he fathered 14 children. He married his first wife, Nancy Dawson, February 20, 1800. The first of their seven children was Isaac, born in 1801. Isaac’s first wife was Mary Tuttle and their first child was Frank Josiah Perkins, born in 1829. We are keying on Frank Josiah Perkins.

While Frank was serving in the Army in Pennsylvania, he married Celina Bamer. (Celina’s mother, Elizabeth Cannon, was the great-grandmother of “Uncle Joe Cannon”, long-time Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives. The Cannon House Office Building is named for Uncle Joe.)

Frank and Celina had a daughter, Laura, born in 1858, who lived only two years. But their next two children are highly significant in this entire summary. They moved back to Ohio (Williams Center, six miles southwest of Pulaski) and a son, Thomas Newton Perkins, was born April 7, 1860. In 1863, they moved to Pulaski where, on August 4, their third child was born: Mary Annabelle (Millie) Perkins, our Grandmother. Frank Josiah Perkins moved his family several times before moving back to Williams Center where he died June 1, 1875.

Now to the other side: the Ezra Gabriel story. Our grandfather. Grandpa.

When Thomas and Anna Gabriel moved from Oley Township in Pennsylvania to Moreland, Ohio, their son Caleb Jones Gabriel was five years old. He did not marry until age 26. He married Frances Charlton. They had five children before her death. Then on February 14, 1867, he married Ruth Isabella Van Gilder, the widow of Gideon Stine. Their first child, Lida Jane Gabriel, was born January 19, 1868, in Moreland. So she was daughter of Caleb Jones Gabriel and his second wife, Ruth.

Lida Jane Gabriel was the half-sister of our Grandfather, Ezra Gabriel. On April 8, 1885, she married Thomas Newton Perkins, our Grandmother’s brother. This is where the “double cousins” comes in (see above reference). Our grandparents, Ezra Munson Gabriel and Mary Annabelle (Millie) Perkins, were half-brother and sister, respectively, of Lida Jane Gabriel (Perkins) and Thomas Newton Perkins.

As noted above, providing some of the information relating to the Gabriels and Perkins was Lois Kerr Perkins, wife of Robert W. Perkins (his birth date October 21, 1908). They lived on part of the section of land granted to Judge John Perkins in Pulaski. In the mid-1970′s, probably 1976, at the end of her writeup, which was published in the Bryan Times, she reported: “There are 153 living direct descendants of Thomas Newton and Lida Jane Gabriel Perkins.” That must have been quite a job, compiling the list. We were told that a new genealogy book on the Perkins family was produced in January, 1988. There does not appear to be any evidence of it on the Internet.

Our grandfather, Ezra Munson Gabriel, was born during the Civil War. The date was January 24, 1862. His future bride, our grandmother, as noted above, also was born during the Civil War, on August 4, 1863. So Grandpa was a year-and-a-half older than Grandma. Grandpa lived 93 years, Grandma 96. He died April 6, 1955; she, December 22, 1959.

Grandpa married Grandma, Mary Annabelle Perkins, April 7, 1885, in Williams Center, Ohio. He was 23, she 21.

They lived in Williams Center their first year after marriage. Their first child was born there —- Guy Caleb Gabriel. Uncle Guy.

My sister Joan (remember it is pronounced JOH-ANN…. “LOL”) provided a writeup for this blog saying that Grandpa then got a job at a flour mill 10 miles down the road in Edgerton, Ohio. Grandpa and Grandma moved to Edgerton and bought a two-story plain frame house, two rooms down and two up, no porch.

A year after moving there, Grandpa changed jobs. He went to work at the Edgerton Basket Factory, which conveniently was just a block from the Gabriel house.

He walked to work (of course, it was a whole block away!) every day at 6:00 a.m., returned for DINNER at noon, then went back to work until 6:00 p.m., when he came home for SUPPER. My sister says he did that six days each week. Ugh!

The rest of their nine children (eight of them) were born here, and Ez and Millie lived in that house until they died. Over the years, the house grew with the family. Eventually, they had six rooms down and still the two rooms up. But they also had a spacious front, screened-in porch, with the traditional swing at one end that everybody loved.

Their two older sons went to serve in World War I. Uncle Guy and Uncle Frank. The youngest boy, Milton, was too young to go to war. Sadly, though the two older sons came home without a scratch, the younger boy was taken from them November 11, 1918, ironically the date of the Armistice. Tragically, at age 17, Uncle Milton died from what then was called tuberculosis of the brain, which probably today would be classified as spinal meningitis.

During one of my sister’s visits there, Grandma told her about Uncle Milton. She said, “He would be 35 years old now; I wonder what he’d be like!” Joan told me: “I felt so sad for her and Grandpa.”

Five of their six daughters married, and gave them ten grandchildren. (Uncle Guy and Uncle Frank married, too. Uncle Frank had one son, Frank, Jr.) Our Aunt Verna, the one girl who did not marry, wanted to go to art school, which she did for one year, at the Cleveland Art Institute. But that was all Grandpa could afford. So Aunt Verna became a stenographer.

Another daughter, Aunt Frances, was sent by Grandpa to a business school in Fort Wayne, but in a few days she got homesick, and came home to work at the Edgerton Post Office.

The oldest daughter, Aunt Hazel, became a Court Reporter in Bryan (12 miles east of Edgerton) after her Business Education. Daughter Number Three was Aunt Norma. She was a Secretary to the Editor of the South Bend, Indiana, newspaper, The Mirror Press.

Our mother, Elizabeth May Gabriel, daughter Number Two, gave up wanting to be a teacher. She said she noticed women teachers never get married, and she wanted to get married. So she worked at the linotype, putting the Edgerton Earth newspaper together each week. Mother worked there for five years. She was paid one dollar a day!

After five years at the newspaper, she got an offer to go to Montana to keep house along with the sister of one of the friends of Uncle Guy and Uncle Frank in Livingston. Our Mother visited Yellowstone Park frequently (among other places) for two years every weekend during her time off.

By this time, our Mother was “Betty” to everybody. Her brothers, both telegraphers, introduced her to a telegrapher friend, Orville Austin Pierron, who became her husband, our Daddy. They were married in Livingston, Montana, just before he left for the war in Europe, where he served in the Signal Corps, thanks to his experience as a telegrapher. (There is a short story about his later work at the Western Union in St. Louis on this blog. You can find the writeup in the story about my pal Dizzy Dean.)

Joan writes that Grandpa Ez was quite the father. He had suggested to Guy and Frank that they invite Betty to come out to Montana for a visit. He noticed Betty was “dying on the vine” in Edgerton. So, in fact, he was instrumental in her move out west.

And in this summary, we can’t forget Aunt Dorothy, the youngest in the family. Aunt Dorothy “stenographed” it out just like her older sisters, in Cleveland. Joan writes that Grandpa saw that his daughters received business educations.

In Betty’s case, says Joan, she was going to school to become a teacher until she thought better of it.

Joan wrote: “Grandpa was always a pleasant person as I remember him. He loved his family and his grandchildren; that was evident. He attended Sunday School and Church every Sunday, and took his children with him. Grandma almost always had to stay home because there always was a baby to take care of! Until the last one was five or six years old. Then, she went to Church, too.

“Grandpa also played in the Edgerton band. He played the Bass Horn. I remember seeing him in the Band during the Homecoming times I experienced. Grandpa could yodel, too. I remember asking him to yodel, when I heard that he could. He did it for me, once. But it was hard on his voice box and he wouldn’t do it in his later years.

“As I said, Grandpa was quite a guy!

“Grandma was quite a gal, too, a very sweet person who always kissed us goodnight when we were visiting and going to bed, and always would say ‘SWEET DREAMS’ !!”

Speaking about Grandpa and Grandma, Joan concluded: “They were such loving and lovely people!!! If I hadn’t had them, I don’t know what I would have become! I felt so loved by them. They thought I was really the cat’s meow!”

I remember both of them well, too, and with great fondness. I can remember always wanting to see my Grandpa smile. He didn’t curse. Well, not really. Except one day, when they were in their 90′s, and I was visiting from St. Louis with my Mother and sister Mary, he said a bad word, maybe two. I was in the kitchen when Grandma came in from the back yard, saying: “I’ve been wantin’ to do that for years!!”

Grandpa almost always sat in his chair up front, in the living room. But he heard Grandma. So he came toward the kitchen, asking her in an unusual, demanding voice: “What did you do!!!!!” You could tell he thought by the way she acted she had done something she shouldn’t have.

She replied that she had just finished cutting down the tree in the middle of the back yard.

“What!!!!!!” demanded Grandpa. “What did you do???” He obviously just wanted to hear her say it again.

“Well,” she said, “I cut down that tree. I never did like it there.”

“You damn fool!!” he bellowed. Never saw him angry before.

And here came more cursing by Grandpa. “Well, consarn it, you’re too old to do something like that!”

“Consarn” appears to be a mild expletive along the lines of “dagnabbit”. Grandma assured him she was fine. She turned to me and said: “I didn’t wanna tell him!” And I got the idea that she had heard “consarn” before, too.

It was, in fact, a beautiful moment.

And before we report here a sad “moment” in the history of the early Lincoln and Boone days, which happened hardly more than a stone’s throw from Boonecroft, I want to mention more about our family and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of whom are related to President Lincoln and Daniel Boone.

Our Dad was born August 5, 1891, and died June 9, 1949, at the age of 57. We were living in St. Louis at the time. Our Mother was born December 29, 1891, so she was just four months younger than our Dad. She died January 6, 1982, at the age of 90. For the last 25 years of her life, she lived in Edgerton in a house she arranged to have built (along with Aunt Norma, who lived there with her). It was right next to our grandparents’ house, still sturdily standing and occupied in those years by Aunt Verna.

Joan and I had a sister, Mary, who was taken from this life much too soon. Mary was born January 7, 1928. She died at age 59 (June 25, 1987) near Dayton, Ohio, after a long illness. She and her husband Fred Morehead had three daughters.

My sister Joan is the Mother of Randall James Murphy (born April 5, 1943), Jan Elizabeth Murphy (born December 13, 1948) and Jacques Pierron Murphy (born March 2, 1959). For her children, President Lincoln is their third cousin, four times removed. They are first cousins of Daniel Boone, seven times removed.

Randy is the Father of Colin Randall Murphy (born October 8, 1968) and Patrick James Murphy (born December 9, 1969). Randy’s sons are President Lincoln’s third cousins, five times removed. They are first cousins of Daniel Boone, eight times removed.

Colin is the Father of Riley Aiden Murphy (born January 26, 2007). Riley is the President’s third cousin, six times removed, and Daniel Boone’s first cousin, nine times removed.

Patrick is the Father of Katherine Manuella Murphy (born January 16, 2001) and Nicole ????? (born ?????). They also are President Lincoln’s third cousins, six times removed. They are first cousins of Daniel Boone, nine times removed.

Jacques is the Father of Austin Richard Murphy (born June 8, 1987) and Sean Charles Murphy (born June 15, 1990). They are President Lincoln’s third cousins, five times removed. And they are Daniel Boone’s first cousins, seven times removed.

Our sister Mary (born January 7, 1928; died June 25, 1987) was the Mother of three daughters, namely, Ann Elledge Morehead Wilson (born August 10, 1948), Nancy Jean Morehead Archdeacon (born August 2, 1951) and Jayne Ellen Morehead Long (born July 20, 1956). They are President Lincoln’s third cousins, four times removed. They are first cousins of Daniel Boone, seven times removed.

Ann Wilson is the Mother of Todd Alan Wilson (born January 12, 1971) and Teri Ann Wilson Smith (born July 5, 1975). They are President Lincoln’s third cousins, five times removed. They are Daniel Boone’s first cousin, eight times removed.

Ann is the Grandmother of Todd Alan Wilson II (born June 17, 1996) and Grace Kelly Wilson (born August 1, 2001), children of Todd Alan Wilson; also, Caleb James Smith (born December 7, 1999), Maryann Elizabeth (“M. E.”) Smith (born April 14, 2001) and Colin Thomas Smith (born January 12, 2005).

Nancy Morehead Archdeacon is the Mother of Erin Archdeacon (born July ??, 1974) and Megan Gabriel Archdeacon (born September 7, 1979). They are President Lincoln’s third cousins, five times removed. They are Daniel Boone’s first cousins, eight times removed.

Nancy is the Grandmother of Joshua Wiles ??? (born ???) and Avery Wiles ??? (born ???), children of Erin Archdeacon. They are President Lincoln’s third cousins, six times removed. And, they are Daniel Boone’s first cousins, nine times removed.

Jayne Ellen Morehead Long is the Mother of Jaimee Gabriel Long (born January 5, 1987). Jaimee is President Lincoln’s third cousin, five times removed. And she is Daniel Boone’s first cousin, eight times removed.

Also, Jayne is Grandmother of Spencer Thomas Webb (born April 17, 2009). Spencer is President Lincoln’s third cousin, six times removed. And he is Daniel Boone’s first cousin, nine times removed.

Your writer of this blog (John Pierron) is Father of four sons, as follows: Thomas Blake (born November 19, 1954); William Orville (born June 27, 1957; died July 27, 1997); Joseph John (born January 14, 1960) and David James (born January 19, 1966). They are the President’s third cousins, four times removed. And they are Daniel Boone’s first cousins, seven times removed.

Joseph John Pierron is the Father of Amy Lynn Pierron (born November 24, 1981), Eileen Danielle Pierron (born April 26, 1984), Joseph Albert Blake Pierron (born September 2, 1986) and Jacob Michael Pierron (born December 23, 2009). They are half-brothers and half-sisters of Katrinka (Kattie) Faye Evans (born March 29, 1991) and Patrick Corbin Evans (born March 21, 1995). The first-named Joseph Pierron children are President Lincoln’s third cousins, five times removed. And Daniel Boone is their first cousin, eight times removed.

David James Pierron is the Father of James Philip (born October 2, 1985), Franklin David (born March 30, 1998) and Nicholas Andrew (born October 10, 2001). They are President Lincoln’s third cousins, six times removed, and Daniel Boone’s first cousins, nine times removed.

James Philip Pierron is the Father of Kevin James Pierron (see “Kevin Is Missing” on this blog . . . johnpierron.com), who was born June 3, 2004. He is President Lincoln’s third cousin, six times removed. And he is Daniel Boone’s first cousin, nine times removed.

Amy Lynn Pierron is Mother of Chloe Ann Pierron (born January 22, 2003). Chloe is President Lincoln’s third cousin, seven times removed. She is Daniel Boone’s first cousin, ten times removed.

Eileen Pierron is Mother of Cameron William Jacob Barnes (born December 4, 2008). Cameron is a third cousin of President Lincoln, seven times removed, and first cousin of Daniel Boone, ten times removed.

Joseph Albert Blake Pierron, one of my grandsons, is the Father of our newest great-granddaughter, Raelyn Lee Pierron, born 36 minutes before midnight August 36, 2011. She is the third cousin of President Lincoln, seven times removed. She is the first cousin of Daniel Boone, ten times removed.

My sisters and I always enjoyed visiting our grandparents in Edgerton. The dinners were total family affairs, something mostly absent in today’s society. Every dinner started with my Grandpa’s prayer:

“WE THANK THEE, OH LORD, THAT WE ARE AGAIN PERMITTED TO SURROUND THIS BOARD, SPREAD WITH THE NOURISHMENTS OF LIFE. BLESS THIS FOOD TO OUR USE, FORGIVE ALL OUR SINS, GUIDE AND DIRECT US EACH DAY AND THROUGH LIFE AND EVENTUALLY SAVE US FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, AMEN.”

In the course of obtaining information on Gabriel family descendants, my niece, Ann Wilson, told me that at holiday dinners, she places Grandpa’s Prayer under a plate and the person sitting there reads the prayer before dinner. Ann says the family members enjoy being the one to read the prayer. “It seems a special way,” said Ann, “to celebrate our heritage, and it’s a meaningful tradition to his descendants as well.”
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What follows (below) is a writeup in 1900 of an infamous event nearly a century prior that reads like a televised “48 Hours” or “Dateline” or “20/20″. The reader should be forewarned; the story is not rated PG-13, even with the severe ratings of movies and TV shows nowadays. It originates in the neighborhood of Oley Township only three-quarters of a mile from a house with which you are now quite familiar …… called . . . . . Boonecroft.

Punctuations and capitalizations or lower case usages are not changed from the original, written 111 years ago. The justification for adding the story here is summarized in its second paragraph.

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“Situated at the distance of a few hundred yards from the Oley turnpike road, in Oley Township, Berks County, upon the border line of Exeter, there stands a large old stone mansion, which, at the beginning of the (19th) century, was the property of the Snyder family, long seated in that neighborhood. Its appearance indicates thrift and comfort, and the region is picturesque and attractive.

“This ancient dwelling possesses a melancholy association with a tragedy which transpired upwards of ninety years ago (from 1900) and has deeply impressed itself in local history and tradition. Though often rehearsed, the narrative of the crime of Susanna Cox and its expiation is of enduring interest, both as a vivid memento of the times of its occurrence, and a pathetic instance of the stern administration of public justice which was the characteristic of a bygone period. The whole tone of the picture is somber, but its contemplation is humanizing.

“There resided here, in the year 1809, the family of Mr. Jacob Geehr, who was married to Esther Snyder, both representatives of old and highly respectable county stock. With the Snyders and Geehrs there had lived for eleven years, in the capacity of a domestic, a girl named Susanna Cox, who, at the time of the lamentable event which fixed public attention upon her, was in the twenty-fourth year of her age. She was born in the lower part of the county, of very humble parentage, and was early put out to service. Entirely without education or the advantages of timely moral training, she possessed nothing to recommend her in her menial relation except a vigorous bodily frame, repossessing countenance and a cheerful and willing disposition. She behaved herself with at least outward propriety, kept closely at home, and, though not considered very bright or apt for work, attached to herself the family of Mr. Geehr by her tender and affectionate care of their three young children, all of whom were born during the period of her employment.

“But, as events developed, the luckless girl, perhaps from the very simplicity of her disposition too easy a prey to the wiles of the designer, was led aside from the path of virtue, and confronted with the consequences of her error. Whilst it was observed that she had complained of some obscure indisposition, no one in the family appears to have been positively aware of her condition, or, marvelous as it would seem, knew the fact that, early upon the morning of the fourteenth day of February, 1809, she had, alone, in her own apartment, become a mother.

“At about daybreak on the morning of the third day there after, the seventeenth of February, Mr. Geehr had occasion to go to an outbuilding a few yards from the house, to search for some old iron needed for certain repairs which were in progress on his farm. This structure, still standing, and bearing as the date of its erection the mark of 1767, is a small one story stone house, originally occupied as a dwelling. The basement was used as a wash house, the Monocacy creek flowing beside it. In a corner of the rear room upon the main floor was a closet, and underneath it a deep receptacle in the wall, usually filled with promiscuous rubbish. Drawing out its contents, Mr. Geehr came upon a parcel wrapped in a piece of an old coat, which, upon inspection, proved to be the dead body of a newly born, fully developed male infant, frozen stiff. The gruesome discovery, being communicated by him to the family, caused much consternation. Although the girl Susanna had been about the house as usual during the preceding days, suspicion was at once directed to her, and, upon being closely questioned upon the matter by the female members of the family, she admitted that the child was hers, and that she had placed it where it had been found, but said it had been born dead.

“Deeming it proper that the affair should be judicially inquired into, Mr. Geehr, without particular inspection of the child’s body, replaced it in the wall, and sent his tenant farmer to Reading to summon the Coroner. Acting in the place of that official, who was sick, Peter Nagle, Esq., for a long period a Justice of the Peace of the town, came, late in the afternoon of the same day, accompanied by a young medical practitioner, Dr. John B. Otto. A jury from the neighborhood being impaneled, a surgical examination of the child’s body was made by the physician, as the result of which it was ascertained that the lower jaw had been broken, the tongue torn loose and thrust back, and strangulation evidently produced by a wad of tow or flax which had been forced into the throat

“The girl being questioned anew by the Justice in private, adhered to her original story as given to the family. But, appearances leaving no doubt that the infant had been violently done away with, the finding of the inquest was that it had been murdered, and that the self-confessed mother was the perpetrator of the crime. Upon being informed of this result, and told that she would have to accompany the Justice upon his return to the town, the girl cried a little at first, but presently seemed quite willing to go, ate a comfortable supper prepared for her, and, after being warmly clothed for the journey, was conveyed to Reading and committed to prison for trial.

“That trial was not long deferred. An indictment against Susanna Cox for willful murder was found by the grand jury at the April Term of the Oyer and Terminer following, and upon Friday, April 7th, the next to the last day of the session, she was arraigned before the Court, then presided over by the Honorable John Spayd, and pleaded not guilty. The prosecution on the part of the State was conducted by the Deputy Attorney-General, Samuel D. Franks, Esq., and the prisoner was defended by three of the leading practitioners of the local bar, Marks John Biddle, Charles Evans and Frederick Smith, Esqs.

“According to the notes of trial taken by Mr. Biddle, the facts developed were as have already been stated. Substantially no testimony was adduced on the part of the defense, Dr. John C. Baum, the family physician of Mr. Geehr, being called and stating that he had prescribed for the accused the preceding autumn for some unusual aliment, without discovering its cause, and that she had also reiterated to him the day after her commitment to prison her previous assertion that the child had been born dead, giving as her reason for the concealment of its birth that she feared she would lose her place if the fact were discovered.

“The prisoner’s cause was ably and forcibly presented to the Court and jury by her learned counsel, who urged in her favor the lack of positive proof of the commission by her of the offence charged, the existence of a reasonable doubt of her guilt, and the hazard of a conviction upon mere circumstantial evidence. The confession of the accused that the child was hers having been given in evidence by the State, that confession, it was contended, must be received in its entirety, coupled as it was with her assertion that it had been born dead. Her previous character, moreover, had been shown to be good, and no person naturally virtuous, it was argued, sinks at once to crime which shocks humanity.

“What stronger plea in the law could, under the circumstances, have been made in behalf of the hapless girl? What greater indication of the public concern for her life than these voluntary efforts by such an array of distinguished counsel? But, divesting the ease of all considerations of sentiment, it would be doing violence to impartial judgment to assert that the verdict of guilty of willful and premeditated murder, which was rendered by the jury after about four hours deliberation, was not fairly warranted under the law and the facts.

“Upon the following morning, in the speedy course of justice, the prisoner was again brought to the bar of the Court and sentenced to pay the penalty of death which the law affixed to her crime. In choking accents the deeply affected Judge pronounced the solemn words which consigned the unhappy girl to her awful doom. A multitude of people, as great as could crowd within the walls of the old provincial court house where the trial had taken place, listened to those words with no less profound emotion. The condemned, herself, bowed her head and wept convulsively, still, however, maintaining her innocence.

“The popular sympathy for the unfortunate girl was now enlisted in an effort to secure at the least a commutation of the sentence at the hands of the Executive. The Governor of the State, Simon Snyder, was petitioned to spare the life which the law had declared to be forfeited to its demands. Whilst the prisoner’s guilt could no longer be judicially questioned, it was urged that justice could be satisfied without the shedding of her blood.

“The hanging of a woman was then, as it continues to be, repugnant to the people of Pennsylvania. Yet there had been numerous instances of it in the history of both the Colonial and State governments, and before the law there could be no just discrimination in the punishment of deliberate murder founded upon distinction of sex in the perpetrator. Two women had previously been executed in Berks County for the crime of murdering their illegitimate offspring. Elizabeth Graul, convicted at the November Term of Oyer and Terminer of 1758, and Catharine Krebs, convicted at the November Term of 1767, were hanged at Reading the former on March 10, 1759, and the latter on December 19, 1767. No facts regarding these remote cases have been transmitted.

“At that period the sanguinary code of 1718 was still in force, under which no less than twelve distinct offences were punishable by death. By the same statute the mere concealment of the death of her illegitimate child by the mother was made presumptive evidence to convict her of murder, unless she could make proof by at least one witness that the child was born dead. This harsh feature of the ancient law, together with the penalty of capital punishment for all offences other than murder of the first degree, was finally removed by the Act of 1794, which also required, with respect to illegitimates, independent affirmative proof of the fact of the killing by the mother as essential to a conviction, and punished the concealment of the death by imprisonment at hard labor, which remains the law at this day.

“Between the organization of the State government under the Constitution of 1790, and the year 1809, five women, three of them colored, convicted in other counties, also paid the death penalty, the offences being, in nearly every instance, the murder of illegitimates. A young woman named Sarah Keating was tried in the Oyer and Terminer of Berks County before Supreme Court Justices Shippen and Brackenridge, in October, 1804, for concealing the death of her illegitimate child, and acquitted; the grand jury having previously ignored a count in the indictment charging her with its murder. Since 1809 there has occurred but a single instance of the execution of a woman in Pennsylvania that of Catharine Miller, who was hanged in the county of Lycoming, together with her paramour, in February, 1881, for the murder of her aged husband.

“Humanity was a marked trait in the character of Governor Snyder. That he regarded capital punishment with disfavor is evidenced by his remarks upon the subject in his annual message to the Legislature in December, 1809, suggesting the expediency of its abolition as a matter proper for their consideration. The signing of death warrants he referred to in the same connection as the most painful duty devolving upon the Executive. But the policy of the law with respect to the due protection of human life was firmly settled, and there was at that day, moreover, less disposition to interfere with the solemn verdict of a jury than there is at this. Nor had modern theories as to individual responsibility for crime materially affected ancient ideas of public justice.

“The particular crime of which Susanna Cox had been convicted was no uncommon offence, and it was especially ill fated for her cause before the Governor that, in the beginning of May, 1809, while the petition in her behalf was still in his hands, a girl named Mary Meloy was arrested upon the like charge at Lancaster, then the seat of the State government. The circumstances were of unusual atrocity, and whilst the defendant was subsequently acquitted, she was at the time of her apprehension believed to be guilty.

“It is not surprising, therefore, that the Governor’s decision was adverse to the pending application. A brief official record remaining in the Executive department at Harrisburg states, under date of May 9, 1809, that, “The Governor this day took into consideration the case of Susanna Cox, now under sentence of death for murder in the first degree, confined in the jail of the County of Berks, of which crime she was convicted at the last Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Jail Delivery held in the said county – and thereupon a warrant under the Great Seal of the State, and signed by the Governor, was issued to the Sheriff of the County of Berks, George Marx, Esq., commanding him to execute the sentence of the said Court upon her, the said Susanna Cox, on Saturday, the tenth day of June next, between the hours of ten and two of the clock of the said day, at the usual place of execution.

“The said warrant was immediately transmitted to the said Sheriff of the said County of Berks, with instructions to communicate the same to the prisoner forthwith.

“This action sealed the fate of the unhappy girl; from it there could be no appeal. When the purport of the warrant was made known to her, and she realized that all hope for her h ad gone, she broke down completely, freely confessed her guilt, and began her preparations for the ordeal of the fatal day, then but one month distant.

“Following the English custom, the execution of criminals in public was then, as it had been from the beginning, the practice in this State. It was not until the passage of the Act of April 10, 1834, that executions were required to be conducted within the prison enclosures, the number of officials to be in attendance thereat limited, and the presence of minors excluded. At almost every county seat there was anciently a “Gallows Hill”. This, at Reading, was the tract upon the county grounds at the foot of Mount Penn, now included within the territory acquired by the city and occupied as a public park. A portion of it, comprising between fifty and sixty acres, was purchased by the county from the Penns in the year 1800, at the instance of the Commissioners, for the especial purpose, the reason assigned for acquiring the additional ground being that the concourse of spectators at public executions was usually so great that the property of private individuals was necessarily trespassed upon.

“Here, during the Colonial period, numerous malefactors were sent to their final account, and here also, subsequent to Independence there were hanged, in October, 1792, a negro, Samuel Pope, otherwise Samuel Peeves, for rape; in January, 1798, Benjamin Bailey, for the murder of a peddler on the Broad Mountain, within the then limits of Berks County; in June, 1809, the girl Susanna Cox, and in January, 1813, John Schildt, the parricide and demoniac. Public executions were deemed great popular object lessons in law and morals, and were commonly attended with religious exercises, including, in some instances, addresses to the multitude by the reverend clergy.

“But experience proved the benefits of such occasions to be a more than doubtful sequence. Murders continued to be as freely committed as before, and the scenes attending hangings were frequently degrading and disgraceful. The presence of the military was always required to prevent outbreak or possible rescue. Had the execution of criminals continued much longer to be thus conducted, it is extremely probable that capital punishment in this State would long since have been abolished. A change in public sentiment in this regard, as evidenced by repeated remonstrance’s to the Legislature, brought about the passage of the Act of 1834.

“The fact that the girl Susanna Cox must so shortly die for the offence which she had now freely confessed, rendered her an object not only of renewed public sympathy, but of great public curiosity as well. Large numbers of people were admitted to the jail where she was, and talked with entire freedom to her upon her unfortunate situation. This jail was the old two-story stone building, still standing, at the corner of Fifth and Washington streets, erected in 1770, a quaint surviving specimen of the rude prisons of Colonial times. The Sheriff with his family resided within it, occupying a considerable portion of its available space. Its limited accommodations were frequently over-taxed; no adequate provision existed for the complete separation of the sexes, and communication with the prisoners from the outside was no very difficult matter. In the beginning of the century, as it is said, a license to sell liquors in the public part of the building had actually been granted to the son of a former Sheriff.

“Insolvent debtors, many of them of a highly respectable class, were brought into close contact with the lowest and most dissolute characters. At that period jails were regarded as houses of detention merely, rather than as reformatory institutions, prison discipline was necessarily lax, and the utmost vigilance of even a well-disposed Sheriff could not prevent many of the evils which gave to them the character of nurseries of vice rather than schools of virtue.

“During her incarceration the youthful prisoner was treated with the utmost leniency, assisted in the Sheriff’s family and was a guest at his table. Her behavior was childlike, gentle and decorous. In the last month of her life she had many tender ministrants to both her temporal and spiritual needs. The Rev. Philip Reinhold Pauli, the venerable pastor of the Reformed Church of Reading, who visited her frequently as her spiritual adviser and comforter, found her extremely penitent, and submissive in an extraordinary degree to her impending fate. Upon the day before her execution he administered to her in the presence of the Sheriff’s family the Holy Communion, and prayed long and earnestly with her for her soul’s salvation. At the same time there was completed for her by friendly female hands the white dress, trimmed with wide black ribbons, in which she was to walk forth to her doom, and which was to be her garment in death as well.

“The tenth of June was clear but oppressively warm. The town was crowded, and the public excitement, though subdued, intense. The two weekly newspapers of that date, the German Adler and the English Advertiser, give but meager accounts of its memorable incidents. The contents of country newspapers of the period were made up largely of advertisements. In their news departments the principal subjects of attention were foreign affairs, particularly wars and rumors of wars among the European powers. Local happenings in a town of between three and four thousand inhabitants were presumed to be known to all, and the journalistic allusions to them were brief and paragraphic, merely.

“On the eighteenth of May previous, Sheriff Marx had issued the proclamation customary on such occasions, notifying the justices of the peace, the coroner, constables and all other civil officers within the county of Berks, ‘that they and every of them be in the Borough of Reading on Saturday, the tenth day of June next, at nine o’clock in the morning of the said day, then and there to assist the Sheriff of the county aforesaid in keeping the peace and good order at the execution of a certain Susanna Cox, now confined in the common jail of said county, who is to be executed on said day at the usual place of execution concluding with the well-worn formula of: ‘God Save the Commonwealth!’

“The public in general needed no formal invitation. Says the Advertiser issued on the morning of the tenth: “This day the execution of Susanna Cox takes place. Eleven o’clock is appointed to start from the gaol for the Commons. Report says that from ten to fifteen thousand people are expected; some coming from fifty miles distance.” Again, in its issue of the seventeenth, it was stated that, “Never did Reading behold so numerous a collection of people. The taverns were all crowded the preceding evening, and all night wagons loaded with people from the country were passing through the streets, some coming upwards of seventy miles to see this truly unfortunate girl terminating her worldly existence. The number of spectators on the ground upon the hill exceeded twenty thousand.” “The arrivals,” said the Adler, “were by wagons, on horseback and on foot, and continued in constantly increasing proportions throughout the night and down to the moment of the execution. The weather was extremely hot, and owing to the crowd many of the people were in danger of suffocation.”

” ‘At a little after eleven o’clock,’ states the Advertiser, in quaintly describing the final scene, ‘the mournful procession moved from the gaol (jail). The unfortunate girl, with a wonderful serenity, intermixed with a smile on her countenance, walked straight up to the awful place of execution on the Commons, at the foot of the hill, supported and comforted by two reverend ministers, kneeled down as soon as she arrived, and committed her last fervent prayer to an Almighty God and Redeemer, to whom she had during her confinement (after the death warrant being read to her) most earnestly supplicated for mercy and forgiveness of sins and transgression with whom she had made her peace, and from whom she was assured she had received the comfort of His mercy and grace. She shortly after ascended the scaffold, willingly surrendering a body of sins for the satisfaction of the offended laws of the country, when she was launched into eternity without a struggle! The greatest decency was upheld during the whole awful scene, and tears of sympathy were seen flowing spontaneously from the almost numberless crowd of spectators.’

” ‘It was indeed,’ concludes the account, ‘a day of sorrow.’ It might in truth have been added that it was the saddest day that Reading had ever seen. Viewed through the mists of more than ninety years, the bosom heaves and the eye moistens as imagination pictures the incidents of that summer’s morning of expiation as they have been described by many eye-witnesses, all now long since passed away.

“A troop of infantry under Captain Lutz headed the procession, marching to the funeral notes of fife and drum, the church bells the meanwhile tolling, next followed the officials, the wagon containing the coffin, and immediately behind it the central figure in the afflicting drama, toward whom all eyes were strained, leaning upon the arm of her aged spiritual attendant, the Reverend Mr. Pauli. As the ruddy, black-eyed, black-haired young woman walked resolutely up Penn Street, followed by the closely pressing throng, many heartfelt farewells and benedictions were addressed to her by the deeply affected spectators. The multitude now saw in her not the self-confessed criminal, wearing upon her breast the scarlet letter of her own infamy, but the transformed penitent, about to ascend to the arms of her Maker and Redeemer. Whence the smile that illumined her features? Was it because she already felt the burden lifted, and had she indeed a veiled assurance of the peace that was to come?

“Once, only, there was a halt for a few moments while a cup of water was procured from a pump along the highway to slake her burning thirst. Arrived at length at the place of execution, the procession entered the hollow square in which the military had been arranged about the scaffold. Pressing solidly up to the ranks, and at a great distance beyond, was a compact mass of humanity, men, women, youths, and even little children clinging closely to the garments of their elders.

“An earnest prayer was offered by the Reverend Mr. Pauli, after which there was sung an old German hymn of the Seventeenth Century, which had been committed to memory by the girl while in prison – a composition of penitence and resignation, the initial verse of which was:

I, wretched creature, sinner poor,
Stand here before thy sight
Oh God! show mercy in this hour,
Judge not with vengeful might.
Take pity Lord, thou pitying God,
Upon my desperate plight

“The simple but painfully impressive service closed, the white-robed supplicant, with bowed head, calm and composed throughout, undismayed, apparently, in the presence of the King of Terrors. The wagon containing the coffin stood directly underneath the rude instrument of death, two tall, upright pieces, with a crossbeam from which the fatal rope depended. The girl, when bidden, resolutely ascended the vehicle and stood upon the coffin, which had been placed across as a sort of platform. The unknown hireling in mask who performed the office of executioner now covered the head of the condemned and adjusted the noose about her neck. At a signal the wagon was driven from below, and there hung the girl in her death agonies before the gaze of the awestricken multitude in her hand a white handkerchief tightly clutched A simultaneous cry of horror at the awful spectacle arose throughout the overwrought throng. It was dreadful to see; it is distressing to relate!

“Some have asserted that the hangman completed his function with an act of brutality by jerking the ankles of the victim to hasten her death. Others said – and this appears the more probable – that he merely stooped to adjust her low shoes which were likely to fall off her feet in the struggle. Be this as it may, he was marked for vengeance, and subsequently, while proceeding from the scene of his invidious duty, was set upon at the corner of Penn and Sixth (then Prince) streets, by one of the town fighters of the day, Andrew McCoy by name, and beaten unmercifully, his silver hire money rolling from his pockets into the highway. Recovering himself as best he could, he made a hasty retreat across the river, away from the town and its excited populace forever.

“After being suspended for seventeen minutes, the now inanimate form was lowered, and having been submitted to a bleeding at the hands of the physicians present, to assure the fact of death, was placed in the coffin and delivered to the relatives. Susanna had a sister Barbara, married to one Peter Katzenmoyer, who lived in the suburb of Hampden. To his house the body was conveyed, and upon the night of the following day buried in an open field upon his land, a heap of stones being piled above the turf to conceal the location.

“For successive days and nights the lonely grave was watched to prevent the remains from finding their way to a dissecting table a disposition which the poor girl had, while in prison, especially requested her relatives to guard against. The spot is indicated as upon the sloping ground, several hundred yards to the westward of the present Hampden reservoir, and near where Thirteenth and Marion streets, when opened, will join.

“A small pamphlet, printed in English and German, entitled: “The Last Words and Dying Confession of Susanna Cox,” issued by the newspapers of Reading, was offered for sale to the public immediately after the execution. The Confession was prepared for the condemned girl, and signed with her mark in the presence of Peter Nagle and Sheriff Marx on the eighth of June, 1809, two days previously. Copies of it are now very rare, but its contents are meager and devoid of special interest. After reciting a few facts regarding her life and crime, it proceeds to express her gratitude to the Sheriff, to the gaoler, Daniel Kerper, the clergy and to all who had rendered her kind offices while in prison, and closes with sentiments of penitence, and an admonition to all, especially the young, to take warning by her example. A “Traveler Lied,” or Sorrow Song, in the German, by some now unknown author, containing thirty-two verses of the doggerel description, reciting the whole mournful story, was published simultaneously with the Confession, and proved so popular that copies of it continued to be reprinted and sold to within a very recent period. It has been memorized and sung by hundreds who have wept over the fate of the subject of the verses, is still preserved in many households, and is to be found in some instances pressed between the leaves of the family Bible.

“Within a little more than a month after the execution of the unfortunate girl whom it had fallen to his sad duty to condemn, Judge Spayd, deeply moved by the event, resigned his office and returned to the practice of the law. The melancholy tragedy made a profound and lasting impression upon all who knew or heard of it, and its traditions, interwoven with some fictitious details, have been transmitted through the successive generations to the present The criminal annals of the State present few narratives of more pathetic interest That the obscure girl was greater in her death, so far as fame is concerned, than if her life, though of the longest, had been devoted to the practice of virtue, is a true, though perhaps grotesque commentary upon her history.

“The docket of the court of Oyer and Terminer of Berks County for the April Term of 1809, contains, in the case of “Respublica versus Susanna Cox,” but the usual brief and formal entries of the charge, the arraignment, the plea, the names of the jury, the verdict and the sentence. Such records are not in their tenor suggestive of appeals to the sympathies or the imagination. But appended to the terse official memoranda in this case is found the following note, in parentheses, in the hand-writing of Mr. Franks, the counsel for the prosecution:

” ‘On the 10th June A.D. 1809, the prisoner was executed, previous to which she confessed the murder and died penitent, Peace to her soul!’

“After the lapse of ninety years (this was written in 1900), let us echo the sentiment of the kindly lawyer of a bygone time, and reverently respond:

“To her soul be peace!”

This article originates from a paper read before the Historical Society of Berks County, Pa.
March 13, 1900
By Louis Richards, Esq.

Historical Society of Berks County
940 Centre Avenue
Reading, Pennsylvania 19601
Phone 610 375-4375 Fax 610 375-4376

Susanna Cox was the last woman to be hanged in Pennsylvania. The Reading Eagle, 200 years afterward, gave the following postscript to Susanna Cox:

Susanna was a domestic servant for a farming family in Limekiln, a village at the border of Oley and Exeter townships.

As the story goes, Susanna was seduced by a neighbor and became pregnant. She concealed the pregnancy from the family she served.

On a cold February day, Susanna gave birth to a baby boy. A few days later, a farmer discovered the child’s body in a small stone cabin on the property.

Susanna claimed the child was stillborn, but a doctor determined the baby had been murdered. Susanna was found guilty after a brief jury trial, and Gov. Simon Snyder signed her death warrant – a death by public hanging.

Once she realized there was no chance for clemency, Susanna confessed her guilt. Those who visited her commented on her gentle demeanor, according to Louis Richards, an attorney who wrote about the Cox case in 1900 (see above writeup).

The young woman pleaded for mercy to God in a note written two days before her execution. The note was read to the crowd moments before Susanna was executed.

The sentence was carried out with Susanna standing on a coffin pulled by a wagon. A noose was placed around her neck. Then a hooded hangman gave the signal and the wagon was pulled away.

Richards described the scene: “A simultaneous cry of horror at the awful spectacle arose throughout the overwrought throng. It was dreadful to see; it was distressing to relate.”

The story of Susanna Cox is perhaps one of the grimmest tales in Berks County’s history.

For years, her story has been re-enacted at the Kutztown, PA Folk Festival. And in 1994, a production company tried to make a movie about her life.

Local actor Conrad Karlson played a supporting role in the independent film, which was shot locally but never made the theaters because of a lack of money.

“It’s a shame,” said Karlson, who lives in Spring Township. “It was a powerful film.”

It’s hard to imagine that City Park (Reading), now an oasis of green in this concrete and asphalt city, once held gallows. There’s no marker noting its history, but a small corner was known as Gallows Hill.

Take a walk sometime around City Park. Try to image the scene: gallows, a crowd pressed tight, and a young woman bravely facing her fate.

THE ABOVE STORY…..ABOUT THE INFAMOUS SUSANNAH COX…… IS A SAGA FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE LINCOLNS AND BOONES. IT HAPPENED LESS THAN ONE MILE FROM THE HOME OF THE GABRIEL-JONES ELOPEMENT, WHICH CAME EIGHT YEARS LATER. IT IS VIRTUALLY CERTAIN NOT ONLY THAT OUR TWO-GREAT GRANDMOTHER, AGE 13, KNEW ABOUT THE MURDER CASE BUT MOST LIKELY SHE WAS IN THE CROWD OF 50,000 THAT DAY IN READING’S CITY PARK.

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Reference was made above to the Exeter Friends Meetinghouse, at 191 Meetinghouse Road, Exeter Township. The 18th century church was damaged extensively by fire Sunday, March 20, 2011. The fire destroyed part of the roof and ceiling. Two days later, the roof was patched over as a temporary repair to allow continued Quaker meetings there.

The Exeter building sits on a prominent rise of ground in the Oley Valley. It is constructed of grayish fieldstone and is trimmed with white-painted woodwork. Mortar plastering was used between the stones. The building is described as of simple design, exemplary of the habits of the sect who built it, people whose religious beliefs forbade anything worldly or ornate.

The fire broke out at 11:05 a.m. during the regular Sunday service. The cause was described as a stove used to heat the church. When firemen arrived, they were met with “heavy fire coming through the roof of the building,” said Exeter Township Fire Department Chief Robert Jordan.

Firefighters were able to control the fire within a half hour, but within that time, considerable damage was caused to the ceiling and roof. Church services were concluding when the fire started. Everyone made it out safely; no injuries.

Chief Jordan said preliminary findings showed the fire was accidental, centering around a cast-iron pot belly stove used to heat the church. The Exeter Township Fire Department was assisted by Amity Fire & Rescue; Monarch; Friendship Hook & Ladder; Earl Township Volunteer; Oley; Liberty of New Berlinville; and Keystone Fire.

Two photographs in the Pottstown Mercury newspaper the next day showed church members saving church pews and seated on two of the undamaged pews.

The monthly meetings are the basic Quaker “congregation” in which membership is vested and which decisions on who may own property are made, marriages are approved and other Quaker business is transacted.

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How Many Relatives Do You Have ??

1 YOU
2 parents
4 grandparents
8 great grandparents
16 gg grandparents
32 ggg grandparents
64 gggg grandparents
128 ggggg grandparents
256 gggggg grandparents
512 ggggggg grandparents
1,024 gggggggg grandparents
2,048 ggggggggg grandparents
4,096 gggggggggg grandparents
8,192 ggggggggggg grandparents
16,184 gggggggggggg grandparents
32,768 ggggggggggggg grandparents
65,536 gggggggggggggg grandparents
131,07 ggggggggggggggg grandparents
262,144 gggggggggggggggg grandparents
524,288 ggggggggggggggggg grandparents
1,048,576 gggggggggggggggggg grandparents
2,097,152 ggggggggggggggggggg grandparents

the above represents 22 generations
perhaps seven centuries

In the research of the Lincoln and Boone families, it was discovered that people in Berks County, Pennsylvania, even those related to genealogy, were unfamiliar with Boonecroft. These same people rather decried the fact that it was their conclusion that “the world is litte acquainted with the fact” that it was in Eastern Pennsylvania that early branches of the Lincolns and the Boones lived and died and that they were so intimately associated in the area.

Many families have reunions, many every year. One year, the entire township of Amity decided to hold a celebration over a three-day period in September. Amity was the oldest settlement in Berks County. The reunion came 250 years after the first settlement by the Swedes.

The first settlements in Berks County were made in Amity by the Swedes along the eastern bank of the Schuykill River in what today is Douglassville. It was in 1701 that Andrew Rudman, a clerk, on behalf of himself and fellow Swedes, applied to William Penn (yes, THAT William Penn) for the privilege of taking up to 10,000 acres in this area nearest the Manatawny Creek. (Years before that, many Swedes already were located there.)

For example, in 1683, Swedes from an area southeast of the Douglassville of today, wrote to their friends abroad: “We live in great Amity with the Indians, who have not done us any harm for many years.” It was from this well-circulated circumstance that the land farther north subsequently was named Amity.

About six miles southeast of Reading, you will find, today, the picturesque building constructed in 1725 by Mordecai Lincoln, Jr., our five-great-grandfather, the two-great-grandfather of President Lincoln. Several of his ancestors were born in this home. Less than two miles away is the home of Daniel Boone, now shown to the public as the Daniel Boone Homestead.

Not far away lived the Hanks family from whom President Lincoln’s mother was descended.

After living in this area for many years, these various families said goodbye to their relatives hereabouts and started in a body through the wilderness for unknown regions. They spent time in other states for many years, but their collective destinies finally led them to Kentucky, where Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks. In February, 1807, their first daughter, Sarah, was born in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Sarah was a common name in the Lincoln generations of families. When she was 18 months old, Thomas moved the family 12 miles away to Hodgens’ Mill, or Hodgenville, as it is now called.

By the fall of 1808, he moved the family from a rented home in Hodgenville to a small farm 2 1/2 miles south of Hodgenville, complete with small cabin. That’s where the future President was born February 12, 1809, even though a half-dozen other locations in Kentucky claim Abe was born in their town.

Childbirth for the pioneer man as well as the pioneer woman was an anxious event. In her book of nearly 100 years ago, Ida M. Tarbell, wrote: “There were few doctors. The woman must depend on what the French call ‘the wise woman’. In this country, she is called ‘the midwife’. Usually, the wise woman was not called until the last moment. Thus, here was Thomas Lincoln one morning hurrying down the road, and meeting one of his neighbors, Abraham Enlow.”

Enlow told Thomas to return to his wife; he (Abraham Enlow) would summon the wise woman. And subsequently, Abe was born.

Years later, Abraham Enlow told people the President was named after him because of his neighborliness in the Lincolns’ hour of need. Not so. President Lincoln was named after his grandfather. There is no question about that. It is too bizarre for noting here, as this blog already admittedly has reached “tome” standing, but we will just mention that Abraham Enlow, in the 1860′s, became object of undeserved scandal as part of a political campaign, apparently. He was charged with being Abe’s real father, maybe stemming from the fact that he summoned the midwife!

Back in eastern Pennsylvania, we are told that there are many records in the Berks County Courthouse telling of the achievements of the pioneer Lincolns and Boones. In addition, the Exeter Meetinghouse, where several generations of the early members of these families worshipped and where they are buried is a silent reminder of the fame achieved in other parts of the nation by those who came after them, the many who migrated to the then-sparsely-settled west. The records at the Exeter Meetinghouse are full of information pertaining to the pioneers. As a house of worship, it once was practically abandoned. Now, a sign outside the building (extensively damaged in the March, 2011, fire), states as follows:

EXETER FRIENDS MEETING

“Established 1725 as Oley, name changed to Exeter, 1747. Present stone meeting house built 1759 near site of two previous log structures. Buried here are members of the Boone, Ellis, Hughes, Lee and Lincoln families. Meetings discontinued 1899; building reopened for worship in 1949.”

In 1699, William Penn granted 6,000 acres of land in Pennsylvania to the London Company, controlled by Tobias Collet, Daniel Quair and Henry Goldney.

The settlers who first made their homes in Exeter arrived in 1718. In 1741 the township was organized. It was named after a district in England from where the first settlers came. Collet, Quair and Goldney took up a tract of 1,000 acres on the east side of the Schuylkill River. Another 1,000 acres was granted to Andrew Robeson, which later came into the possession of Mordecai Lincoln, Jr., the great-great-grandfather of President Lincoln. The Lincoln Home is still there, sometimes called the “best-kept secret” in Berks County. The home is on the south side of Lincoln Road, 1.2 miles from U-S 422 at Birdsboro. The Lincoln Homestead is less than two miles southwest of the Daniel Boone Homestead. Ironically, the Lincoln homestead is in private hands today, never a tourist site, and the Daniel Boone Homestead is a public location, even though, as noted above, it doesn’t like snowstorms. Mordecai died when Daniel was about two years old.

Exeter Township, like Amity Township, was considered a part of Pine Forge Region. Both the Lincolns and the Boones managed and worked in the iron industry.

Daniel’s parents were hard-working Quakers. Their homestead consisted of a small farm, a blacksmith shop and a weaving establishment on what was known as the Thomas Rutter country estate….land that is now the Pine Forge Academy campus. This is along the Manatawny River, east of the Lincoln-Boone homes, east of Boonecroft, the only self-sufficient community between Philadelphia’s Germantown and Reading. Later, his father, Squire Boone, bought land close by, where Daniel lived from the age of 10 until his parents moved southward. If he were asked where he and his family lived, Daniel would say: “In Pine Forge Region.”

Little known is the fact that the Boone family’s first homestead was in Pine Forge village when George Boone and his family moved from Philadelphia to assist Thomas Rutter is his iron forge industry. It was later that Daniel’s uncle and grandfather moved from Pine Forge and built homesteads in Amity Township. Ironically, even after they moved, their new homestead was considered part of the Pine Forge region.

Daniel Boone attended the Sabbath School in Pine Forge (what usually is referred to today as Sunday School) as a child. The Sabbath School was the site of the first Sabbath school in North America, established as a religious and social fellowship for children and teenagers of the Pine Forge area.

Legend has it that Daniel fell in love with a black girl, a servant whose parents worked in the Pine Manor House. More about this below, but first a bit of background on the changing religion of Daniel Boone. The Pine Manor House was a “meetinghouse” for the Sabbatarian fellowship. These were believers in the “near-advent” and included the so-called Rutterites who accepted “Rutterism”, the fellowship of Sabbathkeepers.

Thomas Rutter had held Sabbath schools with the Seventh Day Baptist churches that he had organized in the Philadelphia area. The Pine Forge Academy of today is described on its website as follows: Pine Forge Academy is a co-educational Seventh-day Adventist school that serves grades 9 through 12. The campus is located in Berks County, Pennsylvania, on 575- acres of rolling hills and dales, intercepted by the winding, picturesque Manatawny Creek. Pine Forge Academy is caretaker of historically significant land, which goes back to Colonial America in the early 1700’s, when William Penn deeded it as a gift to abolitionist Thomas Rutter.

A writeup from a library offering in Pottstown in January, 2011, reported the legend of Daniel Boone and his love for the “colored maiden” Esdmonia.

As you know, the Boones were strict Quakers. At the same time, they could live with his coziness with the Sabbath school’s young people, but his infatuation over this servant maiden was a different story. The family decided that for the good of all concerned, moving away from the region was in their best interest. The decision likely was made in part because Daniel became the subject of racial slurs as a youth such as “Daniel Boone met a coon….and in these parts….will not be seen….soon.”

Little has been made of the fact, even by those who live there today, that this region is one of America’s most historic. Some of the area’s residents have been impressed with legendary tales of historic sites in New England and elsewhere. They’ve journeyed to those places where pioneers left their footprints —– scenes, sites, sounds and sights of places of interest in our early history. They did not realize that what they were looking for lay at home right at their front door.

Writers of the past century in this area of eastern Pennsylvania say that the Pine Forge region really is the gateway to historic America. They point out that Daniel Boone’s wanderings in the wilderness outstripped those of the venerated Moses by more than 20 years. Boone died at age 86, but as Moses was in search of the promised land, Daniel never found what he had been searching for all of his life. He had nurtured a day-to-day belief that “there must be greener grass just beyond the next hill”. Fortunately, for Daniel, many times….there was.

In the historic writings about him, there has been the broad assumption that Daniel was born into a wilderness in which life hung by a constant thread, a dark and dangerous forest where savages scalped white men whenever they met. Although this existed in the western part of Pennsylvania, the Pine Forge area was becoming relatively safe and comfortable. Just as it is now, Oley was a land of beautiful hills and valleys.

The clearings were filled with churches. Perhaps no area of outstate Pennsylvania had a great number, nor were their people more peace-loving. To the south and east, the Swedes had built the first church, Morlatton, at Douglassville, the location of the marriage of Abraham Lincoln, great-great-uncle of President Lincoln, and Anne Boone who lived at Boonecroft.

As early as 1705, the Quaker missionary Thomas Chalkley was going by horse and without gun to preach to the Indians at Conestoga. It was a region where people made greater use of the Bible than the rifle.

The Reverend John Caspar Stoever had ridden through the area on horseback, setting up a church at every crossroads.

By 1737, the Oley Monthly Meeting was established in a second log cabin on the original meeting house tract. Soon, across the road, came the cemetery. As evidence that the area was fast becoming populated, take a look at that cemetery today. All of the original ground space within the enclosing walls was filled by 1818. Then, half that area within the walls was covered with additional earth and a second layer of graves was started on top of the first. There are at least 200 graves within this second tier of earth.

It has been explained over the years since Colonial days that the most understandable reason for Exeter’s (see references above) decline was its repeated disowning of its members for marriage “outside the Quaker community”. The Boones were frequent repeaters, the last being Squire Boone, Daniel’s father, for refusing in 1750 to publicly condemn one of his sons for marrying out of meeting.

Katie Couric

The main summary below was written in May, 2006, posted on May 18th of that year. Five months after that, I added the “To start off” lines immediately thereafter, and below that I will insert the five-years-later postscript to Katie’s anchor history, as she had failed. I will not start a “new” post on her successor, mainly because Scott Pelley does not merit such standing. He even will lose some of the audience Katie had. And it will happen within the next year…. in other words, before June, 2012. Suffice it to say that Scott Pelley is drab, dull and not interesting. He is puffed up, and that “air” will not pull viewers over from ABC and NBC. The fact that the collective audience of the nets keeps declining does not give Scott Pelley any room for error. He possesses all of the Katie negatives and adds a few of his own. Katie’s last day on The CBS Evening News was Thursday, May 19, 2011. CBS kept her so as to serve the full five years in her contract. When the ratings in the latter part of 2006 confirmed that Katie was a big mistake, CBS already was on the hook for the duration, and decided to have Katie work it off, which she did for the full five years.

In his review of Scott Pelley’s first night on “The CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley” Monday, June 6, 2011, Jonathan Storm of the Philadelphia Inquirer said the network offered the viewing audience the “same old same old” human-interest fare. “It was so low key,” said Storm, “even a whale couldn’t hear it.”

The column concluded with a Katie review hitting the nail on the head, something predicted five years before in these lines. Said Jonathan Storm: “Couric consistently finished last in the ratings, in part because her personality didn’t jibe with the evening news audience. But it was her frequently lackluster report, filled with the same kind of emphasis on personal stories, that turned a lot of viewers away.” So concluded Jonathan Storm in the Philadelphia Inquirer, my morning yawn.

The choices in news (anchor) talent made by the network suits often show how ill-equipped these people are to make multi-million-dollar decisions. Katie’s future may be brighter simply because her future “bar” will be so much lower. In early June, 2011, ABC-TV announced that Katie, in 2012, will host a syndicated daytime talk show. She will be the show producer along with her former “TODAY” show executive producer, former NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker. The two spent more than a decade together on the “TODAY’ Show. Katie should have stayed there. As part of her new job with ABC-TV, she will “have a position with ABC News starting this Fall”. MEMO TO DIANE SAWYER: If you want to maintain your own ratings, don’t let Katie do any “pieces”.

It is a bit difficult to NOT SAY “I told you so” but the three major networks that do world news at 6:30 p.m. Eastern were anything but fertile field for Katie Couric. The nets have been in a steady decline for nearly 50 years. There are several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the liberal biases of the network newsrooms are a super drag on their potential. It has been clearly shown over the years that the “audience” has been in steady decline due to the networks’ overwhelming liberalism. It has been a scourge. The network suits do not have time to devote to mere news ratings. And they have little knowledge of journalism, especially as it relates to sending pictures through the air.

So, here then is the “insert” written in late 2006 after the blog, which follows, which had been posted in May of that year:

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To start off, this is an update entered Wednesday, October 18, 2006.  It is not a gloating statement  nor an “I told you so” but simply to point out that Katie Couric so far is not setting the world on fire at 6:30 p.m.  EDT or EST.  On Monday, October 14, the DrudgeReport gave ratings for Katie in New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, DC.  These were ratings for the LOCAL VIEWERS in each of the three markets.  In New York, WABC (Charley Gibson) was at 7.1, WNBC (Brian Williams) was at 5.3 and WCBS (Katie) was at 3.7.   In Los Angeles, KABC was at 5.9, KNBC was at 3.1 and KCBS was at 1.5.  In Washington, NBC was out front with a 9.3, ABC scored 7.8 and CBS (Katie) was at 2.5.

Then, on Thursday, October 26, 2006, the Drudge Report had even more sobering news for Katie and CBS:  on Wednesday night, she was SEVENTH in the ratings in Los Angeles.  Katie had fewer viewers in LA than a “FRIENDS” re-run, and also “KING OF QUEENS” and “MILLIONAIRE”.

Katie’s rating in Los Angeles Wednesday (October 25) was a meager 1.1 with a 2 Share, which means just 2% of those who were tuned into television at Katie’s news time were watching her in LA.

  What follows is my “blog” on Katie from this past summer (meaning the Summer of 2006).  This is NOT a sexist statement:  I will not watch Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News. So you and I are clear in the comments below, it has nothing to do with gender.   My reasons are not the same as Andy Rooney’s, but rather are of many years in the making, deep-rooted long before Andy thought he would be in any way affected by Katie Couric.

I  respect  any person who can attract a multi-million-dollar salary legally.  Whether they deserve it or not, the fact is the individuals can  laugh all the way to the bank.

So it doesn’t matter to me whether Katie Couric took a “cut in pay” to move from the TODAY SHOW on NBC-TV to the CBS Evening News.  Her annual salary will be in the millions, and she deserves credit for impressing her future bosses who agreed to pay her even above what her competitors are receiving.  Truth to tell, that DOES matter to me.  But it’s not my money, it’s NBC’s and now CBS’s.  They can afford her, whatever they pay her.

That is not a key point, except to Katie.

Katie… in this week’s Newsweek cover story …. is more or less commended for getting more ink during the week than the announced resignation of Tom DeLay.  She was featured in a recent story in the AARP Magazine.

Tim Russert, moderator of NBC’s “Meet The Press”, hired Katie in Washington in 1991.  She was a reporter on a local Washington TV station.  She was “Katherine Couric”.  Tim is the Bureau Chief for NBC News in Washington.  It always has been fashionable to hire liberals for network jobs.  You won’t find as much slant on this at the local stations, but they are themselves changing, as has been noted elsewhere on this blog. 

Tim told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Gail Shister  (who writes columns on television):  “I saw a spark, an energy, a tenaciousness.  She was all over the place.”

Tim mostly does not show his own liberalism.  But there, in commenting on Katie Couric, he clearly was.  But this is not about Tim Russert’s own liberalism, which, as indicated above, does not reveal itself very often.

He said he thinks Katie Couric will succeed as anchor for CBS News. 

Part of the problem here is that the three major networks’ early evening newscasts have been transformed into treatises for senior citizens.  As a senior citizen, I feel insulted.  The so-called “magazine pieces” on television news started back when I was working as a TV reporter.  In those days, they were founded on journalistic principles.  Today, the magazine pieces are fluff and often liberally, not journalistically, oriented.  I am not going to cite examples here.  Just listen to any of the three networks any evening.  Not only is there the liberal slant (Brian Williams on NBC is the least guilty) but there is the constant effort for magazine pieces aimed at the assumed major TV audience of the newscasts:  older people.

Will Katie Couric attract younger viewers?  That is probably going to be her main appeal, although the “audience” that tuned to her on the TODAY SHOW also can be counted on to be somewhat loyal to her on CBS.  Yet the young people, generally speaking, are not tuned in to the news of the day.  If you listen to Jay Leno or Sean Hannity doing a MAN ON THE STREET interview, you find that young people have almost no clue who national figures are.  They probably can tell you all about the kind of guitar a rock star has, but they don’t know who the Vice President is.

A long-time star of the news spot Katie will occupy later this year, Walter Cronkite, applauds the selection of Katie Couric.  He occupied the chair from 1962 till 1981 when whatshisname took over.  To hear CBS tell it, Walter was “the most trusted man in America”.  Of course, this ignores the fact that the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC enjoyed a higher audience.

“I think she’s a terrific choice,” said Walter.  “I’ve followed her.  I knew her work apart from TODAY SHOW.  She’ll be fine.”

That line is precisely why I am writing this.  Katie’s work apart from the TODAY SHOW was a collection of liberal diatribes masking as journalism.  She started with the completely biased reporting she did on the Clarence Thomas (Anita Hill) Senate confirmation hearings. Along with millions of others, I watched those hearings virtually non-stop, and was appalled at her reporting.  I could not believe she would be long for the job once the coverage was concluded.

Sad to remark:  NBC News loved her.  There was more bias in her reporting than you’ll see in a month of reporting on all three networks of the evening newscasts.

The Media Research Center has done an outstanding job of compiling Katie’s liberal diatribes. citing year after year of her various liberal slants. Check out  http://www.mediaresearch.org and put “Katie Couric” in the search line.  They currently have more than 900 “links” to Katie, and while it takes a while to retrieve the various items, the summary is absolutely riveting and compelling:  Katie Couric is a flaming liberal, and likely will emerge as more of a biased reporter than Dan Rather in the same spot.

She starts on CBS-TV September 5th, the day after Labor Day. She may enjoy an early boost in the ratings due to viewer curiosity.  Sorry, I won’t be among her viewers. 

She is replacing Dan Rather, and more recently, Bob Schieffer.  The irony of Bob Schieffer’s tenure during the past year is that he has garnered better ratings than Rather.  Schieffer is a nice fellow, but nevertheless decidedly on the liberal side, based on his questioning on FACE THE NATION, which he hosts each Sunday morning. 

Said Bob Schieffer:  “I’ve known Katie Couric since she broke into journalism and she’s going to be a great addition to the CBS News team.  She’s tough, she’s fair, she’s a straight shooter…..  She’ll be terrific.  Just watch.” 

The comment is carried in TV ads on the air this summer.  Of course, CBS would not quote him saying something negative.  And I suppose he pretty much feels the way he is quoted above.

Not so Andy Rooney.  Andy Rooney is clearly a liberal, admits it and lets it all hang out. But he doesn’t dig Katie Couric.  It should be noted that Andy favors good journalism, with an aim toward objectivity  (except on SIXTY MINUTES, where he appears!!).  He doesn’t think Katie will be a benefit to CBS  just as he thought Dan Rather was a poor excuse for a TV anchor.

Said Andy on IMUS IN THE MORNING June 22:  “My problem with Dan was always that you knew where he stood politically.  And the fact that he stood on my side didn’t have anything to do with it.  I thought he was a bad representative of the liberal side because he was SO OBVIOUS with his opinions.  There were just little words he used when he was on the air that made it apparent to everyone that he was a liberal Democrat.  And Walter Cronkite on the other hand had the same liberal Democratic opinions as Dan had but you would never know it.  No one knew it during all the time Cronkite was on the air.”

About Katie Couric coming to CBS??  Said Andy:  “I’m not enthusiastic about it.  I think everybody likes Katie Couric.  I mean how can you not like Katie Couric.  But, I don’t know anybody at CBS News who is pleased that she’s coming here.”

CBS is arranging for Katie to go on a “listening tour” in at least six cities this summer.  She will meet with viewers who will give her their ideas on how CBS should report the news.  That is a laugh-and-a-half. 

Over the years, television people have organized so-called “focus groups” to tell them why they tune into TV news.  By and large, these focus groups courageously say they turn on TV news to get the weather.  And boy, do they get the weather.  The TV newscasts “lead” with the weather if it rains (see other item in this blog on this remark).

So, come September, Katie Couric may be giving us the weather !!!  Now, lesseee…… how can you give a LIBERAL WEATHER FORECAST  ???

In mid-July now, Katie has given her new bosses something else to think about:  she told “Access Hollywood” she would NOT venture in the Middle East to cover that hot spot  (Israel and Lebanon for the moment).  Said she:  “I think the situation there is so dangerous, and as a single parent with two children, that’s something I won’t be doing.”

Katie will have great appeal to the wusses of our society !!!

 

Fred Elledge Morehead

Fred was my brother-in-law, my sister Mary’s husband. He lived 22 years after the death of my sister June 25, 1987. He died February 22, 2010, near his Centerville, Ohio, home. He was 82. His obituary is listed below, and I have taken the liberty of providing comments about him from his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and his niece Jan Elizabeth Murphy. The comments are tender and say much about him.

My sisters and I lived in the same block as Fred: the 5600 block of Chamberlain Avenue, just off Goodfellow Bouleard in St. Louis. I think Fred lived four houses east of us.

Mary and Fred were teenaged sweethearts, but World War II interrupted any plans for marriage they might have had during that period. Fred served in the Navy. I can remember times when he would come home on leave in his sailor’s uniform.

As much of Fred’s story is incorporated in the comments below, I want to mention my visits to their Ohio home in suburban Dayton. Fred often would cook breakfast for me and my family. He seemed to enjoy that as much as we did. In recent years, we would see his wood carvings, and ride in his Model A beauty.

I recall that Fred often was “on the road” as international salesman for National Cash Register. The obituary below explains that he worked for NCR 43 years. That’s what you call “a real career”.

On one visit to Ohio, Fred took me to the NCR golf courses (there are two, side by side) for a round of golf. He did not profess to be a terrific golfer but he seemed to enjoy it very much. During our round, on a par five hole, he laced a three-wood onto the green in two shots. His ball was just two or three feet from the hole. He made that putt.

He seemed a bit confused when I told him he got an eagle (two under par). “Is that good???” he asked. (I think he was kidding!)

He smiled.

As his niece said (in her comments below), he always was smiling.

The obituary was as follows:

FRED ELLEDGE MOREHEAD. Age 82, of Centerville (Ohio), passed away Monday, February 22, 2010, at Walnut Creek Nursing Center. Fred was born June 30, 1927, in Centralia, Missouri, to the late JoGenelle (Elledge) and the late Turner Granville Morehead. He served his country proudly in the U. S. Navy during WWII. A sweet, kind and private man, with a great sense of humor, he also will be remembered for being loyal to his family. Fred enjoyed wood carvings, Model A’s, hiking, wild birds and love for nature. He retired from NCR in 1990 after 43 years of employment in International Sales. Fred was a member of Central Presbyterian Church in Moraine, Model A Club-Dayton, Dayton Wood Carver’s Guild. He was preceded in death by his wife Mary (1987) and brother Robert Morehead. Fred is survived by hi daughters Ann & husband Tom Wilson of Sugarcreek Township, Nancy Archdeacon & friend Nancy Kranzley of Morrow, Jaye & husband Tim Long of Dayton, 5 grandchildren Todd, Teri & husband Aaron, Erin & husband Jeff, Megan & husband Dave, and Jaimee, 8 great-grandchildren Todd II, Caleb, M. E., Grace, Joshua, Colin, Avery and Spencer, loving friend Pat VanOss, sister Ann Schaeffer of Denver, CO, sister Pat Elzey of Flagstaff, AZ. The family will receive friends from Thursday, Feb. 25, 6-8 PM t Conner & Koch Funeral Home, 92 West Franklin Street (S. R. 725), Bellbrook. Funeral services 11:00 am Friday at the funeral home. Pastor Brian Newell officiating. Interment in Miami Valley Memory Gardens. In memory of Fred, contributions may be made to Hospice of Dayton, 324 Wilmington Pike, Dayton, Ohio 45420. Online condolences may be sent to the famiy at www.ConnerandKoch.com.

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Personal comments, as follows, were led by Fred’s niece, Jan Elizabeth Murphy, of Colorado.

Today is your dad’s funeral and I am thinking of you all, with loving support. And I also am feeling the joy…in celebration of your father’s good life and how he lived it.

As my Uncle Fred, he was always so sweet to me. He and your dear mom made me feel so welcome in their home. He got the biggest kick out of what happened at one Thanksgiving when I was invited to come to their home in Dayton…(when I was living in Washington, D.C.)… I went to the wrong airport (Dulles) to fly out of the D.C. area, when I should have gone to National Airport, so I missed my plane! New arrangements were made and I arrived in Dayton the next morning…on Thanksgivng Day, and your dad and mom picked me up at the airport. After our wonderful Thanksgiving dinner and celebration, we were sitting around in the living room with all the family and someone asked me about my trip back home on Sunday… Uncle Fred smiled his wonderful big smile and answered for me saying,” Oh she won’t have any problem finding her plane…there’s only ONE airport here in Dayton!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Hahahaha!!!

I also remember when he and Aunt Mary and girls visited us in the mountains in Colorado where we lived. Jacques was a baby, and dad had to go to work that day…and so Uncle Fred took his car and went down the mountain to our little grocery store and bought the groceries, and brought them home. I was quite impressed (being only 10 or 11 years old myself) that he could do that!

I also remember him at the time of his 80th birthday party weekend, when we all sat out on Ann’s back deck enjoying the yummy pot luck meal. Although he’d been having memory problems, he knew who I was…and I told him about the books I had written. And he smiled and I was so pleased! He wanted to know all about the stories in them, and then said he wanted to buy them. I knew he would not be able to, but his very genuine, loving interest was compliment enough for me!

I always thought of your dad as a gentle man. I never saw him be angry or upset, or ever out of sorts. I’m sure that could’ve happened “once or twice”, but I never saw it. That’s the joy of having an Uncle Fred…I can only remember him smiling.

Love, your cousin,
Jan

The first comment from a grandchild was that of Megan Ketover………..

Remembrance of Grandpa

When I think about my Grandpa, I remember lazy Saturday afternoons spent at his house. My Grandpa was a gentle and kind man, with a positive attitude and great sense of humor.

When I spent time with him, I loved how he would be up for whatever adventures I came up with. He’d accompany me to snoop in the barn, or walk all the way across the yard to the trees. Grandpa would tirelessly push me on the swing. Sometimes we would sit together by the window and read.

Grandpa taught me a love of nature, all about hummingbirds and cardinals, to walk quietly enough to not startle the deer, and to drive a tractor.

I know these are my favorite memories because this is how I see him now — in a warm fleece jacket, walking across the field all the way to the trees. I miss his kind soul and warm energy.

Megan Ketover (age 30 at funeral)

Among those noting Fred’s humor was Nancy Kransley, friend of Fred’s daughter, Nancy Archdeacon………….

Fred was a kind and funny man. He welcomed me into the family and, after my own father died, he became that gentle, strong fatherly person that I needed in my life.

But mostly, I loved his sense of humor. I especially remember one day when Nancy, Fred and I were working on the infamous old boat that Nancy owned and stored at his house in the non-boating season. It was the beginning of the first summer that the boat was part of my life. We were scraping the lake muck off the outside, replacing the carpeting, cleaning the seats, repairing the engine, etc, etc. At one point, Fred looked at me and, with that little sly twinkle in his eye, said “So, how are you enjoying boating?!”

I miss that guy!

Nancy Kranzley

Next was his son-in-law, Tom Wilson, husband of Fred’s and Mary’s daughter, Ann……………

When I got out of the Navy in 1972, Ann, Todd and I returned to Dayton. We moved into the house on Sugar Ridge until I could get a job and get back in school. When Fred & Mary had the house built, they didn’t finish the lower level. Dad and I got busy after work each night to finish the lower level.

We had everything framed and all the drywall hung and we were in the process of taping and spackling the drywall. One night while we were working at one end of the lower level we heard pounding at the other end. We went to the area of the noise and there was 15-month-old Todd with a hammer in his hand and three big holes in a newly dry-walled wall.

In my mind I said “Oh NO!

Dad said “I guess we should take the hammer away from him before he helps us some more.”

For those of us who knew Dad, you understand. He was saying that’s life, it happens. Accept it, move on and do the best you can.

Tom Wilson

The first of the comments from daughters came from the youngest, Jayne………………

My Remembrances of Dad

I’m Jayne, daughter number 3, the baby, and undoubtedly… his biggest challenge of the 3.

There is no way to summarize a lifetime of memories in a paragraph or a few minutes. However…

I will remember Dad as a quiet man, with a great sense of humor. Not so much with stories or jokes, but with slow, dry wit, silly quips, followed by his fabulous grin and a chuckle at himself. He almost always cracked HIMSELF up.

I will remember Dad as a strong man, a hard worker, a builder, a repairman, a mechanic…..the all `round Handyman. He was always doing something … he always had a project and in my mind, I don’t think there was a thing he couldn’t do.

Dad traveled all over the world when he worked for NCR and we made many trips to the Dayton airport to pick him up. I remember being so excited when he was finally the one to emerge from the plane, walk down the steps from the plane and across the tarmac. I remember being in awe of him for being so worldly. I don’t know that I really knew what worldly meant as a child … I just knew I felt proud he was my Dad.

I remember a time when in the evening, as he arrived home from work, Mom would be cooking dinner and give me the “heads up” that “Dad’s home!” I would run to the hall closet, nestle in behind his suit jackets, his overcoats and hide. He would set his leather briefcase down in front of my “supposed” hidden feet, hang his jacket up and close the door. I would pop out giggling. Never once did he let on that he knew I was in there and I thought it was so funny I could trick him again and again. I still remember the smell of that leather briefcase.

Dad taught me to ride a bike. He took off the training wheels and we walked to the end of the driveway on Enfield. I got on my bike, he got behind me, with his hands on the seat, started to push and said go. Pedaling, pedaling down the slope of the driveway approaching the backyard… I turn my head around and there was Dad back at the end of driveway grinning that grin. I made a safe stop halfway into the backyard. Ignoring the possibility there could be some serious trust issues later on to deal with….I rode my bike down the driveway over and over that day. There were never any trust issues with Dad either.

I will remember many summer family vacations to National parks, visiting relatives in many states along the way, arriving in California where his Mom and Stepfather, my Grandma and Grandpa….Beanie and FaFa lived.

Dad liked hats. He liked music, braunschwager sandwiches and John Deere Tractors. He especially liked red tractors. He liked to fish…. however I don’t ever recall him ever catching one. He didn’t like the game Bingo.

I will remember Dad as a gentleman farmer…… plowing, planting and harvesting 6 acres of soybeans and loving every minute of it. Writing it off as a loss every year probably nurtured that love.

After Mom passed away and later on in his life when he was no longer farming, I will remember his passion for his hobbies; Tennis, hiking, carving, his Model-A’s and his never ending tinkering around.

He was a loving Dad and would do anything for us. Always ready to lend a hand or give advice.

I will remember Dad as a loving Husband, a wonderful Grandfather and Great Grandfather, a fantastic Father-in-Law who made the guys feel like sons, a loving companion, a helpful neighbor and good friend.

There is something though that Ann, Nancy and I have always wanted to forget… and that is that we were not so blessed to inherit…. through genetics…. his thick fingered, wrinkly knuckle hands. We thanked him often for that and he always chuckled. I believe he has a couple nieces who were blessed as well.

Dad’s big, strong hands, many times scraped and calloused, served him well. As he slowed down, his hands were still big and strong, but very soft. We held hands many times the last few years, in silence, and he would gently squeeze mine. I knew that meant… I love you. Now, whenever I look at my hands, I will think of Dad and smile.

I always will remember watching Dad at the end of the day, sitting quietly on the back porch with a glass of lemonade, ice tea, coffee, or cocktail …enjoying the beauty of his little farm, savoring the accomplishment of a good days work.

Well done Dad… .a life well done.

Love you, will miss you.

Jayne (Daughter Number Three)

Next was Jayne’s sister, Nancy………………

During the course of our Dad’s career at NCR, he had many occasions in which he would need to speak in public or in front of a large group. He took various speaking courses including “Dale Carnegie’s” How to Win Friends and Influence People. From that course he learned that when people identify their greatest fear, they typically list speaking in front of a group as a fear greater than death. To lessen that fear, Dad said that they taught him to stand at the podium and when he looked out at the assembled group….to imagine that the people in the audience had cabbages where their heads should be. I think that it is only fair that you know how I am seeing you all right now.

What I learned from my Dad….when we had Dad’s 80th birthday party, Ann and Tom made a video for Dad and the song that seemed so appropriate for that video was “The Things We’ve Handed Down”.

These are some of the things that he has handed down to me.

Love of nature and wildlife, especially birds.

Just like him, I love having a barn and a workshop and a place to “putter” around, as he would say…. Because of him, I feel pretty comfortable working with the tools that he used. He never made a big deal of teaching me, we simply did things together.

After seeing what he was able to create out of trees, I have the desire to carve wood. I do not know if I will ever be able to do what he did with wood and a carving knife, but I would like to try. His carvings are some of my favorite memories of him.

A love for fishing, not deep sea fishing or big fishing trips, but quietly sitting by the water on an afternoon…. it was not really about catching fish, we never really caught many fish. The family joke is that we caught so few fish and invariably someone at the bait store would say “Oh, you should have been here last week, they were hauling them in.” Maybe that was why is was so memorable when we did……But, he taught me to bait a hook to make it almost irresistible to a fish, which I have taught my grandson, Joshua, and I will teach Avery, if she is interested.

Long before Dad’s memory began to fail, he showed us by his actions what each of us meant to him.

He did not so much teach us, as show us by his actions and by sharing with us the things that he learned as he lived. In this way, he handed them down.

I never doubted where I stood in Dad’s heart, No matter what, I always felt well-loved. And he was well loved in return.

Nancy (Daughter Number Two)

First daughter Ann, who is expert in the role that chronology authorized, said the following…………….

ANN’S REMEMBERANCE

One Christmas, Dad carved us all Santas. They were very cute, each one a little different. Mine was holding a tennis racquet. Thinking it couldn’t be that hard, I thought I’d give carving a try and asked Dad to teach me to make Santas.

Being the infinitely patient man that he was, we made a date for my lesson. Well, the more wood I carved the more I realized that this was much harder than it looked. Dad was very encouraging and kind, but I can’t imagine what he was thinking as my Santa developed one very skinny ankle, completely out of proportion to the other. At that point I was ready to call it quits on learning to carve. He really did have a talent that he didn’t pass on to me!

I remember commenting that carving was not going to be my forte, and asked him how in the world he got the proportions just right, and he said “it’s simple…. just carve away the parts of the wood that aren’t a Santa”.

As I now look at all of his beautiful carvings, I remember his simple answer to my question and marvel at the potential he could see in an ordinary piece of wood.

In much the same way, all of us who were blessed to be a part of his life, felt uniquely accepted, each of us different but perfect in his eyes, perfectly carved and loved just as we are.

Ann (Fred’s and Mary’s oldest daughter)

Ann’s and Tom’s daughter, Teri Ann Wilson Smith (age 33 at the funeral), had the following memories of her grandfather……………..

Memories of Grandpa

G……stands for GRAND….. because that is exactly
what he was.

R…..stands for RED TRACTOR….it was a part of
him….and we always have our own special memories of
the tractor.

A….stands for MODEL A….and riding with him in the 4th of
July parade.

N….stands for NAPS in his chair…..I have so many memories
of sitting on Grandpa’s lap in his chair.

D….stands for DAPPER… because he was so
handsome

P…..stands for PEANUT BUTTER AND BUTTER
sandwiches for bed time snack.

A…..stands for ALWAYS….because I will always love and remember you Grandpa and treasure the wonderful life you lived and all the memories we created.

Teri (granddaughter)

Teri’s brother, Todd Alan Wilson, was next ……..

He was the best grandpa ever because…. well, there isn’t just one thing.

There are many memories that come to mind. Riding around the yard on that mini-bike that was held together with bubble gum and rust. How did we all survive? or how we would all fight to be next to ride on his lap on the tractors…as you look at the video of pictures, there isn’t a picture of him and his tractor that he doesn’t have a grandchild or great grandchild in his lap…

There was the time when he hired me and my friend Shawn to cut down the trees along the lane. Now mind you these were large trees, we were down to the last one and we cut it wrong and it was leaning toward he power lines. Well, never fear Grandpa is here! He rigged some sort of rope system that involved several pieces of old rope, chains, and I think I even saw a piece of rubber hose…he hooked it to the tree and then to the old Ford tractor. I’m not afraid to admit it, I didn’t want to watch…. but, like always, it worked and he fell the tree right where he wanted it…

My dad once said it was frustrating doing work over at Grandpa’s cause he had so many tools but never the right one…but if you needed something, Grandpa would rig or fashion something together and it would work…l could go on for hours….he was the best Grandpa ever because…..he was GRANDPA

………………..oh and by the way Grandpa….I’m getting my haircut later today!

Todd (grandchild, Tom’s and Ann’s son, age 39 at the funeral)

Todd’s son, great-grandchild Todd Alan Wilson II, offered the following…………………

He was the best great grandpa ever because I would remember always wanting to ride on his big red tractor. And I can still remember one time, when I was little, that he took me on it and let me sit in his lap. That was a good day, and an even better memory. He was a great man and the best great grandpa ever.

Todd Wilson II (great-grandson, age 13 at time of funeral)

Todd’s sister was next…………………….

Grace Wilson (Todd’s sister)

He was the best great grandpa ever because he loved all his great grandchildren and loved to ask a lot of questions. He loved his family so much.

(Grace Kelly Wilson, age

And the last great-grandchild, Jaimee Gabriel Long, Jayne’s daughter (age 23)………………….

Jaimee

I will always remember his bright smile, rides on the tractor and walks through the farm.

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Lee Trevino, a Joker but No Joke

Lee Trevino ad-libbed the funniest line I ever heard in golf. Where he did it and when are legend although I never have seen this reported anywhere, anytime. Thousands heard what he said, and now you will find out.

I was among the thousands.

The date was Sunday, June 20, 1971. This was the fourth but not “final” day of the U-S Open at what Sports Illustrated golf writer Dan Jenkins called “marvelous old Merion”, just outside Philadelphia. This was the famed course with the wicker baskets that Merion calls flagsticks. This was the course where Ben Hogan hit that one-iron on the 18th hole in 1950, and where, 20 years before that, Bobby Jones won to capture his famous Grand Slam, and, as an amateur, too.

Before the 1971 tournament, Lee observed: “There are 16 birdie holes here. But…there are 18 bogey holes. I’ll eat all the cactus around El Paso if anybody breaks 280.”

Nobody did. There is still plenty of cactus around El Paso. Both Trevino and Jack Nicklaus finished at exactly 280, which meant they had to face each other in an 18-hole playoff the next day, Monday. But that’s for later.

What about the ad-lib by Lee Trevino?

To get to the full measure of its verbal explosion, you have to recall what came before on that great Sunday. For one thing, the leader at the start of the day was a 21-year-old amateur, Jim Simons. He led Jack Nicklaus by two strokes at the start of the day.

Jack was two shots ahead of Lee. But Lee said that morning he thought he would win, just as he had won the U-S Open three years before at Oak Hill (Rochester, NY). “I’m playing fantastic”, said Trevino. “I’ve been playing super ever since Nicklaus told me in February that he hoped I never found out how good I really was. For the best player in the world to tell me that just filled me up with confidence, and I’ve almost won every tournament I’ve been in the last six weeks. I know I can win this thing.”

Nicklaus and Simons were the last pairing of the day, Trevino just ahead of them. As much as I liked Jack Nicklaus, something told me to keep my eyes on Lee.

Simons did what 21-year-old amateurs are supposed to do in a major: He quickly made two bogeys to draw everybody close. Nicklaus tied Simons when he sank a curling downhill 30-footer at the fourth hole.

But the next hole, Nicklaus double-bogeyed, hitting his tee shot into a creek.

Some say Trevino’s golf that day was the best he ever played. All he did, said Dan Jenkins, was split the center of the narrow fairways and rivet his irons close to the wicker baskets. When he birdied the 12th hole, he tied for the lead. He nearly made a deuce there “with more backspin on his approach shot than you can get in car wheels on a sandy road” (Jenkins).

When Trevino reached the 14th green, still tied with Nicklaus, he found himself with probably a 45-foot putt. I had a perfect spot in the gallary from which I could see the “break” (the hill) between Lee’s ball and the cup.

If there had been a pin to drop in the Merion rough as Trevino looked over the putt, I think you would have heard it, the gallery was that quiet, and respectful. Lee took a long time walking back and forth. Finally, he crouched behind the ball to check the line to the hole one last time. All eyes were focused on him; all mouths were shut.

In a slow, confidential but audible voice heard by everybody, he said: “I’d sure like to make you, honey!”

The gallery exploded. Surely the laughter could be heard in the group behind where Jack was playing with Simons, who, by the way, stayed competitive until his double-bogey on the last hole.

I recall that 14th green as though it was just today thinking THERE IS NO WAY HE CAN COMPOSE HIMSELF NOW AND SINK THAT PUTT. It was somewhat of a task for him to wait for the gallery to return to quiet.

The putt started up on that hill to his right and snaked downward into the hole. Birdie, and a one-shot lead.

The roar was louder than the laughter of the minute before.

For me, the rest was “anticlimactic”. Even the snake the next day. The rubber one, not a Trevino putt.

Because this is a Trevino story, I would be remiss not to add, here, for the record the additional Lee humor that day, and the next.

Some would say that Trevino choked on the 18th hole with that one-shot lead Sunday. Hardly. He was laughing on the 18th tee, teasing his caddie for forgetting to give him a club. “You choking already?” Lee asked him. The crowd roared. Grinning, Lee added: “You wanna give me something to fan this with?” The crowd roared again.

Lee hit a drive with a bit too much fade (that’s a slice for an amateur). His three-wood to the green was a bit too much club. His chip back from 70 feet was excellent, but stopped seven feet past. Had he made the seven-foot par putt, he would have won that day. But he had to back away from the ball when he became momentarily nettled, unlike his composure at the 14th green. As he was addressing his crucial putt, a kid fell off his perch near the clubhouse, breaking Lee’s concentration. Lee refused to blame anybody but himself. Surely, an hour before, on that 14th green, he proved to thousands he can crack a double-entendre and sink a putt in the same two minutes.

Missing the putt for a bogey, Lee still had his 280, the score he said nobody would beat.

Jack Nicklaus soon finished with the same score, and the Monday playoff (18 holes) was on.

I had to work the next day so I missed the playoff.

Dan Jenkins said the tension around the first tee on Monday was unbelievable. Nicklaus was sitting under a tree, his head down in apparent concentration when Trevino came out on the tee, smacking gum, rubbing his hands together, pacing, waving to the crowd. He reached into a side pocket of his golf bag, pulled out a three-foot-long toy snake and held it up. The crowd shrieked as Lee laughed and tossed it at a scrambling Nicklaus.

Said Jenkins: “Big Jack broke up laughing. So did the crowd. So did the world.”

Lee finished at 68 to Nicklaus’ 71. He was U-S Open champion for a second time.

He said: “I’m a lucky dog. You gotta be lucky to beat Jack Nicklaus because he is the greatest golfer who ever held a club.”

And in conclusion, you wanna know more about those times….back there in 1971? For winning, Trevino won $30,000; Nicklaus got second place money of $15,000. Somebody named Arnold Palmer won $1,500 and not many attaboys for the way he criticized Jack’s alleged slow play. They became best friends years later.

And one of Lee’s many “quotes” kept him in the limelight for decades after: “You can make a lot of money in this game. Just ask my ex-wives. Both of them are so rich that neither of their husbands work.”

My Pal Dizzy Dean

Jerome Herman Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is there because of his pitching, but also because of his career. They didn’t call him Dizzy for nothing.

He preceded Yogi Berra in being a public figure (i.e., baseball star) in part for his sayings. And for what people said about him.

St. Louis Cardinals teammate Pepper Martin once said: “When ol’ Diz was out there pitching, it was more than just another ball game. It was a regular three-ring circus and everybody was wide awake and enjoying being alive.”

Others get some credit for this remark, but I heard it first from Dizzy: “It ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up.”

In one Cardinals game, he told the fielders to sit down on the field, he was going to strike out the side. He did. He was the last National League pitcher to win 30 games in one season.

You will note that this article began with Dizzy’s several names. Some say his legal name was Jerome Herman Dean, others said Jay Hanna Dean. One story about Diz’s legal name is that he gave conflicting information to three different sportswriters in quick succession. A teammate asked him about it and he replied: “I wanted to give each of them fellas an exclusive story.”

Ol’ Diz once said: “It puzzles me how they know what corners are good for filling stations. Just how did they know gas and oil was under there?”

If you have some time on your hands, Google DIZZY DEAN QUOTES for laughs similar to those that ensued when Yogi said things like: “Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore. It’s too crowded.”

This is a story about Dizzy Dean after his last days on the baseball diamond. But before I get to my friend (this is a stretch, of course, as you will see), let’s review some of the things that earned him entry into Cooperstown.

He was born January 16, 1910, in Lucas, Arkansas. He was just 64 when he died (July 17,1974, in Reno, Nevada). When he died, I was 40 and really felt I had lost a good friend. Actually, I hardly knew him. I knew him mostly as thousands did. But that’s for later.

He pitched for the Cardinals (1930-1937), the Chicago Cubs (1938-1941) and briefly for the St. Louis Browns (1947). I saw that game. I was 13 years old. But again, I am getting ahead of myself.

Dizzy was best known for leading the 1934 “Gashouse Gang” Cardinals to win the World Series in seven games over the Detroit Tigers. He had a 30-7 record, a 2.66 ERA in the regular season. His brother, Paul (they called him “Daffy”; that’s a fact), also pitched for the Cardinals. They both won two World Series games that year. Dizzy won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award that year, and he was runner-up in the voting the next two years.

While pitching for the National League in the 1937 All-Star game, he faced Earl Averill of the American League Cleveland Indians. Averill hit a line drive back at the mound, hitting Dizzy on the foot. Told that his big toe was fractured, he replied: “Fractured, hell!! The damn thing’s broken!”

It was said he came back to pitching too soon from the injury, which caused him to change his pitching motion to avoid landing so hard on his sore left big toe. As a result, the story went, he hurt his arm and he lost his fast ball. By the next year, when he was with the Cubs, his arm was just about shot, but he kept at it for three more years. That year, 1938, he pitched well enough to help the Cubs win the pennant and he pitched gamely in the second World Series game before losing to the Yankees in what became known as “Ol’ Diz’s Last Stand”.

It was said that between ages 23 and 27, Dizzy was the best pitcher in baseball. By 28, he was just another pitcher, and at 31, it was all over. Except for that time in 1947 when I saw him pitch for real.

My Dad worked for Western Union and occasionally he would be assigned to Sportsmans Park for the baseball game. Using his telegrapher’s “bug”, he would transmit baseball results to other cities, and receive them for local consumption. Sometimes he would take me along, and I would be able to walk the bridge into the press box where my Dad worked along with sportswriters, the official scorer, and so forth, and Dizzy Dean and Johnny O’Hara in the radio booth.

Need I tell you? There was no security. I could walk all through the pressbox, including the radio booth. I was 10 years old. The year was 1944, and both the Cardinals and the Browns were in first place, and ultimately played each other in the World Series that year. It was a heady time for me, of course.

One night, I was standing behind Johnny and Dizzy, listening to them. Occasionally, they would look back at me, smile but not shooosh me away.

From my vantage point, I could not see all of the field, and a batter lofted a high fly to right field. It looked like it was going over the Mississippi River. I could not help myself. I was a kid. I started hollering WOWWWWWWWW!

The right fielder caught the ball.

Johnny was doing the play-by-play. He turned around and so did Dizzy. They said nothing. I have thanked them quietly ever since. I got into no trouble that I know of, and I never told my Dad. And I guess that was the start of my radio career, as that was the first word I ever said on the radio.

It was quite a while before I had the courage to return to that position in the pressbox.

And actually, it was because of my familiarity with my new-found friends in the pressbox that I had the courage to go to the radio booth one Sunday afternoon after a thunderstorm had caused a rain delay. This day, the Browns were scheduled to play a double-header, and before the first game, they had a “Long Ball Hitting Contest”, involving star players from both the Browns and the Detroit Tigers. I remember Chet Laabs was one of the Brownies’ stars and pitcher Dizzy Trout was one of the Tigers hitters.

The first game was interrupted early. While I had been sitting in the grandstand behind third base, when the rain stopped play, I went up to the pressbox, worldly as I was, of course, at age 10. And, of course, already fascinated with radio work, I headed for the radio booth.

Johnny O’Hara and Dizzy were just sitting there with the radio engineer, not on the air. Their broadcast had been returned to the studio during the rain delay. I think Johnny and Dizzy wanted to remind me about hollering about a high fly to right, but they didn’t bring it up. They started talking with me as though I was an adult.

Dizzy started really talking about the long-ball hitting contest. He asked me if I had seen it. I had. He asked me who I thought should have won. I think I said Chet Laabs. I remember, however, vividly what Dizzy came back with: “Dizzy Trout hit the HARDEST home run. That line drive would have gone through a mule!” I agreed. Dizzy wasn’t through. “He’s a pitcher, you know!!!” I said yes, I know he is a pitcher. Dizzy always told his radio audience what a great hitter he was.

The story is not finished. I had no place to go, doncha know, so I stayed right there as we waited out the rain delay. But the rain never stopped. Eventually, the umpires called off both games. And here came the bad part. The stadium announcer said all fans could get refunds at the streetside ticket windows WITH THEIR STUB for today’s admission.

I reached in my pocket to find my ticket stub. I pulled out four stubs. Obviously, I wore the same pants to several games, and never threw my stubs away. My mother always had clean clothes for me, but most likely I wore and wore the same pants to ballgames.

I held the stubs in my hand to show Dizzy. I asked: “How can I tell which stub is for today?”

As you know, they didn’t call him Dizzy for no reason. He replied, to his 10-year-old friend, “Turn all of ‘em in. You’ll get alot more money! They won’t be able to tell.”

It sounded good to me. I went downstairs to the ticket windows, and stood among the throng in front of the windows. There were no lines; it was just fight-your-way-up-there.

When I finally made it to the window, I turned in the four stubs. The woman ticketseller took my four stubs, and for the next two or three minutes, panic was starting to set in. She showed the stubs to another ticketseller, and then came back to the window, and in a tone similar to a school teacher, she asked, no, she demanded to know: WHERE DID YOU GET THESE?

As God is my witness, I broke into tears and replied rather frantically: DIZZY DEAN TOLD ME I COULD TURN THEM IN!

DIZZY DEAN TOLD YOU!!! she hollered as all fans within earshot roared with laughter.

I realized it was too farfetched a story to continue. So I just kept crying. She actually identified the one good ticket for the day, and gave me a refund. God Bless Her for not having me arrested for fraud. I know she never believed my answer. Nor did the nearby fans. Sneaky kid. Got caught.

Actually, Dizzy was pretty famous as a baseball broadcaster. He first started with the Cardinals and Browns in 1941 right after his playing days were over. In those days, the broadcasters did not travel with the teams but Ol’ Diz had a good deal for the season, as, when one team left town, the other team came home. Dizzy was both funny and colorful, partly for butchering the English language, much to the chagrin of St. Louis English teachers.

When Al “Zeke” Zarilla tripled, he described how Zarilla “slud into third”. When the English teachers complained, Dizzy simply enjoyed more opportunities to say “slud”.

An English teacher once wrote to him that he shouldn’t use the word “ain’t” on the air, as it was a bad example to children. He responded to the teacher on the air, not so elegantly: “A lotta folks who ain’t sayin’ ‘ain’t’ ain’t eatin’. So Teach you learn ‘em English, and I’ll learn ‘em baseball.”

Dizzy advanced to join Pee Wee Reese on the CBS-TV Game of the Week each Saturday, which he did from 1955 to 1965.

And yes, I enjoyed actually seeing Dizzy Dean pitch in an official baseball game. His last, so to speak. It was September 28, 1947. He was 37 years old.

By this time, Dizzy was well-known for his broadcasting. The story has been that he had been doing the St. Louis Browns’ games, enduring several poor pitching performances in a row, and he got so frustrated, he blurted out on the air: “Doggone it, I can pitch better than nine out of the ten guys on the staff!!!” The wives of the Browns pitchers complained, and team management, needing to sell tickets any way they could, took him up on his offer and had him pitch the last game of the season.

I thought Sportsman Park would be filled and got there soon after the gates opened. Sad to say, it was far from a sellout. But Dizzy did not disappoint. He pitched four innings, allowed no runs and got a single in his only at-bat. Rounding first base, he pulled his hamstring, ending his experiment.

Returning to the broadcast booth later on, he told his radio audience: “I said I can pitch better than nine of the ten guys on the staff, and I can. But I’m done. Talkings my game now. I’m just glad that muscle I pulled wasn’t in my throat.”

So that’s my story about my pal Diz. Now don’t forget to Google QUOTES BY DIZZY DEAN. Here are two that clearly identify him:

“I won 28 games in 1935 and I couldn’t believe my eyes when the Cards sent me a new contract with a cut in salary. Mr. Rickey said I deserved a cut because I didn’t win 30 games.”

And….. “Anybody whosoever had the privilege of seeing me play knows I am the greatest pitcher in the world.”

Tiger in Philadelphia

It has been my pleasure to have watched the play of many of the world’s top golfers. This past week, I hit the jackpot when, for the first time, I saw Tiger Woods “live” (i.e., not on the telly).

Tiger did not have an especially good tournament, finishing four over par in the AT&T National at the Aronimink Golf Club in suburban Newtown Square, PA. He finished in a tie for 46th, and won $16,581. Many Tiger followers will call that “chump change” for the likes of Tiger.

I agree with most golf fans of today “in the know” that Tiger is the best golfer of all time.

Before Tiger, I once put Ben Hogan in that slot, then Jack Nicklaus.

I never was able to watch Sam Snead in person (nor another great Byron Nelson). Snead won more golf tournaments than anybody. Now, Tiger is on a mission to surpass Slammin’ Sammy. Of course, at this writing, the Tiger question most golf fans want answered is WHEN is Tiger going to return to better than $16,581 form?

My first golf tournament was the 1963 Western Open in Chicago. I don’t remember much about it, except Bob Goalby and Bob Charles and Jack Rule were in the field. Arnold Palmer won the tournament, but I don’t remember much about my visit to the Beverly Country Club. The most noteworthy thing I remember is that I was in Philadelphia on the Friday of the tournament for a job interview with WRCV Radio-TV, owned by NBC. The news director and assistant news director, during the interview, seemed favorably impressed, and said they would contact me the next day back in my home city in Iowa. I had to cough up that I wouldn’t be home, but rather at a golf tournament. At the time, I didn’t think that might be a good thing for my resume, but Saturday night, after all day at Beverly, the call came through: you have the job.

Although I have watched Arnold Palmer in person since the early 1960′s, I could not adopt him as Number One of all time. But I well recognized he has been called “The King”. While working for WHO-TV in Des Moines, I was doing the half-hour Sunday night TV newscasts and one Sunday, Arnie was playing an exhibition at Waveland Golf Course in Des Moines. With a noisy camera of the era, I followed him around all 18 holes, recording virtually every shot. I had asked him prior to the exhibition if it would bother him; I said my camera was anything but noiseless. He said it would be no problem if I started the camera at least 15 seconds before he hit the ball. On one occasion, I was asleep at the switch, discovering he was about to hit an approacb shot to the fourth green, turned on the camera amidst the deafening silence and practically on his backswing, Arnie stopped. Everybody laughed but me. I was terribly embarrassed and suffice it to say I did not resume the coverage until the next hole. A little post-script to that faux pas: Arnie started once again to hit the ball, and then actually topped it up the fairway, so I felt further hurt. But he put his third shot on the par five hole on the green, and walked off with a birdie anyway. I have thanked him for that ever since. That night, after our film editor had put the whole three-minute package together, I used my local knowledge of Waveland (which I had played a hundred times) to ad-lib his entire round. It brought many nice compliments from people who did not trudge 18 with Arnie.

I still felt Ben Hogan was the best ever.

When I heard that Bantam Ben was coming to Philadelphia for the IVB Championship, in 1966 at Whitemarsh Country Club, I asked our Channel 3 sportscaster Jim Leaming if I could use his media pass if he wasn’t. No problem. My goal was to watch Ben Hogan.

To my surprise I was pretty much alone in my admiration for Ben Hogan. He was joined by the Hebert brothers, Lionel and Jay, and somebody else I do not recall, and me. Four players and me. No other gallery for Ben that day. Are the people in this city crazy???? It was not Ben’s first visit to Philadelphia. Perhaps you remember his famous one-iron to the 18th green at Merion to win the 1950 U-S Open? This was just more than one year after his horrific auto crash with a Greyhound bus in February, 1949. He was nearly killed; a broken collarbone was only one of his injuries that had doctors unsure whether he ever would pick up a golf club again. Glenn Ford played Ben in a movie about his life called “FOLLOW THE SUN”.

I wish I would remember more about his round of Wednesday practice golf at Whitemarsh. There were no Arnold Palmer-topped-fairway-wood moments. In fact, he was rather jovial all around the course, enjoying some, for him, casual banter with the Hebert brothers. Even in those days (he was now 53), Ben was pretty much a robot on the golf course. I am pretty sure Ben did not make the cut for weekend play in that tournament. I also watched him all around the course on one of the regular tournament days. I thought I was watching the best ever.

In those Whitemarsh days, Arnold won the championship in 1963, the same year I saw him win in Chicago. But Jack Nicklaus ultimately won three times at Whitemarsh, and I must be candid: Jack was the better golfer. I interviewed both of them during my TV years and found Jack to be the far more congenial, frank and cooperative. I think I caught Arnie on bad days, I’m not sure. For some time, Arnie had a tough time realizing that Jack was surpassing him. Now, they are pals, and I like that.

Jack has won 18 major tournaments. That is more than anybody, ever. And up until the last decade, I had changed the “best ever” from Ben to Jack. I saw Jack do more incredible things on the golf course than anybody else.

Until this past weekend. Tiger is the best ever. There is no question about that. Of course, I am talking golf here, not incorporating his off-course behavior into that analogy.

More than a year ago, it was revealed that the Congressional golf course in Washington, DC was to be renovated and re-shaped for a future U-S Open. It was the site of the 2009 tournament that was Tiger’s personal signature. For the next two years, however, the Tiger AT&T National needed another home. So 20 months ago, Tiger and his Foundation looked for a substitute home course for two years while Congressional is getting its major fixup. And his Foundation would continue to receive parts of the profits from the tournament.

Then, November happened. Tiger and his girl friends hit the front pages of newspapers and all the sports and celebrity TV shows all over the world. It was a horrific crash. Anybody, as I did, who already had bought a weeklong ticket for Aronimink wondered what it meant insofar as Tiger finally playing Philadelphia.

They sell “season” tickets for golf tournaments the same as NFL football teams. You have to buy the whole package: Tuesday through Sunday. In the NFL, you have to pay for the “pre-season” games when the regulars hardly even play. In golf, Tuesday is a practice day, Wednesday the pro-am.

Aronimink probably was one of the first events in which many people were happy to buy the “pre-season”. I watched Tiger play nine holes (he only played nine) on Tuesday, and 18 Wednesday. But actually, nobody saw him play all nine, or all 18. Oh, sure, some healthy blokes might have seem him walking or putting on every hole, but hardly in the fashion of being able to say you SAW HIM.

If you were lucky enough to get a spot where you could see him drive, you likely did not see him finish the hole. There were just too many people. So, after you had seen one laser drive (he was hitting the ball just about farther than anybody in the field, with the ball resembling an Astronaut in a Cape Canaveral rocket), you realized you had to concentrate on your position on the green, most likely the next green, not the one you just saw him where he hit the laser.

For the first day of competition, I had decided to forego watching his drive, and went directly to the Number One green. It was a 12:56 p.m. tee time so just about all the Tiger Fans already were on Aronimink real estate. I was fortunate to get a standing spot just behind a guy not any taller, and I was able to see Tiger’s Thursday drive off #1 alight in the fairway. His short approach to the green was dead-on, and Tiger drained the putt for a birdie. The pros say you can’t birdie ‘em all if you don’t birdie the first hole. Tiger had birdied the first hole.

But, alas, when he played the second hole, I already had headed for #3 green in the hope that I would find another vantage point almost as good as at #1. I did not see the play on the second hole. And Tiger bogeyed #2, and he no longer was one under par with just 71 more holes to go.

While earlier this year, Tiger has been spraying drives off the fairways, in this tournament he was impressively accurate. And long. He hit the ball so long off the tee. He said afterward he used his driver almost every par four and par five hole. He sounded as though that was alot of fun for him.

On his first day, Tiger birdied the first par three hole (fifth hole) to once again get a red number on the portable scoreboard. He finished the first nine at one under par, and his huge gallary already was figuring this was just Thursday, heck, this tournament is in the bag. (He was the defending champion for the AT&T National, having won last year at Congressional.)

But, of course, Tiger having proved his mortality in the November revelations, he bogeyed the 14th, a par three, to fall back to even.

He then did the un-Tiger-like: he bogeyed the par five 16th (Tiger bogeyed a par five??? C’mon!!!). Now, he was over par. And he never again for the four days would see a red number.

In fact, the very next hole, the par three 17th, Tiger double-bogeyed. His par on the 18th gave him a three-over-par 73 for the first day.

Most of the Aronimink gallery was there to see Tiger. Last November did not interfere except perhaps between Tiger’s ears. Then again, at the British Open in less than two weeks, Tiger may erase his recent negative golfing past.

The attendance at Aronimink was 36,685 Thursday, 45,366 Friday, 45,231 Saturday and 35,872 Sunday. While the blue sky weather moved into the 90′s for the weekend, I think the Sunday decline was as much due to Tiger’s far-back standing as it was perspiration. At the start of the day Sunday, Tiger was 13 strokes behind the eventual winner Justin Rose, who won by the narrowest of margins.

Tiger had even par rounds of 70 Friday and Saturday, but this kept him three over par and far behind. There was no charge. And Sunday, he finished with a one over par 71. In Round 2, he did birdie two holes in a row, #3 and #4, both par fours. Tiger had 13 birdies in all. I saw about half of them. I am happy about that. As the song says in “FIDDLER”, ON THE OTHER HAND, he had 15 bogeys and one double-bogey, mostly from faulty strokes with the flat stick. From tee to green, I would say: WATCH FOR A TIGER IN THE SHORT GRASS AT ST. ANDREWS, the British Open July 15-18.

I have seen Ben, though not in his prime, and I know his terrific record. I saw Jack and Arnie in their prime. And now Tiger.

Tiger is the best ever.

Robin Roberts

Hall of Fame workhorse pitcher Robin Roberts of the Philadelphia Phillies died today (Thursday, May 6, 2010) at his home in Temple Terrace, 10 miles northeast of Tampa. He was 83.

Mr. Roberts started three games on the final five days of the 1950 season and was the winning pitcher in a victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers that gave the Phillies their first pennant in 35 years. That year, he became the Phillies’ first 20-game winner since Grover Cleveland Alexander in 1917.

I report on Robin Roberts because I had the rather unique pleasure of meeting and talking with him over a period of months in the mid-1970′s. I had personal experience in meeting a man whom many today have called “a very nice man”.

At the time I was Executive Director of the Philadelphia Civic Center. After the demise of the Philadelphia Blazers in 1973 in the World Hockey Association, the owner of Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens, Ed Piszek, formed a minor league hockey team in the North American Hockey League and they played their games at the Civic Center. Mr. Piszek was a friend of Robin Roberts’ and invited him to be the team’s General Manager. I am not sure but a comment left on the philly.com website today said Robin Roberts was part-owner of the Firebirds. I just do not recall that distinction.

However, he did seem to enjoy his role as the GM of the Firebirds. Once or twice a week, he would call me from the Firebirds second floor offices to see if I was available for a meeting. While I believe I was “available” for all callers, I always was “available” for Robin Roberts.

He usually would ask for some kind of cooperation from “the building” for something the Firebirds wanted to do. I served as his enabler, so to speak, and was honored to do so. His requests always were reasonable.

Our meetings were maybe 30% business and 70% baseball. Once he found out I was an ardent baseball fan, he knew he had a major audience of one with someone seven years younger than he.

I told him that as a young resident of St. Louis, I had been weaned on Stan Musial of the Cardinals. Robin Roberts spoke with great admiration for Stan the Man, whom he faced numerous times.

Mr. Roberts was amusing and blessed with philosophy. He said even then (I think he was 46 or 47 at the time), old-timers with the Phillies all still greeted him the same way: “How’s the arm, Robbie??”

He said he always would reply: “The arm’s fine, thank you.”

He said he enjoyed his position with the Firebirds and enjoyed working with the young hockey players. But I never will forget what he added: “You know, John, I made a big mistake when I retired.”

If you know of his way of talking, and visualize his sitting there in the chair in almost a confidential tone, he told me: “I made a big mistake….because I should have been smart enough to get a bunch of business cards printed. Just my name and phone number, and under that, just one word: CONSULTANT.

“The guys who make all the money these days are consultants. And, y’see, you don’t say what kind of consultant you are. You’re just a consultant. And when they call you up and ask you whether you can consult on something, of course you can do that!”

He laughed.

Albert V. Gaudiosi

Albert V. Gaudiosi was described in an obituary in the Philadelphia Daily News as “the quintessential tough, hard-boiled newspaper reporter who later became a tough, hard-boiled city official under Mayor Frank L. Rizzo”.

Al was my boss during the Rizzo for Mayor Campaign in 1971, and when he was (briefly) City Representative and Director of Commerce in the mid 1970′s. He died April 7, 2010, in Houston at age 86 of complications of lymphoma.

The Daily News obituary writer, John F. Morrison, suggested Al “might have been abrupt, impetuous, pushy and annoying, but, as those who knew him agreed, was also a fine administrator with a keen intelligence and quick wit”.

During the 1971 Rizzo Campaign, I recall going to Al’s office to ask him about the new poll he had just received. To hear the newspapers tell it, the race was going to be very close between Police Commissioner Rizzo and Republican candidate Thacher Longstreth.

“John,” Al said. “Don’t worry! We’re winners. We’re winners.”

He said it with such confidence, I stopped the worrying!

In 1963, Gaudiosi and fellow Philadelphia Bulletin reporter Jim Magee along with photographer Frederick Meyer shared a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative series on a numbers racket with police collusion. Myers photographed gambling transactions from a room they had rented in South Philadelphia. Gaudiosi took the photos to Rizzo, then a Chief Inspector, who identified the policemen or had them identified.

That was the beginning of his relationship with Rizzo.

The Daily News had a bit of the Gaudiosi scenario a bit incorrect. It said that when Commissioner Rizzo decided to run for Mayor in 1971, Gaudiosi was in the Philadelphia Bulletin newsroom taking a story from a reporter when city editor Sam Boyle came up and pulled off Al’s headset.

“You’re out of here,” Boyle declared.

“What do you mean?” Gaudiosi asked.

“Rizzo just named you his campaign director.”

You would think, by the Daily News obituary, that this came as a surprise to Al Gaudiosi. On the contrary, Al was prepared for this for many months. My source for this? Myself.

One day, back in the spring of 1969, I got a call from the Commissioner’s office. “The Commissioner would like for you to stop in his office this afternoon.”

At the time, I was a reporter/newscaster for KYW-TV.

When I arrived, Frank Rizzo sat down at his conference table and said he had two things he wanted to say to me “off the record”. He said he had just decided to run for Mayor, having received the private assurance from Mayor James H. J. Tate that he would have the Mayor’s endorsement some day in the future.

And, he said, I want you to work for me. He told me I was “the second newsman” to know about his decision. I soon realized that reporters who go into politics don’t necessarily do it overnight. This was 2 1/2 years before Election Day.

The first newsman? Al Gaudiosi.