ABC:LHS #087-5   Rev. William Smith...

...was a Scottish-born Anglican who impressed Benjamin Franklin with his ideas about higher education and set up the skeleton and backbone of what became the University of Pennsylvania today, but he made few friends and is little remembered today

ABC:LHS #087-4  Hilery Baker...

...was a German immigrant who became two-term mayor during the time when the city was also the nation's capital. He established the first city police force and was the first "Officer Down" in the city's history.

ABC:LHS #087-3 Alexander Murray...

... came from a family that was part of the Scottish diaspora to the New World after the Jacobite Rebellion in the early 1700s. Born in Maryland, he was a ship's captain before he was out of his teens and rose to become a Commodore in the Navy. By the time he retired, he was a battle-hardened veteran with years at sea.

ABC:LHS #087-2 Thomas Godfrey...

...was one of the New World's first native inventors. While working as a glazier, he was intrigued by the reflection and refraction of light through a shard of glass. This led to his invention that made life on the seas easier and safer, and saved thousands of lives in the process. 

ABC:LHS #087-1

The concept of "celebrity corpses" to attract customers to a cemetery was nothing new. People had been digging up other people for years for legal, political, religious, scientific, and other reasons, so why not for commerce? Many transportable cadavers have made interesting journeys to their final resting places. 

ABC:LHS #087

Even in death, some people don’t rest easy. Someone always wants to dig them up and move them. Though Laurel Hill East opened in 1836, several of its 18th-century dead were buried elsewhere first.

First, I trace the many reasons people exhume the dead. And there are plenty.

Thomas Godfrey invented a lifesaving navigational instrument. Buried first on a Germantown farm, he was later pursued by Laurel Hill as one of its earliest celebrity corpses.

Commodore Alexander Murray was as important a sailor as Isaac Hull or Stephen Decatur, but without the headline-grabbing legend.

Mayor Hilary Baker served when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital and crossed paths daily with the signers of the Declaration and Constitution. He died in office.

Rev. William Smith deserves recognition alongside Benjamin Franklin as a cofounder of the University of Pennsylvania, yet Franklin is celebrated while Smith is largely forgotten.

I had a blast making this one. I think you’ll have fun listening.

BBB:LHWS #056   George Gerbner...

...was a Hungarian refugee and combat survivor who grew up through the start of European Fascism during the 1930s. His discovered that the power lay with those who controlled the narrative and tell the stories. He used violence as an example to spread his message, but a deeper reading shows that his concerns were that American media were starting to resemble the prefascist state he had known in his youth. Needless to say, he was a controversial figure for many years. 

River Section starts at the BODE plot 

Join me on an audio guided tour of the River Section of Laurel Hill West, one of the original four segments when the cemetery opened in 1869. You won't miss and of the fancy mausoleums or Tiffany studio stained glass, since they came later.

You will meet the Father of Scientific Management and the Mother of Mother's Day, the man who literally changed two sports and his sister who wrote for The New Yorker, a man who decorated several rooms in City Hall and Masonic Temple, and a woman whose work is primarily at The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the first doctor to take care of Phineas Gage after the tamping bar incident (it wasn't a crowbar), and a bride who wore her dress for the first time in her coffin. Plus ... oh, I don't know, maybe a couple of dozen more. I promise you at least two or three stories you will want to tell others. 

ABC:LHS #086-4   Drews and Barrymores...

...are among the best-known acting families in the United States. Although many of them started in an alternate final resting place, Louisa Lane Drew, owner-manager of the Arch Street Theater found a final resting place at Mount Vernon. Several years later she was joined by the ashes of her grandson John Barrymore, aka "The Great Profile." Thomas Keels tells their story.

With the warm weather here, you can take advantage of Laurel Hill's location as part of the Trails System that connect the Cynwyd Heritage Trail to the Wissahickon trail system. If you have walked or ridden your bike through West Laurel Hill Cemetery from the entrance just off the Cynwyd Trail all the way to the Pencoyd exit on Righter’s Ferry Road, you have probably passed dozens of mausoleums and gravesites that you had questions about.  Now there’s an audio narration to help you quench your curiosity.  It is done by Joe Lex, the same person who researches and narrates Laurel Hill’s twice-monthly podcasts “All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories” and “Biographical Bytes from Bala: West Laurel Hill Stories.”  Find out about William Luden, inventor of the mentholated cough drop; Charles Harrah, who made his fortune in Brazil; Eldridge Reeves Johnson, inventor of the Victrola, and many more.  And at long last, you can discover the mystery of “Cocktails at Six.”  The tour covers only people interred on the right-hand side of the road and takes about 40 minutes.  Look for its companion audio covering the other side from Pencoyd back to Barmouth in a few months.