There is no one still alive who was present when the Philadelphia branch of the Exchange Clubs Association withdrew and renamed itself the Right Angle Club. Since these mens luncheon clubs tended to specialize in tall tales and ribald jokes, it is unclear how much credence should be placed in the ancient mythology of the event. It is fairly certain that the assertion is merely badinage that since the Reserve Clubs supported charities to prevent child abuse, the club which withdrew, did so because it was in favor of child abuse. It seems unlikely that this organization of stockbrokers were making reference to a carpenter's square, or that it particularly favored engineers and architects. While the club moved from the Bourse Building to the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, and thence for several years to the Engineers Club, the name is still not a reference to engineering.
The most plausible story about the name is that the proposal had been made that members follow the example of the
Within our living memory, everyone was a beginner in the computer/electronics world. We thought we were just as good as beginners as anyone else, so our personal discoveries were written down aimlessly. Much later, they have been sorted out, culled, and offered for the use of others.
Haddonfield sits right on the PATCO High Speed Line into Philadelphia, so it's perfectly convenient for commuting and culture. Haddonfield has blocks and blocks of magnificent houses dating from before the Revolution to the present with Queen Victoria's era well represented.
Founded by the Quaker Elizabeth Haddon shortly after her arrival from England in 1701. The Quaker meeting continues in operation to this day and Haddonfield Friends School has taught hundreds of students over the years.
GENTLEMEN: This time last year our country was facing a severe financial crisis. We had no idea who would be affected, or by how much. As the news darkened daily, the Friday Right Angle meetings continued to provide good cheer, solid friendships, and enlightening speakers. It was truly a bright spot on the calendar.
I was concerned that we would lose a few members who might be directly affected by the economic problems. I was also worried that the economy would hamper recruitment of new members. Fortunately, neither was the case. Instead, we have five new members: Jack Foltz, Bill Hill, Walter McClatchy, Robert St. George, and Bill Brady. Thanks to Jerry Leon who has been very active in recruiting. I hope that, as the economy picks up, we will continue to attract more good members. Joe Martinez has headed the Membership Committee for a number of years and I feel certain that he will continue this important campaign.
Unfortunately, Roger Hamm resigne
Most groups of Quakers look like other nondescript people. Flambouyant behavior is neither encouraged nor very common. And yet, Quaker discussions are often salted with anecdotes about members who once behaved in notable or highly individualistic ways. Sometimes, the adjective would be "outrageous". A few such stories follow.
The likely dynamic is that these epics stake out the implied borders of approved behavior. The religion has no fixed dogma; behavior no prescribed form. Prescribed behavior was once very notable, and without rejecting, Quakers are in retreat from it. To some extent it is necessary for such a group to assemble its pantheon, or its epic poem.
Quakers can give even those ancient ceremonial forms a unique twist of their own. Extremely reluctant to offend by criticising others, the group uses historic examples to praise, other history to deplore, still other stories as building blocks in a debate by indirection. As Samuel Johnson
Quakers, or the Society of Friends, originated as a dissenting religion during the Sixteenth Century. George Fox founded the religion in the region near Manchester, England. Interestingly, the Industrial Revolution began in the same place, at about the same time or only slighly later. Quakerism borrowed some features of German Mennonites, particularly pacifism and simplicity of speech and dress. Quietism, with totally silent meetings as a religious experience, may have been centuries older in monastaries, but it is fair to surmise that it came to the Quakers from the Mennonites. It is still common to hear Mennonites referred to as German Quakers. Fox was an evangelist among the poorly educated classes of society, many of them made newly-aware of their own ideas by translations of the Bible. A handful of well-educated and well-born converts to the religion, led by William Penn, wrote down, softened, and intellectually strengthened the ideas of the quietist movement into
Sixteen years after the Clinton Health Proposal was withdrawn from Congress, its sponsors can thank their lucky stars it failed. While high-minded or even nobly intended, its operational feature was an elaborate system of Managed Care, usually called HMO (Health Management Organizations. The leaders of large business, hoping to streamline the risk-adjusted health insurance they provided to their employees, had originally cooperated with the Clinton administration, but became dismayed by the congressional habit of micro-management they encountered. In their view, politics would soon cripple a complex idea. So, major businesses undertook to do the job themselves, and badly burned their fingers when they found the HMO concept was fundamentally doomed to failure. The public bitterly resents the intrusiveness and loss of personal freedom which characterize HMO systems. HMO is now the butt of every joke, but the Democrats escaped the stigma of its flaws by failing to get it passed.
Stephen Girard once personally financed the War of 1812, and J.P. Morgan the Spanish-American War. Since then, American finance has become world finance, immense and too politically sensitive to entrust to bankers, even if their systems could handle the volume. Restoring control of the money supply "to the People" was what the 1913 Federal Reserve was all about. Unfortunately, the monetary system then just grew even bigger and more complex. A mistake might destroy civilization, and in 1929 it seemed it might do it right then. Instead of politicians, we think we need financial experts who never make mistakes, but unfortunately in 1929 many mistakes were made by both bankers and experts. We think we have learned a lot about the monetary system since then, and we think Nobel Prize winners have devised a workable system. For twenty years it has indeed seemed to work, because we haven't had another depression; bad inflation is what Austrians had, so they fear it most, and that's the oth
Philadelphians are a trifle irked that most visitors to the city don't even stay overnight, reflecting the unspoken belief that everything worth seeing is clustered around the Liberty Bell. That's like saying you have seen London if you see Big Ben on Westminster, or that the Empire State Building is all there is to New York. Grr.
On the other hand, you haven't seen anything at all unless you do see Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and the old Eighteenth Century buildings in Society Hill. We've here put together a walking tour of the Olde Towne, intending to show the most notable attractions in the shortest possible route. It will take all day, and your feet will be sore by the time you are done. But at least you will have seen -- and possibly photographed -- the real essence of the place the founding fathers saw, in one day's brisk walk.
If you are from out of town, you will have to park the car and ransom it at the end of the day. If you are a local person, this
THE MEDICAL CLUB OF PHILADELPHIA
by
Richard M. Nelson
Copyright 1992 by Richard M. Nelson
Published By
The Medical Club of Philadelphia
Broomall, Pennsylvania
1992
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:92-96909
The new Constitution Center is an imposing anchor to the north end of Independence Mall, almost as large as an airplane hanger. Unlike the other main components of the Mall, it is neither an antiquity itself nor mainly devoted to displaying relics, and it lacks the National Park Service image of relentless scholarly custodianship. Rather, it seems to strive for public diversity and involvement, and probably would not mind an occasional wiff of controversy. Somewhere there lurks a trace of that ancient controversy between Jefferson and John Adams, the controversy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, ultimately reflecting the distinction between spontaneous town-meeting democracy and reflective republican governance.
Some even worried that the Supreme Court might be uneasy about a citizen center telling the world what the Constitution is, beca
Furthermore that this new Collony may the more happyly increase by the multitude of people resorting thither Therefore wee for us our heires and successors Do give and grant by these presents power License and libertie unto all the Leigh people and subjects both present and fur the future for26 us our heires and successors Excepting those who shall bee specially forbidden to transport themselves and Familyes unto the said Country with such convenient shipping as by the Laws of this our Kingdome of England they ought to use and27 with fiting provisions paying onely the customes therefore due and there to settle themselves dwell and inhabite and plant for there public and their owne private advantage.28 And furthermore that our subjects may be the rather encouraged to undertake this expedition with the ready and chearfull mindes Know yee that wee of our especiall grace certaine knowledge and meere motion doe give and grant by vertue of these presents aswell unto the
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| American Philsophical Society Seal |
In the age of the Enlightenment, science was called natural philosophy; that accounts for the present custom of awarding PhD. degrees in chemistry and botany. The sort of thing which interested Ralph Waldo Emerson was called moral philosophy, and you will have to visit some other place than the A.P.S. if that is what interests you. Roy E. Goodman is presently the Curator of Printed Material (some would say he was chief librarian) at the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Benjamin
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| thcphotography.com |
The City of Philadelphia and the County of Philadelphia have had the same borders since the consolidation of 1855.
Their area is 135 square miles.
There are 14 square miles of municipal parkland.
Philadelphia has 22 miles of riverfront.
Since the days of William Penn, the streets have been laid out in a grid. The North-South streets are almost but not quite due North. The perpendicular East-West streets are therefore, also, almost but not quite in true compass direction. At the time of the spring and fall equinoxes, it can be seen that the error from true compass direction is about 10%.<
1680 c. May. Petitions Charles II for a colony in America. June. Crown officials begin their consideration of WP's petition.
1681 January-February. Crown officials revise WP's draft of the charter for Pennsylvania.
4 March. Receives his charter for Pennsylvania.
14 March. Son William Penn, Jr. (1681-1720) is born.
April. Appoints William Markham as deputy-governor of Pennsylvania.
Writes Some Account of Pennsylvania, his first advertising pamphlet.
Spring-summer. Begins work on his constitution for Pennsylvania.
June. Begins lobbying to secure the lower counties (Delaware) from the duke of York.
July. Announces his plan of land distribution in Pennsylvania.
July-August. Publishes a Map of Pennsylvania.
Takes his first land selling trip to Bristol.
August. His deputy governor arrives in Pennsylvania.
16 September. Writes to planters in Maryland, claiming the northern quarter of that colony.
Sep
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| John Dickinson |
It is difficult but not impossible to have a coherent view of the mind of John Dickinson. He was seriously offended by the Townshend Acts, which he rightly perceived to be the work of a few malignant personalities in high places who were soon replaced. Later on, he refused to be troubled by the inconsequential Tea Act, which he correctly assessed as a face-saving gesture of reconciliation. Unfortunately, Dickinson could not comprehend reckless hotheads among his own neighbors, and reckless hotheads seldom comprehend the measured behavior of Quakers. In t
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| Benjamin Franklin |
It's easy to make soap, but hard to make good soap. You just boil animal fat with wood ashes, and you get soft soap. Soft soap was sold by the barrel in the Colonies. Hard soap is made by adding salt to the mix, allowing it to be sold by the bar. The trick to all this is to know how long to boil it, how much ash of what kind, and how much salt. If you get it wrong it will be too soft or too hard, and if you have too much lye from the ashes, it will burn your skin when you wash with it. Most people made their own soap in the colonies, so they often got it wrong, because they didn't exactly know what they were doing. What they were doing was called
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| Philadelphia 1800 |
IN the year 1800 Philadelphia, with a population of 70,000, was the first city in America: New York was growing rapidly (its population rose from 33,000 to 60,000 between 1790 and 1800); Boston, however, was a more or less static provincial town of 25,000. Philadelphia was not only the temporary capital of the new nation but also its publishing, artistic, literary, and social center. As Henry
 Tales of the Sea abound, even a hundred miles from the ocean.  |
We are indebted to the President of the Maritime Law Association of the U.S., Richard W. Palmer, Esq., for both a strange definition, and an amusing story. An "allision"
The Proprietorship of West Jersey is pretty much unchallenged as the oldest surviving stockholder corporation in America. A number of points could be made about this creation, but an essential one is that Penn had very few existing models to work from. Nowadays, there are thousands of corporations in existence all over the world, many of them started by men of very little education or notable intelligence. Now that the subject has been mentioned, I can confess that I started three of them, myself. As I recall, it required only an hour's visit to a lawyer's office, for an agreed fee of $500 for each one of them, and after a two-week delay, I was said to be in business.
By contrast, consider Penn's problem. He had to conceive of the idea, and decide to go forward with it in spite of probably having almost no association with any other corporation, and probably without any assistance from any lawyer who had useful experience. While it is unlikely that he design
| To hope to retire, is to hope to be prosperous without working. Those who must work can grow sullen about it. |
| Dr. Fisher |
Rentier income is passive income, such as interest on savings accounts. Lord Keynes gave the defin
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| Lynmar Brock |
Lynmar Brock is a Quaker, so what he does is surprising. He lives on a farm, but is Chairman of the Board of a food distribution corporation. He's also chairman of several other boards. He's written several books, and among them a novel Must Must Thee Fight? relates the tribulation of one of his pacifist ancestors who nevertheless became a soldier at the Battle of Brandywine. The theme of this em
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| William Allen |
William Allen was once famous for his expensive carriage and team of horses, at a time when there were only eighty carriages in the colony. He was born wealthy, but personally made considerable sums in maritime trade, which in those days included a mild form of piracy called privateering. Taking his accumulated wealth, he invested heavily in colonial real estate. His urban ventures included the land under Independence Hall, and his lands in the hinterland included the present town of Easton. He was a tough businessman, providing "muscle" where needed in a colony dominated by pacifist Quakers. At
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| Mexican Ball Court |
David Richards recently entertained and educated the Right Angle Club about his hobby interest in the Mexican ball game. Several thousand stadia have been excavated in Meso America, dating back three thousand years, so no other team sport can claim to have endured so long. The stadia vary in size from quite small (Copan) to quite large (Chichen Itza), the teams varied from two on a side to seven on a side, the rubber ball varied in size, and so on. But it has endured for many centuries as a team sport trying to get a rubber ball through hoops, on a playing field within a stadium. It had many fatal results, but it remains a little unclear wheth
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| Dick Watson |
Most Americans would like to lose weight, particularly if they could eat, and eat some more, at the same time. Dick Watson recently told the Right Angle Club about an adventure cruise on a sailing ship in the South Pacific, where he and everyone else ate huge mounds of delicious food, but still lost 12 pounds in a month. About twenty of these voyagers spent eight thousand dollars for the privilege of working as sailors for a month on an authentic pre-steam brigantine, sailing from Aukland to Easter Island. Dick took fourteen hundred beautiful photos of the experience, but most of his audience sat transfixed at the
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| Phillies Stadium |
Built to house the Dempsey-Tunney prize fight, we have seen six stadiums built there in one lifetime, a seventh in prospect, and three torn down. Building stadiums well is not the same as playing sports well, just as buying cameras is not the same hobby as taking photographs. In both cases, it is possible to get confused as to what hobby you are trying to excel in. Anyway, we have just opened stadium number six, for baseball, named Citizens Bank Stadium.
The new bas
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| Delbay |
Pennsylvania was founded as a religious colony, but it should not be assumed that the early Quakers were all tea totalers. The drinking water was suspect in all parts of the world, especially in the swampy Delaware Bay area . A great many colonial houses had brew-houses nearby and made no bones about it. Prohibition traces its more recent origin to a counter-reaction to the craze for gin which swept the country in the early 19th Century, leading successively to the Salvation Army, which was a Methodist movement, and to the Volstead Act. When all that settled down, Pennsylvania was le
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| Benjamin Henry Latrobe |
Philadelphia didn't really want the national capital to move to Washington DC, but the yellow fever epidemics, brought from Haiti by refugees, made it politically impossible to reverse the decision to move. We now know that Yellow Fever is transmitted by mosquitoes, but there was enough trash and pollution lying about the that it was plausible that polluted water was the cause. With no time to waste, water was piped in, through http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1721.htm
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| Stephen Girard |
Keep flipping a coin, it's unlikely to come up Heads eighteen times in a row, but it could happen. Once they get to be the richest in the country, most people would quit flipping rather than risk everything on the fifty-fifty chance the next flip will come up Tails. But Robert Morris, William Bingham, Alexander Hamilton, and many others would not only reach the pinnacles of wealth but still gamble everything they owned on a bold chance to get
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| Appalachia |
Abraham Alphonse Albert Gallatin
was born to a rich, famous and noble family in the French part of Switzerland in 1761, but was orphaned a rich orphan and fled to America in the 1780s to escape overbearing and grasping relatives. He started out teaching French at Harvard, but soon purchased Friendship Hill, a 600 acre estate south of Pittsburgh along what was to become the National Road. At first, he ran a busy general store, but soon branched out into successfully buying and selling real estate. Although Uniontown now seems a lonesome hermit  |
| Prime Minister Gordon Brown |
With voters watching three weeks before the 2008 American presidential election day, finance ministers and their political masters met to decide a basic question: dare they risk disaster to save the existing system, or play it safe by sacrificing small banks to rescue big ones? That is, guess if the situation is so bad only strong rowers can be allowed in the lifeboat, or whether things are really manageable enough to try to save everybody but at the risk of worse consequences for failure. For example the credit default swap mystery; there are $60 trillion notiona
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| The Four Horseman |
Catastrophes seem to have fashions. There was a time when the four horsemen of the apocholypse -- pestilence, war, famine and death -- rounded up the main things to keep you awake with worry. Perhaps it is too soon to gloat, but pestilence and famine seem tamed, even ready to be "put down". War remains a serious cause for concern, but a case can be made that two economic disasters, inflation and recession, have moved up to dominate our nightmares. Indeed, it is the Summer
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| Chinese Factory Workers |
Computers, whether small or mighty, could be described as modified telephone switches. In any event, almost every computer is attached to the telephone system with wires. It once required an electrician to splice the ends of copper wires together in a way that would hold, but now the ends are held together by a little plastic clip that slips into the fitting, and then is held in place by a small plastic dongle. Unfortunately, these dongles break off easily and you get a wire that keeps falling out of its attachment. The plastic dongle surely costs less than a tenth of a cent, but a multi-gigabyte Internet
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| david altman |
Daniel Altman draws attention in the January 1, 2006 New York Times to Ben Page's estimation of compensating rises in federal tax revenue after tax cuts. Page (for the Congressional Budget Office) says revenue increases will only offset 28% of tax loss. The Laffer theory (that tax cuts pay for themselves) may be overstated but it's kind of right. Not only is the full amount of the tax reduction immediately released to the private sector, but only 72%
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| Duke of York |
William Penn, who spent considerable time in British prisons, established a penal code for his new colony which largely swept away the draconian punishments established by the code of the Duke of York. Until as late as 1780, jails were mainly confinement hotels for debtors, prisoners awaiting trial, and witnesses. For actual punishment, the methods were execution and flogging. Penn's Code for Pennsyl
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| Benjamin Franklin Print Press |
The Protestant Reformation provoked a wide variety of reasonings, and the Quaker position is at one extreme of them. One way of looking at it is to see the Reformation as largely a reaction to the invention of the printing press. At first, there was the impact of Latin versions of the Bible, or vulgate, which could be read by priests like Martin Luther, and possibly interpreted by them to vary from established Church doctrine. T
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| Jonathan Rhoads |
Charitable institutions and other non-profit organizations occasionally assemble an endowment, and thus develop a need for an oversight committee to hire (and occasionally fire) an investment manager, to monitor the fund's management, and to assess the manager's fees. The meetings of the oversight committee could therefore be pretty brief, related to two numbers. How had the endowment portfolio performed, compared with some acknowledged benchmark. To these two numbers might be added a brief summary of the investment management fees, compared with th
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| American Philosophical Society |
Jay Robert Stiefel of of the Friends Advisory Board to the Library of the American Philosophical Society entertained the Right Angle Club at lunch recently, and among other things managed a brilliant demonstration of what real scholarship can accomplish. It's hard to imagine why the Vaux family, who lived on the grounds of what is now the Chestnut Hill Hospital and occasionally rode in Bentleys to the local train station, would keep a book of
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| Inazo Nitobe |
The story of Inazo Nitobe (1862-1933) comes in two forms, one from the Philadelphia Quaker community, and the other from his home, in Japan. One day in Philadelphia, a ninety year-old Quaker gentleman, rumpled black suit, very soft voice -- and all -- happened to remark that his Aunt had married a samurai. A real one? Topknot, kimono, long curved sword, and all? Yup. Uh-huh.
That would have been Inazo Nitobe, who met and married Moriko, ne� Elkinton, while in college in Philadelphia. He became a Quaker himself, and when the couple returned to Japan, the Emperor then found himself with a warrior nobleman who was a
JUDGE. Mr. Smith, are you trying to show your contempt for this court?
MR. SMITH: Why, no, Mi lord. I'm trying to conceal it.
Whether this exchange ever really took place, most English lawyers believe it did. It could only have happened in an English court, because lawyers in other jurisdictions would be afraid of reprisals in later cases before the same judge, if not in this one. Like Naval Captains, judges have a lot of latitude to be petty, eccentric, incompetent or arbitrary, and not a lot can be done about it, least of all by lawyers who must appear before the same judges month after month. A judge's legal opinion can be appealed and reversed in a higher court, but if a judge just slapped down a smarty lawyer, higher courts would likely look the other way.
