The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
... William Penn's Quaker Colonies
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Philadelphia Revelations
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George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827)
The Artist in His Museum
1822, Oil on canvas (The Joseph Harrison Jr. Collection)
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts.
all of the red brick buildings on Independence Square look as though they were part of Independence Hall, but there is one exception. The building facing Fifth Street is Philosophical Hall, one of the four buildings of the American Philosophical Society. Right now, Philosophical Hall is used as a museum. It could be called the first museum in America, but not the oldest, because it had interruptions and different proprietorships. Charles Wilson Peale started his museum of curiosities there and then moved it to the second floor of Independence Hall, where he painted the famous portrait of himself holding up the curtain. In recent years, Philosophical Hall has again become a museum, holding treasures and curiosities belonging to the Philosophical Society itself. The docent is pleased to alternate between calling it America's new oldest museum, and America's oldest new museum. And, yes, the newell post has an Amity Button.
American Philosophical Society
Patents were established by the Constitution when it was a piece of parchment lying on a table fifty feet away from here, and the early patent office required the submission of a working model of every application for patent. After a while, that got to be a lot of working models lying around, and many of the more interesting ones are on display in the museum. Like the model of Fitch's first steamboat or the gadget Jefferson used, to make simultaneous copies of documents he was writing. That's right near the Gilbert Stuart copy of Washington's portrait, and von Neumann's first algorithm to be stored in his stored program machine, or computer, and Neil Armstrong's speech on the moon, concerning one step for mankind and all. It's a splendid museum, full of the real stuff, in a handsome Georgian building with sparkling immaculate marble staircases.
John Fitch received a US Patent for the Steamboat August 26, 1791
In the Eighteenth Century, Natural Philosophy was what we now call science. That's why PhDs get a degree of Doctor of Philosophy when they study chemistry and physics. The idea for forming a scientific society in America apparently originated with John Bartram. As so often happens, the originator couldn't quite get it established and had to call on Ben Franklin that impression of publicity, to get it off the ground. To be fair about it, Franklin was probably the more distinguished scientist of the two. To be even more fair about it, the organization struggled a bit until Thomas Jefferson (that's the one who was President of the United States) gave it a real publicity shove. During the depths of the 1930s depression, one of the members left it several million dollars with the stipulation that the investments should focus on common stock. Since buying stock in 1935 was widely regarded as about the stupidest thing an investor could do, this little episode reinforced a strong impression that membership in the APS is given to people who are very smart, not merely famous. The four buildings, the many fellowships, and the big endowment were largely made possible by this contraries investment decision.
There are eight hundred members, of whom 93 have won Nobel Prizes. Over the years, two hundred members have been awarded Nobel Prizes, but you must remember that the organization existed for 150 years before there was such a prize. Several U.S. Supreme Court justices are members and lots and lots of people who are famous. The docent comments that they look pretty much like everyone else. There's a rumor that Bill Gates turned down the offer of membership, so now we will just see. He's young enough to have several decades' opportunity to reconsider an offer, although the APS might just be old enough to lack interest in any second chances.
In 1823, the Biddles were prosperous, having made money in real estate (a Biddle ancestor had been a member of the Proprietors), and influential, having been Free Quakers who sided with the Revolution. So, Nicholas Biddle became the president of the Second Bank at 4th and Chestnut. Like all banks, he was given the ability to create money by taking deposits and loaning them out. Since in this process, two people (the depositor and the borrower) think they have the same money, there is effectively twice as much of it -- unless both actually demand it at the same time. If a bank has Federal revenues on deposit, as Biddle did, it is fairly easy for a politically active banker to predict whether that large depositor is likely to withdraw it. Political deposits seemingly make a bank stronger and safer, unless the banker has a fight with a politician. That's banking, but Biddle also became a central banker.
Biddle had ideas, derived in part from Alexander Hamilton. In
those days, banks issued their own paper currency, or bank notes,
representing the gold in their vaults or the real estate on which they
held mortgages. There was a risk in one bank accepting bank notes from
another bank that might go bust before you changed their notes into
gold. The further away the issuing bank was, the riskier it was to rely
on it. So, it was important to be a friendly sort of banker, who knew a
lot of other bankers who would accept your money or who were known to
be trustworthy.
Nicholas Biddle himself was well known to be pretty rich, and utterly trustworthy. He
had a good instinct for how much to charge or discount the banknotes
from other banks, or even other states. It was quite profitable to do
this, but it became even more profitable when people began to use
Biddle's own bank notes because they were safe. By setting a fair
standard, he could control the exchange rate -- and hence the lending
limits -- of banks that dealt with him. Sometimes a distant bank would
get into cash shortages, and Biddle would help them out; if the other
bank had a bad reputation, he might not.
Bank of the United States
In this way, the Second Bank was a reserve bank for other banks,
with its banknote currency coming close to being the currency for the
whole country. Soon, within a few blocks of Biddle's Bank, there were
dozens of other banks, making up the financial capital of the country.
Although it was a little obscure, and even Biddle may not have
completely realized what he was doing, in effect his system
automatically adjust the amount of currency in circulation to the
size of the economy. If the correspondent banks prospered, they issued
more currency, and if there was a recession, the country had deflation.
The volatility of this system was related to the volatility of a
pioneer economy, so Biddle made lots of enemies whenever he guessed
about the direction of the economy. It wasn't a perfect system, but at
least he kept politicians from inflating the currency to get
re-elected, and hence annoyed politicians by constraining them. During the great western land rush of those days, all banks were under pressure to issue more loans than was wise, and politicians were under pressure to make them do so.
The worst enemy Biddle made was Martin Van Buren of New York. Van
Buren was a consummate politician, one of whose many goals was to move
the financial capital of the country from Chestnut Street--to Wall
Street.
REFERENCES
America's First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837 Alasdarir Roberts ISBN-13: 978-0801450334
To a remarkable degree, employees tend to remain in either the nonprofit or for-profit sectors of the economy for a lifetime. A prospective new employer naturally wants to know about previous work experience so it is natural enough to poke around for clues. An interviewer may just be jumping around when most questions are fired at a prospective new hire, but this one is hard to dodge.
Whether it is a reasonable position or not, almost everyone on both sides of the interview desk has the impression that for-profit employers prefer to hire people with experience in the for-profit sector, and the reverse is true for non-profits. So far, so good; experience in related fields is an attractive feature. But going considerably beyond favoring prospective employees with related experience, there is a general impression that experience in the other sector has a curse attached, reducing the chances of being hired. When an impression is this widespread, it no longer matters whether it is sensible. Make the wrong answer, and you don't get the job; that's reason enough. And it's equally true in both sectors, so the workforce segregates pretty quickly.
It's plainly true that the for-profit sector votes Republican, the non-profit sector registers, votes and talks pro-Democrat. Since young people usually vote for Democratic candidates, it seems to follow that party-switching is mainly in the direction of young Democrats becoming Republican after a few years of employment, although the reverse is seen when young residents of farm communities move to the city, with college sandwiched in-between.
Going to college may not be exactly like being employed by a college, but it's close enough. The faculty are in a similar power relationship to students as a boss is to employees, in command, but also portraying a role model and parent-figure; it is axiomatic that students emerge from college more liberal-leaning than they entered. It's beyond challenge that college faculties are the most liberal-leaning group in America; their institutional employers are all in the non-profit sector to some degree. As long as government research grants, scholarship grants, construction subsidies (and indirect overhead allowances) continue to dominate the finances of higher education, the allegiance of all colleges and universities will belong to the party so proudly representative of non-profit principles. Professor Gordon S. Wood of Brown University has propounded the theory that the 18th Century concept of a gentleman had three distinctive features: he didn't need to work, he deplored aggressive money-making, and he went to college. Americans dislike the concept of the aristocracy, but they strongly favor playing the role of a gentleman. It's as good an explanation as any.
Future trends are of course hard to predict, but since the proportion of the population going to college is steadily increasing, there is a strong force in the direction of continuing to strengthen the Democratic party. But since taxes derived from the for-profit sector are the ultimate source of all non-profit revenue, some strong push-back from present trends also seems inevitable.
Because it was widely expected a new Constitution would devise some kind of republic, the convention in Philadelphia began serious deliberations with how the people might choose their representatives in Congress. Congressmen were mostly selected by State Legislatures under the Articles of Confederation, but there was widespread dissatisfaction with State Legislatures. The voting inclinations of chosen congressmen would undoubtedly reflect how they had been chosen, in a two-step process. If the voting franchise is only given to college graduates, congressmen, for the most part, would predictably be college graduates. If women got the vote, in time many members of Congress would be women. And if poor people got the vote, they would surely outnumber rich people, and might even elect representatives who would seize money from the rich to redistribute to the poor. The experience of Fort Wilson eight years earlier was not only on some minds, but several of the former combatants were sitting in Independence Hall as Delegates, three blocks away. Although the amount owed in debt was the same as the amount loaned, the number of individual debtors greatly exceeded the number of individual lenders, Consequently, the debtors might easily confiscate or injure lenders unjustly. That result had taken the form of ruinous paper money inflation in the recent past and was one of the main reasons the Constitutional Convention seemed necessary. Delegates soon took care that when the issue of state powers came up, states were prohibited from issuing paper money, or taking comparable actions like dishonoring debts. Such rules would at least concentrate the power to create inflation into a single body, the national congress. Meanwhile, the voting franchise would be limited to non-slave male citizens who owned property, to exclude recent immigrants who would probably be mostly poor, as well as carpet-baggers who might be imported by the boatload by some foreign power. Meanwhile, amendments to the Constitution must be made difficult to achieve, partly as a symbol that agreements freely made, must be kept. Parenthetically, there have been only two dozen amendments in two hundred years, a majority of which concern expanding the voting franchise, so the Constitutional Framers accurately assessed the difficulty they created. Unfortunately, the most questionable action they took was to award 3/5 of a vote to slaves, which obviously transferred that voting power to their owners. It may be too much to blame the Civil War on this Constitutional provision, but it certainly warped the direction of affairs leading to the war. Although this provision is difficult to justify in retrospect, it reflected an underlying understanding that Delegates were unlikely to vote for measures which injured the interests of substantial numbers of their members, except for binding concessions in return. This slavery provision was the result of a grand three-way compromise, all of whose provisions make historians squirm, but acknowledge that no Constitution would have emerged from the convention without substantial resolution of the various gridlocks. James Madison drove the convention to revolve around the central principle of compromise, which always seems to be necessary for the democratic process, and always somewhat taints it.
In settling the nettlesome issues of the voting franchise, the delegates proceeded to the principle of proportionality. The assumption was that uniform rules of voter franchise would lead to uniformity among all the states, a concept hard to reconcile with States Rights, and particularly hard to reconcile with slavery. If a state had more voters with the stated qualifications for franchise, of course, that state got more congressmen. Or is that necessarily so? Because Virginia had called for the convention, provided the presiding officer in the form of George Washington and the leading scholar of government in James Madison, and most of all because Virginia was the most populous and richest state, Virginia was oblivious to any way of organizing a republican congress except strict proportionality. But John Dickinson of Delaware, the smallest state of all, proceeded to teach Virginia a lesson. Dickinson had been the penman of the Articles of Confederation, was probably the best-educated lawyer in America, and a serious thinker about representative government. He had been Governor of both Pennsylvania and Delaware, probably had a major hand in the separation of the two states, and was a man of substantial wealth and fame. Dickinson is said to have drawn Madison aside and made a strikingly incisive analysis of national mergers, possibly entirely original with himself. If thirteen states are merged, some will be larger than others. Therefore, as long as the biggest remains the biggest, it will have the most votes in Congress. A lawyer of his experience would know that a political component with the most votes will relentlessly seek to warp the laws in its own favor, and will believe that to be an entirely natural thing to do. But the consequence of this situation will be that the smaller states will be perpetually consigned to a fate of seeing the rules warped against them. That's neither fair nor reasonable, and Dickinson wouldn't have it. So, unfortunately, it would be necessary for him to gather the nine votes in the convention (the delegates voted by states, one vote per state) from small states, and defeat the three large states (Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts) on this particular point: Do you want a Constitution or not? We are told that Madison, who had won almost every vote up to this time, began to lose every vote afterward. This man Dickinson meant what he said, and it became evident that another compromise was going to be necessary. That should please Madison, the great advocate of compromise. We are told that the necessary compromise was here suggested by Benjamin Franklin in a taproom. There would be two houses of Congress, a House of Representatives and a Senate, and legislation would require the approval of both. The House of Representatives would elect members proportional to population, thus favoring big states with big cities, and the Senate would receive two votes per state, regardless of size, thus favoring small states with sparse rural populations. Because it was going to be necessary for the Constitution to seek ratification by the states, the Senators would be appointed by the states, usually the state legislature. This second great compromise has received great acclaim, both for its success and for its ingenuity. Unfortunately, it has two ominous flaws, just beginning to emerge after two centuries.
In the first place, populations grow and shift with time, making equitable bargains lose their fairness. Virginia is now far from the largest state and may come to regret its bargain made under other circumstances. And we have fifty states, not thirteen; most of the newer ones are far larger geographically than the original ones. In time, some or many of the new states may develop large populations as California has done. Hawaii, The Philippines, Puerto Rico, and unknown others might, however, skew the numbers toward smaller states. Since the electoral college is tied to the sum of the two houses of Congress, unexpected results are a possibility. Because the House of Representatives was frozen to 534 members in 1925, the degree to which two votes per state will compensate for proportionality is quite uncertain in the future. Because of our national tendency to wait for something bad to happen before we act to correct a flaw, it seems likely that something disruptive will occur before we consult with mathematicians to devise a floating relationship between the two methods of congressional selection. Meanwhile, it seems like a good topic for dissertations.
The second flaw in the system also arises out of population growth. On the only occasion when George Washington stepped down from the podium to debate a point, he did so to urge that no congressman should represent more than 30,000 constituents. At present, the average congressman represents 600,000 constituents, and the number is constantly growing. Long ago, the House of Representatives recognized that their size was beginning to interfere with the ability to deliberate. Even now, the number of congressmen has grown to a size where crowd management techniques have been applied to member disadvantage, and by their own elected leaders. Since the unfortunate manipulation of members, especially new members, was begun by Henry Clay and Martin VanBuren, it has many more causes than member overcrowding. [For example, the Rules Committee controls the agenda, and the Speaker controls the Rules Committee. Henry Clay's politicization of the Speakership is an offense to the Constitution.] But overcrowding is certainly now at a practical limit, while representation is twenty times more dilute than the Father of our Country thought was wise. Once more, something disastrous will probably have to occur before this situation is addressed by its present beneficiaries, but at least a few scholars should start thinking about it. One suggestion would be to elect sub-congressmen at a ratio of twenty to each of the 534, with assignments to them of duties now performed by Congressional staff.
Finally, it is inadequately perceived that the accumulation of compromises between the interests of the different states, inexorably led to creating the Electoral College, for which there is no visible substitute. It does not mandate casting a winner-takes-all vote of its College Members, but it might as well because it effectively limits one state's maximum voice to the agreed number under a winner-take-all system. Here is reflected the fact that the Constitution is a bargain between the states, almost all of whom achieved some questionable advantages for themselves. But having established a working balance of such advantages, no state is able to discover some new loophole and increase its voting powers with it. Far from being a quaint anachronism, the Electoral College is a keystone which assures that any state which tries to unbalance it, will be confronted by a substantial number of states with something to lose.
Bill Doane died in 2017, at the age of 95+, after a long career as Chief of Surgery in Santa Barbara, California. This letter was found among the relics of his former roommate at the Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first one, established in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin. With the aid of retrospect, we know he was to marry Carol Smith, who worked at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and after some wanderings, settled in an upscale hospital in California, eventually dying at an advanced age in a Santa Barbara retirement village, where he was the daily tennis partner of Bill Scranton, the former Pennsylvania Governor. He did a lot of third-world traveling and surgical volunteering, out of which grew the founding of an international non-profit organization to distribute American hospital equipment to places like Afghanistan.
W.A. Doane
USS Essex (CUA 9)
F.P.O. --San Francisco
Feb 20, 1954
Dear George, Stu, Georgie,Miriam (any others?)
I've enjoyed hearing from you immensely. Your Christmas Card was first and more recently. Carol forwarded a note from Stu. Needless to say, I gobbled the P.H. news voraciously. It really sounds like an old home week, with Twadddell, Deaver Alexander, Dinon, Cretzmeyer, J. Johnston, and Rakov holding the fort. The big news from the East China Sea is I'll be getting off this bucket in late March or early April and will be separated in early April. Our second offspring should be dropping in on us shortly thereafter and as soon as things get stabilized, I'll be in Philly to horse around and of course, come back to Pennsy for a look see. My plans for practice are still a trifle nebulous. I'd love to practice around Philly but I certainly hate the thought of hanging on for 2 years before I make a living. Keep your ear out to check the keyhole for me, Geo., and let me know of any golden or even castiron opportunities. Our year in San Diego was very pleasant, and if things don't seem very propitious about Philadelphia -- we might even settle in Southern California.
Our oldest (and only child at this writing) is really a delight to the old man. I just never realized that paternity could be so richly rewarding.
I guess you never really look at kids until you have one yourself.
My travels in the Orient have been a bit restricted but I did get a few days in Hawaii and have had a quick tour of Yokosuka (?), Yokahanna and Tokyo. I find Japan quite fascinating. It's just not possible to tell anyone about it adequately ters the little toy people and their way of life are so different from ours. My overall impression is definitely favorable. They are exceedingly industrious, clean, pleasant and clever craftsmen. Also, they purvey very good beer in very large bottles for very small amounts of YEN, I can see how a guy could really go to pot out here. All drinks at the "O" Club at Yokosuka are 25 cents, and when you have been to sea for 3 weeks it's rather easy to accumulate a lot of quarters.
The money situation over here is a riot. When we neared Japanese waters, all hands were ordered to change their YONKEE DOLLAs for MPC-- military payment currency. The resemblance between this medium of exchange and Dick Tracy play money is striking. They make it in every amount from 5 cents up, and all are different sizes and shapes, and all are paper. So you go ashore on the naval base with pockets bulging with MPC. Before you can go out the gate into the town and buy anything-- you must exchange MPC for YEN--Jap currency. Again, you get a bale of flimsy colored paper in every conceivable shape.
$ 1.00 m PC = 360 YEN so you can see you have to have large pockets to carry it all. Every time you reach into your pocket for dough - a few stray scraps of YEN float away as you bring your hand out. The Japs are understandably anxious to relieve us of as much cabbage as possible and they have a large variety of ways of doing it. By far the largest business is, of course, the girl-sans. There's a pimp on every corner and every cabaret in town is loaded with Japanese dollies from age 15 to 25 -- all available for a price. Apparently, the price is always right because they do a booming business.I'm amazed our VD rate isn't 10 x as high.
Japanese hot baths (hotsy botsy as the Japs call them) are extremely popular with the troops. Sightseeing and shopping opportunities are endless. Cultured pearls, brass ware, silk, silver -- are all supposedly "best buys" over here. I'm just a typical tourist and am loading it up with all sorts of items. Cameras are dirt cheap here. If you know any of the fellows at the hospital that would like a camera, I might be able to bring one back. Don't noise this around too much, however. A Nikon f1.4 is about $120, and about $275-300 in the US. An Argus C-3 is $41 with case and flash, and $69 in the US. So it goes. (There will be a small carrying charge of course for all but G.R.F.)
I've rambled on at great length but it's time to hit the pad so must close.
Very best regards to you.
Bill
P.S. Give my regards to all the group.
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
