Backcast: Pennsylvania’s Legacy of Split Cane Fly Rods

Posted by on Feb 18, 2020 in | Comments Off on Backcast: Pennsylvania’s Legacy of Split Cane Fly Rods   It’s important not to rush this. A mistake will obliterate a month of work. I take care to make sure that my workbench is uncluttered, the lighting is adequate to the task, and the tools I’ll need are handy but not in the way. Before me is a tapered hexagonal shaft composed of Tonkin cane (Arundinaria amabilis McClure), a type of extraordinarily tough bamboo found mostly in southeastern...
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Remembering TMI 40 Years Later

Posted by on Feb 3, 2020 in | Comments Off on Remembering TMI 40 Years Later In late March 1979, south-central Pennsylvanians were startled to learn of an accident that had occurred at Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant in the Susquehanna River near Middletown, Dauphin County. In my own experience, the initial news came to me at Dallastown Elementary School in York County after a teacher shouted out to my fifth-grade class to come back inside the school building...
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Presence from the Past: A Gift to the Future Through Historic Preservation

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Presence from the Past: A Gift to the Future Through Historic Preservation The United States is a nation and a people on the move. It is in an era of mobility and change … The result is a feeling of rootlessness combined with a longing for those land­marks of the past which give us a sense of stability and belonging … If the preservation movement is to be successful, it must go beyond saving bricks and mortar. It must go beyond saving occasional historic...
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Executive Director’s Message

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Executive Director’s Message TMI. Even after twenty years, mere mention of these three letters triggers an immediate response from anyone who lived through the harrowing week beginning Wednesday, March 28, 1979, when the entire world held its collective breath and contemplated the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. The accident at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg is one of the defining events in twentieth-century...
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From Chaos to Calm: Remembering the Three Mile Island Crisis, An Interview With Harold Denton

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on From Chaos to Calm: Remembering the Three Mile Island Crisis, An Interview With Harold Denton Thursday, March 28, 1979, is a day forever etched in the memory of most Pennsylvanians and, indeed, many Americans. During the pre-dawn hours, events swiftly unfolded at a nuclear power plant on an island in the middle of the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg that would lead to the worst commercial nuclear accident in the nation’s history. In the days that followed, Three Mile Island (TMI)...
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Documents from the Three Mile Island Crisis

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Documents from the Three Mile Island Crisis In late March 1979, the nation ex­perienced its worst commercial nuclear accident as a result of techni­cal malfunctions and operator error at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear generating station near Harrisburg. The crisis, which began on Wednes­day, March 28, lasted for several days and prompted the evacuation of thousands of residents. The accident and reaction to it are well docu­mented in...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and its Region Edited by Joel A. Tarr University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004 (281 pages, cloth, $32.00) Visitors to Pittsburgh in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were invariably shocked by the ways in which industrial development dominated the landscape. Steel mills sprawled across hundreds of acres along the rivers. Land and...
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Max Hess Jr. Puts Allentown on the Map

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Max Hess Jr. Puts Allentown on the Map When Diane Stoneback, food editor of The Morning Call, the daily newspaper published in the Lehigh County seat of Allentown, challenged readers to a concoct a strawberry pie as scrumptious as the trademark dessert once served at the popular Patio Restaurant in Hess Brothers, a beloved department store, she found more than a flood of recipes overflowing her inbox. Hopeful contestants who...
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An Impressive Legacy: A Half-Century of Historic Preservation in Pennsylvania, 1955-2005

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on An Impressive Legacy: A Half-Century of Historic Preservation in Pennsylvania, 1955-2005 A quarter-century ago, James Biddle (1929-2005), president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, from 1968 to 1980, was named chairman of Pennsylvania’s first State Historic Preservation Board. Jimmy, as the scion of one of the Commonwealth’s most notable families was known – especially to fellow preservationists, many of them working at the grassroots level –...
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The Barrymores of Philadelphia: America’s Royal Family of the Theatre

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Barrymores of Philadelphia: America’s Royal Family of the Theatre America’s fabled royal family of the theatre, the Barrymores — a name recognized throughout the world by generations of audiences — began its meteoric rise in mid-nineteenth- century Philadelphia. The twentieth-century scions of entertainment — Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore — were born in Philadelphia, children of the rapscallion English charmer, Maurice Barrymore (1847–1905) and his equally...
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