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
plus medicine, economics and politics ... nearly 4,000 articles in all
Philadelphia Reflections now has a companion tour book! Buy it on Amazon
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.
Everybody ends up getting fired in a recent book by John Kastor about recent events at the University of Pennsylvania just like everybody ending up dead in an Elizabethan play. The vital difference, of course, is that the dramatis personae at Penn can still relate to a bewildered audience their own versions of those grand events. To protect himself, the author peppers his book with more footnotes than a Ph.D. thesis. And thousands of stakeholders at the University can now realize that during those eventful times they were as clueless as Rosencranz and Guildenstern.
One basic fact about that institution is that the medical school spends three-quarters of the entire university budget. That leads to grudges in the little law school, the little engineering school, and the little president's office, as they knuckle under to the Golden Rule. The department chairman with the gold makes the rules. Since most of that gold comes from research grants, hence ultimately from the federal government, the medical students and the teaching faculty don't have the same power they had during the Vietnam War era, either. Although medical school tuition imposes a crushing burden on the students and their families, leading to debts close to a quarter of a million dollars apiece, the tuition money doesn't amount to much in the university scheme of things, either. In some schools, tuition amounts to two percent of the medical school budget. You could eliminate the students entirely and not see much difference in the "school".
Unfortunately, when you become dependent on government grants, you find they can suddenly be terminated, or awarded without funding, or held up for several months by Congressional bickering. Meanwhile, there are salaries to pay, contracts to fulfill. Even if you can furlough some of the staff, it's not easy to see what you do about a thirty-year mortgage on a research building when there is a lull in its research funding. If you try to save money, the granting agency will try to get it back; they aren't authorized to make grants to be squirreled away. If you shift money to unauthorized uses, you risk going to jail. And yet, if you don't do something along those lines, the whole enterprise can collapse.
Having said that much to be fair, it is still uncomfortable to see the financial transparency of our most valued nonprofit institutions vanish behind a Byzantine fog of secrecy, out of which arise the magnificent towers of new buildings, and in front of which an occasional limousine is to be observed. No wonder the research scientists feel the constant pressure to produce. A Nobel Prize every ten years, or so, would go a long way toward quieting envious remarks from the liberal arts faculty.
Housed in those ivy towers are three institutions, the teaching hospital, the medical school, and the university, with three boards of trustees, and at least three ruling potentates. At irregular intervals, congressional committees do things to the Budget Reconciliation Act which enrich one of the three components of the institution or suddenly impoverish another, or both. Integration of the three under one governance sounds plausible until you notice how radically different is the mission of each one. You can take a big building away from one component and rent it back to them, and things like that, but you can't do it without starting whispers about Enron. You can gather up surplus funds from one of them during the decade of the eighties, but you have trouble giving it back twenty years later. Officials at Blue Cross come snooping to see if health insurance premiums are passing through this shell game, ultimately paying salaries in the department of English Literature. Everybody distrusts everybody else, somebody sasses somebody, and everybody gets fired.
Nothing unusual about that. It happens at every medical school.
One must be sympathetic with the original designers of modern conventional health insurance. They had few models to work with and no advance knowledge of how medical care would evolve in the following century. Most major scientific advances have driven disease costs away from working people. Consequently, retirees expanded in number. The result is employer-based insurance with a little remaining disease in the employees, but which still ends at the time of retirement. Consequently, Medicare developed in part as one way to tax workers to pay for retirees. Longevity continued to expand, but initial revenues became exhausted, and the government quietly resorted to deficit financing. As the balance of payments turned negative after 1965, we resorted to foreign borrowing. It is now revealed by Secretary Sibelius that 50% of Medicare funding is a subsidy, temporarily funded by borrowing (selling them U.S. bonds) from the Chinese government.
This situation cannot continue indefinitely, and it especially cannot be extended to other programs in the form of "single payer" programs. The Health Savings Account retains the spread-the-risk feature of insurance but more or less limits it to hospital inpatients, who are in no position to negotiate prices, by utilizing high-deductible insurance. In the outpatient area, the early adopters have demonstrated a 30% reduction in costs in the outpatient area, while prudent shopping is rewarded by returning the savings to the individual. It helps cost-saving to have a defined incentive, that any unused surplus may be used for retirement. This success prompts another warning: merging Medicare with other health programs would clash with merging Medicare with Social Security.
It seems certain to a doctor that the enormous resources being devoted to medical research will eliminate at least one of the half-dozen remaining expensive diseases within a decade or two. If we are lucky, the ongoing costs of this future cure will be less than the present cost of treating it. That's what happened when we woke up to the preventive value against heart attacks and strokes, of a little aspirin tablet. Even if early costs are high, patents soon run out, competitive products emerge, competition brings down the cost of that disease. Repeat that miracle five or six times in the next fifty years, and the whole cost issue changes. Instead of worrying about the cost of dying too soon, we will gradually worry more about the cost of living too long. Medicare will shrink, but Social Security will get more expensive. What could possibly make more sense than to merge Medicare with Social Security? And, what would be more unfortunate, than to merge Medicare with healthcare programs for other ages, thereby creating more or less direct competition for available funds and program control? Perhaps that could be avoided, but choices would be governmental rather than individual. And they would be wasteful, generating resistance to reducing one part of the program, rather than diverting any unused medical budget toward retirement benefits.
So it seems in the interest of retired people to soften their resistance to the development of programs to shift unused Medicare funds to retirement. That is, to close down Medicare as it becomes unneeded, allowing the individual subscriber to decide the balance between them, in his own particular case. Inevitably, that would provoke resistance, but it need not constitute the third rail of politics: touch it and you are dead.
Accordingly, we examine in this section of the book, just what might be involved in allowing voluntary, gradual, buy-outs of a Medicare program which surely cannot continue on its present course indefinitely. It's just one part, but an important part, of funding about half the cost of healthcare, other than Obamacare.
This is the second of several volumes on rearranging the pieces of lifetime healthcare financing. Without adding substantial sums of money, it begins to appear an entire lifetime of healthcare, plus the extended longevity it provides might be paid for with rearrangements of what we already spend. It's a hope, not a promise.
One consideration is not ready for incorporation into the scheme, however. The working years of life, from age 25 to 65, are covered by disputed and undisputed portions of the Affordable Care Act, pending lawsuits before the federal courts, and the political positions of the two political parties about how they should be modified or repealed. Essentially, we have not decided how much working people should directly contribute to their own retirement, or what they must give up to do it.
This plan treats extended longevity and retirement costs as inherent costs of improved medical treatment, acknowledging the wide variety of opinions about defining a basic, a modest, or an overly generous retirement income. Without substantial resolution of these two gaps in the plans, it seems impractical to suggest lifetime financial coverages. Therefore, the Affordable Care Act is treated here as revenue neutral, and retirement income becomes whatever falls out of other plans, plus whatever the individual manages to accumulate, on his own. We all must continue to "plan" for our retirement by saving more than we think it will cost. That's the theory; the reality is, many or most Americans just "plan" to muddle through. That's only workable for a few more years. Eventually, we must decide whether to sacrifice retirement in order to preserve the Affordable Care Act, or the reverse.
The technical toolbox of alternative revenue sources for retirement is not exhausted, however. (1.-2.) We have not specified the direction of the remaining three-quarters of the Medicare withholding tax, nor the Medicare premiums. (3.) Under this plan, working-age persons make minor direct contributions toward their own retirement, and shift the cost later, down the road. (4.) The last-years-of-life rearrangement would pay for half of Medicare's 20-year cost by expanding to the last four years of life (That's half of Medicare's 20-year cost in exchange for 20% of its revenue). (5.) Reduction of premiums for employer-based health insurance can actually be anticipated from shifting obstetrical costs to the baby, reducing childhood health costs from the employed parents. (6.) Similarly reduced Medicare deficits, now financed by bond sales to foreigners, should ease the government cost of healthcare. (7.) Even though group health insurance is heavily subsidized by employer tax deductions, the deductions are not entirely free, and employers should benefit. (8.) If savings of this sort are shifted to younger age groups and saved at compound interest, one could expect substantial contributions to retirement income to result. (9.) A rather small transfer of the foregoing savings to a contingency fund (begun at birth) should ease the competition for allocation of investment income between the public and its financial agents. There can be optimism, therefore, that the discord and unexpected reversals of such an elaborate scheme, can eventually be overcome by the basic axiom of compound interest. Start saving younger, in order to save for a longer time.
Four Prescriptions: Proposals or Reform of Health care Financing
Rx. I: PRE-FUNDED HEALTH INSURANCE
INTRO page 1.
Introduction
Benjamin Franklin organized the first American fire insurance company in 1736. Success in the insurance business rests almost unnoticed among the many scientific and political accomplishments of that remarkable man. Even in Philadelphia, few people realize Franklin’s company and several others like it still operate comfortably. Franklin called his company a “Contribution shipâ€, but a more familiar modern term is “mutual†insurance company. Even though mutual life insurance companies have come to predominate, for important reasons fire insurance has been more salable when provided by profit-making companies. The ancient mutual fire insurance companies remain small but reflect some important thinking which this book argues should be applied to health insurance, where ideas are currently badly needed.
What the world already knows about these quaint little companies is almost a hindrance. Occasional articles in the Philadelphia Sunday supplements do sometimes mention them, mostly fascinated with how socially prestigious it is to be a member of their boards of directors, what excellent dinners are served at directors meetings, what priceless antiques are to be found in their headquarters. Franklin to be sure would probably relish the elegance. Unlike the Quakers of Colonial Philadelphia, Poor Richard was not frugal in order to be inoffensive; he was frugal to get rich. Dying the second richest man in the city, he lived the kind of life many Yippies might admire.
Mutual fire insurance companies sell something called "perpetual insurance" which turns out to be perfectly ordinary homeowner's insurance, with one big twist to it. The customer makes one large lump sum deposit in advance, then never pays premiums. During all the time the insurance is in force, perpetually if need be, no further premiums are paid. The deposit earns enough interest to pay the full premium cost of the insurance protection. In that way, the customer has the perfectly astounding experience of having every penny he paid to the company returned when he eventually gives up the insurance. Centuries of experience show that a single deposit of roughly ten years conventional premium will generate enough investment income to cover all anticipated costs from "losses" and administration. The deposits themselves "share the risk", eliminating the cost of paying investors to provide a "contingency reserve". This simple scheme is Perpetual mutual insurance.
As everyone knows, that isn't the way most fire insurance works; the only things perpetual about a more typical policy are the yearly premium notices, which in the aggregate eventually cost much more than making a deposit and giving up the income from it. It is left to the typical stockholder company to worry about getting contingency reserves coming from investors are more popular with homeowners than reserves they have to provide themselves, consequently why perpetual premiums are so much more scalable than perpetual insurance. The young homeowners is typically a debtor, stretching to buy the best house he can afford when he can stump up a down-payment; fire insurance is something his mortgage banker insists he buys. In order to have the American dream a little earlier, the homeowner agrees to pay a little more, later.
Two hundred years after Franklin's death it is possible to gain other insights from "perpetual" insurance because the unfamiliar approach makes us ask basic questions. The next several chapters of this book now set out to argue that health insurance has some serious problems which could be improved by asking those questions. The problems of health insurance are not trivial; many experts question whether we can afford to continue the present system. Whether a breakdown of health insurance would lead to worse care, no access to care or rationed care, the whole subject of health insurance is important to more people than insurance executives. We will return to Franklin's idea after a flyover of current major problems of health insurance, with reflections on how things got to be such a mess. Then, after compounding several insurance remedies based on Franklin's formula, an effort is made to identify potential harmful effects but few are found. The main problem with the prescription is that it has a rather bitter taste.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH HEALTH INSURANCE
There are many things good about the American system of health insurance. Compared with the nationalized health insurance schemes of other countries, our health insurance is a utopia. Indeed, the main reason to criticize the American system of health insurance is to save it from itself, since the foreign alternatives are so much worse. No doctor ever saved a patient by ignoring the symptoms. To be concise, our health insurance system is unfunded, inappropriately linked to employment, adequate for moderate illness but not for catastrophic ones, and incredibly expensive to run. For each of these four disorders, this book offers a prescription. In the first section, keeping Poor Richard in mind, the disorder under examination is that health insurance is unfounded. For the ailment of being unfunded, the prescription offered is the IRA for Health.
Unfunded, Being unfunded does not mean cheap. It costs a typical family about $3500 a year for health insurance premiums. It has become commonplace to read newspaper articles announcing or predicting 15-30% increases. Annual national costs of healthcare are about $500 billion. Those who would like to solve the problem with a national health scheme should remember that $500 billion would be half of the current Federal budget; the $200 billion already federalized are nearly destroying the government. Health care is expensive all right, and unfunded.
Further, because an employee can escape income taxation on a health insurance premium if his employer pays it for him, that's the way health insurance.
The life of Howard Hughes is a 20th-century story; airplanes, money, movies, and sex. It’s usually presented as an enigmatic tragedy when it might play better as a rollicking Preston Sturges comedy. In her book “Seduction†Karina Longworth finds her own unique purpose for Hughes’s adventures: “It’s time,†she writes, “to rethink stories that lionize playboys†and “one way to begin†is to study “a playboy’s relationship with some of the women in his life from the perspective of those women.†This worthy purpose creates a book with two parallel tracks: one about Hughes and one about the lives and works of women in film. Ms. Longworth attempts to connect the biography of Hughes (1905-76) to the modern world of #MeToo awareness, a dubious scholarly idea but certainly a commercially viable (and highly readable) one.
The author of books on George Lucas, Al Pacino, and Meryl Streep, Ms. Longworth is the creator and host of the popular podcast “You Must Remember This,†for which she uses her prodigious research skills to present “the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century.†The Hughes story is neither secret nor forgotten, having been covered in a fake autobiography by Clifford Irving in 1972, discussed in countless magazines (from Time to Confidential to Fortune to Modern Screen), reimagined in movies by Jonathan Demme (“Melvin and Howardâ€) and Martin Scorsese (“The Aviatorâ€), and chronicled previously by various authors (including his long-time business associate Noah Dietrich).
SEDUCTION
By Karina Longworth
Custom House, 543 pages, $29.99
Thus the freshest—and most interesting—parts of “Seduction†are those where Ms. Longworth refutes the idea that there were no women working in key jobs in early Hollywood. She presents Hollywood “as a place where women could immigrate in search of legitimate work and do it without the help or chaperoning of men.†She’s right. When the film was officially born in 1895, it wasn’t a boy. It’s long past time for the history of the medium’s women pioneers to be written: This book isn’t that, but Ms. Longworth could write it if someone would let her.
The author is a dedicated film historian, and in “Seduction†her basic love for Hollywood and its motley crew of shysters and stars is on full display. She uses Hughes’s entire life—not just his relations with women—as a platform from which to jump off into areas of historical interest. A discussion of Hughes’s magnum directorial opus, “Hell’s Angels†(1930), corrects the exaggerated idea that sound ruined the careers of most silent stars. His production of the violent “Scarface†(1932) allows her to explain the demarcation between pre-Code and post-Code censorship. His relationship with Ginger Rogers veers off into a lengthy (and terrific) discussion of the film “Kitty Foyle†(1940), for which Rogers won an Oscar. Ms. Longworth says Rogers “is remembered as a trouper†but also was a woman “who believed in the ritual of marriage†(she believed in it so much she went through it five times). When Hughes takes up with Katharine Hepburn, Ms. Longworth puts the much quoted “box-office poison†label into accurate perspective, calling it “a work of hyperbolic propaganda.â€
Howard Hughes was born in Texas, the son of a man who grew rich selling drill bits and other tools to oilmen. Hughes inherited his family’s considerable wealth at age 18 and took it to Hollywood in 1925. Ms. Longworth calls him “a failure as both an artist and a mogul.†She sees him as a seducer, an abuser of male power. Although famous for relationships with the great beauties of his era (movie stars Billie Dove, Rogers and Hepburn, Ava Gardner and others), he married only twice—first in 1925 to a Houston girl of good family, Ella Rice, and then, in 1957, to a beauty-contest winner from the Midwest, Jean Peters, who had become a successful star briefly in the late 1940s.
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As he aged, Hughes became known for “sponsoring†young females he hoped to turn into stars, signing them to contracts and keeping them as virtual prisoners held hostage to his whims. One of these women, Faith Domergue, never made it to the top and spent her youth captive to Hughes’s control. He kept a stable of informers, security guards and private detectives to spy on her, causing her to retaliate. In 1943 Domergue, tooling around Hollywood in a little red car Hughes had given her, spotted him driving his big black Buick with the gorgeous Ava Gardner sitting beside him. Domergue viciously rammed them, smugly saying later that “poor little Ava seemed to bounce up and down in her seat like a yo-yo.†(This surely has to be the only time anyone ever referred to Gardner as “poor little Ava.â€) Domergue—with a straight face—once said Hughes told her, “You are the child I should have had.â€
Ms. Longworth does not ignore the serious accomplishments of Hughes’s life. He was a man of innovation, intelligence, and enterprise. Besides running an enormous business empire and designing airplanes (and cantilevered brassieres), Hughes earned his pilot’s license in 1928. By 1933 he set a world land speed record and in 1936 a record nonstop transcontinental flight time. In 1946 he flew the test flight of the XF-11 he had designed for the government, crashing spectacularly in a near-fatal disaster.
“Seduction†carefully traces the ups and downs of Hughes’s career over decades that culminated in his personal decline. Ms. Longworth pinpoints 1942 as the year his workaholic habits began to become “unsustainable.†By late 1944, he began exhibiting “obsessive-compulsive tics.†Ms. Longworth pinpoints a July 1948 Time magazine cover story as the moment in which Hughes started to “lose control of his own story.†His behavior was erratic during his years as head of RKO, the movie studio he purchased in 1948 and sold in 1955; he became an “increasingly eccentric†mega-millionaire who had “become obsessed with eradicating Communists.†After his sale of RKO, Hughes receded from the public eye, and Ms. Longworth makes clear why she thinks he withdrew: a decline in both physical and mental health; head injuries suffered in plane crashes, especially the near-fatal one in 1946; the loss of his identity as a lone wolf after he married Peters; and the 1957 business resignation of Noah Dietrich, his reliable friend and business sidekick since 1925.
Ms. Longworth sheds as much light on Hughes as probably can be shed. She shrewdly calls him a man who knew that “the gap between perception and reality could be made to disappear.†As early as 1947 Time described Hughes as “the Hollywood playboy and planemaker about whom the public has heard very much but actually knows very little.†It’s an evaluation that’s still valid.
—Ms. Basinger is chairwoman of the department of film studies at Wesleyan University and the author, most recently, of “I Do and I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies.â€
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.
