George R. Fisher, III, M.D.

Obituary

George R. Fisher, III, M.D.

Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield Dr George Fisher III

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.

Curtis: The Business Plan

Cyrus Curtis

Years ago, Cyrus Curtis maintained you could tell who read a magazine by simply looking at the ads. In his view, a magazine was a means for advertisers to reach selected customers; the text was just baited. Hearing this offensive view, I immediately picked up a high-brow glossy magazine, one with rather advanced literary pretensions, and flipped through its ads. They consisted entirely of ads for cigarettes and liquor. In a flash, I got entirely new insight about that magazine, and maybe an important truth about high-brow readers.

Well before World War I, Cy Curtis had grasped the idea that the real revenue of magazines could be advertising revenue, and the secret of rich revenue was getting potential customers to read the thing. Giving it away free wasn't good enough, you even had to be willing to bribe people to read. The form of bribing people was to provide high-quality reading material at less than cost. Curtis was a businessman, not an editor. His business plan was to hire good editors and then leave them alone. If circulation numbers increased, that must be a good editor.

For many years, the Post by that definition had good editors. Its circulation rose into the millions, followed by advertising revenue in the hundreds of millions. It happens that the editorial mix which produced this result was a combination of first-rate fiction and interesting articles built around the theme of glamorous home improvements (for women) or how to make your way as a small business entrepreneur (for men readers). The Post was a how-to manual for a population moving off the farm, into the towns. If it were still published today, it would be called the Bible of the "red" states, the core of the Republican party. That's what the picture of Ben Franklin on the masthead was meant to signify, not the rather tenuous connection with Franklin printing press.

Ben Franklin on the Cover

In retrospect after the glory days of the Post were over, there developed a general agreement that what killed the magazine was television. Free television; with huge expenditures on entertainment programs. Television is a way of funneling gobs of money from national commodity advertising into the pockets of the entertainment industry. In effect, show biz robbed publishing biz and Hollywood robbed the libraries and bookstores. New York and Hollywood robbed Philadelphia and Boston. And the brokers for this transaction were the advertising agencies of Madison Avenue.

That how it may seem in retrospect, but at the time it was more personal. It seemed as though Life and Look beat the Post, when in fact they just lasted a couple years longer. It looked as though single-subject magazines beat out general-topic magazines, but notice that PC Magazine rose to a thousand fat pages an issue in the 1980s and then fell to its present fifty skinny ones.

A particular source of bitterness lay in the fact that during the last ten years of its life, the circulation of the Saturday Evening Post actually doubled, far higher than it had ever been. If circulation was what advertisers wanted, where were they? The editors of the Post felt they had been betrayed by a conspiracy of a handful of two-martini advertising agents in New York, and it must be admitted there was a wide cultural divide between Sunset Boulevard and Walnut Street, between Greenwich Village and Bucks County. Between the flower children and the gardening clubs. And even, we have to say it, between the Ds and the Rs.

It took almost eighty years for it to happen, but Cyrus Curtis was eventually hoisted on his own petard. No amount of circulation, no level of editorial excellence, was going to rescue a magazine when its advertisers got steered to serving a different sort of free lunch in the barroom. The success of a magazine did not depend on the management of the magazine, it depended on the tribal convictions of the advertisers. The producers of operas, symphonies, and professional sports need to be wary of the same trap; even with a full house, the performing arts cannot meet their expenses from ticket sales, alone. In the cruel arithmetic of economic survival, it may not completely matter how good the artistic performance is.

Armonica, Momentarily Mesmerizing

Ben Franklin's Glass Armonica

Everyone knows Ben Franklin spent a lot of time holding a wine glass. Evidently, he noticed a musical note emerges if you run your finger around the open mouth of the drinking glass, and systematically studied how the tone can be varied by varying the level of liquid in the glass. The same variation in emitted tone relates to variations in the thickness of the glass. So, he set up a series of different sized glasses impaled on a horizontal broomstick, enough to cover three octaves, rotated the broomstick with a treadle like those used for spinning wheels -- and made music. The tone has a haunting penetration to it, which induced both Beethoven and Mozart to write special compositions for the harmonica, and the Eighteenth Century went wild with enthusiasm.

Glass Armonica

Unfortunately, a number of the young ladies who played the armonica went mad. We now recognize that since the finest crystal glass was used, with very high lead content, the mad ladies were suffering from lead poisoning after repeatedly wetting their fingers on their tongues. As a matter of fact, port wine at that time was stored in lead-lined casks, resulting in the same unfortunate consequences, which included stirring up attacks of gout. Franklin himself was a famous sufferer from gout, which was more likely related to the port wine than playing the harmonica, in his particular case.

Anyway, the reputation for inducing madness added to the spooky sort of sound the instrument made, attracting the attention of a montebank named Franz Anton Mesmer, who falsely claimed to be the father of hypnotism. Mesmer enhanced the society of his stage performances by hypnotizing subjects while an assistant played the harmonica, meanwhile relating all sorts of wild tales about animal magnetism. This was pretty sensational at the time until a young man in an audience suddenly died. It is now speculated that the victim probably had an epileptic seizure, but the news of this public fatal event pretty well finished Mesmer as an evangelist and the harmonica as a musical instrument.

Franklin Court

There's a replica of an armonica on display in the Franklin Court Museum around 3rd and Chestnut, which we are vigorously assured is not made with leaded crystal glass. The Park Rangers put on two daily performances by request, at noon, and 2:30 PM.

Merging Cities With Their Suburbs

Philadelphia 1854

When the City of Philadelphia turned into the County of Philadelphia (or vice versa) in 1854, the area had about 150,000 residents in 1850 but 500,000 in 1860. It qualified as one of the largest cities in America at the time, but what we today call middle-sized cities are about that same size. As a generalization, when a thriving American city approaches a size of about half a million, the business community often gets the idea that the city should expand its limits by annexing the neighboring districts. And, as a further generalization, the metropolitan newspapers are simply ecstatic about the idea of expanding their market reach, while the working classes of both the city and the region it proposes to swallow, are violently opposed. Since the business community typically feels that expansion would be good for business, labor unions are subdued. Leadership of the conservative middle-class rebellion is therefore generally led by the police and volunteer firemen, who are the most organized groups within the combative working class in a metropolitan region. Many citizens of all classes are of course quite indifferent about the matter. As history has turned out, only one such proposal in five will be successfully adopted, but it is almost unheard-of for a successful amalgamation to be reversed once it happens. In recent years, this general pattern has been followed in Indianapolis, Lexington, Jacksonville, Nashville, Baton Rouge, and Louisville. In countless other cities, the effort has been defeated by the voters.

It requires thriving prosperity for the business community to become politically dominant in a city, so the political context of these circuses amounts to a contest between the business "elite", often augmented by "carpet baggers from out of town" threatening comfortable lives within settled neighborhoods by merging them with culturally discordant residents in suburbs or countryside. On a political level, professional urban politicians favor expansion, because increasing the electorate generally makes it more expensive for an outsider to raise the funds to defeat them in an election. Exceptions to this rule occur when the two merging regions have different political parties in control, or when working-class city districts are so opposed that urban politicians fear to anger them. A symptom of this conflict for control of a city machine can be observed in the seemingly unrelated issue of a city charter with a "strong mayor" design. Cities with a strong city council generate greater ability to defeat the machine and are hence more reluctant to see mergers with suburbs. Nevertheless, the attraction which the business community can offer to the politicians is a larger tax base, although in the surrounding suburbs the dynamic is exactly the opposite. In the suburbs, it is the local businesses and professions who feel threatened, and who attempt to agitate the suburban politicians to protect their tax collections.

Although campaign rhetoric in these battles tends to exaggerate or distort the probable economic changes, academic studies find that the actual effect of city expansion is generally of modest subsequent growth, with modest increases in taxes. These effects seem comparatively weak since a metropolitan region is unlikely to produce a successful merger unless the economy is already growing fast enough to generate expansionism, and that vigor is likely to persist after the merger. These political uproars talk a great deal about economics, but in fact, the issue is primarily political. One commentator calls them "chess games pretending to be circuses", and the real force at work is usually an elaborate variation of gerrymandering. Urban minorities who usually vote Democrat can be swallowed up by suburban majorities who usually vote Republican. Or else a thwarted inner-city business community hopes to replace the urban machine with a more favorable suburban set of attitudes. There is seldom a uniform political gradient as the city border is approached from either side, so the chess game takes these patchwork population variants into detailed consideration. It is often argued that crossing a political boundary is unworkable, but since the thriving city of Atlanta is located in two different counties, that must not be a dispositive argument.

In their most elemental form, these expansion efforts have to do with political boundaries. It is therefore not surprising that the people most concerned are politicians. The battle cry is often to create a city without suburbs; failure to act leads to suburbs without a city. In fact, the underlying agendas are much more prosaic.

Rearranging Mickles, Makes Muckles

Right Angle

Thank you, Mr. President. Tonight I'm to discuss Right Angle Club's odd contribution to book publishing, with emphasis on history books. To make it easier for the audience to follow, I originally titled the speech Three Threes, for three meanings, in three categories each. It touched -- in threes -- on 1) book technology, 2) variable proportions of facts and opinion, and 3) pitfalls to success. Times three, made nine bases to touch, so that evening at the Philadelphia Club I had to hustle. For a reading audience, however, it's more comfortable to revert to the writing style which I am advocating, since it illustrates as it explains.

Philadelphia-Reflections

First, let's deconstruct the essay you are reading. Ten years ago, I began taking notes at the Right Angle Club's Friday lunches, writing reviews of the speakers. The younger generation calls it "blogging" when you then broadcast such essays on the Internet; that's how I started the journey, giving it the title of Philadelphia Reflections, which is reached by entering www.Philadelphia-Reflections.com/topic/233.htm in the URL box of any search engine, on any browser. If you prefer, you can simply click on the underlined lettering in this blog, a process called "linking". The blogs in this website concentrate on the Philadelphia "Scene" because that's what our speakers usually do. Our club has met since 1922, so by rights, it might contain ten thousand blogs, but unfortunately, I arrived late, so we only have 3000. Call them 3000 beads in a bowl, subdivided into annual bowls of beads. After more accumulation, they were re-connected as Collections for ease of use in re-assembly. Sometimes they are chronological, sometimes by subject matter; the purpose is to expedite searching for things, placing them in temporary categories, ultimately producing a book, a speech, or an essay. When an archive grows to this size, it's surprising how easy it is to lose something you know you have written.

The Right Angle Book

After a while themes emerge, so if I picked similar beads from the combined bowl of four hundred, then groups of similar beads become necklaces. Just as green beads make a green necklace, blogs about Ben Franklin make up a Franklin topic. Selected but related necklaces can then be artfully arranged into a rope of necklaces, which is to say, a book about Philadelphia, from William Penn to Grace Kelly. Almost without realizing it, I had been writing quite a big book without foreseeing where it would go. I described this curiosity to my computer-savvy son, who wrote a computer program to make it simple for anyone to rearrange blogs and topics of aggregated material. Simple, that is, for an author re-arrange his random thoughts repeatedly, as if to wander among his own random thoughts, and only in retrospect extract the books. Most authors are not Scotsmen, but they eventually learn that Many a Mickle -- Makes a Muckle. Many authors, however, once imagined they sat down to write a book from start to finish, only to discover one was already there, waiting to emerge if the Mickles could be re-arranged. At the end of the process, it is of course often necessary to insert a few bridging sentences to smooth out the lumps. However, when this outcome hasn't been planned, most authors must totally rewrite their material into a coherent book, once they finally realize where it has been going. Since I am also in the publishing business in a small way, I was able to guide my son into automating several subsequent steps of conventional publishing so any author could perform them without a publisher.

That begins to make book authorship resemble fine art; the artist does it all except marketing. In marketing fine art, it is conventional for the artist to receive 50% of the retail price, whereas in book publishing an author only receives 10%, and must sell five books to achieve an equal result. With refinement, using this system of authorship promises to incentivize the writing of many superior books, in smaller individual numbers, but an overall greater reading audience. True, "file this program" also aspires to eliminate the whole old-fashioned assembly line of publishing, which is in the process of dying anyway, but without a useful replacement.

So here's the cluster of three components -- blogs re-assembled into topics, topics re-assembled into volumes, with copy editing, spell checking and book design mostly performed by the computer. Whether paper books will completely transform into e-books is not so certain, but will mainly depend on computer design, not book design. At the moment, e-books are making their greatest progress in fiction books, for technical reasons. No doubt their negligible production costs will promote the emergence of vanity publishing, works of transient interest, and otherwise unsalable books. For this to work, will require not merely a further computer revolution, but a revolution within information circles. I'm afraid I am too old to indulge in such distant visions and can only hope to advance it a stage or two.

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LastPass--call George

Decline and Fall of Philadelphia

1929 Crash

We talk high finance here, so perhaps a simple story from Wall Street is needed to introduce the topic to a non-Wall Street audience. Following the 1929 crash, and consequent to the Glass Steagall Act, Morgan Stanley was the only American investment bank in existence. It was the first of a new kind, but barely in existence, doing something like $300,000 worth of business in 1933. As finance adjusted to the new ground rules, Morgan Stanley grew in size, commonly referred to as the "White Shoe" investment bank. That term was an allusion to the Ivy League background of its partners, who came from colleges which affected white buckskin shoes among their more elite students. It also referred to the fact that almost all Morgan Stanley partners were pretty rich and fairly young, entirely able to live by a code of behavior which might be summarized as, "We don't find it necessary to cheat."

Buried within that motto was the idea that Morgan Stanley was as good as its word, and tried very hard to avoid doing business with anybody who did cheat. In a business where a great deal of business was transacted too quickly for written contracts or vetting by law firms, that meant a lot.

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Morgan Stanley soon climbed to the top of a very tough heap and stayed there for fifty years. Many of its partners were millionaires in their twenties, but so what, they were mostly pretty rich before they joined the firm. The company ran as a partnership, with the capital they leveraged coming from the personal fortunes of the partners. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising many partners retired in their forties, taking their enhanced capital with them. The Glass-Steagall Act (now being imitated by the Volcker Rule within the Dodd-Frank Law) made it illegal for a depository bank to be under the same roof with an investment bank. Much of the capital in the pre-1929 days had been supplied by the deposits in the depository bank, but Glass Steagall cut that off when it created depository insurance, on the theory that deposit insurance was a Federal gift, and its "moral hazard" should not flow through to the speculation of investment banking.

That comment was tinged with populism, with the dubious implication that those who are two generations off the farm are less likely to cheat than those who are five generations off the farm. So the depository bank of Morgan Guaranty has split away from the investment bank of Morgan Stanley, which was the three-step process by which Morgan Stanley eventually grew so big it could no longer be sustained by leveraging the personal wealth of its partners.

Buy And Sell

Eventually, the pressure to raise money by selling stock to the public could no longer be resisted. The rich partners became even richer by selling their company's stock on the stock exchange, the company did grow enormously, and a lot of new stockholders got rich, too. Unfortunately, when you sell a stock you also sell voting rights, so the sale transferred voting control of the company to the new stock purchasers. It did not take many years before the white shoe atmosphere was a thing of the past, along with the discipline that the atmosphere imposed on the rest of corporate America. When the 2008 crash came along, there was enough questionable behavior on Wall Street to justify a populist President of the United States to tolerate, or even encourage, a witch hunt of Wall Street bankers for ruining the country.

Even so brilliant an economist as Paul Volcker has encouraged the idea that separating the two forms of banks was an unmitigated blessing which must be restored, while in fact it is only justified by the gift of Federal Deposit Insurance to the depository arm, not the Investment Banking Arm. It seems only a matter of time before there will be agitation to extend the insurance to the investment arm so we will be chasing our own tail, of extending insurance to encourage risk-taking, instead of using demand deposits to do so. And thus inviting another crash.

I'm sorry, Paul, but there is a reversed way to describe it. The small investors demanded the entitlement of risk-free investing, protected by deposit insurance. And they declared this insurance was a special entitlement to which wealthy players were ineligible. When small punters go broke, it is a tragedy. When big players go broke, it serves them right for being so greedy.

No matter. The point of the story is not the value of Glass Steagall, but rather the enormous power of Wall Street, to force a partnership to become a stockholder company, even so, might a company as the House of Morgan. Because I have become persuaded, and hope to persuade the public, that this is the main mechanism which humbled Philadelphia, from being the mightiest industrial engine in the world, in less than twenty years. Like the perfect storm, it took three other forces to make it quite so violent, and quite so swift. They were the first World War, the 1929 stock market crash, and Prohibition. The central operational lever of force was exerted by converting industrial corporations, from partnerships into stockholder corporations. That was the tool which destroyed the old Philadelphia. The other three forces simply made it happen in certain ways and at certain times.

Gasoline

Converting partnership or family businesses into stockholder organizations was a universal outcome of both World Wars, all over the world. The phenomenon can be looked at as one way of extracting frozen wealth to pay war debts. It is accompanied by an increase in national indebtedness, so it makes civilizations less stable. Scraps of partnership control do continue to persist in remote developing countries, and in tiny principalities like Luxembourg, but it seems only a matter of time before the public buys them out. The only major developed country to retain family control of businesses in Germany. Apparently, it was intentional, based on the inheritance laws. Tightly held countries are more commonly tightly held together by force, as in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Monaco, usually because of a monopoly grip on oil or other natural resources. But even those governments could probably be toppled, except for fear of ensuing chaos, just as did happen to many former dictatorships, and was a source of fear in Philadelphia. A case can be made for populism if it is kept small and under control. Hardly any case at all can be made for chaos.

Brewerytown Map

For those of us who love Philadelphia and wonder what happened to it, let me point out three defining local peculiarities. Prohibition was more of a factor than we like to think because Philadelphia's Tenderloin was the former Brewerytown, filled with Beer Gardens, refrigeration plants (Lager beer is brewed in the cold) and beer distributors. The passage of the Volstead Act suddenly transformed the largest alcohol-production center in the country into the largest alcohol-consuming area, from River to River, from Franklin Square to the Schuylkill.

It was concentrated in the Brewerytown by being illegal, and somewhat secret. Brewerytown soon turned into the Tenderloin, and the Tenderloin into Skid Row, cutting off North Philadelphia from law and order, but in time it was alarming in a different way to see speakeasies spread into other sections of the city. Much as it tried, even the Mafia couldn't control the influx of amateur criminals, when the Tenderloin essentially cut the city in half.

When the great migration from the South occurred after WW II, the immigrants turned North Philadelphia into a slum. Cutting I76 along the same center-city lines helped shrivel North Philadelphia and hustle its flight to the suburbs. Some misadventures of Philco and Ford, Baldwin and Stetson hastened the process and may have caused some of it.

Pennsylvania Railroad

America grew into a mighty industrial nation as a result of becoming the Arsenal of Freedom in the Civil War and two World Wars. The nation needed to expand its industrial base from the essential monopoly corridor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and it had the money to do so. The land was cheaper elsewhere, labor was nonunion elsewhere, and air conditioning made the South bearable. Wall Street saw an enormous opportunity to buy stock from the family partners of Philadelphia industries, and sell it again to the world. These new owners had no interest in preserving lovable Philadelphia; they wanted to reap the harvest of expanding what we had, to the rest of the country, maybe even the rest of the world.

Once a spiral like this gets started, it runs by itself. The owners of the mansions on the hills, proprietors of what were big businesses by Victorian standards, sold their partnerships, their children were converted into coupon clippers, and their grandchildren into trust-fund babies. If you really have nothing much to do, why not do it in California next to the beaches? Hollywood made trust fund babies seem glamorous on the Main Line, just as Madison Avenue had once made patriots on the left bank seem fatally attractive. Those movies and novels made somebody pretty rich, but whoever it was, doesn't live here, anymore.