Call the Cops! Someone Stole My Tarantula!

OK, hands up or we’ll shoot! 
Pat them down, Sgt. Kelly. 
Not too hard. 
You don’t want to kill any hissing roaches or centipedes.

Yes, in other cities bugs are stomped-on, sprayed or swatted.
In Philadelphia, they’re stolen.

Who knew bugs can be valuable? We learned that bugs worth $40,000 were taken in an inside job this past summer from the Insectarium, a kids’ museum on Frankfort Avenue in Torresdale.

Just last week we posted a story on this blog describing the enormous federal battle to kill Japanese beetles first seen in the United States across the Delaware in Riverton, N.J. Certainly, huge amount of cash are spent every year to kill agricultural pests.

But there are collectors for everything – including rare insects.

An exterminator – Steve’s Bug-Off – opened the museum on the second-floor of his office in 1992. The center piece was a modern kitchen – surrounded by some sort of electrical barrier – containing hundreds of cockroaches.

Today both floors are museum space and the new featured attraction is a live butterfly exhibit.

Security cameras inside and in the parking lot revealed young employees walking off with the valuable bugs and a few reptiles. We assume the villains were juveniles because the police have never released the names of those arrested.

There is a spider in my bathroom. Wonder how much a collector would pay for it?

Do You Know These Philadelphians Real Names?

Here’s something different for the blog: a quiz.


Some people are well-known in Philly by assumed names. Here is a mlist of
 birth names. Can you guess who they are?

Answers below.


1 – Carmine Tilelli
2 – Freddy Cocozza
3 – Ernie Evans
4 – William Claude Dunkenfield
5 – Elaine Berlin
6 – Joseph Abraham Gottlieb
7 – Angelo Mirena
8 – Hyman Litsky
9 – Joseph Nigro Jr.
10 – Arnold Cream
11 – Cornelius McGillicuddy
12 – Angelo Annaloro
13 – Robert Louis Ridarelli
14 – Amir Khaib Thompson
15 – Robert Rihmeek Williams



ANSWERS

the answers below are invisible. use your computer's cursor to 'highlight' the invisible text to see it!

1 – boxer Joey Giardello
2 – Mario Lanza
3 – Chubby Checker
4 – W.C. Fields
5 – actress Elaine May
6 – Comedian Joey Bishop
7 – boxing trainer Angelo Dundee
8 – radio DJ Hy Lit
9 – radio DJ Joe Niagara
10 – boxer Jersey Joe Walcott
11 – baseball legend Connie Mack
12 – Mafia Don Angelo Bruno
13 – singer Bobby Rydell
14 – drummer Questlove
15 – rapper Meek Mill

Japanese Invaders Hit the Delaware Valley

The Japanese Beetle and kudzu farm

Were the Japanese practicing their evil 1941 attack on America much earlier right here in Philadelphia and south Jersey? It certainly seemed that way.In 1876, the Japanese introduced a decorative plant called kudzu at the huge Centennial Exhibition that drew 10 million to Fairmount Park.

Then, in 1916 a shiny new insect was discovered at a Riverton, N.J., plant nursery. The bug arrived with imported plants from Japan. It was the Japanese beetle, capable of destroying farm crops, orchard, pasture even a golf course.

Herculean efforts by federal and state agencies to contain the Japanese beetle to a small area of southern, N.J., failed. Since 1916, the beetles have spread to every state east of the Mississippi.

Let’s first take a look at the “kudzu monster.” At the 1876 Centennial and at the 1883 New Orleans Exposition, the Japanese sold kudzu. It had nice flowers, grew quickly and was good to frame a front porch. It was also good feed for livestock.

It was in the 1930s that the government handed out free kudzu plants as ground cover to farmers to fight soil erosion. Many farmers went bust and abandoned their properties but the kudzu kept growing.

Though the kudzu was bad, the beetles were worse.  In late July 1923, the they swarmed across the Delaware River in huge numbers recorded in a long, detailed front-page story in the Inquirer.

Large Inquirer photos showed three men sitting around a bushel basket of corn in the Dock Street market picking out beetles. Another photo showed beetles all over a man’s clothes.

The nation was deadly serious about halting the beetles. One government entomologist had just returned from three years in Japan becoming an expert on the insect. And a Department of Agriculture lab was established in Riverton to test out way to exterminate the pest.

For a while New Jersey and the Philadelphia area was put under a “quarantine.” In order to ship out produce, fruit, cut flowers, sand or soil, every box and container was searched for beetles by more than 200 federal inspectors.

The government put out a list of plants the beetles liked to eat, including everything from asparagus to pussy willow. They munched on the leaves of most trees. The Philadelphia entomologist worried that Fairmount Park might provide a smorgasbord for the bugs.

The term “yellow peril” was used to describe the beetle invasion. One newspaper columnist said a “new sport among shoeshine boys on the Delaware River ferry boats was to pick off the Japanese beetles from Jersey commuters.”

The quarantine didn’t last long. Eventually a Japanese beetle trap was developed.

In 1931 a news story claimed that “530 million Japanese beetles were trapped and killed” in New Jersey. We wonder who was counting.

Buried Alive in Center City

If you want an example of how things have changed for the better in Center City in recent years, let’s return to 1975 and what was happening at 12th and Walnut streets.

It’s hard to find an empty lot anywhere near that location today, but in 1975 there was an empty lot at that intersection. Whoever owned the empty lot was so desperate for cash, he rented it out for a Halloween stunt.

A man was “buried alive” there and his wife changed 50 cents to look down a tube and view “The Phantom of the Grave.”
 
No one learned the Phantom’s actual name. His alleged wife/money collector would only say he was “a businessman from Lancaster County.”

He emerged from his casket midnight on Halloween after 10 days.

He was fed through the tube which descended down from a fake tombstone. It was all under a tent.

The newspapers paid little attention to the stunt so we don’t know how much money either the Phantom or the lot owner earned for the show.

The Phantom provides a dramatic example of the value of prime Center City land in 1975 and 44 years later.

Small Game Hunting On Pine Street And Other Weird Stuff in 1907

If you think Philly is weird these days take a look at the front page of the Inquirer of December 12, 1907. You can do this on Newspapers.Com. We accidentally ran across this issue while searching for something else and we are still bemused by what we read.

For instance, a lady’s hat - full of feathers and other embellishments - was set on fire by a mysterious cigarette while she waited on the corner of Broad and Chestnut. A heroic gentleman noticed the smoke pouring off her noggin and extinguished the blaze with his hands.

Another front page story about a divorce case involving a wife who spoke to the “spiritual world” during séances she organized. Her love poetry to a plumber, was not hers, she told the judge. The spirits wrote it.

And there was a guy living near South Street who trapped live rats. Then he doused the rodents with kerosene, set they on fire and released them.

But the story we found most bizarre occurred on Pine Street near 18th. The story said two “prominent families” were locked in a legal battle over the death of a young girl’s kitten.

Mrs. William Hepburn told the Inquirer she was entertaining guests when she heard a commotion outside. Neighbors called the Women’s SPCA because there was a cat stranded in a tree in front of the Hepburn’s Pine Street house. The thoughtful neighbors and the humane society folks were holding a blanket and urging the cat to jump.

“All of a sudden, a man rushed out of an apartment house at 18th and Pine streets and broke into the crowd,” Mrs. Hepburn related. “He carried a gun in his hands and began to fire shots at the tree. 

“The first thing I knew, the little white kitten dropped down into the blanket dead. It was the first time I knew it was my kitten. I was so sorry. I almost fainted.”

Actually, the kitten belonged to her 13-year-old daughter. Liza, whose photo was on page one. And the girl was heartbroken, said her mother. The Inquirer identified the Great White Hunter as “Henry Paxton, well- known retired Army officer.”

We’re guessing that Paxton was a Civil War veteran suffering PTSD. The Inquirer speculated that “the terrified cries of the kitten annoyed him” so the old soldier opened fire. He was charged with animal cruelty and hired a former district attorney as his defense lawyer.

He Had A Karl Marx-Style Beard – So He Must Be a Commie

Walt Whitman and his friend Peter Doyle.
They were believed to have a gay relationship

Back in 1955 people knew a “commie” when they saw one and men who loved other men were “dangerous perverts.”

The commie-pervert that so upset some local people in the mid-1950s was, none other than, poet Walt Whitman, and the proposal to name a new bridge in his honor was galling to some.

The Catholic Church launched and led the attack. Then the Inquirer editorial page, Gloucester City and Philadelphia city councils also went on record as anti- Walt.

An anti-Walt letter writing campaign was started by south Jersey Catholic churches, lay groups and Catholic school kids who copied a form letter.

The Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) had decided to change the name of the Delaware River Bridge to the Ben Franklin Bridge. No problem there. However, the bi-state agency was building a new bridge. Since Ben Franklin was associated with Philly, the new bridge must honor someone from south Jersey.

Now, here was a challenge. Who from south Jersey was famous enough to deserve having a bridge named in his honor?

Well, Walt Whitman was from Long Island but lived in Camden from 1873 until his death in1892. And he is buried in Camden. So, it would be the Walt Whitman Bridge, said a committee of the DRPA.

The first salvos in the Catholic attacks on Whitman were somewhat oblique. Jersey-based priest Rev. James Ryan began with an article in the local Catholic newspaper by attacking Whitman’s talent. Wrote the priest, “Whitman possesses the depth of a saucer and enjoys the vision that extends about as far as his eyelids.”
 
Soon people were made aware that a recent book on the poet described Whitman as “homoerotic.” This was an unfamiliar term for most folks, but they understood “homosexual.”

Letters that poured into DRPA called Whitman “vulgar” “corrupt” “unnatural, “disgusting.” Worse, he was “unchristian” and his work was “contemptuous of religious principles. “

One writer said Whitman’s poetry praising the common man was very popular in Red China. The writer declared: “He is the poet laureate of world communist revolution.”

The bridge controversy got into the New York newspapers and soon there were many pro-Whitman writers. At least, a couple letters said the Catholic church should cleanup its own house in regards to sexual perversion.

The controversy died down in 1956. The bridge opened in 1957 and today most bridge users do not know that the poet was once attacked as a communist, atheist and a shameless queer.

Suggested Highway Sign: ‘Camels Use Bicycle Lane Only’

A relative in Hawaii sent an e-mail in November with the subject: “Here’s Something for Your Blog. Only in Philadelphia!”

The e-mail contained a short video clip of a camel by the side of the road in a snowstorm near Philly.

No need to explain. Unless you were visiting Azerbaijan at the time, you saw the clip on TV or social media and know the amusing story.

It happened on November 15. 
Here are two questions about the inconsequential camel story, and two questions about important news stories on that date.  
Try the quiz. Answers below:

1 – The camel had a name. What was his name? On what highway was the
camel stranded?

2 – Two huge wildfires were blazing in California. Name one of the fires. In
what state were they recounting votes for a U.S. Senate seat?


ANSWERS:

1 - The camel’s name was Einstein and he was seen on Rout 309.
2 – The two large California wildfires were the Camp fire and Woolsey fire. The Senate recount in progress was in Florida.