George Washington, rock star? Well maybe the father of this country is not the first name you think of after Elvis, but in the America of 1782, when Washington stopped at Bethlehem’s Sun Inn, he was very popular with a lot of patriot folks in the country.
Cliff McDermott, owner of the historic King George Inn in South Whitehall Twp., Lehigh Co., near Allentown, since a Friday the 13th in 1970, is not a guy who necessarily takes ghosts seriously.
On the afternoon of January 26, 1922, reporters came knocking at the door of a big, white home at 45 S. 16th Street, in Allentown. They were not unexpected.
When word came recently that the National Canal Museum was moving out of its “digs” at Two Rivers Landing in Easton's Centre Square to Hugh Moore Park, it was in a way déjà vu all over again. “Being here is almost a coming home,” said museum executive director Tom Stoneback.
When Kelly Ronalds of the Hotel Bethlehem decided to do a re-enactment of the last dinner held in the Titanic’s first class dining room before its sinking 100 years ago on the night of April 14-15th 1912, she recalled hearing hotel historian Natalie Bock had discovered a link between the hotel and the Titanic.
In the spring of 1928 Lehigh Valley newspaper readers might have noted a wire service story by Louella Parsons, the leading movie gossip columnist of the day, writing from a place that nobody had yet thought to call ‘Tinseltown.”
Mike Cavanaugh of Bethlehem is a quiet guy. But he does have his passions and, outside of his family and friends, chief among them is handling the programming duties for the Civil War Round Table of Eastern Pennsylvania.
Richard C. Wolfe, owner for the last 41 years of Northampton’s Roxy Theater, still remembers vividly how it was when he walked into the door of that venerable movie house in 1970.
U.S. World War II veterans are dying at the rate of 1000 a month. As they do, it is difficult to remember that they were once youthful men and women who patriotically at the risk of their lives took on the most soul-destroying regimes that the world has ever known and defeated them soundly.
Donato ”Don” Giaquinto and his wife Joan think it was on a Sunday morning in mid 1987 or 1988 when the doorbell rang at their home at 29 S. 13th Street in Allentown.
Some institutions have 100th birthdays, 200th birthdays and even 250th birthdays. But Allentown’s Episcopal Church of the Mediator at West Park and Turner Street is one of those few organizations that next year will be celebrating its100th re-birthday.
The Lehigh Valley relationship with its namesake river is not what it once was. For most people heading out of Allentown or going into Bethlehem, it seems a blur. And for those who can actually see it most of the time, it appears to be a large but placid stream.
Go to just about any Revolutionary War re-enactment and you are almost sure to find members of the 6th Pennsylvania Regiment. Dressed in uniforms of the period they can tell you a lot about what it was like to be a soldier during what Thomas Paine called “the times that try men’s souls.”
It was April 1861, and patriotic fever was running high in the Lehigh Valley. Lehigh County men flocked into Allentown to join up with Allen Infantry, bound for Washington at President Lincoln’s request to save the nation’s capital from falling into the hands of the Confederates.
World War II produced a number of American military leaders from the understated Dwight Eisenhower to the flamboyant George Patton. But for sheer star quality few could equal General Douglas MacArthur. And on September 21, 1951 when MacArthur arrived at the Allentown Fair, it was a red letter day in local history.
The Bethlehem diaries of Robert H. Sayre, right-hand man to Lehigh Valley Railroad founder Asa Packer, now in the archives of the National Canal Museum in Easton, are small, limp-leather volumes designed for a busy man who had little time for anything but a brief notation of the day’s events.
Once upon a time, roughly 100 years ago, Catasauqua was known as the "Borough of Millionaires," and the "Birthplace of America's Industrial Revolution."
History's Headlines by Frank Whelan | In the 1950s and early 60s Easton native Judge Joseph Force Crater and his story were part of national folklore. In 1954 when a skeleton was found in a mine near Friedensville, newspapers speculated it was Crater.
History's Headlines by Frank Whelan | August 2, 1951 in the Lehigh Valley was a perfect day to spend at an amusement park in that era when air conditioners were few and far between.
Trying to imagine Allentown without the Great Allentown Fair is like trying to imagine it without the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at Center Square, in short unthinkable. And as the date gets closer for the next fair at the end of August the office at the Fairgrounds is one continuous bustle.
History's Headlines by Frank Whelan | There is no detailed record of what the funeral of Margaret Elizabeth "Betsey" Allen, the second daughter of James Allen, who died in child birth in 1798 in Allentown was like, but we know enough about that the time to imagine it.
History's Headlines by Frank Whelan | A lot of traffic passes the corner of 6th and Chew Streets in Allentown. Still it is impossible to miss the large building with the majestic columns topped with Corinthian capitals located there.
By Frank Whelan | In the 1790's you could not have found a more patriotic group of people in America than the Pennsylvania Germans. How did they end up finding themselves regarded as traitors...
By Frank Whelan | In 1926 the subject of a new hotel was much on the minds of Allentown's civic boosters. In 1921 the Hotel Bethlehem had opened and in 1924 the Hotel Easton.
By Frank Whelan | Annie Weaver of Allentown was a sensible down to earth sort, not given to flights of fancy. But as she stirred in her hotel room in the ancient university town of Heidelberg, Germany in the pre-dawn hours of a July day in 1914...
By Frank Whelan | Standing tall in the heart of downtown Allentown, the Lehigh County Soldiers and Sailors Monument seems like it has always been there, and, for 112 years, it has.
By Frank Whelan | One hundred and ten years ago, in July 1901, the three Mack brothers, then wagon makers located in Brooklyn, NYC, decided to expand their limited partnership and incorporate themselves as the Mack Brothers Company.
By Frank Whelan | John Adams, the Founding Father from Massachusetts knew he had short temper. He did not suffer those he regarded as fools gladly. And among those who raised his ire the most were the wealthy Allen family of Pennsylvania.
By Frank Whelan | Harvey Wiley Corbett's buildings, including London's Bush House, the former headquarters for the BBC, were few. He is best known for his visionary concepts, drawn by delineator and architect Hugh Ferris, in a 1929 book "The Metropolis of Tomorrow."
By Frank Whelan | When he first drew up his plan for Allentown in 1762, founder William Allen was far more interested in selling building lots then planning for churches. He might simply have expected they would come in God's good time...
By Frank Whelan | Ask just about anyone who the father of Bethlehem Steel was and most would name those two 20th century titans of industry, Charles Schwab and Eugene Grace. Ask who the father of Lehigh University was and the reply will surely be Asa Packer.
By Frank Whelan | Annie Weaver of Allentown was a sensible down to earth sort, not given to flights of fancy. But as she stirred in her hotel room in the ancient university town of Heidelberg, Germany in the pre-dawn hours of a July day in 1914...
History's Headlines by Frank Whelan | Harvey Wiley Corbett's buildings, including London's Bush House, the former headquarters for the BBC, were few. He is best known for his visionary concepts, drawn by delineator and architect Hugh Ferris, in a 1929 book "The Metropolis of Tomorrow."
History's Headlines by Frank Whelan| John Adams, the Founding Father from Massachusetts knew he had short temper. He did not suffer those he regarded as fools gladly. And among those who raised his ire the most were the wealthy Allen family of Pennsylvania.
History's Headlines by Frank Whelan | When he first drew up his plan for Allentown in 1762, founder William Allen was far more interested in selling building lots then planning for churches. He might simply have expected they would come in God's good time...
By Frank Whelan | Ask just about anyone who the father of Bethlehem Steel was and most would name those two 20th century titans of industry, Charles Schwab and Eugene Grace. Ask who the father of Lehigh University was and the reply will surely be Asa Packer.
By Frank Whelan | Ask just about anybody over the age 60 about the Bell Telephone Hour, the popular television musical program of the late 1950's and early 1960's and the first image...
By Frank Whelan | There are a lot of old buildings in Allentown but one on the southeast side of South 7th near Union Street, a rambling sort of dark red brick structure, bears a particular honor.
By Frank Whelan | In the 1920s a movie theater was not just a place you went to see a movie. It was designed to take patrons' minds off the workaday world and transport them to a stately Spanish palace or court of an English king, or at least what the theaters' designers thought these places should look like.
By Frank Whelan | On April 18, 1861, an errant crow flying high over the Pennsylvania- Maryland border might, if crows worried about such things, cast its glance below at the North Central Railroad passenger train slowly chugging its way from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to Baltimore, Maryland. But it was no ordinary train, for it was carrying history.
By Frank Whelan | In its heyday the Bethlehem Steel Corporation made an awful lot of history, from railroad rails to skyscraper H. beams. But sometimes the people story gets lost in the product story. And during World War II the role played by women was significant.
By Frank Whelan | Then as now, there were a lot of politicians in America 100 years ago. And then there was Theodore Roosevelt. On the beautiful spring afternoon of April 11, 1912, he came barnstorming into the Lehigh Valley...
By Frank Whelan | The clerks working at the general delivery department at Easton's U.S. Post Office on Wednesday, December 30, 1931 probably had other things on their mind that day than the world's politics. But tragically it was about to arrive at their post office window.
By Frank Whelan | March 6, 1860 was one of those rare warm days that hit the Lehigh Valley in that oddest of months. But the citizens of Easton were not about to argue. Not only was it the anniversary of Northampton County's creation, a major social holiday at the time that was celebrated with balls and militia marches, but it was also the launching date of the new Delaware River steamboat, the Alfred Thomas.
