October 19, 2006 Issue

Richard Wood Snowden
The ups and downs of a new age landlord

Because of substantial demand, the Local is republishing the three-part series on Richard Snowden which appeared in 2001. This is the entire series as it appeared in July and August of that year.
July 26, 2001

Quick Links

October 23, 2006
Inquirer writes about latest bowman properties situation.

Education Section

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Essay: Learning from Cape Town
A Springside student spends a summer in South Africa
by Kimberly Ashby

When most kids think of summer, they think of hanging out with friends, sunbathing at the shore and completely avoiding anything remotely academic. But last spring, when I began to search for a memorable way to spend my last high school summer, I wanted to go in a different direction.

I have always been an ambitious student. I have challenged myself with difficult courses and have sacrificed free time for studying, but when I entered high school, it seemed to me that it was important to conquer more than algebra and biology.

I witnessed the cultural ignorance that thrived undetected in my school community and I wanted to do everything in my power to make a change. I joined Springside’s multicultural board and got involved with community groups in Philadelphia. The more I participated, the more I realized that multiculturalism would be a part of my future.

With college plans and preparations everywhere I turned, I felt as though my aspirations for what I wanted to achieve “someday” needed to speed up. I had gotten past the carpools and sleepovers of my youth, and it was time for me to turn my dreams for social justice into a reality. The Summer Academy at Cape Town was my method of action.

Quilt stamps recall terrifying civil rights days
by LINDA HUNT BECKMAN

Mt. Airy resident Linda Hunt Beckman (left), seen here as a civil rights worker in Alabama in 1968 with her friend, Nancy Scheper, from Queens, New York (she is now Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a rather famous anthropologist), and Robert Rembert. “When I last heard from Robert long ago,” said Linda, “he was working as a security guard in Buffalo, married and doing well.”

At the post office the other day I saw that they were selling “Gee’s Bend” stamps. Each has an innovative, abstract quilt design on it in bold colors. The originals were made at a 10,000-acre farm community that dead-ends at a bend in the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama. Some of you may know about the Gee’s Bend quilts since there was an exhibit that toured various museums around the country, winning media attention. The exhibit explains that this community had long made unusual quilts, remarkable because their colors were so bright and their designs so modernist that they reminded the curator of painters like Frank Stella.

To me these stamps bring a flood of memories because I lived in a cabin in Gee’s Bend with my then-husband and Nancy Scheper, my friend (who is still my friend today), in the summer of 1968. All three of us were in our mid-20s, and were working with a civil rights group called the Southern Rural Research Project (SRRP) by researching and writing about protein deprivation and hunger among black farmer families and about the inadequacy of the Department of Agriculture’s surplus food program for these families.

CHA football falls in Inter-Ac opener
by Ed Mahon

CHA’s Rashad Campbell (#2) is protected by Eric Dziengelski (#58) as he rushes to the end zone. For more photos visit www.chlocalphotos.com. (Photo by Jimmy J. Pack Jr.)

Students wore blue T-shirts proclaiming “We’re Back.” Members from the 1972 team watched with them in the crowd, which was almost as large for the school’s homecoming game. Television camera men along with scribes from the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News reported on the sidelines. After 34 years, Chestnut Hill Academy’s football team had returned to the Inter-Ac league.

When junior Rashad Campbell completed an 80-yard drive to rush four yards into the end zone, giving Chestnut Hill the 7-0 lead in the first quarter, the large crowd of students chanted “We are back.” Even after those cheers turned into critiques of the referees, even after Penn Charter (4-2) took and held a 17-14 lead to defeat the Blue Devils (5-1), the chant still rang true.

Pat Meehan, a junior tight end on the 1972 squad whose season ended early because of injuries to an already undermanned team, said a win would have been nice “because it would have been a cap stone to the return to the Inter-Ac.” But the United States district attorney who lives in Drexel Hill added, “It’s obvious they’ve got a very good and competitive team that will give them a chance at any game in the Inter-Ac. And really that’s all anybody would be looking for. It was fun game to watch, two good football teams that are really duking it out. Maybe next year.”