June 16, 1966

Where have all the women gone?

The appointment of Mrs. Kenneth Roberts to the Springfield Township School Board is cause for congratulations. We are pleased to see this eminently qualified person selected by the board to fill one of two vacancies occasioned by the realignment of the school districts. It is cause for wonderment, however, that Mrs. Roberts is the first woman to serve in 20 years, while Mrs. O’Neil, Springfield’s only woman commissioner, is the first to our knowledge ever to serve in that capacity. If there ever was a field crying for qualified people of education and concern it is that of civics. The men who serve on school boards, PTAs, commissioners’ posts, both paid and unpaid positions, do so on top of full-time jobs. Housewives most certainly have full-time jobs while their children are small... but the need for responsible citizenry must be filled.

June 17, 1976

Executive committee will review Local’s editors

The Community Association’s board of directors has unanimously supported a resolution authorizing its executive committee to evaluate the performance and salaries of the Local’s co-editors annually and make recommendations to the board. The resolution further states that no committee should evaluate, be responsible for, or make recommendations about the Local’s editorial structure. The vote climaxed a three-week debate about how the editors could be reviewed and evaluated, and what the CHCA board’s relationship is to the newspaper it publishes. Board member Bernard V. Lentz, for whom the so-called Lentz policy is named, recalled that they had struggled with this issue in 1968, when “Ellen Wells was a very independent editor,” and noted, “as long as we had an editor who was dedicated, willing to work for nothing, and intellectually honest but often wrong, the best thing to do was to let her roll.”

June 19, 1986

Execs push for traffic count, officer at farmers’ market

The issue of one-way streets will be given top priority on the agenda of the Chestnut Hill Community Association Board of Directors on June 26 when it meets to discuss a final report on a traffic study of Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill. The committee is trying to decide what to do about traffic around the farmers’ market, and whether one-way streets would relieve bottlenecks around it. The board may recommend a traffic officer to handle an expected increase of 70 to 130 additional cars but professional engineers said these numbers would not create a problem. The real problem was not traffic but parking, they said.

June 20, 1996

Update on community playground and garden

Over the past several months, the community playground and garden group has been building support for the design and implementation of a community-built project to be located at the John Story Jenks School. While it is proceeding with the approval of the School District of Philadelphia, this is NOT a school district project. Rather, it is a community playground and garden that will benefit us all. It has the support of multiple local organizations and generous contributions have already been made. The next meeting of the group is June 25 and everyone is welcome.

June 22, 2006

Bottom of Chestnut Hill is (SO HA)ppy

The boutiques, restaurants and other retailers to the south of Southampton Avenue are making a name for themselves — literally. SOHA, or south of Hartwell Lane, developed because business owners on Germantown Avenue south of Hartwell wanted their strip of stores to be known as something less derogatory than “Bottom of the Hill,” which it is often called. The name SOHA is a spinoff of New York City’s SOHO district. SOHA is an acronym for South of Hartwell Lane because originally, that’s where the shops involved were located. But when the businesses north of Hartwell caught wind of the idea, they asked to join (and Southampton Avenue does work with SOHA). SOHA is an effort to attract people shopping at the Top of the Hill to shops farther down the Hill as well.

June 16, 2016

G’town actor stars in Broadway’s hottest show in years

The Alexander Hamilton we all learned about in school was not considered a very sexy guy. Most of us may remember that he was the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, the primary author of the highly influential Federalist Papers, and the man who was killed in a duel in 1801 by Aaron Burr, the vice president under President Thomas Jefferson. But that same Founding Father is now the subject of “Hamilton,” a hip-hop musical on Broadway, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, that is receiving the kind of unanimous raves that have not been seen since Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” debuted in 2001. And one of the main reasons for this outpouring of splendiferous reviews, one more celestial than the next, is the performance of Leslie Odom Jr., 34, who is originally from East Oak Lane but grew up singing solos at Germantown’s Canaan Baptist Church, near where his parents still live. Odom is starring in the role of Aaron Burr in “Hamilton,” for which he just won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical.