PAPennsylvania Famous People

Two presidents born 151 years apart

James Buchanan was born in a log house at Cove Gap, near Mercersburg in Franklin County, in April 1791, and he is still the only president Pennsylvania has sent to the office from within its own politics. He served a single term from 1857 to 1861, never married, and watched seven states leave the Union in the weeks before he handed over to Lincoln. Joe Biden was born in Scranton in November 1942, in a house on North Washington Avenue, and moved to Delaware at ten when his father found work there. Because he then represented Delaware in the Senate for thirty-six years, his Pennsylvania birth gets forgotten, though he went back to Scranton in every campaign he ran.

Latrobe, Donora, Indiana: small towns with long resumes

Latrobe in Westmoreland County holds fewer than eight thousand people and produced Fred Rogers, born there in 1928, and Arnold Palmer, born there in 1929. Rogers taped Mister Rogers' Neighborhood at WQED in Pittsburgh from 1968; Palmer won seven major championships and kept his house and his airstrip in Latrobe until he died in 2016. Donora, a mill town on the Monongahela, produced Stan Musial, born November 21, 1920, and Ken Griffey Jr., born November 21, 1969, two Hall of Fame outfielders from one small town sharing a birthday. Jimmy Stewart was born in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his family kept a hardware store, and the museum devoted to him sits on Philadelphia Street there.

The quarterback belt of the western valleys

Something about the coal and steel towns around Pittsburgh turned out quarterbacks in a run with no equal anywhere else. Johnny Unitas grew up on Mount Washington in Pittsburgh, Joe Namath in Beaver Falls, Dan Marino in the Oakland district, Joe Montana in Monongahela, Jim Kelly in East Brady, George Blanda in Youngwood. All six are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Johnny Lujack of Connellsville won the Heisman Trophy in 1947 and is not. Basketball made its own claim on the state: Wilt Chamberlain came out of Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, and his hundred point game on March 2, 1962, was played at the Hershey Sports Arena in front of about four thousand people. Kobe Bryant, born in Philadelphia in 1978, was still a Lower Merion High School senior when he entered the 1996 draft.

Warhol, Rachel Carson, and Easter Sunday 1939

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, the son of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, studied pictorial design at Carnegie Institute of Technology, and left for New York in 1949. The museum on Pittsburgh's North Shore that carries his name holds the largest collection anywhere devoted to a single American artist. Rachel Carson was born in 1907 in a farmhouse at Springdale on the Allegheny River, studied at the Pennsylvania College for Women, and published Silent Spring in 1962. Marian Anderson was born in South Philadelphia in 1897 and learned to sing in a Union Baptist Church choir. When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused her Constitution Hall in 1939, she sang from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday to a crowd of seventy-five thousand, and in 1955 she became the first Black singer to appear with the Metropolitan Opera.

From Philadelphia to Hollywood, and a Christmas tree farm

Grace Kelly was born in East Falls in 1929 into a bricklaying family with Olympic medals in it: her father John B. Kelly won three golds in sculling. She took the Academy Award for The Country Girl and married Rainier III of Monaco in 1956. Gene Kelly, no relation, grew up in Pittsburgh's East Liberty. Will Smith came out of West Philadelphia and Tina Fey out of Upper Darby. Taylor Swift was born in West Reading in 1989 and raised on a Christmas tree farm at Wyomissing before the family moved to Nashville. John Updike grew up in Shillington and set the four Rabbit novels in a city he called Brewer, which is Reading with the name changed.

The adopted Pennsylvanians

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston and walked into Philadelphia at seventeen in 1723. He founded the Library Company in 1731, the Pennsylvania Hospital, and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and signed both the Declaration and the Constitution as a Pennsylvania delegate. Andrew Carnegie arrived from Dunfermline in Scotland in 1848 and settled in Allegheny City; the steel fortune he built paid for 1,689 public libraries in the United States. Milton Hershey was born at Derry Church in Dauphin County in 1857 and built a chocolate works and a company town on the spot, which took his name in 1906. He and his wife left the whole company to the school for orphaned boys they founded in 1909. Henry John Heinz, born in Pittsburgh in 1844, was selling horseradish from Sharpsburg long before the 57 varieties slogan turned up in 1896.

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