Portal:Philadelphia/Selected biography archive/2008
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[edit] 2008
- December
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- November
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- October
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- September
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- August
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- July
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- June
Al Wistert is a former All-Pro American football offensive tackle in the National Football League (NFL) for the Philadelphia Eagles. He played his entire nine-year NFL career for the Eagles and became their team captain. He was named to play in the NFL's first Pro Bowl as an Eagle. During most of Wistert's career there were no football All-star games although he was named to the league All-Pro team eight times. He played college football for the University of Michigan Wolverines. He is one of the three Wistert brothers (Alvin, Francis) who were named All-American Tackles at Michigan and later inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. He was the first Michigan Alum to be selected to the National Football League Pro Bowl. He and his brothers are three of the seven players who have had their numbers retired by the Michigan Wolverines football program.
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- May
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander was the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in the United States, the first woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and was the first National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander served on many boards, committees, and commissions and held office in many local and national organizations including: President Harry Truman's Committee on Human Rights in 1947 and on the Commission on Human Relations of the City of Philadelphia from 1952 until 1968. She worked in her husband's law firm from 1927 until 1959, when he was appointed to the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. She practiced law on her own until 1976, when she joined the firm of Atkinson, Myers, and Archie as a general counsel. She retired in 1982, was ill with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases for several years, and died in 1989.
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- April
Charles Barkley is a retired American professional basketball player. Nicknamed "Sir Charles," for his aggressive and outspoken demeanor, and "The Round Mound of Rebound," for his unusual build and talent as a player, Barkley established himself as one of the National Basketball Association's most dominating power forwards. He was selected to both the All-NBA First Team and All-NBA Second Team five times and once named to the All-NBA Third Team. He earned eleven NBA All-Star Game appearances and was named the All-Star MVP in 1991. In 1993, he was voted the league's Most Valuable Player and during the NBA's 50th anniversary, named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. He competed in the 1992 and 1996 Olympic games and won two gold medals as a member of the United States' Dream Team. In 2006, Barkley was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Barkley was popular with the fans and media, and made the NBA's All-Interview Team for each of his last 13 seasons in the league. He was frequently involved in on- and off-court fights and sometimes stirred national controversy, as in 1993 when he declared that sports figures should not be considered role models. Short for a power forward, he used tenacity and strength to become a dominant rebounder. He was a versatile player who could score, defend, rebound, and assist. In 2002, he retired as one of only four players in NBA history with 20,000 points, 10,000 rebounds and 4,000 assists.
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- March
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the '60s and '70s. She was both a populariser of the insights of anthropology into modern American and western life, and also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist. Her reports about the purportedly healthy attitude towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the '60s "sexual revolution". At the end of her career, her propositions were — albeit controversially — challenged by a fellow anthropologist and literate members of societies on whom she had long before studied and reported. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life. Perhaps unexpectedly, in view of her famously unconventional views as to the desirability of adjusting traditional family patterns to suit modern times, she remained to her life's end a conventional Anglican Christian and indeed took a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer.
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- February
Al Wistert is a former All-Pro American football offensive tackle in the National Football League (NFL) for the Philadelphia Eagles. He played his entire nine-year NFL career for the Eagles and became their team captain. He was named to play in the NFL's first Pro Bowl as an Eagle. During most of Wistert's career there were no football All-star games although he was named to the league All-Pro team eight times. He played college football for the University of Michigan Wolverines. He is one of the three Wistert brothers (Alvin, Francis) who were named All-American Tackles at Michigan and later inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. He was the first Michigan Alum to be selected to the National Football League Pro Bowl. He and his brothers are three of the seven players who have had their numbers retired by the Michigan Wolverines football program.
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- January
Terry Gross is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview format radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed throughout the United States by National Public Radio. Gross has won praise over the years for her low-key and friendly yet often probing interview style and for the diversity of her guests. She has a reputation for researching her guests' entire lives and asking them about lesser known aspects of their early careers. After growing up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York she began her radio career in 1973 at WBFO in Buffalo, New York. She moved to WHYY-FM in Philadelphia in 1975 to host and produce Fresh Air which began being distributed nationally by NPR in 1985.
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