Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania (36 page)

From our archives: a true story of danger, seduction, betrayal, and a deadly escape
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Allegheny County Jail, Pittsburgh, 1901

Katherine Soffel (the warden's beautiful wife), Ed Biddle (famous outlaw), Jack Biddle (Ed's younger brother and accomplice), Peter Soffel (prison warden)

Jack and Ed were known as “the Biddle Boys,” leaders of a gang of small-time outlaws who relied more on brains than brawn to carry out their nefarious crimes. Sometimes they used chloroform to render their victims unconscious; sometimes they used beautiful women as distractions. They carried guns, too . . . just in case.

On April 12, 1901, the gang was robbing a house next to a small grocery store in Mt. Washington, Pennsylvania. A female accomplice kept the grocer occupied while the boys searched the adjoining house, looking for a pile of cash. The distraction didn't work, though—the grocer heard a noise and went to investigate. A struggle ensued, shots were fired, and the grocer ended up dead on his living room floor. The Biddle brothers fled the scene and holed up nearby, but the police soon caught up with them. After a shootout in which a police officer was killed, the outlaws were arrested. The trial was quick and the sentence severe: the Biddle Boys were to be hanged for their crimes on February 25, 1902.

Prison warden Peter Soffel and his wife Katherine were in the midst of a divorce when the Biddles arrived at the Allegheny County Jail. Katherine spent most of her time visiting the prisoners, offering them spiritual advice and bringing them Bibles. For the inmates, Katherine Soffel was a welcome sight—they called her the “Queen of the Jail.”

She first went to see the Biddles out of curiosity. Their exploits had made them notorious, and Ed's charm and good looks soon won her over. She became infatuated and visited him more and more often, at least 25 times over the next few months, sneaking him food and books. The warden knew his wife had taken an interest in the outlaw, but he must not have realized how keen an interest it was, because he didn't stop her from visiting.

After a few months, Ed and Jack convinced Katherine that they were innocent and asked her to help them escape so they could live honest lives as coal miners in Canada. She agreed.

Katherine's room was so close by that Ed could see it from his cell window. The two devised a secret code: Katherine would point to various parts of her body that represented different letters and to spell out messages about the warden's movements. The two brothers then came up with a plan. They asked Kath erine to smuggle in two saws and a revolver. Again, she agreed.

On January 29, 1902, the brothers cut through their cell bars, overpowered three guards, and locked them in a cell. As the Biddles hurried from the prison, Katherine came out to meet them . . . which was not a part of the plan. She was supposed to lie low and meet them in Canada a month later. But to
their surprise, she'd taken a page out of their book, chloroformed her husband, and then snuck away in the night.

The warden awoke to a nasty headache and an empty house. When he was told the Biddle Boys had escaped, he knew Katherine was involved and immediately put out an all-points bulletin on the three of them.

Meanwhile, Ed had agreed to let Katherine come along, much to the dismay of his brother Jack, who thought she'd slow them down. They stole a horse and sleigh from a nearby farm and made it to Cooperstown, 38 miles north of Pittsburgh. They planned to have a quiet breakfast and slip away unnoticed, but news of the breakout had beat them there and the police were on their trail.

On January 31, 1902, just outside the town of Mount Chestnut, the Biddle Boys and Katherine Soffel ran into a posse at the crest of a snowy hill. Ed stopped the sleigh, handed the reins to Katherine, and then he and Jack jumped off, each with a gun in hand. The sheriff told them to surrender, but Ed opened fire. The lawmen responded with a hail of bullets.

When the shootout was over, Ed was shot twice, Jack 15 times, and Katherine—who had grabbed a gun and joined in the fray—was shot once by Ed after pleading with him to take her life. (She didn't want to live without him.)

The three were taken to nearby Butler Hospital. Katherine's wound was treatable; Ed and Jack were not so lucky. As he lay on his deathbed, Ed told police he'd never loved Katherine, that he just used her to help him escape. Katherine claimed that Ed was
just saying that to protect her, and love letters he'd written her while still in prison seemed to back her up. And Jack? He died, along with his brother, on the night of February 1, 1902.

The Biddle Boys' bodies were put on display at the Allegheny County Jail for two hours. More than 4,000 people came to see the famous bandits. Katherine served 20 months in prison and died on August 30, 1909.

 

 

 

Comedian Bill Cosby is one of the most famous people to be raised in Philadelphia. And like fellow Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin, Cosby can be both witty and wise. Here's some of what he's had to say
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“Always end the name of your child with a vowel so that when you yell, the name will carry.”

“Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.”

“I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

“When you become senile, you won't know it.”

“A word to the wise ain't necessary. It's the stupid ones who need the advice.”

“I want to die before my wife, and the reason is this: If it is true that when you die, your soul goes up to judgment, I don't want my wife up there ahead of me to tell them things.”

“Did you ever see the customers in health-food stores? They are pale, skinny people who look half dead. In a steak house, you see robust, ruddy people. They're dying, of course, but they look terrific.”

“Gray hair is God's graffiti.”

“Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.”

“Immortality is a long shot, I admit. But somebody has to be first.”

. . . and some other natural wonders in the Keystone State
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Five miles south of the town of Franklin in northwest Pennsylvania is the Indian God Rock, a large boulder that sits on the bank of the Allegheny River. The 22-foot-high rock is covered with hundreds of ancient petroglyphs: images of people, hands, animals, arrows, and geometric designs. Archaeologists believe they were carved between the tenth and the seventeenth centuries, probably by ancestors of the region's Algonquin Indians. But some historians say the petroglyphs resemble ones made by Europeans and may have been carved by European explorers—possibly Vikings.

This deep cave system in south-central Pennsylvania is the only fossilized coral reef cavern known in the world. Discovered by miners quarrying for lime in 1928, the cave's defining feature is a towering wall that was once a living coral reef lying on the seabed of an ancient ocean. It's covered with fossils of tiny sea creatures that lived more than 400 million years ago.

The Triple Divide Summit, located in Potter County on the New York border, isn't much to look at—it's just a mountaintop about 2,500 feet high. But it has the distinction of being a major “hydrographic triple divide point” of North America, meaning
that the water that falls on it can end up in one of the continent's major drainage areas. Depending on where it lands, rain falling on Triple Divide Summit can flow north and end up in the St. Lawrence River and then Hudson Bay; east and into the Atlantic Ocean; or south to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and then into the Gulf of Mexico.

Archbald Pothole State Park, northeast of Scranton, features one of the world's largest known potholes—depressions cut into solid rock by swirling water . . . in this case, water from glaciers that melted during the last ice age. The massive Archbald Pothole—it's about 40 feet deep and 40 feet across—formed between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago.

Located in Tioga State Forest in the north-central part of the state, Pine Creek Gorge is known as the “Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.” The long, forested gorge runs nearly straight for more than 40 miles, is more than a mile wide, and is more than 1,000 feet deep. Hiking trails line the rim and the gorge floor, and the area is home to a vast array of wildlife, including bald and golden eagles, ospreys, wild turkeys, otters, fishers, porcupines—and lots of black bears.

 

Today, the name Hershey is synonymous with sweet treats. But did you know that the man behind the brand built an entire community in Pennsylvania—and then kept its citizens employed through the Great Depression?

H
ershey, Pennsylvania, is a town built for fun. Not only is it the unofficial “chocolate capital of the world” and the self-proclaimed “sweetest place on Earth,” it's also home to a chocolate factory, a theme park, a zoo, and a chocolate spa . . . where guests can take a whipped cocoa bath or get a chocolate fondue wrap. And it was all the vision of one man: Milton S. Hershey.

Hershey founded the Hershey Company in 1894 in his home-town of Derry Church, Pennsylvania. The son of Mennonite farmers, he'd become an apprentice to a candy maker in Lancaster when he was a teenager, and in 1875, at the age of 18, he moved to Philadelphia to open his own candy business. That shop failed after just a few years, so he headed to Colorado, where he took on another apprenticeship, this time with a caramel manufacturer.

It was during this trip that Hershey perfected a caramel recipe with extra milk, which resulted in a softer, tastier product. Armed with his new caramels, he headed back to
Lancaster, where there were plenty of dairy cattle to provide milk for his new candy. Then in 1883, after two other shops failed (one in Chicago and another in New York), he had a hit: his Pennsylvania-based Lancaster Caramel Company became a commercial success, and its caramels were popular all over the United States and Europe.

Hershey wasn't done coming up with new kinds of candy, though. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he saw an exhibit of German chocolate makers who added milk to the otherwise crumbly candy to create creamy milk chocolate.