Halloween on Elfreth's Alley: All Bones Considered with Joe Lex
On Sunday, October 19th, the Historic District will transform into a spooky destination, inviting everyone to come trick-or-treating in the area from 11:00am-3:00pm. Come visit Elfreth’s Alley to trick or treat at the museum and at other residences on the Alley (costumes are encouraged - our staff will be dressed up too!)
As a special Halloween treat, we are welcoming local author and podcaster Joe Lex to our museum garden where he will be discussing and selling signed copies of his new book All Bones Considered: 52 Laurel Hill Women. Joe Lex retired in 2016 after 45+ years in emergency medicine which he started as a combat medic in Viet Nam and ended as a professor of Emergency Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia. When he took a tour of the historic Laurel Hill Cemetery, founded in 1836, he realized that the role of a cemetery docent seemed to suit his personality. After a year or so of giving tours, he decided that both cemeteries, East and West, really needed a podcast to talk about their amazing inhabitants. The result was "All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories", followed a couple of years later by "Biographical Bytes from Bala: Laurel Hill West Stories". Soon he had accumulated hundreds of scripts loaded with biographical and historical information, along with some pretty astounding stories of movers and shakers, artists, authors, and entertainers, scholars and educators, healers and givers, and the inevitable odds and ends - a woman who started her own religion, another who videotaped everything on television for 30 years, a 20 year-old religion instructor who died of a heroin overdose at the start of the 20th century, and a woman whose family thought that her husband had poisoned her for her wealth - and many more!
“People in Philadelphia are dying to get the stories of their lives narrated by Dr. Joe Lex - at least those who ended up becoming one of the “permanent residents” of its two Laurel Hill Cemeteries. Because he not only knows where all the bodies are buried - even better than that, he can make these dry bones speak. In this book, the city’s most jovial cemetery guide and most persistent podcaster shares tales about some of the most consequential women of Philadelphia. He re-animates for us the colorful details of their lives. He knows why they mattered, who they loved, what they struggled for - and most importantly, what they left behind. This book is a fascinating and delightful read for fans of local history.” — Peter Schmitz, author of Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia
