Word: archbold
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Would he have wound up looking like this anyway? If Ralph Archbold hadn't been talked into playing Ben Franklin in a local summer production in Dearborn, Mich., when he was a 31-year-old professional photographer who looked nothing like the man, would his head have gone bald in just this way? Would he have gained this much weight, needed bifocals and developed a bad hip that required a cane? Is it possible that a person can so identify with someone else that he morphs into his likeness...
...When Archbold started doing Franklin in 1973, he immediately liked it. He liked being wise. He liked being funny. He liked that people listened to him. So he started reading every Franklin book he could find (more than 200 sit on his bookshelves) and quickly discovered that he was born on Franklin's birthday (Jan. 17). Archbold began performing as Franklin in schools around the Middle West full time, and in 1981 he moved his business to where the market for Franklin...
...shoes, white stockings, a frilly white shirt and a red vest, with a gold pocket watch and a postal bag adorned with a perfectly forged Franklin signature--just one of eight complete outfits--but it did. "My first day here, a bag lady looked at me and said, 'Weirdo,'" Archbold says over breakfast at the Cosi sandwich shop after talking to one of the many homeless people who know him. "You have hit a new level of weirdo when a bag lady is calling you a weirdo...
Since then, Archbold has become an institution. His face is on 11 tourist postcards and the official Philly tourist brochure, and he has performed for every President since Gerald Ford. He makes a handsome living by delivering several lectures a week to business conventions. When the city wanted to cut his funding for his free daily children's programs--just three years before Franklin's 300th birthday--Archbold knocked on some corporate and government doors and got the cash. It's hard to say no to someone willing to dress up as a Founding Father in public...
Brenner says, "I think it goes without saying that the Archbold visit is an extraordinary experience for students in ecology and land-use planning...