Word: franklins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...took a little while for Philadelphia to accept a man who walks around in buckle 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...
...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...
...seven days a week at 11 a.m. (he usually gets there at 10:30), Archbold walks over to Franklin Court, where Franklin's house once stood and a museum now does, sits on a bench under a mulberry tree as Franklin did and talks to people. Especially the womenfolk. This morning he uses the classic "If you ladies have any questions, the answer is yes." Being Franklin is a whole lot more fun than being John Adams...
...date with a local historian. He says he plans to change into his street clothes before dinner, but last week, on a date with another woman, he showed up in the buckle shoes. He steps into his Subaru station wagon to call his date, since he doesn't want Franklin to be seen in public with a cell phone. In addition to having the anachronistic phone, Archbold checks his e-mail regularly and has a website, ben1776.com "Despite what people may think, I don't live in a place where I use only candles and have Colonial furniture," he says...
...accident that the Benjamin Franklin you see on our cover is portrayed as a kind of action hero. Of all the founding fathers, he was early America's boldest intellectual adventurer, making history in every realm from science to business to statesmanship. "My goal," says artist Michael Deas, who painted the cover, "was to present Franklin as a vigorous, flesh-and-blood person, not the somewhat frumpy figure we see on the face of a $100 bill." During the 84 years of his amazing life, it was a rare moment that Franklin, young or old, wasn't hatching an innovation...