By Elizabeth Stieber
Times Staff Writer
She’s known simply as the “William Penn Lady.”
Visit Elaine Peden’s Frankford home and it’s not hard to see why. She has dedicated a bedroom with Penn memorabilia; works of art cover the walls and lay stacked on the floor, and books and statues practically burst from a wooden china closet.
That’s only the beginning. Peden, 74, has spent the past 30 years studying Pennsylvania’s founder and spreading the word about his historical importance to the Commonwealth.
Peden turned the City Hall Tower into a gallery honoring the Penn family in the 1970s. She climbed the scaffolding as the famous Penn statue high above City Hall got a facelift in the mid-1980s, and she held interactive presentations on Penn for elementary school students throughout the years.
Her greatest feat, however, occurred in 1984, when she became the driving force behind making William Penn and his second wife, Hannah Callowhill Penn, honorary U.S. citizens.
Penn, a British citizen and Quaker, founded Pennsylvania in 1681 and stayed just three and a half years before returning to England. His wife, Hannah, governed the colony from England.
In her quest to earn the Penns honorary citizenship, Peden passed around petitions, spoke with congressmen and had doors shut in her face so often that most would have given up.
“I believe in reincarnation, and I had to have been either him or her in another life,” Peden said. “Who else would go through all this?”
Now, she has written of her fight to give the Penns citizenship in a book called Good Intentions, so that her young grandchildren will realize the lengths their grandmother went to during this special quest.
“When you get old, your grandchildren want to remember their grandmother,” she said. “So I put it all into a book so my grandchildren don’t have to go looking for material on me.”
Five years ago, she decided to compile recollections of all her research, frustration and triumphs. The draft took her two years to complete, writing her memories and experiences with paper and pen before having someone type it.
“It was easy letting it flow,” she recalled. “I’m not a writer or a historian, but it was easy because I had lived it, I’m self-taught. I’m just as versed as a historian because, to me, it was a labor of love.”
She started at the very beginning, and the three decades of crusading for Pennsylvania’s premier couple “came back in a flash,” she said.
Peden used to operate her family-owned tavern, which was located in Frankford. In 1971, she and members of the city Tavern Owners Association were outside City Hall, protesting a bar tax initiated the year before to benefit the School District of Philadelphia — a tax later declared unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court — when the group decided to visit the City Hall Tower.
As they waited in the lobby for the elevator, Peden noticed the bare walls and envisioned adding artwork of Penn and his family created by high school students.
I have no idea why or how I came up with the idea, her book reads. I simply felt a chill run through my body and I knew that I wanted to come up with a way to tell visitors about William Penn.
At the time, she knew almost nothing of William Penn, yet she felt she wanted to give tourists who visited the tower an artistic impression of Penn. She asked a number of high schools to take part, but only a student from Frankford High School and some students in George Washington High School’s art program showed an interest.
The Frankford student created an oil painting of Penn; the Washington students applied a number of artistic techniques to create artwork of Penn and his family. Peden’s son, Jim, who was 16 at the time, made the frames.
Peden donated the pictures for display in City Hall, and Mayor Frank Rizzo and Gov. Milton Shapp acknowledged the students’ artwork. Unfortunately, a decade later, the room was remodeled and the artwork was thrown in a closet.
Peden salvaged some of the paintings and drawings, which are now mounted in her Penn room.
When the students were creating their Penn masterpieces, Peden began researching the Penn family more deeply, spending hours at the City Hall archives, Quaker meetinghouses, museums and libraries. On a trip to England to gather more information about the Penn family, she found their graves.
When Peden placed flowers and a small American flag on Penn’s grave, a groundskeeper jokingly said the flag was inappropriate because the Penns were British subjects.
That’s when a Penn historian and friend of Peden’s suggested that William and Hannah Penn should be declared honorary U.S. citizens. At the time, only World War II-era British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who, to his advantage, had an American mother, and Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved more than 20,000 Jews from Nazi persecution, had been given that recognition.
“I thought there must have been a zillion people given that title,” Peden recalled. “When I realized there were only two, I should have quit.”
But Peden didn’t. Because honorary citizenship requires an act of Congress signed by the president, she and her friend traveled to Washington, D.C., to speak with lawmakers about enacting such a bill. A bill was introduced in 1972, and again in 1976, but both died in Congress.
Pennsylvania Sens. Arlen Specter and John Heinz introduced the Senate bill, while Pennsylvania congressman Bill Goodling promoted it in the House of Representatives. Finally, on Oct. 19, 1984, Congress passed the measure. President Ronald Reagan signed it into law on Nov. 28.
Peden received a phone call from Washington, D.C., to inform her that William and Hannah Callowhill Penn were honorary citizens of the United States of America.
“It was the evening and I was in bed,” she recalled. “I thought it was a joke. It took a few days to sink in.”
Since legislative approval of that proclamation, only two other people have received such an honor — humanitarian Catholic nun Mother Teresa and French Capt. Marquis de Lafayette, who helped the colonists win the Revolutionary War by persuading his government to send aid to the American military.
The only goal Peden has yet to achieve is having Penn’s face on a postage stamp.
In the meantime, she’d like to eventually have her book published. And although her Penn “hobby” has been expensive to maintain, she’s had a lot of fun discovering new and interesting facts and making a difference, she said.
“I proved in the book that I can make change,” Peden said.
More important, she hopes the Penns’ honorary citizenship will be mentioned in school social-studies textbooks so children will realize that Pennsylvania’s founder was never recognized as a U.S. citizen until centuries after his death.
She’d also like to see her Penn collection in its own museum in Philadelphia, preferably at a vacant former Quaker meetinghouse at Fifth and Arch streets.
As for her grandchildren, Elaine Peden said, “I want them to know what a feisty grandmom they had, and I hope it rubs off on them.” ••
Reporter Elizabeth Stieber can be reached at 215-354-3036 or estieber@phillynews.com