Chestnut Hill Professor Discusses His Newest Book, The Glenside Kid

professor Ted Taylor said the original idea to sit down and write The Glenside Kid first came to him while he was working as a columnist for Montgomery Newspapers. 

Taylor’s columns ran the gamut of topics.  But whenever he put pen to paper to wax nostalgic, it was always a hit with his readers.  

“People like hearing about the old days and all that stuff,” said Taylor during a phone interview.  “I’ve never gotten too far from the area and this thing just cried out to be written.”    

And so, at the urging of friends and colleagues, Taylor finally sat down one day and compiled "The Glenside Kid".  It’s a story that spans the first two decades of Taylor’s life, growing up in middle-of-the-century Glenside.  

But there’s a lot more to the tale than that.  

And you surely don’t have to be a local to dig it - the coming-of-age experiences that Turner relates are all but universal.  

“It’s a feel-good kind of book,” said Taylor.  “Something that anyone growing up almost anywhere can hopefully relate to.”

Still, it probably won’t hurt the story if you just happen to know all the shops along Easton Road or, like Taylor, have spent an evening or two at the Keswick.

“The book has a lot of names, a lot of locations, a lot of stories people [from the Glenside area] will all know - I’m told that it really kind of resonates with them,” said Taylor.   “But I really think for most people it’s not so much the setting as it is the period.”

The cover alone harkens back to what many consider the golden age of the American middle-class: on it is a photograph of Taylor, no more than eight years old, dressed in cowboy hat and western tie and brandishing a pair of six-shooters.  

It’s all Saturday morning serials, bubble gum cards, and afternoon trips to the soda fountain.   

“I always say Glenside is the kind of town Norman Rockwell would have invented if it wasn’t already there,” said Taylor.  “It’s just a nice town and it was a fun town to grow up in.”

Drawing many comparisons to Jean Shepherd’s "A Christmas Story", Taylor couldn’t be more happy with the praise.  He’s met Shepherd on a couple of occasions and cites him as a primary inspiration behind the book.    

As for the Chestnut Hill connection, Taylor said it’s a pretty strong one. Not only has he taught writing at the college for over a decade, but Chestnut Hill was the town his ancestors first settled in after making the trip across the Atlantic.  

“In 1910 my grandfather, John Taylor, came here from England by himself,” said Taylor.  “The first two years he basically lived in the basement at St. Martin-in-the-Fields.  He eventually became the sexton there and saved enough money to bring his family over.  They moved to Highland Avenue in Chestnut Hill.”

Co-founder of the Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society, Taylor has written four books in the past three years.  While most of his writing has been about baseball (and the Philadelphia Athletics specifically), Taylor said his newest venture is doing much better than he ever expected.  

The positive reviews and word-of mouth haven’t hurt.  

“When you write a sports book, you figure that there are sports fans all over the country,” said Taylor.  “And a lot of them are real history buffs.  As for this book, I just didn’t have a clue as to how well it was going to do.  I really owe my publicist a lot - it’s gone a lot better than I thought it would.”