Category: Announcements || By Submitted Report
Reformer and pioneering social worker Sophie Loeb will be the subject of the second program in the McKeesport Heritage Center's Summer Speaker Series.
A biography of Loeb will be presented at 2 p.m. July 21 by Ellen Show, Heinz History Center ambassador. The program is free and open to the public.
McKeesport Heritage Center is located at 1832 Arboretum Drive, Renziehausen Park. For more information, call (412) 678-1832 or visit the website.
Born in the Ukraine, Sophie Irene Simon came to the United States when she was 6 years old. The family settled in McKeesport. When Simon's father died, she was forced to begin working in a store to support her siblings.
Upon graduating from high school, Simon taught in the city's East End School before marrying the owner of the store where she had worked, Anselm F. Loeb. In the evenings, Sophie Loeb wrote essays for Joseph Pulitzer's New York Evening World newspaper.
When her marriage to Loeb ended in divorce, she moved to New York City to write for the newspaper full time. Her stories about inner-city poverty and illnesses among children and widowed mothers helped lead to new laws and educational reforms.
In 1924, she co-founded and served as the first president of the Child Welfare Committee of America. She died in 1929; six years later, a fountain in New York's Central Park was dedicated in her honor.
(Image: Library of Congress Collection via Wikimedia Commons.)
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