Friend Aubrey Haines Baldwin, Jr.
Aubrey Haines Baldwin, Jr. was for many years an active member of the Fair Hill Meeting, Religious Society of Friends, Philadelphia; when that meeting closed around 1970, he joined the Green Street Monthly Meeting, in Germantown. During the final years of his life he was a regular attender at the Carlisle Monthly Meeting, and this meeting joyfully accepted his transfer of membership here in the Fall of 1998, about a month before his death on December 15, at age 94.
Aubrey was born on September 13, 1904, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Liberty High School there in 1923. He loved music, and at one point in his life he had hoped to be a singer. He said later that an adverse reaction to a diphtheria antitoxin ruined his voice, so he became a journalist and writer.
After two years as a reporter for the Harrisburg Evening News, he attended Dickinson College and spent his college years here in Carlisle, from 1925 through 1929, graduating with an AB degree. He soon joined the staff of the Main Line Daily Times, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, where he worked until 1935. By 1938 he had also earned a masters degree at the University of Pennsylvania.
During the later years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Aubrey worked on the WPA Writer’s Project. In time he became project head for Philadelphia and the southeastern counties of Pennsylvania with oversight of some 1,500 writers. During part of this period, he also worked as a rewrite man, an editorial position, for the Philadelphia Record.
In 1943, Aubrey accepted a job with RCA as a technical writer on a project for the navy Bureau of Ships. He worked on other publications for RCA. He worked for that company’s engineering and advertising departments from 1951 until his retirement on October 1, 1969.
Aubrey spent his post-retirement years in travel, genealogical and historical research, and writing. He wrote several volumes on Baldwin family history, placing them in the libraries of the Historical Society of Philadelphia and in genealogical libraries in Salt Lake City, Boston and Cleveland. He was a life member of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, and member of historical societies for Friends, Mennonites, and Chester County.
Aubrey retained, and was able to indulge, his love of music. A Friend from Philadelphia recalls that he collected LP records (which he was able to buy from RCA at $1 each). He attended operas, annotated programs, and stored them with the corresponding LPs. He donated his collection—which by that time filled nine feet of shelf space—to the clerk of Green Street Meeting, and many of them are now at Cheyney College Music Department.
He was active in the Fair Hill Meeting, whose history dates back to the time of William Penn. After it was laid down as an active meeting, he transferred his membership to Green Street. A friend there recalls that he attended faithfully in all but the very worst weather, although attendance involved an hour-long trolley ride from his home. He wrote a history of the Fair Hill Meeting and its historic graveyard and a history of the Green Street meeting. At one point he served as clerk of Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting and on a representative committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
Aubrey was preceded in death in 1975 by a brother Bertram, who was three years younger than he. Another brother, Alpheus, survived Aubrey by only four days. His youngest brother, Richard H. Baldwin, lives in Carlisle.
Although Aubrey was part of Carlisle Monthly Meeting for only a few years, he was active, admired, and loved. Carlisle Friends are grateful to have shared in even a small part of his long life.
