By Adam Levine
The life of Jimmie Daltry, with a subplot on archival sleuthing
This story was published in the Media (Pa.) Borough Newsletter in 2020, but I liked it so much I wanted to share it here, with a wider audience. I hope readers will indulge this brief detour from water into an element that was once considered a fluid: electricity.
On April 9, 1901, when James William Daltry was ten years old, he was playing with friends in the driveway of George Darlington, who lived where the Holly House Condominium now stands on Providence Road in Media. The boys were horsing around, and while reaching for what he thought was a stick thrown by one of his friends, Jimmie instead grabbed onto the uninsulated end of a wire that was dangling from a nearby electric pole.
The Philadelphia Times (and many other newspapers around the country) carried a brief story the next day, with this sad headline: “Picked Up Live Wire: Youth May Die From Injuries Received.” The article stated that Jimmie’s hair and part of his scalp were burned off, and that until his father, John L. Daltry, came to his rescue and pulled the wire out of his son’s grasp, “sparks were being emitted from the top of the boy’s head and body.”
Bu that was not the end of the story. A Media doctor, J. H. Fronefield, worked on the boy all night, and after eleven hours finally revived him. The day after the incident, Jimmie was sitting up in bed, talking to a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer: “To tell the truth, Mister, I don’t think I know what it was that hit me.” That front page article’s headline says it all: “Electricity Could Not Kill Jimmie Daltry: Vitality of the Boy Withstood Overwhelming Current of 1050 Volts.” One of the story’s subheads called Jimmie a “Human Pyrotechnical Display,” referring to the “long, viscous blue sparks…springing from [the boy’s] feet and from his head.”
Jim Daltry, as he came to be known as a young man, was an all-around athlete who played shortstop on local baseball teams. As Media’s “youngest businessman,” he ran a cigar shop on Orange Street when he was twenty-one. He later coached basketball and played on company softball and bowling teams. In 1911 he married Bertha Habbersett (of the local meat packing family), and they raised two children, James Jr., and Dorothy. His 1960 obituary in the Chester Times makes no mention of his childhood accident. But it might not come as a shock to learn that Jim Daltry spent 40 years working for the Philadelphia Electric Company.
How I Uncovered this Shocking Story Besides being the resident historian for PWD I am also chair of the Media (PA) Historic Archives Commission, which has a large collection of documents and photographs related to the seat of Delaware County, just west of Philadelphia. This photograph was from the Stephen Appleton Collection of more than 2,000 glass plate negatives. PWD also had a large collection of glass plates, the scanning and cataloging of which I oversaw in 2004, so I was familiar with the details these negatives can reveal if properly scanned. In my usual obsessive manner, I singlehandedly cleaned and scanned all the Appleton photographs, then set about trying to properly catalog them. Unfortunately, identifying some of the images was a problem. The original negative envelopes had been discarded; the man who transcribed the titles off these envelopes had terrible handwriting; and the photographer’s original index to his photos was cryptic at best.
Two related photographs bore the cryptic titles: “Daltry Case, inside lawn,” and “Daltry case, outside lawn.” At first I had no idea where they were taken, or what was going on in the picture with the children: three boys and a girl, standing in a yard, a fourth boy lying on the ground, holding a white flag. This was either Jimmy Daltry himself or someone representing him, but I had no way of knowing that.
The second photo has a sign identifying the property as that of of George Darlington, but he was a wealthy lawyer, and could have owned property anywhere. I definitively identified the location by zooming in on the background of the first photo, which shows familiar buildings in downtown Media. Based on the elevated position of the photograph and the position of the buildings, I thought it might have been taken on Providence Road. The pillars also looked vaguely familiar. I walked up the road to investigate, a photocopy of the photograph in hand, and sure enough, one of the pillars was still standing, near Providence Road and Fifth Street. And when I looked at old maps, I wasn’t surprised to learn that this had been the property of George Darlington.
I then did a search in Newspapers.com. I don’t remember the exact terms I used—some combination of Daltry and Darlington—but I do remember feeling very lucky when I found the story of Daltry’s near-electrocution. Appleton sometimes took photographs to be used as evidence in legal cases, and these may have been part of a suit filed by the Daltry family against Darlington or the electric company. But a further search of newspaper record turned up no articles about such a case, so it’s likely that such a suit, if it was ever filed, never went forward. For Jimmie Daltry’s parents, it may have been enough that he came through this horrific incident alive.
If anyone out there knows more about this story, I’d be happy to hear from you.