Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Edmund Randolph BIDDLE
Deceased Name: EDMUND R. BIDDLE, 79, PROFESSOR, POET
Edmund R. Biddle, 79, of Bryn Mawr, a Widener University professor, poet, and World War II veteran, died Sunday of an apparent heart attack at his home.
Mr. Biddle, who taught English and American literature at Widener for more than 20 years, was also faculty adviser to Widener's student newspaper for many years.
He grew up in Chestnut Hill, then moved as a youth with his family to Washington when his father, Francis Biddle, was named U.S. attorney general by President Franklin Roosevelt. After World War II, Francis Biddle would serve as the chief U.S. judge at the Nuremberg war-crime trials. For years, Mr. Biddle kept on his mantel the gavel his father used at the trials.
Mr. Biddle's father was also the author of a novel, and his mother published poetry under the pen name Katherine Chapin. Such American literary figures as Edmund Wilson and Robert Lowell were not infrequent visitors at their home. It was no surprise, then, when Mr. Biddle chose to earn a master's and then a doctorate in literature from the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the plays of American author Theodore Dreiser.
His graduate work was interrupted by World War II. Mr. Biddle served in the Army Air Force, in the China-Burma theater, as a teletype operator, scrambling and unscrambling American intelligence messages.
On his return, he reenrolled at Penn, and in one class, he met his future wife, Frances Disner. Family legend has it that Mr. Biddle was upbraided by his professor for making eyes across the room. "Mr. Biddle, if you're that interested in Miss Disner, why don't you just go over and sit next to her instead of disrupting my class," the professor is said to have harrumphed.
The two were married in 1951.
Mr. Biddle wrote poetry as a hobby and had one of his works published in the now-defunct Saturday Review of Literature.
Despite his literary pedigree, Mr. Biddle was known for his sometimes-ribald humor. Even as strokes and diabetes slowed him down, "he still had a magical way of pulling from memory everything from an Ogden Nash poem to a Burma Shave commercial and reciting the lines impeccably," said his younger son, Daniel Biddle, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is now The Philadelphia Inquirer's national editor.
"He described literary characters in class as if he knew them personally," Daniel Biddle said. Among Mr. Biddle's students at Widener were Billy "White Shoes" Johnson, who went on to star as a wide receiver for football's Houston Oilers, and Brent Staples, an essayist and editor at the New York Times.
Though illness confined him to a wheelchair at the end, Mr. Biddle still made it to the store in his assisted-living community last week to buy his wife of nearly 50 years a sweater for her birthday.
In addition to his wife and younger son, Mr. Biddle is survived by an older son, Stephen B. Biddle, who sits on the Quakertown-area Planning Commission and prepares group health-insurance policies for Guardian Life Insurance Co. of America. He also is survived by three grandchildren. He was preceded in death by a brother, Garrison Biddle.
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