(upbeat music) - Here's what's coming up next on "You Oughta Know."

celebrating the Electric Factory's impact on Philadelphia's entertainment scene and beyond.

Plus, we check out an exhibit highlighting the contributions of women in science.

And see how puppies are helping these Delaware students improve their reading skills.

Hi, I'm Shirley Min.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Lately, I've been interested in stories about reading.

A few weeks ago I told you about a New Jersey man whose free books are helping to foster a love for reading.

But the key to becoming a lover of books is to start reading early.

Well some first graders in Wilmington, Delaware are learning side by side with puppies, and this pairing isn't just cute, it's yielding some positive results for the kids and their furry friends.

Charlotte, Fern, and Wilbur, named after characters in "Charlotte's Web" are learning so much like these first graders in Brooke Hughes's classroom here at Hanby Elementary School in Wilmington.

- We have puppy time, we call it.

And to have puppy time, you have to be, you know, having a positive attitude, doing all the school rules, and get your work done.

So it's actually increased a lot of our productivity.

Riley, what are you writing about?

- [Riley] The puppies.

- [Brooke] The puppies?

Who are your characters in the story?

- Wilbur, Fern, and Charlotte.

- Wilbur, Fern, and Charlotte?

Fern, you're a character in the story.

And if the puppies are sleeping, they have to read to them.

- One windy afternoon, the little old lady left her cage, cottage.

- It's kind of a hard book.

- I don't know how I'm doing that.

Like, it's like I'm reading it and I'm like getting better and better every time.

- Wow, that's great.

(upbeat music) The puppies don't know the words, the puppies don't care if you sound out words.

And so it's really increased the kids' reading confidence and their fluency because they love to pick up a book to a curled up puppy and read to them.

The kids that were so reluctant to pick up a book, first one to say I can't read, are now so excited to pick a book.

And they're like, I can read to the puppies.

And they're just non-judgmental listeners.

And so that's the part we see amazing growth in, just the willingness to want to read and to practice.

- [Shirley] This is the second year Brooke has brought in rescue pups as part of her program, Foster Tails Puppy Therapy.

- [Brooke] So I kept saying the idea like, wow, we should have puppies in the classroom.

And people looked at me like I was absolutely crazy.

Puppies don't belong in a first grade classroom.

But I just kept thinking of all of the wonderful benefits that they could bring to not only the students, but the staff too.

- [Shirley] While it took some convincing for the school to sign off on the idea, Brooke proved it could work.

Last year, 18 puppies came through the program, were adopted, and even got a taste of fame.

A video Brooke posted of the kids with the dogs went viral on TikTok with close to 3 million views.

(gentle music) - For the kids, they are just natural life lessons that the puppies bring as far as responsibility and patience and teamwork.

And the puppies have brought out a sense of empathy in them.

So that's been the surprising factor for me.

They just have been so much nicer and kinder and compassionate within each other after being with the puppies.

- [Shirley] Another surprise, higher test scores.

- Last year, our growth from when they came in January to the end of the year was amazing.

We saw so much growth just in their winter and spring test scores.

And so this year we're really collecting that data all year and compare that growth to other years where we didn't have puppies.

- [Shirley] And these furry friends are teaching Brooke about her students.

- One of our students who we thought was well below grade level with reading was reading a fourth grade book fluently to the puppies.

He felt calm and safe reading to the puppies, and it taught us, oh wow, he knows a lot more than he was showing us in the very beginning of the year.

- [Shirley] The puppies are also getting something out of this.

- [Brooke] These puppies for sure, they're getting used to all different kinds of sounds and smells and noises and people.

They're getting lots of love and if they weren't with us, they could be in the cage all day until they're adopted.

- So far, six puppies are in the paw of fame.

Brooke hopes to have 25 puppies come through her classroom this year.

A brief stop on their way to their fur-ever homes.

The puppies all come from the Rags to Riches shelter in Glen Mills, PA, and Brooke would love to see more puppies in classrooms.

She even created a how-to guide at fostertailspuppytherapy.com.

If you grew up in or around Philly, you are familiar with the Electric Factory's events.

Well thanks to Drexel's Collections and Exhibitions Department, you can experience it through a free exhibit highlighting its creator.

(upbeat music) - We do collections for a living and we've been doing it for over 125 years.

Within the university now, we have the Academy National Sciences Aid Collections.

Drexel has this ambition of being the most civically engaged university in the country.

And so part of it is to get out and share what we have with Philadelphia and the region.

So doing an exhibition like this is about engaging with our large community, using the collections and exhibitions to teach.

In Philadelphia, there are generations of people who went to Electric Factory concerts and it became the biggest concert promoter in America.

Every famous musician almost has played at either the original factory, second factory, or at at the Spectrum JFK Electric Factory Concerts events.

Larry Magid, he has been one of the pillars of the development of American music in the last half century.

And together with his partners, the Spivak Brothers and the whole Electric Factory concerts business have changed the world in really important ways.

- When I was a student at Temple, I booked bands for fraternity parties and I started booking concerts.

I got an offer for a job in New York to work for an agency, but every so often I would come back to Philadelphia, I would go to the Show Boat, which Herb Spivak owned, and he asked me how he could get into the rock business.

I said the thing I think get you into that field was to open up a club.

February 2nd, 1968, we opened the doors to a amazing new world and we helped expose new forms of music to the city.

And it grew and it grew and it grew and it grew till we became the largest concert company in the country.

We toured a lot of acts, not only nationally, but some internationally.

But there was another phenomenon, and that was the next wave of British acts, Janice Joplin, Doors, Fantastic, Jimi Hendrix, who actually broke in in the UK and then came back to America.

- Really want to engage our students with collections and exhibitions as Drexel does actually hold a number of the more recent posters from the second Electric Factory.

But in fact, the material that you're seeing in this gallery comes from Temple University, from the special collections at Temple because Larry Magid, he gave his graphics, the photos, and the posters to Temple.

Then it just grew and grew and grew.

And it ended up with Bruce Springsteen's guitar he so generously lent.

And we had two great guitars on loan from Hard Rock International.

We have musical paraphernalia, like we have a drumhead signed by the Ringo Starr All Star Band.

And then we have materials related to the original Electric Factory, and we have these big speaker stacks from Clare Brothers, from Clare Global and Marshall Stacks and the music industry program faculty will use that also as part of their teaching.

And it's housed in the College of Engineering.

What lies behind the very loud noise that you hear at concerts?

It's electrical engineering.

So we try and bring it all together.

- [Larry] After all this time that we can go back and say, we helped change the world.

Just as it was evolving, we presented art imitating life, - "Pursuit and Persistence" is the title of an exhibit at the American Philosophical Society.

But the title also represents what the female scientists on display had to overcome.

(gentle music) - The American Philosophical Society was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin for the purpose of promoting useful Knowledge.

And we carry on that tradition today.

Our exhibitions focus on the strength of our collections.

This exhibition, "Pursuit and Persistence: 300 Years of Women in Science," we really wanted to highlight and showcase that women have been doing science for centuries and they didn't have the same opportunities.

They faced a lot of obstacles, but despite all those obstacles, they've continued to make breakthroughs, they've made spaces for themselves in science, and they've also made spaces for other women in the process.

So I think we really wanted to showcase both all of their adversities that they faced, all the triumphs that they had, and then all the mentoring and networks that they created along the way for the last 300 years.

(dramatic music) We do have several stories that are Philadelphia focused.

In the 19th century, we have Emma Seiler, who was a self-trained physiologist.

She started as a opera singer and a teacher, and she was really interested on the operational functioning of the voice and published groundbreaking understandings about how the voice worked.

She was from Germany originally, but she became a Philadelphian and was really lauded in the Philadelphia community for her work.

When we go into the 20th century, we have Mildred Cohn.

She was a professor at the University of of Pennsylvania.

She was a biochemist, and of course she did a lot of really groundbreaking work in her own field.

But what was so wonderful about Mildred Cohn and is highlighted in this exhibition was that she was just a fierce advocate for women and people of color to demand that they make spaces and get recognition in academia.

So she really was a champion in that regard.

And then lastly, one of the other real significant Philadelphia-based women is Beatrice Mintz.

Bea Mintz was an embryologist.

She spent a good chunk of her career at Fox Chase Cancer Center in genetic modification.

And those discoveries led to a deeper understanding about the causes of cancer and also the potential cures.

We really delve into so many different sciences.

A wonderful acquisition we got, Jeannine Duane was a teacher in space.

She never actually went to space, but she did train.

That was a program in the 70s and early 80s.

We have her space jumpsuit and a lot of the ephemera that she used to encourage careers in NASA and the space program.

(upbeat music) Every year we do conferences that are aligned with the themes of the exhibitions.

So we have a lot of great speakers coming in talking about the initiatives to try to make STEM and science more open, thinking about the future of women in science and all the opportunities that they might have.

- This is an awesome event.

We're getting this opportunity to really talk about women's role in science, to build out the ecosystem and kind of change the stories we tell ourselves about who does science and what does that look like.

So it's really been incredible to meet all of these wonderful women and do this work and have these conversations.

- I think that the Women in Science Conference has been such a great opportunity for us to be able to connect with other people that are in the field, and that it's important for us to be able to be in community with one another and just be in a state where we feel seen, safe, and supported.

- We really want people to come in and see not only these fantastic stories about women, but also get an understanding about the APS and its place in the history of both early America and the sciences.

- "Pursuit and Persistence" runs until December 30th.

Well from science to architecture, preserving the contributions of women is important for those who will follow in their paths.

(gentle music) - [William] We're here in the architectural archives of the University of Pennsylvania, and we're part of the School of Design.

And an architectural archives is a place where creative imagination is kept.

And by that I mean the materials that an architect or a landscape architect create in the process of building something of consequence in the world.

This is the idea of taking an inspiration, the invisible that's in the mind and translating that through drawing, through models, through collaboration with other people who are also creative to make a place that actually affects people out there in the world in a positive way.

- I first came to Penn as a graduate student in historic preservation.

I had had an undergrad in architectural history, so I graduated here in 2012.

Minerva was my thesis subject, and I've always been interested in the ways that women have shaped the built environment, both formally and informally, so as designers, but also as people living in space.

I found references to Minerva, but they were pretty few and far between.

She's not really addressed in mainstream architectural histories that I had used in classes, but I felt like the more I went looking, the more there was something there.

- We're talking about Minerva Parker Nichols, and we're thinking about the way in which objects help us tell a story in the archives.

It's really remarkable to follow Minerva as she enters the profession.

She's starting in 1883.

There's next to no women in the profession of architecture, there's probably less than 20 to about three to 4,000 men working at that moment in time.

And even then, maybe some of those women are an assistant, maybe they're running the office or they're involved in the office.

It's not really clear, and it takes us all the way to the end of Minerva's life in 1948, she dies in 49, before there's 1,000 women in architecture.

So there's a long arc there.

- She was the first woman in the country to practice independently.

So there's that kind of hook as something that makes her interesting in the late 19th century and was worth digging into.

University architecture programs were only starting around this time in the 1870s, and some of them were open to women, most were not.

She seeks out technical programs, which is how a lot of people, a lot of men especially, were getting into the field of architecture.

She lands the apprenticeship around 1886 with a man named Edwin W. Thorne, and they worked together here in Philadelphia.

Their office was at 14th South Broad.

They were basically where Dilworth Park is now.

- There's a rendering that was published in an architectural magazine in 1888, and it's a perspective.

So you see the building, you see the landscape, you see shade and shadows.

What's remarkable about the drawing is that while it says the name of the client, it says the name of Edwin Thorne.

The corner of the drawing is turned up.

On that curl up, it says Minerva Parker.

So she's put her name on the drawing in a way that kind of establishes a separation from Edwin Thorne, but maybe makes it known that, hey, I'm the person behind the drawing.

Maybe I'm the person behind the design.

- Around 1888 or early 1889, Edwin decided to move his office to a different place on Arch Street and Minerva stayed put.

So that location that was really advantageous for both of them becomes advantageous for her.

And she hangs out her own shingle.

She becomes the first woman in the country to practice architecture independently, and now she can take advantage of the fact that she's so close to City Hall, that she's in the thick of things, that she's got such easy access to the train station and it can take her to her project sites because she will ultimately supervise construction on all of her projects.

- One of the most interesting images we found was a photograph of Minerva in her studio in 1890.

And what's exciting about this image is it's just her sitting in the room.

Her back is to the camera.

She's focused on her work.

By the way, in that very building on the ground floor, are two developers.

They both commission her not only to do their private houses, which were large, substantial houses in Overbrook and out in Radnor, but they're also commissioning her to do speculative housing.

- [Molly] For her residential architecture, first and foremost, she's taking into account how it looks from the street, even if there aren't other neighbors around yet, she wants to set the tone for the personality of that community, of that particular client, and them living there.

That factors into the styles she's choosing.

A lot of her projects are on large, empty lots, so they're kind of given position to be kind of a jewel box for that lot, but then also for the neighborhood as a whole.

But then on the interior, she gave a lot of thought to the organization of the plan and the movement within the house and the spaces that it needed to incorporate.

- Hi, Molly.

- Hi.

Good to see you again.

House is looking beautiful.

- Thank you.

- Remind me how long your family has been in this house?

- Since 1969.

- [Molly] And you've lived here?

- [Linda] Till I got married and then I came back in 1977.

- [Molly] It looks so in keeping with the way Minerva designed it over 130 years ago.

- Come on in, see the rest of the house, Molly.

- Oh, I love this dining room.

It's so big.

I know that was intentional on Minerva's part back in the day in terms of a servant could navigate it with a tray, but you hold a lot of things here now, right?

- It's always been a party house and a family gathering place.

- I love that.

- I'll show you the focal point of this room, which is the fireplace.

- [Molly] It was important to her that woodwork not be too elaborate.

There is kind of a movement in this time that woodwork is carved intricately, and yet she deliberately pares hers back because it must be easier to clean.

So if it has a simpler profile, it won't take us long to dust.

In houses that have children, she's factoring in what's the maximum height of a stair so that a child's legs could navigate it more easily.

- You could see how one bedroom door leads to the other.

- Yeah, Minerva incorporated that into a lot of houses so that in the middle of the night, if there was a crying child next door, the parent has that much shorter distance to get over there.

- She was smart.

(gentle music) - [Molly] She seems to have had success pretty quickly.

By 1890, she's named in some local publications as having already done several dozen projects in her own name.

And a lot of the clients in these early years seemed to be women.

So women hiring her to do private residences, which she considered her specialization, but also women hiring her to do women's clubs, which were an emerging movement in the late 19th century.

And they were creating their own headquarters.

She does the project for the New Century Club of Philadelphia, which was at 12th and Sansom.

It's no longer standing.

It was demolished 50 years ago this spring.

That then leads to a project for the new Century Club chapter in Wilmington.

And that is still standing.

It's her only surviving public building.

Those clubhouses that she designs, which have auditoriums where the members could host functions and fundraise for their causes and bring in special guest speakers is setting a new standard for space that women could use for organizing, for education, for socializing, and for generally building out new networks in the late 19th century.

And Minerva is creating a space for those networks and then ultimately benefiting from them herself.

She got married in December 1891 to a Unitarian minister, and they actually postponed their honeymoon because she needed to finish supervising the construction of the new Century Club in Philadelphia.

- This is a full page article about her and her work and about the place of women in architecture.

It's 1901 and that year coincides with the last time that a notice of her work appears in a professional newspaper or magazine.

So it's actually a turning point in her career.

She's still active.

That is probably one of the most unique photographs of an architect in the first years of the 20th century where she's surrounded by her three children and she never gave up on architecture.

And a piece like this shows her state of mind.

- [Molly] She's consistently a designer.

She's consistently thinking about the ways that the built environment needs to serve those using it, and the ways that design can elevate social causes.

After 1896, she designed several schools, but she also gets involved in the affordable housing movement to think about architecture in a systemic scale.

In 1945, she's designing homes for veterans.

She's an 85 year old by this point, and still designing.

The research that we've done for this exhibit and the research that carries us through her life, it's important to really recontextualize those later years as a shift and not an end to her work.

- If brunch is one of your favorite meals, Brunchaholics, located in Fishtown and now Cherry Hill, New Jersey, may be your next destination.

And here now to tell us more about the eatery is owner Aaron Anderson.

Aaron, thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- It smells incredible.

But before we dive in, tell me about Brunchaholics.

- Brunchaholics is a concept that myself, chef Terrence, and another partner Derek kind of came together and wanted to put some brunch dishes together and then create an environment that was different from anything else that you've ever been to any type of brunch experience.

- Different how?

- On Saturdays, we have like a live band.

On Sundays we have a live DJ.

So it's pretty exciting in there.

- That sounds fun.

I'm excited about the food.

But this is not your first eatery, and as someone who owns several restaurants, what keeps you coming back to the food industry and keep building bigger?

- I mean, as an entrepreneur, you put yourself in scenarios where you want to challenge yourself.

The restaurant industry, the food business is very, very tough.

So putting yourself through that ringer, challenging yourself, you need to do that every once in a while.

- And you're doing that voluntarily?

- And I'm doing that voluntarily.

And then also too partnering up all of these concepts, I'm not the sole owner, so I partner up with chefs and one of the biggest things is I talk to them and get to know them and I ask them, like, what's one of your dreams?

And it'd be, you know, hey, I wanna own my own restaurant.

So just meeting somebody, coming into their life, and then playing a part and actually making a dream come true, to me that's something that definitely keeps me coming back.

- Do you do that because as a Philly native, this is a way you can give back?

- That is part of it for sure.

Giving back in that capacity.

But then as a restaurant and a brand, we believe in nourishing the community and then also providing jobs for the community.

And that's another way of giving back as well.

- 100%.

So enough talk, I wanna bring in Chef Terrence Clark.

Terrence, why don't you come on in here.

Kind of walk me through some of these amazing creations here.

- So right here in front of me, we have our short rib hash, which is our eight hour braided short rib.

Our hash that we do at the restaurant with our special AP seasoning that maybe hopefully will be coming out sometime soon.

Gets hit with a nice gravy and the egg of your choice.

Our french toast cobbler, which is probably one of our biggest sellers.

Thick cut brioche, our french toast batter, which we do a little different.

Bourbon apples, cookie crumble, and a little bit of drizzle.

And our SGG, which probably is our number one seller, our shrimp gumbo grits, which is a vegetarian gumbo.

13/15 shrimp, fried catfish, jumbo crab meat, and of course our grits.

- So this one gives me chills because this is so up my alley.

I wanna try this.

I just do have to ask, this french toast cobbler combo, who thought of that because that is genius?

- The way I come up with stuff is I sit down, I kind of go through other things and I see what people aren't doing and I try to do things that people aren't doing.

That way we can be unique in our space.

- Oh my gosh.

Wait, can I try some of this stuff?

- Absolutely.

- Real quick before we run out of time, we're almost out of time.

I'm gonna go with my, yes.

I'm gonna put my cards down.

(chefs laughing) So good.

- Thank you.

- Oh my gosh.

Quickly, do you guys have any holiday things coming up, holiday menu items that you can kind of talk about or?

- Well since we just opened in Cherry Hill, we were thinking about doing some things for the holidays, but we're not 100% sure yet.

We wanna make sure that we have all our systems and things in place and we're doing just our regular menu as well as possible.

- Just gotta check it out then and see what they do.

So for more information on Brunchaholics' hours and location, here is the website.

Aaron, Terrence, thank you so much for joining us and filling my belly.

This is incredible.

We will see you all next week.

Thanks for joining us.

In the meantime, I'm just gonna be stuffing my face.

Bye everyone.

- Bye.

- Bye.

(upbeat music)