Clinton Phfahler Edgar grew up in Newtown Square, one of seven children of Andrew and Mary Edgar. The family lived on a farm, “The Orchard,” and the farmhouse still exists at 34 ½ Mary Jane Lane, though surrounded by the tract homes built when the farm was sold off in the 1950s. Clinton, known as “Day,” attended local schools. He was 12 in 1907 when the Newtown Square Post Office was burgled for the first time. By 1910, the post office had been robbed four more times, that’s five times in four years! 15-year-old Day Edgar decided that this circumstance was worthy of note, and so he wrote a play about the topic, entitled “Robbing the Newtown Post Office, or Easy Money.” The play was cast, and according to an old history account, “It played to a capacity audience when presented in the old Newtown Hall.”
Day had talent. He went off to college at Princeton, where he thrived. He was elected editor of the Daily Princetonian newspaper. He co-wrote the 1925 Triangle Show, traditionally a student-written musical comedy that is first performed on campus and then taken on a national tour. “The Scarlet Coat” was performed at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music on two dates in February of 1925, to a Who’s Who of prominent Society families. A critic recorded that the show received an enthusiastic reception, noting:
“The Scarlet Coat, merely another name for the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, is a drama of the Northwest. … Sixteen voices in a special chorus “put across” the musical numbers. … The dancing and lighting effects were good.”
Day also found time during his college days to write and sell 12 articles to the Saturday Evening Post, one of the most popular weekly magazines in America. Those stories were later compiled into a book, “Princeton Town” published in 1925 when he graduated.
After college, he returned to Newtown Square and continued to live at The Orchard while pursuing a career as a freelance author, selling over 100 articles to the Post, Colliers and Ladies Home Journal, and doing copyrighting for N. W. Ayer & Son, the oldest advertising agency in the country. He married Helen Hester Seeley in 1939, and they continued to live in Newtown Square until after the war when they moved to Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia to begin raising their children, Andrew and Deborah.
Day accepted an offer from the Post to work full-time in 1941 and was an associate editor and contributing writer for 24 years, retiring in 1965. He passed away in 1970. Let us remember this son of Newtown Square, whose successful writing career got its start because the local post office was robbed!
For more history on Newtown Square, Delaware County, and membership information, please visit our website at: https://nshistory.org/