Channeling Cornelius

Nearly eighty years ago when a heavy radio fell on the head of Dolores Ann Theresa Veronica Duffy, her panicked mother ran with her to a Philadelphia hospital. The doctors treated her but told her mother the injury was severe, and to watch for strange behavior in the future. Those doctors were right about the strange behavior, but they could never have predicted her amazing life. Channeling Cornelius is the memoir of a spunky octogenarian and a coming of age story on the edge of the greatest generation. It's a walk back in time through growing up on the front stoops of tight-knit ethnic neighborhoods in the City of Brotherly Love when friends and family gathered in the evening to "chase the duck"; when everybody took care of their neighbors and when a beat cop could become the mayor of one of the largest cities in the United States. It tells the fascinating and little known story of the relationship between one of the great legends of Philadelphia baseball and the legendary man who owned Broadway, who her family swears to this day is a close relative. It is a crazy tale filled with her conversations with an imaginary friend who wore a feather in his hat; relatives that included horse thieves, bootleggers, grave robbers, card sharks and a husband she adored who worked for decades at an evening newspaper that nearly everybody in Philadelphia once read. From celebrating in Times Square at the end of World War II to a boardwalk in New Jersey listening to a new band called Bill Haley and the Comets, and from witnessing the Hindenburg airship disaster to being mistaken for the kidnapped Lindbergh baby, the life of Dolores McDowell was anything but dull. But most of all, Channeling Cornelius is a charming love story, and an inspirational tale of an extraordinary woman who never graduated from high school but became an entrepreneur who founded and operated several businesses, while raising four children who somehow turned out normal. Crazy because a radio fell on he