Almost everybody loves chocolate.

Henry Oscar Wilbur was a Philadelphia chocolatier who was probably most famous for his small chocolate pieces with his name on the bottom. He called them Wilbur Buds and offered a spirited competition to Milton Hershey’s Kisses.

Although Hershey is not buried locally, his beloved wife Kitty spent nearly three years in a receiving vault until a new cemetery was built in Hershey as her final resting place.

Grain merchant Franklin Baker once received a load of coconut as payment for a boatload of grain. Baker turned this serendipitous occurrence into a lifetime of working with coconut, such that the name “Baker’s” is almost synonymous with coconuts.

You’ll hear about these three Laurel Hill West residents - two permanent, one temporary - in this episode of Biographical Bytes from Bala #034 – Sweet Tooth: Wilbur, Baker, Hershey.

An earlier episode of All Bones Considered covered the 1900 Paris Olympiad and some Laurel Hill residents who participated. This month features four more Olympians from the early 20th century.

Lawson “Robbie” Robertson won medals in the Intercalated Games of 1906 in Athens and went on to become head coach of the University of Pennsylvania track and field team. He took them back to the Olympics several more times.

Jervis Watson Burdick was a UPenn student member of the Sphinx Club and the Canteen Club who competed in the1912 Olympics but did not medal.

James Edwin “Ted” Meredith was the fastest schoolboy in the country and broke every distance running record from 100 meters to 1 mile; his Gold in the 1912 Olympics was for the 4 x 400-meter relay.

And Donald Fithian Lippincott surprised everyone, including himself, when he won a silver and a bronze in 1912.

You will learn about these four athletes along with the jumbled letters of the AC4A, the AAU, the NCAA, and the IAAF on this month’s edition of “All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories – Four More Olympians from 1904 to 1912.”

Abram Winegardner Harris was one of the top educators in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After he was schooled in Philadelphia and spent time with the Department of Agriculture, he served as president of the land grant school in Orono when it became the University of Maine. While there he helped establish the first general studies academic fraternity Phi Kappa Phi.

Then he spent a few years at a private secondary boarding school in Maryland where he established the Cum Laude Society for secondary school scholars.

Next stop: Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he was responsible for a massive expansion of the entire campus – gymnasium, stadium, science center, and much more. A tradition he began in 1916 continues more than a century later.

Harris is interred under a simple, tasteful stone next to the road in the River section of Laurel Hill West. It identifies him simply as “SCHOLAR / TEACHER / LEADER / FRIEND".