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An even more spectacular Biddle venture was consummated simultaneously with the Television launching. Always a sportsman, himself a boxer of the first order, Anthony Biddle last week inaugurated a return to the sporting traditions of a hundred years ago by buying, for his personal amusement, an interest in a professional fighter. The fighter was René De Vos, Belgian contender for the middleweight championship; sports - writers laughed merrily for days at the notion ot a respectable person engaging in the fight racket and of a decently dressed and wellspoken person undertaking to pat and rub a bloody pugilist between the rounds of a fight.
Such escapades have made Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr. popular but they have not, naturally, made him considered a financial authority. While other sound names— Charles G. Dawes, Victor C. Bell, Harris Hammond — were listed on the Jenkins directorate, Wall Street wondered why, if television were now an immediate commercial possibility, General Electric Radio, or some other established power had not helped to back it. There appeared to be, however, a friendly alliance with de Forest of which young Biddle is also chairman.
Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr. of Manhattan etc. is not to be confused with Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Sr. who lives in Philadelphia still, guarding jealously the Biddle fame and fortune, both of which were founded by Nicholas Biddle just after the Revolutionary War. Biddle Sr. was once a better boxer than his son; he allowed his proficiency to lead him to a pursuit which he called Athletic Christianity and which he preached around the world.
It was in 1908, then a clubman much like his son at present, that the older Anthony visited Dr. Floyd Tomkins, a Philadelphia divine, and said "I have seen the Great Light. . . ." He was given a Bible class of three men. Soon he inaugurated his own movement, designed to unite the ideas of Sport and of God. In 1912 he held a formal meeting at his Philadelphia house to organize formally "Athletic Christianity," so that any Bible class in the country could become a Drexel Biddle Bible Class and utilize his scheme for keeping young persons near to the churches.
Nor was this the extent of Biddle Sr.'s enterprises. When a mere youth, he conducted an exhaustive investigation into the condition of the inhabitants of the Madeira Islands. After eight years of preparation, he published a literary work on this topic in which the London Athenaeum, blind to the merits of U. S. enterprise, saw only the "naïve conceit of the compiler."
* Anthony Biddle's sister married the brother of Mary L. Duke; after a divorce she remarried Thomas Markoe Robertson, famed architect who has a snake tattooed on his arm.