WWII-era Philadelphia comes back to life in Count Basie tunes, Strawbridge’s, and South Philly block parties

When we first meet Bok High graduate Ozzie Phillips — one of three protagonists in Sadeqa Johnson’s latest novel Keeper of Lost Children — a block party on South Philadelphia’s Ringgold Street is just winding down. In between the last dollops of creamy potato salad and sips of clear corn liquor, Ozzie’s friends and family wish the young serviceman a bon voyage.

The year is 1948 and 18-year-old Ozzie is headed to Germany to join hundreds of thousands of military men occupying post World War II Germany.

He spends the last few weeks with his girlfriend, Rita, picnicking at the Lakes in FDR Park and walking through Center City department stores like Wanamaker’s and Strawbridge’s. One night the couple go to Ridge Avenue’s Pearl Theater to see Pearl Bailey perform.

The next morning, Ozzie’s Uncle Millard picks him up in a Vagabond-blue Oldsmobile and the two cruise down Broad Street, Count Basie tunes playing on WHAT AM. Uncle Millard circles City Hall, depositing Ozzie at Reading Terminal Station where he hops on a train to Trenton’s Fort Dix Army Base before embarking a steam boat to Germany.

It’s Ozzie’s time in Germany that fuels the plot of the sentimental historical fiction novel.

“It’s such a joy for me to write the Philly scenes,” Johnson said during a recent video chat. The book publicist turned New York Times best-selling author was born in South Philadelphia, grew up in North, and graduated from George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science. Today the married mom of three writes from her home in Virginia, right outside Richmond.

“I left Philly when I went to Marymount Manhattan College in New York,” Johnson said. “But where you grow up is always in your DNA. Philly is in my soul. When I sit down and paint pictures of historical moments in Philadelphia, I get to go home.”

Johnson has six books out in the world. She self-published her first, Love in a Carry On Bag, in 2012.

Her books center young Black women in old school and modern times trying to do the best with what they got. But in most of her works — especially the captivating historical fiction novels through which she’s made a name for herself on BookTok, podcasts, and traditional bestseller lists — her heroines face insurmountable odds.

Take the Yellow Wife’s Pheby Delores Brown. Set in antebellum Virginia, Brown’s story is based on the harrowing real life experience of enslaved woman Mary Lumpkin who is forced into a relationship with her enslaver for whom she bears five children.

It was a 2022 finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. It was also named one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year in 2021.

“I have this propensity to tell the story of young women 15, 16, 17, who are in a situation that feels insurmountable,” said Johnson who, up until 2023, taught creative writing in Drexel University’s master’s of fine arts program. “And I really love developing those stories that show how those young women get to the other side.”

The House of Eve, a 2023 New York Times bestseller and a Reese Witherspoon Book Club of the Month pick centers 1950s North Philadelphia teen Ruby Pearsall who falls in love with a Jewish boy whose family runs a corner store. In the book, Ruby must choose between a free ride to Cheyney University and motherhood.

“I love the research,” Johnson said. “I love learning interesting things about this city that I was brought up in.”

In Keeper — released this month by 37 INK, a division of Simon & Schuster — Ethel Gathers, a journalist and wife of an Army officer, also stationed in post World War II Germany, is the central character. There, she chances upon a group of multiracial children who she learns are the offspring of Black servicemen and German women.

Gathers, whose story is based on the life of journalist Mabel Grammer, adopts eight of the “Brown Babies” and starts an adoption agency, ultimately placing hundreds of the children with Black families in the United States. In the book, Grammer visits Philadelphia from her Washington, DC home and books a room at the Divine Lorraine, the country’s first fully racially integrated hotel.

“I stumbled upon Ms. Grammer while researching The House of Eve," Johnson said. “And in that moment, I knew I wanted to tell that story.”

Johnson breathes life into her fictional characters through extensive research, adding vivid details that take the readers back in time and thrust them into the rich tapestry of her story. Fans will often find connections to characters from previous books where they least expect it.

Ozzie’s military time and South Philly swag is based on Johnson’s great uncle, 94-year-old Edgar Murray, who, like Ozzie, grew up in South Philly and spent the latter part of the 1940s in Germany. (For the record, Johnson said, her uncle didn’t didn’t suffer with alcoholism like Ozzie does in the book.)

It was Murray who suggested Ozzie live on Ringgold Street and take his date to the Pearl Theater.

“I like the factual things she puts in there,” said the 94-year-old veteran who lives with family in Denver, Colo. “It makes it more interesting.”

Philadelphia readers with an eye for history will enjoy seeing the city unfold through Ozzie’s eyes after his 1952 return.

He leafs through Philadelphia Inquirer stories reading detailed accounts of white veterans securing “large mortgages and moving out to lofty suburbs” on the GI bill that he too applied for. He works a job at the Navy Yard, gets married at Tasker Baptist Church, and experiences a miracle at West Philly’s Mercy-Douglass Hospital.

Halfway through Keepers, Ozzie attends a party thrown by elite Civil Rights husband-and-wife-team Raymond Pace Alexander and his wife Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander at their swanky home at 17th and Jefferson. Attorneys John Francis Williams and co-founder of the Pyramid Club, Lewis Tanner Moore. Sr. — whose son, art collector Lewis Tanner Moore Jr. died in 2024 — shoot the breeze about an NAACP fundraiser and Buddy Powell, a 1940s jazz musician who was so severely beaten by the Philadelphia railroad police that he ended up in an asylum.

“In The House of Eve, I got to dig around in my mom’s memory for Ruby,” Johnson said. “This time around I got to dig around in my dad and Uncle Edgar’s head to get South Philly down. Let’s see what happens in the next book.”

Sadeqa Johnson will give an author’s talk at The Philadelphia Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, Friday, Feb. 13, 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 and include a copy of “Keeper of Lost Children”