Biography of Phillip Magroin

Phillip Henry Magroin was born on October 30th, 1938 in Trenton New Jersey.  It was the night of the famous Orson Wells radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds and Phil's mother, Sharron Magroin, was one of those who panicked thinking that the show was an actual broadcast.  In her frantic frenzy to get out of town she was hit by a train as she crossed the tracks near where she lived.  Upon the impact little Phil squirted out and shot two blocks over, landing on a pile of reject mattresses that happened to be on the dock of a mattress factory.

With little Phil's mother wrapped around the axle of a steam locomotive, she wasn't going to be in very good shape to be a parent.  Phil was adopted and cared for by her brother, who just happened to be an employee of the mattress factory and was at work the night that Phil landed on the dock.  When it came time to pick a name, Phil's uncle, now officially his dad, remembered how one of the startled dock workers had yelled out "Jesus Henry Christ", upon seeing the newborn fall out of the sky and onto the dock.  He didn't think it proper to outright name him Jesus Henry Christ but did want to give Phil a name that connected him in some way to the uniqueness of that night.  With that in mind Phil's dad named him Phillip, the name of the co-worker that had yelled out the profanities, and then used the name Henry as the middle name.  With the names officially in place, Phillip Henry Magroin began his life.

Drama, trauma and tragedy were with Phil all of his life.  At a very young age his parents would dress him up as a lab rat and rent him out to the local laboratory.  It was two years before the laboratory realized what was going on and had to put a stop to it.  Unfortunately there were a large number of drugs that had to be recalled when they realized that Phil was not a lab rat therefore skewing all of the data that was collected during the research.  Ironically, one of the drugs that was developed while Phil was doing time as a lab rat was the drug that he was prescribed to treat a life threatening infection that he had developed due to a wedgie. 

By 1956 Phil had finished high school and had received a full scholarship to Fairleigh Dickinson University.  His life as an undergraduate student was relatively uneventful.  He went most all the way through his studies without having selected a major.  That changed about half way through his last year as he set alone in his dormitory after smoking a joint.  He claims that his dictionary started speaking to him in tongues.  He found that rather odd because it was an English dictionary and he didn't understand how an English dictionary could be speaking in other languages.  Furthermore, when had the dictionary had time to learn all of these other languages.  A few days later, after the smoke had cleared, Phil marched into the deans office and declared that he would be majoring in world literature and that his goal in life was to have a text font named after him.  Phil graduated with honors a few months later.

Phil spent several years in different jobs that were relevant to his degree.  None of them seemed to last more than a few months.  In early 1965 Phil decided that it was time to do something different and took a job in the warehouse of Jersey Paper Company.  He had finally found steady employment and over the years begin to advance his career.  Phil had been promoted to a quality control supervisor position in the 8 1/2" x 11" division for only six months when he lost his job due a dyslexic moment that caused thousands of reams of blank paper to be manufactured backwards at 11" x 8 1/2".

Phil had lost all interest in industrial America and the capitalist mechanism.  He felt completely without cause.  A couple of months later he noticed an "orphans for sale" sign in a neighborhood window and became infuriated at the gesture.  From that point on he grew to become a formidable activist for orphans and drew world-wide attention to orphans rights with his OFUQ (Orphans for Unbiased Quality) program.

Phil died at the age of 82 moments after coming out of a meeting with Microsoft where he was unsuccessful at getting them to add a text font to Microsoft Word that was named after him.  He never revealed to anyone what the Phil Magroin font looked like, carrying that information with him to the grave.