From The Local: Student Discovers a Jazz Pioneer in Vintage Letters

It was in a hidden corner of a Lansdale antique store that 14-year-old Ali Norcini stumbled upon a cardboard box covered in what appeared to be decades of dust. Inside were 117 handwritten letters and postcards, their yellowed pages filled with elegant cursive—a script the Springside Chestnut Hill Academy 8th grader couldn't fully decipher.

"I never learned cursive writing," Ali explained, "and I couldn't read everything." Yet something about these forgotten messages, postmarked between 1952 and 1961, captivated her.

What began as a curious purchase would become a window into the life of Charles E. Austin, a now largely forgotten but once-celebrated jazz trumpeter from Pittsburgh—and a hands-on lesson on what makes history matter.

Continue reading in The Chestnut Hill Local.