George Dana Boardman was born on August 18, 1828, in Tavoy, Burma (now Myanmar).

He was an American clergyman. The son of the Baptist missionaries George Dana Boardman Sr. and Sarah Hall, he returned to the U.S. as a boy and attended first Worcester Academy (1846), then Brown University, where he graduated in 1852. In 1855, he graduated from the Newton Theological Institution and became pastor of the Baptist church in Barnwell, South Carolina. His views on the slavery question impelled him to exchange his charge in 1856 for a church further north. He was pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Rochester, New York, until 1864, and pastor of the First Baptist Church, Philadelphia, from 1864 to 1894. In 1899, he established the permanent lectureship known as the "Boardman Foundation in Christian Ethics" at the University of Pennsylvania. He belonged to several American and European peace organizations, e.g., the Pennsylvania Peace Society; the Universal Peace Union; the British National Peace Society; La Société de la Paix, France; the International Bureau de la Paix, Berne, Switzerland; and the International Arbitration and Peace Association. Boardman sent his 1890 pamphlet, “The Disarmament of Nations,” to the czar of Russia, Queen Victoria, and the archbishop of Canterbury. He was also president of the American Baptist Missionary Union and a founding member of the Brotherhood of the Kingdom in 1892, a group of the leading thinkers and writers of the Social Gospel movement at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

In 1855, he married Ella Catharine Covell. He died on April 28, 1903, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Bobrow Architects is an international architectural and planning practice with experience in Canada, United States, Spain, the Carribean, the Middle East and Africa. Since 1963, projects have included academic and cultural facilities, health care and research centres, institutional, commercial and government offices, integrated housing, municiple facilities, site and master planning, as well as residential architecture. The firm's design philosophy is to create sustainable architecture that is sensitive to its context but rooted in modernist values.

Composer Jerry Bock is best known as half of an award-winning musical team of Bock and Harnick. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in Flushing, New York, he got his start in musical theatre in high school after childhood piano lessons. It was in his senior year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison that his talent became evident: the musical he wrote for a student club, “Big as Life,” about the Paul Bunyan legend, went on a state tour and later had a run in Chicago. He and his classmate collaborator, Lawrence Holofcener, spent three summers gaining experience at Taminent Playhouse in the Poconos. Back in New York, Bock and Holofcener made their Broadway debut in 1955 with songs they wrote for the musical “Catch a Star.” There followed “Mr. Wonderful,” written for Sammy Davis, Jr., which ran for over 300 performances, then “Ziegfield Follies of 1956,” which flopped. Bock met a new partner in lyricist Sheldon Harnick. Their first effort, “The Body Beautiful," was not a success, but director George Abbott and producer Hal Prince nevertheless hired them to work on a musical biography of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. For this, in 1959 they won the so-called “triple crown”: a Tony (tied with Richard Rogers for “The Sound of Music”), the New York Drama Critics’ Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The team went on to compose many other musicals together, the most famous of which was “Fiddler on the Roof,” which won them another Tony in 1964. They were both inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in 1972, and in 1990 the institution gave them the Johnny Mercer Award on the 25th anniversary of the opening of “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway. That same year they were inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. In 1997 the BMI, the performing rights organization, instituted an annual Jerry Bock Award for Excellence in Musical Theater for a composer and lyricist of a project developed in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. In a bittersweet coincidence, Bock died just ten days after he had spoken at the funeral of Joseph Stein, the author of “Fiddler on the Roof.”