Ollive. Paine first became involved in civic matters when he was based in Lewes. He appears in the Town Book as a member of the Court Leet, the governing body for the town. He was also a member of the parish vestry, an influential local Anglican church group whose responsibilities for parish business would include collecting taxes and tithes to distribute among the poor. On March 26, 1771, at age 34, Paine married Elizabeth Ollive, the daughter of his recently deceased landlord, whose business as a grocer and tobacconist he then entered into. From 1772 to 1773, Paine joined excise officers asking Parliament for better pay and working conditions, publishing, in summer of 1772, The Case of the Officers of Excise, a 12-page article, and his first political work, spending the London winter distributing the 4,000 copies printed to the Parliament and others. In spring 1774, he was again dismissed from the excise service for being absent from his post without permission. The tobacco shop failed. On April 14, to avoid debtors' prison, he sold his household possessions to pay debts. He formally separated from his wife Elizabeth on June 4, 1774, and moved to London. In September, mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Commissioner of the Excise George Lewis Scott introduced him to Benjamin Franklin, who was there as a voice for colonial opposition to British colonial rule, especially as it related to the Stamp Act, and the Townshend Acts. He was publisher and editor of the largest American newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette and suggested emigration to Philadelphia. He handed out a letter of recommendation to Paine, who emigrated in October to the American colonies, arriving in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774. In Pennsylvania Magazine Paine barely survived the transatlantic voyage. The ship's water supplies were bad and typhoid fever killed five passengers. On arriving at Philadelphia, he was too sick to disembark. Benjamin Franklin's physician, there to welcome Paine to America, had him carried off ship; Paine took six weeks to recover. He became a citizen of Pennsylvania "by taking the oath of allegiance at a very early period". In March 1775, he became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, a position he conducted with considerable ability. Before Paine's arrival in America, sixteen magazines had been founded in the colonies and ultimately failed, each featuring substantial content and reprints from England. In late 1774, Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken