Correspondence! We get correspondence! We get stacks and stacks of correspondence! Bad weather? We scoff at bad weather. Scoff, scoff! Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays our electrons from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
First-Time Reader Angela checks in to ask:
I am moving up to McKeesport sometime soon. I am curious to know where I could start my search for a job in reception. I have already looked in the local papers (well what I could find on here) and I just need some help from a local around there. And is there any shopping around McKeesport? Thanks ahead of time for any help!
Well, welcome to Our Fair City, Angela, and good luck! There are some challenges in the Mon-Yough area, but there are a lot of opportunities, too.
When you say "reception," I assume you mean a job as an office assistant or something similar. Two large employers in McKeesport right now are Dish Network (Echostar) and UPMC McKeesport Hospital. Echostar has a national call center in McKeesport, and they post job openings on their website. UPMC McKeesport is a large community hospital affiliated with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
You should also check with McKeesport Area School District and Penn State McKeesport Campus.
Our Fair City is close to West Mifflin, Monroeville, and North Huntingdon, and only about 20 minutes by car from Pittsburgh, so you may also want to expand your job search slightly. You can find job listings from The Daily News and other local papers via Adquest.
As for shopping, there is a fairly new shopping development called The Waterfront up in Homestead, and large shopping malls in West Mifflin (Century III) and Monroeville (Monroeville Mall). Shopping in McKeesport itself is, unfortunately, pretty limited these days to supermarkets, florists, etc. --- no big clothing stores or stuff like that.
Good luck, and welcome to the area!
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Alert Reader Arden wants to know:
Just read about this in the latest
Wired ... have you ever thought about podcasting Tube City Online? Sorta like doing a radio reading of your blog ... which might be a interesting new frontier for Tube City Omnimedia.
Well, I have been told I have an excellent face for radio. Also, some of my friends say they like to hear me on the radio, because then they can turn me off.
One problem is that we lack the infrastructure here at Tube City Omnimedia World Headquarters, high in the hills above Our Fair City, to support a podcast. However, thanks to a donation of a new computer by Dementia Unlimited Technical Support, we have recently replaced our Timex Sinclair with a newer machine, and we are also looking to upgrade our 300 baud modem. So, something like that is a possibility in the future.
Of course, there is still a semi-dormant effort to bring a low-power FM radio station to Our Fair City, and I am involved with that organization, along with seven other people. We were rarin' to go until Congress kicked the legs out from under the FCC rules that would have allowed these small community broadcasters to go on the air.
However, U.S. Senators John McCain, Patrick Leahy and Maria Cantwell have introduced new bipartisan legislation that would relax the arbitrary restrictions that have hampered our effort, and those of so many other non-profit groups. As they say on the radio, "stay tuned"!
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Alert Reader John says:
I thought I'd share with you some stuff I found on the internet while looking for other things. This website has information regarding St. Mary's German Church on Olive Street. I was depressed when I learned it was demolished back in 1997. I'm happy to find out that paintings in the church were saved, and are displayed at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church in Carnegie, Pa. The site has some interesting information about the artist-monks who painted them in the early 1900's. I'd like to know where the very large image of God sitting at the throne is located. That image seemed so life-like when I was a kid.
Great website, John! Thanks.
I attended St. Mary's German School from second through fourth grades, and I don't remember that particular painting, though we went to Mass once a week. I do remember being surprised that there were swastikas carved into the marble pillars; of course, the church was built 30 years before those symbols would come to be associated with the horrors of Nazi Germany. I was later told that swastikas were originally benign and was a form of decoration that German Christians often used.
To a little kid, St. Mary's German was a dark, forbidding church. Unlike modern churches, which strive for a relaxed, informal feeling, St. Mary's made you feel the foreboding power of God --- as if he was not only present in that church, but he was ticked off. That's very Germanic, now that I think of it.
Like you, I found the demolition of St. Mary's disappointing, though McKeesport was definitely "overchurched" at the time. St. Mary's had very unusual architecture (historians considered it one of the best examples of Italian basilica-style church design in the U.S.), and had it been located in Pittsburgh, it undoubtedly would have been preserved for some other use, like a concert hall or restaurant. Once architectural treasures like St. Mary's are gone, they're lost forever. And what did we gain in place of St. Mary's? An empty, weedy lot.
On the other hand, the old Protestant church (Baptist, I think?) across Olive Street is still standing even though the congregation is long gone, and it's been sad to watch that building torn apart by vandals and homeless people. Sometimes I wonder if it's for the best that St. Mary's is gone, rather than watching it fall into disrepair.
John adds: "I just wanted to say I love the Tube City Almanac. I look forward to reading it every morning."
Thanks for the kind words. Some people like to print out the Tube City Almanac and take it into the necessary room when they have their morning constitutional. They find it comes in handy in case they run out of paper. In fact, Tube City Omnimedia is thinking about introducing a new quilted, double-ply version of the Almanac just for that purpose. Other people like to read the Almanac at lunchtime, especially if they're on a diet; it helps suppress their appetites.
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Confidential to Professor Quackenbush: Just because you can't drive a rear-wheel drive car in the snow doesn't mean that the big kids don't know how. After all, the late Hunter S. Thompson used to tool around Colorado --- which gets a lot more snow than Western Pennsylvania --- in a Chevy Caprice convertible with a 454 V-8 and a racing suspension (the infamous "Red Shark"). And he was doing it high on God-knows-what --- we're sober. My advice, Quacky, is to keep the training wheels on your bicycle and stay on the sidewalk where you belong!
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To Do This Weekend: McKeesport Symphony Orchestra presents "In Sousa Style," 7:30 p.m. Saturday at McKeesport Area High School auditorium. Tickets start at $12. Call (412) 664-2854 ... The Al Lewis Big Band plays The Palisades, Fifth Avenue at Water Street, 9 p.m. Saturday. Call (412) 678-6979 ... The Flow Band plays Beemer's, West Fifth Avenue near the Mansfield Bridge, at 9 p.m. tonight. Call (412) 678-7400.
And last but certainly not least, the girls' basketball team at my dear alma mater plays Clairton at 5 p.m. today at the A.J. Palumbo Center for the WPIAL championship. Serra Catholic is 20 and 1 and averaging more than 70 points per game. The Tube City Almanac, being the objective publication that it is, does not take sides. But I do. GO EAGLES!
Sometimes I get really worried that someone might actually take the babble written in the Almanac and elsewhere at Tube City Online seriously. Like, for instance, a few weeks ago, I commented on two things that made me scratch my head about Our Fair City's website; namely, that the bridge pictured in the banner was obviously not in Our Fair City, and that a page about the history of the city made a very flattering reference to the former mayor.
About a week later, I checked the website, and both of those things had been corrected. Geez-oh-Pete, someone at City Hall isn't really reading this stuff, are they?
If so, I have four words for them: Get back to work!
No, seriously, to Mayor Brewster and anyone else who might be out there looking at this nonsense: Hello, and feel free to send complaints, corrections, bouquets and brickbats to me via email or snail mail. Don't hesitate to give me the business. (Everyone else already does.)
Also, I tease the Mon-Yough area because I love the Mon-Yough area; I hope that's obvious. It dawned on me the other day that I've never lived more than walking distance from the Monongahela River; the farthest away was three or four years when I was first growing up in Versailles. Even in college, I was only a mile or two away from the mighty Monongahela.
(Meaning for all of these years, I've been drinking Mon River water, which probably explains my dain bramage.)
That's why I'm always happy when I see a story like this one by Jonathan Barnes in the Post-Gazette:
Next month, Canady Technology will open its headquarters in the Industrial Center of McKeesport, and the firm's founder, who lives in McKeesport, as well as town leaders say a new Mon Valley legacy will start on this former site of the National Tube mill.
The town already is the birthplace of the Canady Catheter, which spawned the company and which is named after its inventor, transplant surgeon Dr. Jerome Canady.
During his residency at UPMC McKeesport Hospital in 1991, Canady developed the flexible catheter which bears his name.
According to Barnes' story, the Canady office will employ 10 people at first. Eventually, up to 300 people will be working there at a facility to manufacture the catheters.
And you wonder why they still call it the "Tube City."
You can read more about the Canady Catheter here. (This is a good time for one of those disclaimers: You know, the opinions expressed here are not those of my employers, my friends, my family, or the Commissioner of Major League Baseblog.)
Also from Barnes in the P-G: Efforts to rehab the Lysle Boulevard parking garage continue. Possible uses include parking for RIDC's industrial park, just across the railroad tracks, or a park and ride lot for Picksberg-bound commuters (as was suggested here in the Almanac some time ago).
In an item from elsewhere in the news, let's play "what if."
Let's say hypothetically that you had an alcohol problem and you beat your spouse. Then, hypothetically, let's say the cops showed up one night to break up an argument. Hypothetically speaking, you shot one of them in the chest at point-blank range with a .44 Magnum and blew him over the railing of your porch.
And then, again, strictly hypothetically, you were arrested, charged with attempted homicide, then convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Hypothetically speaking, do you think your employer would allow you to take an early retirement and collect your flipping pension?
At my alma mater, that's apparently how it works. I was reading the news stories this week (Post-Gazette, Tribune-Review) about the shooting of Mount Lebanon police officer Daniel Rieg and noticed that the person convicted in the shooting is being referred to as a "former" or "retired" professor. A quick search through the archives of those newspapers revealed that after his arrest he took early retirement.
Now, I'm assuming that this fellow had a contract that obligated the institution to pay his pension. But don't those contracts have morals clauses? Meaning that if you did something illegal that brought disrepute upon yourself and (by inference) the institution, like, oh, I don't know, for example, shooting a cop, the contract was no longer binding.
I appreciate the need for compassion, and I'm glad that my alma mater has some compassion for someone who's clearly having a rough time of things right now.
But I also wonder exactly what tiny fraction of those big student loan payments I make every month are going for this fellow's pension.
By the way, remember that disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone, not those of my employers, my friends, my family, or the Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County, which according to the commercial that runs every morning on the radio, was voted as having the "best-tasting water by the American Water Works Association."
Which brings up another question: Isn't water supposed to be odorless and tasteless? But that's a question for another Almanac, I suppose.
Up in Harrisburg, your state Legislature has been busy, busy, busy.
OK, they didn't find time to arrange funding for mass transit before they took off for a break. (State legislators don't ride buses --- get real!)
Yes, there are still potholes forming in the state highways around the Mon-Yough area that are large enough to form their own townships.
Maybe our school property tax system is as antiquated as a canalboat full of buggy whips.
And sure, our local municipalities are straining under the weight of providing police, fire and public works service.
But you're missing the point. The Pennsylvania General Assembly doesn't have time for that kind of penny-ante nonsense. Our solons are tackling the real issues:
Public schools would be required to start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem under a bill that would revive certain elements of a state law that a federal appeals court overturned last year.
Two of the bill's sponsors, Republican state Sens. Jeffrey Piccola and James Rhoades, said Wednesday they believe the new bill would withstand a legal challenge because it would not require students' parents to be notified if they declined to say the pledge or sing the anthem.
The parental-notification requirement of the law, which was passed and signed in 2002, was cited in a district judge's ruling that declared it unconstitutional in 2003. An appellate court upheld the decision in August.
Of all of the pressing problems confronting the Commonwealth, the shocking lack of patriotism among grammar schoolers is the most important, I think. I keep seeing gangs of elementary-school kids at bus stops sporting Che Guevara T-shirts and anarchist tattoos, don't you? Of course you do!
I'm not sure why, since in the same AP story, a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association says that "only a few" school districts anywhere in the state don't require students to say the pledge.
Nevertheless, before this kind of rampant lawlessness got out of control, legislators swung into action, and they've struck an important blow for ... something. Their own re-elections, most likely. Can you imagine what would happen to any legislator who failed to vote for this law? "Joe Doakes doesn't think kids should say the Pledge of Allegiance. What does he have to hide?"
Nice work, guys! Take another leased car out of petty cash.
Still, Pennsylvania has a long way to go. Our elected officials are a group of pikers when it comes to tackling the important issues that shape our modern world. For real, hot, stimulating legislative action, one must turn to Pennsylvania's sister state, Alabama. The Montgomery, Ala., Advertiser explains:
The U.S. Supreme Court declined Tuesday to review the constitutionality of an Alabama law banning the sale of sex toys, but that doesn't mean products are going to be pulled from Alabama store shelves.
A judge's injunction stopping enforcement of the law remains in effect, and the judge will have to decide whether to leave it in effect until other issues in the case are resolved, said Alabama Attorney General Troy King, who has been defending the law. ...
In 1998, the Alabama Legislature enacted a law that bans only the sale of sex toys, not their possession. Alabama residents may lawfully purchase sex toys out of state for use in Alabama, or use them if the devices have other recognized medical or therapeutic uses.
That's why they have those big signs on the Interstates leading into Alabama: "Sell a vibrator, go to jail. It's the law."
Now, there are those who would say, "When marital aids are outlawed, only outlaws will have marital aids." But I say to these people, "Please wash your hands before touching anything in this room."
Let's review: Enforced patriotism? OK. Sex toys? Not OK.
I feel safer already, don't you?
Things I learned from the Internet while I was looking for other things:
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Good grief!
It's been five years this month since Charles Schulz died. Feb. 13, 2000, to be exact. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard the news, and while I'm soft (in the head, mostly), I'm not too proud to admit I cried a little. I think the idea that he had died the night before his last comic strip was set to run was a little bit too much for me.
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This is truly a bizarre waste of time. TV Party has posted a page of pilots and promos for '70s TV shows. The promo for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" includes a version of the famous "You've got spunk" scene that you've probably never seen before. You'll also get to see the original anchors of "20/20," who were replaced after the pilot.
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Have you seen those online services that allow you to create a smaller URL? "Abcde ... Whatever" allows you to create the world's longest email addresses.
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Why do the people at "Anti-Magnet" hate America?
We don't hate America, we hate that people think slapping a stupid magnet on the back of their car has meaning. Mostly everyone in this country supports the troops and hopes they will return safely. Maybe you should be telling them directly in person, on the phone or in a letter and not driving around with a big magnetic banner you probably got at Wal-Mart that simply attempts to prove to everybody but the troops that you support the troops more than everybody else.
Reporter: Yes, Bill Jones here, a.k.a. Tom True, a.k.a. Rev. Wholey Rowler. My tough independent question is, Do you think that the President is even more handsome today than he was a week or ago? And, really, is there any end to how dashing and gallant he can be? Whatta hunk.
Those old enough to have worked at the Mouse House back in the sixties might remember that Disney animated features were often loaned to employees for private screenings. Of course, the films were not meant for the general public. In order for my experiment to work, I had to fudge the rules a bit, but it was worth it. I borrowed a copy of Disney's "Song of the South," and filled a hall with dozens of black families. I threaded the 16mm film into my Bell and Howell projector, and the show began. The audience laughed, cried and cheered the film. It appeared the movie made by a "racist" named Walt Disney failed to enrage black people -- it delighted them. And, it seemed to me that Disney's fear factor was not real, but imagined.
My brother called me Friday. "You know that today is grandma's birthday, right?" My unprintable response indicated otherwise.
Her birthday has only fallen on the same day for (mumble-mumble) years. In fact, for my whole life, as it might be apparent. You might think that I could find some space in what's left of my brain to remember it, but no, every year, it's a big surprise. Am I self-centered much? Maybe I should write it down --- with a tattoo on my forehead, for instance.
I was extremely lucky in being able to know all of my grandparents, and remain extremely fortunate in that my grandmothers are both still alive, at somewhere north of age 39. Or as birthday grandma said this weekend, "They say life begins at 40, but they don't tell you what kind of life!"
I learn something new every time I talk to my grandmothers. This weekend, I learned that she saw the infamous Dionne quintuplets during a visit to see my Aunt Marie up in northern Ontario during the 1930s. As grandma remembers, visitors were taken up to a balcony to look down on a nursery where the children were playing.
(As it turns out, her memory is spot-on --- that's exactly how the quints were exhibited.)
She grew up in Our Fair City's East End, in a neighborhood that's mostly gone now, wiped out when Fifth Avenue was widened and an interchange was built at the east end of the McKeesport-Duquesne Bridge. Their house was on Sylvan Avenue, two doors away from Crooked Run Creek --- close enough, as she's told me in the past, that every time it rained, they had to move their furniture to higher floors.
Afterward in those pre-flood control and pre-sewage treatment days, she and her neighbors had the disgusting job of cleaning the muck out of their rented houses. Most of the neighbors were German immigrants, including my great-grandparents; indeed, my great-grandmother learned English by helping her children (including my grandmother) with her homework. The landlady for my grandmother's family was widowed; she lived in one room at the back of the house and worked in a McKeesport department store as a seamstress, sewing beads onto gowns by hand.
Birthday grandma was one of seven children --- six sisters and one brother --- though one sister died as an infant, and another died at age 11 after an accident at the old St. Mary's German School on Olive Street. According to grandma, she was jumping rope when several boys tripped her, seriously twisting her leg. The nuns sent her home in a taxi after she passed out in class.
But the doctor, an incompetent, didn't treat the wound properly, and after several days it went septic. It was only when a visiting nurse from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. came around and realized that my grandmother's sister was dying of blood poisoning that the little girl was rushed to McKeesport Hospital. By then, it was too late.
A third sister died a few years later, shortly after being married and giving birth to two children. Such was life in a Mon Valley milltown before modern medicine.
Yesterday, grandma recalled peddlers bringing wagons of fresh produce around the neighborhood. One peddler might bring nothing but potatoes; another, nothing but watermelons. Often, they'd water the horses in the creek and leave the wagons on Sylvan Avenue.
"The horses would thank us for the water by leaving a mess in the street," grandma recalls, "and the men in the neighborhood would go out and shovel it up and use it for their gardens."
During the Steel Strike of 1919, she says, there were new visitors to Sylvan Avenue --- mounted Pennsylvania State Police, who also watered their horses in Crooked Run.
When my great-grandfather got sick and died, the children were forced to drop out of school and get jobs, although the city required them to attend an alternative school for one day per week until they turned 16. A "waste of time," grandma says. "We sat and read magazines."
Grandma worked at the lunch counter at the old G.C. Murphy five and ten store on Fifth Avenue near Sheridan Street, while her mother took in laundry until she, too, became too ill to work.
When I left, grandma said, "I'm sorry that I tell you these old stories. I know nobody wants to hear them."
I'd never tell grandma she was wrong about anything, of course, but I admit I'm sometimes sorely tempted.
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Last week I wrote about how addicted I am to Google. On a lark, while I was working on this entry, I "googled" the first name of my cousin's husband in Canada, along with the town he lives in and the business that he used to be in. I didn't even enter their last name, mind you.
Within two jumps I had pulled up a complete family tree, including a picture of my great-aunt --- that is to say, my grandmother's sister, who's been dead now for 20 years.
What a weird world we live in.
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Speaking of Canada, I'm not a hockey fan, but I have found the whole NHL lockout-slash-strike fascinating to read about.
The Toronto Star says Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky were badly misused by their friends when they were asked to broker a deal between the NHL and the players' union:
What has become apparent is that both Gretzky, a managing partner of the Phoenix Coyotes, and Lemieux, a star player and reluctant owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, worked tirelessly to try to bridge the gap and broker a deal between the two sides after NHL commissioner Gary Bettman cancelled the season last Wednesday. Colorado Avalanche owner Stanley Kroenke and Vancouver Canucks president Stanley McCammon were also said to be working for a deal.
The involvement of Gretzky and Lemieux spiked optimism that the imbroglio could finally be settled.
Going into Saturday, most media outlets in North America were predicting a deal was at hand, largely because they assumed that the two sides wouldn't risk dashing hockey fans' hopes once again.
But when the league and players actually sat down to talk, they discovered that the chasm between the two of them was wider than ever and both Gretzky and Lemieux, both firmly in the ownership camp, couldn't do anything about it.
What seems to be forgotten is that the NHL was something approaching a terminally ill condition before the lockout. Television ratings were a joke, public acceptance -- beyond hard-core fans -- was minimal. Hockey might have been considered by some to be one of the four major sports, along with football, baseball and basketball, but it has long since fallen from that group. Auto racing has a significantly larger following.
To have returned to that status might not have been the death of the NHL, but it would have been the death of the Pittsburgh franchise.
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