The April Fool's spoof is available at cranberry.dementia.org.
The Almanac entry the other day about Downtown car dealers, including Standard Auto, the Chrysler garage where Sunray now has their warehouse, inspired a reader to ask: "What was at 801 Walnut? Looks like it was an impressive building, now fallen into a little disrepair, and a church is selling furniture in the building as well as the one next door."
I think the church in question is called Voice of Vision Outreach Ministries, and my understanding is that their furniture thrift store has some real values. (I have no first hand knowledge, because I don't have enough cash to pay attention right now, much less buy more furniture.) Corrections are welcome, as always.
As for 801 Walnut, which is a four-story brick and terra-cotta building across the street from the post office, the first floor was most recently Progressive Music, which recently moved down to the old Rubenstein shoe building on Fifth Avenue. But originally, it was Baer Brothers Studebaker. In fact, if you carefully at the roof of the building on the Olive Street side, you'll see a circular engraving. That's the Studebaker "turning wheel" emblem. (As for "disrepair," I can't comment one way or the other, but according to county tax records, the building was recently sold to a couple from Jefferson Hills, and I've seen workmen going in and out since they bought it. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they're fixing it up. There appear to be people living in the upstairs apartments.)
Walnut Street was "Auto Row" in Our Fair City, much like West Liberty Avenue is in Dormont today. Most of the city's auto dealers were either on Walnut or within one or two blocks. Besides Baer Brothers Studebaker and Standard Auto, Eger Motors Ford was on Walnut (in the building currently used by Mon Valley Plumbing, but originally the Hippodrome theater). Booth Chevrolet (later Deveraux) was on Sixth Street behind the Penn-McKee Hotel; Palmer's Garage (the Pontiac dealer) was on Market across Seventh Avenue from St. Peter's Church; Galen & Jones De Soto-Plymouth was on (I think) Ninth Street about a block east of Walnut Street; and Hunter Cadillac was in the old W.W. Hunter Livery building on Sixth next to Hunter-Edmundson-Striffler funeral home. If I remember correctly, Spitz Auto Parts --- the junkyard --- was between Walnut and Market between 10th and 11th avenues, near the train tracks.
The other major dealers were John P. Mooney Packard (later Edsel, then Volkswagen) on Fifth Avenue at Hartman Street (there's a car wash there now); Palace Garage (the Nash dealer) on the first floor of the Palisades; and Sullivan Buick (on Lysle Boulevard where Rite Aid is now, they also had the Rambler franchise at one time). Bruce Browne Oldsmobile was on West Fifth Avenue near the Mansfield Bridge (it's an office building now).
I'm probably missing several other auto dealers. I'm not sure who the Dodge dealer was before Paul Jones picked up the franchise in the '60s, when his dealership was out on Eden Park Boulevard where S&S Transit is now.
...
By the way: Regarding yesterday's Kyrgyzstan spoof, only one factoid in the piece is entirely fictional. The others are true. You could, as they say, look them up. I'll leave it to your imagination to spot the completely bogus one (though you probably have a good idea already).
Western Pennsylvania has a lot of ethnic social clubs, but the other day out in Wallboard Township I ran across what I think is the region's only Kyrgyz-American Social Club. It's three miles south of the Business Route 31 Bypass on Shun Pike Road.
If you decide to visit, you can't miss it; it's a one-story cinderblock building with a Diet Rite Cola sign and a statue of Attila the Hun.
The only person there when I stopped was the club president, Zbigniew Czolgosz, who told me that he was working on the annual charity drive.
"The collapse of the Kyrgyzstan government has only made the collection more necessary than ever," he said. "We want to complete this year's drive in time for Kyrgyz Independence Day."
I interrupted him. "When's that?"
"August 31. That's when Kyrgyzstan declared independence back in 1991. Every year we hold a traditional Kyrgyz folk festival where we dance to traditional Kyrgyz melodies and old favorites like "Shüüdüngüttün Jürüshü. We also eat traditional Kyrgyz foods like assip, shurpa and besh barmak."
"That must be popular. Who doesn't enjoy a good besh barmak?"
"You'd think that, but the festival isn't as successful as we'd like," he said. "And of course, we always sing the Kyrgyz National Anthem."
Czolgosz handed me a copy of the sheet music for "Vpered Kyrgzskii Narod."
"How is this pronounced?" I asked.
"With great difficulty," he said.
Czolgosz showed me some of the club's exhibits that document life in Kyrgyzstan, like the dioramas showing sheepherders working beneath high-tension power lines.
"I understand the land of the Kyrgyz people was occupied by the Russians for more than 700 years," I said.
"That's right," he said. "And Kyrgyz culture was brutally oppressed by the czarists and the Soviets. That's why so few people have ever heard of Kyrgyzstan's great artists and composers. Everyone knows about Tschiakovsky, but how many people have ever heard of Sagïmbay Orozbak uulu? How about the great Kyrgyz inventor Tkszycky Fydrzyksy?"
"What did he develop?" I asked.
"The reversible fabric belt. But the Soviets thought he represented a dangerous threat to the native Russian pleather reversible belt industry, so they deported him to a gulag, where he was forced to make double-knit polyester suits for high-ranking Communist party officials. It's a miracle that he was able to get his life story out to the people."
"How was that?"
"A lime-green leisure suit with two pairs of pants was to be sent to the head of the Communist Party in Osh, so Fydrzyksy embroidered his autobiography into one of the pairs of pants. That pair of pants was diverted into the Kyrgyz resistance movement."
"When did you become interested in your Kyrgyz heritage?" I asked.
"Right after I discovered that I can claim to be one-thirty-second Kyrgyz on my mother's side."
"So I take it your great, great, grandfather was Kyrgyz."
"No, but my great, great, grandmother changed trains in Pulgon in 1918, and that's about as close as anyone else here in Wallboard Township."
We walked to the lobby, where a large oil painting depicts a barge laden with cement --- the product of one of Kyrgyzstan's top industries --- on Lake Issyk-Kul.
"How many people are in the Kyrgyz-American Social Club here?"
"Well, counting me, my wife, my mother, my kids, my cousins, the people who own the building --- we gave them honorary memberships --- and, um ... well, you're not Kyrgyz, are you?"
"No," I said.
"Seventeen, then," he said.
"When I first walked in, you said you were collecting for Kyrgyz relief," I said. "What type of clothes are in most demand?"
"Not clothes," he said.
"Well, Kyrgyzstan sounds like it's still mostly agrarian," I said. "Surely you're not collecting food."
"Nope, not food ..."
"Medicine? Money?"
"No, although those are always in demand," he said. "But that isn't the most pressing need."
"And that would be ... ?"
"Vowels," he said. "The entire country is suffering from a severe vowel obstruction. Until the recent trouble in Kyrgyzstan, the government was close to a trade agreement with Tahiti --- Kyrgyzstan was going to send Tahiti consonants in exchange for Tahiti's loose vowels."
I started heading for the car. Czolgosz followed me.
"Up to 45 percent of Kyrgyz suffer from irritable vowel syndrome, and each year 1 in 1,000 children choke on a glottal stop while saying their own names," he said as I tried to unlock the car door.
"That's fascinating," I said, opening the door and getting in. "Listen, good luck."
"Can't you please help?" he said, blocking the doorjamb with his elbow. "Just one ouguiya a day can help a family of four."
I started the car and put it into gear. "That's amazing," I said.
"We're also accepting oolong, unguent and auks!" he shouted as I drove away.
But as I left, I wondered if I hadn't left too hastily.
After all, even if I didn't have any extra vowels with me, I'm sure he would have accepted an IOU.
...
(P.S. Tip of the Tube City hard hat to Officer Jim for the idea.)
I see Uncle Harris has changed the design of the license plates again. I saw two of the new plates the other day. You may recall the big hullabaloo in 1999 when the Commonwealth began issuing plates with its Website URL on the bottom of them:
The idea was that no matter where Pennsylvanians went in the United States, people would see our URLs and say, "Ooh! Isn't Pennsylvania spiffy! They know what the Internet is!"
Meanwhile, the reason that the Pennsylvanians were in the other states was because they were moving the heck out of Pennsylvania, but that, as they say in the circus, is rear elephant.
Well, at least a few police officers have told me that the typeface of the word "PENNSYLVANIA" was hard to read on that light blue background, and that they looked too much like a West Virginia license plate to be easily distinguished at a distance:
Apparently, their complaints have been heard. The great minds of PennDOT put their shoulders to the wheel, and promptly got stuck in a pothole, but then they put the wheel back on the road and came up with the new Pennsylvania license plates:
You'll notice that "PENNSYLVANIA" is a bolder typeface and on a darker blue background which doesn't fade out, like the old plates did. Also, the gold at the bottom of the plates is darker and doesn't fade to white.
I have no strong opinions on the new design one way or the other. It's kind of dull-looking, though. If they wanted a license plate that was easy to read from a distance and instantly identifiable, they should have gone back to this one:
For crying out loud, it's shaped like the state of Pennsylvania. How much more identifiable could it be?
It could be worse, and it's about to get much, much worse, in fact. The Commonwealth has just announced a special licensing deal with the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing --- you've heard of them, right? --- to put the names and numbers of NASCAR drivers on Pennsylvania plates.
Which means that pretty soon, you're going to be seeing plates like this one:
I wish I was making this up, but I'm not. There's no "Dick Trickle" plate yet, but I'm hopeful.
The proliferation of speciality license plates is really becoming problematic, I think. I don't even know if I would mind a plate that said something generic like "AUTO RACING" --- maybe with a checkered flag on it --- but branding it with the NASCAR logo seems to be a bit too much. (Yes, I know, a "portion of the fees" from each NASCAR license plate goes to charity. I'll bet PennDOT spends more in one day for soap in the washrooms at the I-79 Welcome Center.) Once you brand the plates with "NASCAR," can "SpongeBob SquarePants" license plates be far behind? How about Nike? Adidas?
Besides, we already have enough nitwits driving Route 30 at 90 mph as they live out their NASCAR fantasies. Now they're going to demand banked curves. They had just better watch out for the walls, that's all. Turn, damn you, turn!
(1999 and 2005 Pennsylvania tag images courtesy John McDevitt's "PA Plates" Website. West Virginia tag and 1970 Pennsylvania tag from "Nick's Pl8s." Dale Earnhardt plate courtesy PennDOT Office of Driver and Vehicle Services.)
(P.S.: If you get one of those new plates, I'll bet they'd look really good with one of these.)
Easter Sunday always seems so anti-climatic --- you spend all of that time decorating the Easter tree, hanging the Easter decorations, going Easter shopping, and then on Easter morning, you drink some green beer, shoot off the fireworks, and it's over.
Or maybe I'm mixing my holidays again. We almost lost an altar boy in church Easter morning; we were sitting quietly while people filed up for Communion when there was a loud "clonk!" at the altar. The church ladies had stacked tulips, daffodils and lilies in pots on the wall at the back of the sanctuary to decorate it.
Well, one of the flower pots tipped over and dropped to the floor, nearly bonking one of the kids on the head. Talk about church abuse!
I can see the sad tableau at the funeral home now: "How did your son die?"
"A senseless Easter flower accident."
That afternoon --- after visiting with the relatives --- I played Betsy Ross. My American flag was starting to become unraveled at one end and was presenting a pretty sorry sight to the neighborhood, so I stitched the stripes back together (insert your own "binding up the nation" metaphor here). My needlework isn't great --- we took metal shop, not home ec --- but it's serviceable. The flag is a little bit shorter at that end because I had to cut away the frayed fabric, but I don't think anyone will notice. Also, I checked the World Almanac, and there don't seem to be any uniform standards for the length of a flag.
After last week's discussion of Bugs Bunny sawing away Florida, I was tempted to remove one of the stars, too, but I didn't know which one was Florida's, so I left them alone. God forbid I should accidentally pull off Rhode Island's star or something by mistake.
Otherwise, it was a pretty uneventful day, which is nice. Alert Reader Officer Jim noted that Our Fair City has apparently got some new police cars, so I made a field trip to the Municipal Building.
Indeed, there were three shiny Chevrolet Impalas parked on Fourth Avenue --- and they're painted in Our Fair City's traditional white with red and blue stripes, not the black-and-white of the previous mayoral administration. Hooray! I'm no fan of the modern new lettering, but it's nice to see the red and blue stripes back on the squad cars. The police cars had those stripes for at least 30 years before the recent change. If I ever get the flatbed scanner hooked back up to the computer at Tube City Omnimedia World Headquarters, I could have even grabbed a photo.
To continue this pointless exercise in nostalgia, I don't remember Our Fair City ever having Dodge or Plymouth police cars. As far as I can remember, they've always been Chevys or Fords. I've even seen photos of McKeesport squad cars from the '50s, and they were Fords and Chevys.
It's not as if Our Fair City didn't have Chrysler dealers; for a while in the 1950s and '60s, we had two --- Standard Auto on Walnut Street (currently the Sunray Electric warehouse) was the Chrysler dealer, and Galen & Jones Motor Company (now gone, it was on Ninth Street, I think) was the DeSoto-Plymouth dealer. I don't know who had the Dodge franchise before Paul Jones (Eden Park Boulevard, it's now the S&S Transit Company garage) took it.
(Fords, of course, were sold by the Red Coats at Eger Motors on Walnut Street, now Mon Valley Plumbing but originally the Hippodrome theater, while Chevrolets were sold by Booth Motor Company on Sixth Street behind the Penn-McKee Hotel. Booth became Deveraux, which moved to Eden Park Boulevard; Devie's location is now Pro Bowl Ford.)
Where was I? Alert Reader Alycia points us to a now-completed eBay auction of sound-effects and music tapes from Kennywood. Sixty tapes covering everything from the Noah's Ark sounds to music for the Lagoon Stage Shows to Fall Fantasy parades going back to 1974 went for $400.
I don't have any of that stuff, but I do have a copy of the "Voice of Kennywood" closing announcements and music that are broadcast over the public-address system 15 minutes before the park closes. One night while I worked there, we tapped a reel-to-reel tape recorder into the PA system and made a dub.
I worked for Kennywood for five summers, yet I never once thought to just sit on a bench for an hour somewhere between the carousel and the calliope and tape the ambient sound. I often think that the sounds of Kennywood --- the music, the roller coasters, the noises of the games, the kids shouting and yelling --- are as much a part of the experience as the sights and smells. If you recorded a tape like that on a June afternoon at about 3 p.m., and played it back for almost any Mon Valley person, they'd only need to listen for about a minute before they'd know instantly what it was.
Alert Reader "Elka Bong" writes to inform us that the Sky-Vue Restaurant on Lebanon Church Road near the Allegheny County Airport has apparently closed. I hope this is temporary. I just ate there a few weeks ago (with two alert readers, come to think of it) and the food was still fine. The Sky-Vue is a great place for a quiet meal, and a lot of lightplane pilots depend on it when they fly into the county airport for a "$500 hamburger."
A first-time alert reader wrote to say that the 1964 photos of Eastland Mall in the History section of Tube City Online "take me from 43 years old to 4 years old in an instant! Wow ... I remember that so vividly. Thanks."
Well, you're welcome. There's lots more to post, if I ever get around to it. Maybe if I spent more time working on the Web site, and less time sewing up old American flags ...
From the Tube City Almanac National Affairs Desk, the word "acerbic" was invented to describe Vanity Fair writer and online columnist James Wolcott, but anyone who likes "Pogo" can't be too bad. Wolcott helpfully pointed to a pop-culture blog called "By Neddie Jingo!" which recently discussed at length the appeal of Walt Kelly's immortal comic strip.
"Neddie" included an audio file of Kelly singing (growling, is more like it) a song called "Go-Go Pogo." I think it's my new favorite song. I downloaded it and burned it to a CD, which I then played about 20 times in the car this weekend:
As Maine go, oh so Pogo go, Key Lar-ar-ar-go,
Otsego-go to Frisco-go to Far-ar-ar-go,
Okeefenokee playin' possum on a Pogo
Stick around and see-ee the show.
Land-alive a band o' jive will blow go Pogo,
I go, you go, who go, to go, parlez-vous go,
From Caravan Diego, Waco and Oswego,
Tweedle-dee, he go, she go, we go, me go, Pogo!
The song is from the 1955 LP "Songs of the Pogo," and you can buy a nice clean digital CD copy of your own.
And finally, Professor Pittsblog points us to a shocking expose of the so-called "blogosphere" (pronounced "blow-gosp-EER"), or as hip teens today say, the "live journal," helpfully provided on Sunday by One of America's Great Newspapers.
Apparently these so-called "blogs" (short for "bologna logs") are sort of online diaries where people (called "bloggers") can write about themselves. According to the sidebar called "Navigating the Blogosphere," they often use so-called "emoticons," animated faces that illustrate the writer's state of mind. (Gee, thanks! Next, can you explain this hippy-hoppy rock combo music that all of the kids are so wild about?)
Because these "blogs" are available on the Internet (a worldwide network of "computers," which are portable electronic calculating machines), anyone with a so-called "Interweb browser" (such as "Microsoft Netscape") can look at them.
By the way: For the benefit of our younger readers "navigating the blogosphere," a "newspaper" is a kind of a version of Google! News edited by poorly-paid, overworked humans and printed on large pieces of paper ("newsprint") made from dead trees. Sadly, it also sometimes turns out to be a collection of yesterday's news tomorrow.
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