While looking for an address near Duquesne Village two Saturdays ago, I found myself on Pennsylvania Avenue. Near the curve at the Knights of Columbus Hall, a fire department car with its lights flashing was blocking one lane of the road. I figured there was an accident up ahead.
It helps at this point to recall that I was driving the sleek, gray Mercury, which also has two ham radio antennas (antennae?) on the trunk.
The line officer manning the roadblock saw me stop and waved me past the roadblock, and I tooted my horn and drove around the curve ...
... and almost head-on into a West Mifflin police car, behind which was the West Mifflin Area High School marching band and a couple of dozen fire trucks. On both sides of the road sat people in lawn chairs, waving American flags.
I had inadvertantly found the Duquesne Village volunteer fire department parade, and it instantly hit me that the guy at the roadblock saw the antennae (antennaes? aerials?) on the trunk of the Mercury and assumed I was another fireman on my way to help out.
So I threw on the brakes, pushed the gearshift up into "reverse," and backed as fast as I could up Pennsylvania Avenue and past the roadblock, then cut the wheel around, executing a nice 180-degree spin that, in my humble opinion, would have made Jim Rockford proud. In the back mirror, I could see the firefighter's mouth hanging open a little bit, and then he started to laugh; he realized what he'd done, too.
I didn't start to laugh until I got to Dravosburg and concluded that the West Mifflin police weren't following me to give me a ticket. For what, I don't know. Disrupting a parade? Aggravated stupidity?
Anyway, that's today's Almanac, cut short because I spent Thursday nigh designing a new feature and adding what I hope will be the start of entire new section to Tube City Online devoted to driving in the Mon-Yough area. I call it "Blacktop Jungle," which was the name of a column I used to write for the Observer-Reporter.
I've decided to start tracking gasoline prices as I drive along and posting them to the new Mon-Yough Gas Gauge, but I'm going to need your help. Visit the Gas Gauge for details and for my first spotchecks, made on my way home from work last night in the West Mifflin area ...
... where I almost ran into another doggone parade, this time on Greensprings Avenue. What is it with those people?
...
To Do This Weekend: Rankin Borough hosts "Jazz in the Park" from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday at the parklet on Rankin Boulevard near Hawkins Avenue ... If you've digested your food from International Village, the Greek Food Festival continues afternoons and evenings through Sunday at Olympia Hall on Electric Avenue near East Pittsburgh. It's sponsored by Presentation of Christ Greek Orthodox Church and also features music, dancing and a jewelry sale. Call (412) 824-9188. ... Or, head back to Renzie Park tomorrow and Sunday for the fourth-annual barbecue and rib cookoff at Stephen Barry Field from 2 to 11 p.m. There will also be crafts and games, live music and fireworks Sunday night. Call (412) 675-5068 ... And if you rappa-rappa-rap, and they call you The Rapper, stick around, because The Jaggerz are playing Renzie at 7 p.m. Sunday.
Letters! We get letters! We get stacks and stacks of letters!
Somewhere, I wish I could find an original copy of Perry Como's letters theme, which apparently is on an obscure RCA Victor LP. And despite the fact that I can't stand when webpages force me to listen to music or an advertisement, I'd love for that theme to start playing whenever we get letters! We get letters! We get stacks and stacks of ...
Never mind.
An anonymous reader from the South Hills of Picksberg writes regarding the K-Y Jelly commercials running on network TV:
And I thought I was the only one who noticed.
Actually, I think I saw mine later, and it may have been during the Peter Jennings tribute on Nightline, which makes it worse.
There have been some K-Y spots before, and let's not forget "Trojan Man," who annoyed me for years on end, not just on TV, but on radio as well.
One of my frustrating experiences is trying to watch "Star Trek: The Next Generation" --- a very intelligent and literate program --- on Spike TV, where every spot break is full of GIRLS GONE WILD, VOLUME 213!, or SNOOP DOGGY DOGG HANGS WITH DA PLAYAS!, or whatever they can sell to all the Beavis and Buttheads who apparently comprise their usual audience.
Amen, brother. Signed, a Lutheran choir member who once was a Catholic lector.
I'm not sure whether this is a valid e-mail address (I love your humor, but I can't discern when you are serious), so I am sending this as a test. I am from McKeesport, but I now am relegated to slumming it in New York City. I was looking into the history of the Mon Valley steel industry when I found your blog. (A McKeesport Blog !!??) I have a few observations if you are interested. Please e-mail me back before I make a complete fool of myself by writing a longer letter to an invalid e-mail address.
Every so often, one of my colleagues walks past my desk and says, "Are you working in construction again?"
He's talking about the paper carton of iced tea (in my case, diet iced tea) that I sometimes buy to drink with my lunch. He thinks it's ... how do I put this? ... declasse.
Look, I'm a simple man with simple tastes. If I'm craving a 65-cent carton of iced tea, then by cracky, I'll have a 65-cent carton of iced tea. And me and the rest of the guys at the ironworkers' local don't appreciate the smart remarks.
But he's not the only one who's questioned my iced tea habit. A out-of-towner (a Noo Yawker, if you must know) once asked how Pittsburghers can drink "that stuff."
That makes me think that iced tea from a dairy is mainly a Pennsylvania thing, and more to the point, mainly a working-class and rural Pennsylvania thing. So, as I've traveled over the last year or so, I've made it a point to look for iced tea in dairy cases in stores, and guess what: You just don't see it in Ohio, Florida or the parts of Noo Yawk that I've visited. Lipton, Nestea or Snapple in glass bottles, yes, but not iced tea from the local dairy.
A quick Internet search (which is not "research," but you don't think I put a lot of time into these Almanacs, do you?) for "iced tea" and "dairy" turns up mostly references to Pennsylvania, including this article from a dairy trade magazine. As you might suspect, dairies in Pennsylvania started selling iced tea because they already had the infrastructure for packing milk; packaging tea allowed them to use the same equipment with little additional investment.
The article doesn't explain why it seems to be exclusively a Pennsylvania practice, or why Pennsylvanians drink so much of this stuff, but they do. The dairy stores and shop 'n robs around Our Fair City regularly run big sales in the summertime on iced tea in cartons, and people snap it up by the truckload. In my neighborhood, it's not uncommon to see people at my local (in)convenience store buying the stuff by the half-gallon.
Big business? I should say so. Turkey Hill Dairy in Lancaster, which recently moved into the Pittsburgh market, is running TV commercials specifically pushing its iced tea. According to this AP story, in 2003 Turkey Hill sold 24 million gallons of the stuff, making it the largest supplier of refrigerated iced tea in the country. That's pretty remarkable for a regional dairy, and I suspect most of the consumers are within two hours of Lancaster.
I wonder if the taste for cold, sweetened tea was brought to Pennsylvania by immigrants. Growing up, my grandmothers made something they called "hunky tea," which was tea with lots of lemon and honey or sugar. Could it be that dairies started bottling and packing iced tea to sell to thirsty steelworkers?
And appropriately enough, guess what's on display at International Village this year? Why, it's Turner Dairy's "Tea-Bird" --- a late '50s Ford Thunderbird painted to look like an iced tea carton.
All this isn't to say that other parts of the country, especially the South, don't love iced tea. Southerners call it "sweet tea," and very few restaurants (especially of the greasy spoon type) don't offer it, but I don't remember seeing iced tea in milk cartons in North Carolina, Virginia or anywhere else.
Johnstown's Galliker Dairy says it sells its iced tea in "parts of" Ohio, West Virginia, New York, New Jersey and North Carolina. Either this is a relatively recent development, or I'm not stopping in the right stores. The Winn-Dixie supermarket chain also apparently makes iced tea at its dairies. Could it be that expatriated Pittsburghers are taking their taste for iced tea with them as they move elsewhere? Is dairy-made iced tea about to become the next Western Pennsylvania delicacy about to go national, like the Klondike bar and Rolling Rock Beer?
And what, exactly, was my point today?
I don't know, but I sure am getting thirsty.
International Village, Western Pennsylvania's first and best ethnic food and music festival, opens at 3 this afternoon at Renziehausen Park in Our Fair City and runs through Thursday. Carol Waterloo Frazier wrote in last night's Daily News that nationalities and ethnic groups represented this year include African-American, Chinese, English, German, Hawaiian, Croatian, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Mexican, Serbian, Slovenia, Lebanese, Polish, Slovak and Vietnamese.
The arts and crafts booths return to the Jakomas Pavilion (last year I won two passes to McKeesport Little Theater) and other exhibitors include McKeesport Tigers Boosters, McKeesport Area High School Alumni Association, the Allegheny County Sheriff's Department, McKeesport police and fire departments and McKeesport Ambulance and Rescue Service. There are also rides and games for smaller children.
Admission has gone up to $2, but what else can you do for $2 these days? Go out and support your neighbors (some of whom start working months in advance to prepare for the Village), listen to some music, eat something bad and go home happy.
The Village wraps up with fireworks and polka dancing Thursday night, and if I eat my usual mix of Hungarian, Greek, Italian and Mexican foods at the Village, I'll be wrapped up with fireworks of my own on Friday morning.
In honor of the Village's opening day, enjoy this special feature from Tube City Online's half-vast archives. It's a look at International Village in 1972 from the pages of the Ford Times, the (sadly defunct) travel magazine for Ford owners.
The inside page of this issue (August 1972) has the above advertisement for the Ford Pinto, which the Village has now outlasted by 25 years.
Ironically, however, both Ford Pintos and people who eat too much at International Village sometimes end up with their rear ends burning.
I knew I was in trouble when I pulled into the parking lot at church (not at my regular parish) this weekend and saw someone toting an electric keyboard. Inside, my worst fears were confirmed: It was contemporary music day!
Two people were plugging in electric guitars; the third was setting up the keyboard. It's a pity they didn't have a drummer. I started saying the serenity prayer in my head.
It has now been about 40 years since the Vatican allowed Catholic churches to use contemporary music at Mass. I expect that within another 40 years, someone will write some contemporary hymns that don't set my teeth on edge.
This Almanac is painful to write ("not so painful as it is to read," you're thinking), because I know the people who pick music for their churches are trying to do their best. I'm sure they think they're reaching out to young people by bringing in electric guitars and what they think is "modern" music. But they're really only making themselves look more of out touch.
Now, I realize that I'm an old fuddy-duddy, and I'm not asking that churches use nothing except dirges and chants. I enjoy uplifting hymns as much as the next guy (presuming the next guy happens to be a Christian, I suppose). Nothing gets a Sunday off to a good start like a couple of rousing choruses of "How Great Thou Art" or "Amazing Grace" or any of hundreds of other hymns; and after all, gospel music was one of the strongest influences on early rhythm and blues and rock and roll composers.
However, there's a reason that traditional gospel music and the work of 18th century composers endures: It's good. Much of the contemporary worship music that finds its way into Catholic churches is at best trite, and I'm told by Protestant friends that they're being afflicted by the same composers and publishers.
Many of the "contemporary" hymns being used by churches were written in the 1970s, and they sound like the worst folk and pop of that decade, with pretentious wording and melodies that are difficult to sing for all but professional vocalists. It's as full of phony sentiment as anything that Tony Orlando and Dawn or the Partridge Family ever took onto the Top 40 charts. If you saw the folk music parody A Mighty Wind, any of the songs on the soundtrack, with a few lyrical alterations, would fit the genre.
Worse yet, where sacred music should be designed to encourage the congregation to participate (the idea of singing during church should be that the songs are a form of prayer, after all), the quick key and tempo changes of this stuff discourages participation.
And that's what happened at this Mass. Most of the congregation stood silently as our three-person combo "performed." The keyboard player had programmed the device to sound like a Hammond B-3; they even did a surf-rock version of one hymn. I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not.
This is not an isolated incident in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, or around the country, at least in my experience. I've lost count of how many Masses I've attended featuring acoustic guitars and tambourines.
The worst offender seems to be a collection of music called Glory & Praise, which comes from Oregon Catholic Press. Oh, Lord, I'm sure these folks mean well, and I know they've tried their best, but this is awful stuff. I work weird hours, and I do a fair amount of traveling, so I regularly visit Catholic churches besides my own parish. If I walk into the vestibule and see a stack of Glory & Praise hymnals, I cringe, despite myself.
I first encountered Glory & Praise in the second grade. I had grown up in a conservative parish with an older priest who was near retirement. When the Catholic school I was attended closed, my folks sent me to the old St. Mary's German on Olive Street. At the time, St. Mary's pastor, Rev. Tom Smith, was leading a troupe of performers in a sort of Catholic cabaret. (He made it onto "Real People" at one point, which is a dubious distinction at best.)
"Father Tom" had recently equipped St. Mary's with a set of Glory & Praise hymnals, and even as a little kid, the music hurt my ears. Pretty soon, other parishes around the Mon-Yough area were buying them, and when our priest retired, we got them, too. We also got a choir director who used to rehearse us before Mass in trying to sing the unsingable.
When the congregation resisted, or sat in stony silence, the choir director only became more strident --- "Come on! You people can do better than that!" --- until the people in the pews, grudgingly, would croak out a few verses for her. And you haven't lived until you've seen a group of white-haired 60-something Catholics try to keep up with the key changes in a Carey Landry arrangement.
Eventually, the congregation got with the times. Or rather, they stopped coming to Mass early to avoid these painful and condescending mandatory choir practices. I'll even bet a few of them stopped going to church there altogether, because attendance suddenly dropped precipitously.
I've never, ever met a Catholic, Lutheran or Episcopalian who liked this stuff, but I'm willing to admit that my sample is self-selected, so I decided to do some quick web research. Apparently, hundreds if not thousands of churchgoers agree. An article in Crisis Magazine from 2002 singles out Glory & Praise for particular scorn and claims it has hijacked the liturgy; the author calls the hymns "musical candy that was already stale about 15 years ago" and says that they're "far more politically than doctrinally correct."
Take a look at the comments on this religious blog (one poster calls a popular contemporary hymn "the liturgical equivalent of dragging fingernails across a blackboard, and stupid to boot") or visit "Confessions of a Recovering Choir Director" or the webpage of composer Brian Page.
And back in 2000, a certain Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke out against this stuff, calling it "banal" and "in opposition to Christian worship." You may know Cardinal Ratzinger better these days as Pope Benedict XVI, so perhaps there's reason for hope.
Anyway, if any pastors or church council members happen to stumble across this web page while looking for information about Glory & Praise, I urge you, on behalf of music-loving Christians everywhere, run far, far away from this contemporary stuff. The members of your church or parish are too polite to tell you that they hate it. They just sit in the pews and grind their teeth whenever the organist says, "Take our your Glory & Praise hymnal and turn to number 49, 'Sing a New Song Unto the Lord.'"
By the way, all through church this weekend, we could hear ominous rumbles of thunder outside. We exited the building just as the skies opened with a tremendous deluge of rain and lightning that knocked out electricity to parts of the neighborhood.
But the power wasn't interrupted, you'll notice, during the service, when a loss of electricity would have meant no keyboards or electric guitars.
Evidently, God has a weird sense of humor.
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