Speaking of Mifflin Township (were we? sort of), its direct lineal successor made national news this week when a 74-year-old woman was charged with robbing the National City Bank branch inside the Shop 'n Save at Century Square.
Take a look at the pictures by the Tribune-Review's Andrew Russell and the Post-Gazette's V.W.H. Campbell Jr. No offense, and I say this with all due respect, but I wouldn't be surprised if the suspect was going to use the money for a new set of false teeth. I'm no cover model myself, but mercy.
...
Down in Morris Township, a rural community south of "little Washington" on I-79, Scott Beveridge writes in the Observer-Reporter that Consol, the former Consolidation Coal Co., based in Upper St. Clair, has purchased $18 million in property in Washington and Greene counties over the past three years. It intends to longwall mine the ground below, and since longwall mining invariably causes the land on the surface to collapse, Consol has decided it's cheaper to just buy any affected properties than to try and fix them.
In Morris, that's left the township studded with abandoned houses that are now being stripped of valuables and recyclables. One of the homes is a stately Victorian once owned by a prominent local family.
But the best is yet to come:
When completed over the next several years, the coal preparation plant will have the capacity to process 10 million tons of coal a year.
The plant will create a massive industrial complex in what was an otherwise sleepy country landscape, (township supervisor Scott) Finch said.
"It was a beautiful place," Finch said. "I know we can't stop it and the country needs the coal."
On Super Bowl Sunday, I wrote what I thought was a sweet, sweet Valentine to my hometown, Pittsburgh, which happened to have a football team in the big game that day.
I expected the same response from my readers that the column generated in me: I was weeping sentimental tears by the time I finished writing it. ...
"I hate to stomp on your hometown pride, but people who aren't from Pittsburgh think it's the armpit of America," wrote one reader.
And that was just the beginning. There were perhaps 50 e-mails waiting for me, and most of them advised me, in the most unpleasant terms, to go back where I came from.
"And take your pathetic family with you," read one.
Another reader warned that it was not smart of me to have my picture run with that column.
The problem? Pittsburgh is in the same football division with Baltimore's Ravens, and readers expected me to have switched allegiances when I switched my driver's license.
Last week I popped for the new book about Homestead and Mifflin Township, titled, interestingly enough, Homestead and Mifflin Township.
Ivan Shreve Jr. over at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear has highlighted yet another project that will cause me to part with two double sawbucks before the month is out. A company called First Generation Radio Archives has collected 20 episodes of the earliest work by offbeat radio comedians Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding.
Recorded on electrical transcription discs in the late 1940s, they are episodes of Bob and Ray's first series, "Matinee With Bob and Ray" (Elliott commented years later that if the word was called "Matinob" they'd have gone their entire careers being billed as "Ray and Bob"). Mostly improvised, they originally aired over WHDH radio in Boston as a time-filler before Red Sox baseball games.
Longtime staples in New York radio over WOR, WINS and WHN, Bob and Ray also had a daily 15-minute segment on CBS Radio, made regular appearances on the original "Today" show with Dave Garroway and on NBC's "Monitor," and hosted an NPR weekly show in the 1980s. Goulding, in poor health, died in 1990, and Elliott is retired in New England.
Bob and Ray are an acquired taste --- they didn't go for punchlines and jokes, you either get their absurd take on life, or you think they're idiotic --- but those of us who've acquired it can't get enough. (Of all people, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has one of the largest private collections of Bob and Ray recordings, and others who counted Bob and Ray among their big inspirations include the original cast of "Saturday Night Live," Stan Freberg, David Letterman, Kurt Vonnegut and Garrison Keillor. How's that for an eclectic group of fans?)
Incidentally, over the years, Bob Elliott has collaborated with public radio producer Larry Josephson on a series of "best of" Bob and Ray collections. You can order those at www.bobandray.com. I've got a bunch of them, and they're very well done.
While Larry has released a couple of the WHDH "Matinee" shows on his collections, the ones being released by First Generation don't appear to include those. That's good news and bad news ... the good news is that I won't be buying duplicates of things I already have. The bad news is that I'm almost compelled now to purchase the damned things!
And the even worse news: First Generation is claiming that this is only "volume one," meaning, presumably, that there are many more volumes to go.
Egad. Anyone have a winning Powerball ticket they'd like to share?
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