February 02, 2007
Briefly Noted
If Almanacking (is that even a word?) has been light recently, it's mainly because of the book. I've promised to have the manuscript to the publisher by May, and any "creative" "energies" (and in my case, I use those words in their loosest possible senses) have to go in that direction.
Otherwise I expect to find an angry mob of ex-G.C. Murphy employees standing at my front door with pitchforks and torches.
Also, I have spent the last two days fighting a sinus headache that has now decided to take up residence in my ears, and it's taken what little willpower I have to keep from using the power drill to drain some of the pressure off. So there's that. A lot of sleep and judicious use of the humidifier today is helping.
But I didn't want to let any more time go by without noting that Pat Cloonan, writing in the Daily News this week, called "bullsh-t" on Steve Bland, CEO of the Port Authority (new motto: "You can't get there from here"). In a story published last Saturday, Bland complained to Joe Grata of the Post-Gazette that "95 percent" of the people testifying at the service reduction hearings have been riders, not public officials.
As Cloonan pointed out (sorry, the story's not online for non-subscribers), something like 20 of the 60-odd people testifying at the hearing in Our Fair City last week were elected officials or leaders of non-governmental community agencies like Turtle Creek Valley MH/MR. I missed the first part of the hearing, but I saw state Rep. Marc Gergely there, although I didn't get a chance to talk to him.
Bland told Cloonan that McKeesport was the "exception."
Hmmm. Maybe, or did the P-G just take Bland's word for it that public officials aren't attending?
And is anyone from the P-G attending? Because Pat was the only representative of the media (OK, I guess I am, too) that I saw at the Palisades last Thursday night.
Just askin', is all.
. . .
In other news, I wanted to note that city native Bob Carroll Jr. died last week at 87 in Los Angeles. You probably didn't know his name, but you knew his work --- Carroll was a writer for Lucille Ball and worked on every TV show she ever had, including I Love Lucy. Born here in 1919, an obituary in the Washington Post notes that he moved with his family to Florida at age 3, and I don't know that he had any local ties in the region.
He started working with Ball on her radio show, My Favorite Husband (really the prototype of Lucy) before making the leap to television with her in 1953. Carroll and longtime writing partner Madelyn Pugh Davis eventually stayed with Ball until her last show, Life With Lucy, left the air in 1986.
Ivan Shreve Jr. has an item about Carroll's career over at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear. Requiescat en pace.
. . .
To Do This Weekend: I know what I'm going to do --- drink a lot of fluid and hope my sinuses drain. You, on the other hand, might want to register for the driver safety courses that Carnegie Free Library of McKeesport is offering next week --- if you're a senior citizen. (Today, I feel like a senior citizen, and Lord knows I could use some driving classes. At least people who've been passengers in my car seem to think so.) Qualified seniors will receive a 5 percent reduction in their auto insurance premiums, which sounds like a good deal to me. Call (800) 559-4880 (Tube City hard-hat tip: McKeesport Recreation Committee) ... Pittsburgh Area Jitterbug Club has dancing at the Palisades at 9 p.m. Saturday. Hope your long winter underwear doesn't show underneath your poodle skirts. (The ladies, that is. The guys aren't wearing poodle skirts, although it's none of my business if you do.) Call (412) 366-2138. ... Artifacts and photographs of the history of steelmaking are on display in the exhibit "Steel Around: Big Steel's Enduring Legacy," at the Bost Building, East Eighth Avenue in Homestead, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Call (412) 464-4020.
January 31, 2007
Gorilla My Dreams
You've all seen the ad here on the front page of the
Almanac for at least a week, and the big day has finally arrived --- today is National Gorilla Suit Day. Despite the cold temperatures, I sure hope you're celebrating with someone you love by dressing up in moth-eaten monkey suits and going from door to door, asking for bananas and singing gorilla carols.
In the Mon Valley, "Go Go Gorilla" by The Shandells has long been the favorite traditional National Gorilla Suit Day carol, though some younger children find it easier to sing the theme from the Banana Splits, with its immortal words: "Tra-la-la, tra-la-la-la, tra-la-la, tra-la-la-la."
Los Angeles-based screenwriter and historian
Mark Evanier has been the nation's leading chronicler of National Gorilla Suit Day since the death of artist and social commentator
Don Martin. While I'm hardly qualified to add to Evanier's body of scholarship, I can elucidate briefly on gorilla suiting traditions in the McKeesport area.
Gorilla suiting was introduced to McKeesport by George Washington when he visited Queen Allequippa, chief of the Seneca Indians, who had her headquarters village at the mouth of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers. Legend says that when Washington first called on Allequippa in 1753, he presented her with a hand-sewn imported English gorilla suit and a bottle of rum.
According to Washington's diary, Allequippa and the other natives "greatly enjoyed the rum," but they were mystified by the gorilla suit --- gorillas not being native to Western Pennsylvania --- and even more puzzled when Washington jumped inside and began cavorting around, going "Eeek, ooop, eek."
The Indians called Washington "Anneygityurgun," which they told him meant "future statesman from far away," but actually means, "Man with wooden teeth who may be a
furvert."
After he left, some seamstresses in the village turned the gorilla suit into a neat pillbox hat, mittens and matching fur-lined moccasins for the Queen, which she wore until her death from non-gorilla related causes.
But the gorilla suit tradition returned to McKeesport in 1755, when the first permanent white settlers arrived from Ireland.
David McKee and his family were trying to escape religious persecution after the Roman Catholic Church banned gorilla suiting as "being of low moral character and frankly, a little bit weird."
(Many Catholics still practiced gorilla suiting in the privacy of their homes, often buying them from back-alley gorilla suit dealers, though the official prohibition would not be lifted until the
Second Vatican Council, when Pope John XXIII issued the landmark encyclical
"Ad Vestitum Gorillum.")
After McKee established his ferry across the rivers and erected his new town of "McKee's Port," the village grew rapidly, and many of the early Scotch-Irish settlers brought their own gorilla suiting traditions with them. The establishment of iron furnaces and rolling mills in the mid-19th century brought with it a wave of
immigration by Italians and Slavs, and this created inevitable culture clashes.
Many of the Roman Catholic immigrants objected to the idea of gorilla suiting on religious grounds, while Byzantine and Russian Orthodox immigrants celebrated National Gorilla Suit Day a week later than the Protestants, on Feb. 7.
The tensions finally boiled over on Jan. 31, 1891, when a gang of gorilla-suit clad Scotch-Irish rowdies wielding clubs and pitchforks rampaged through the lower First Ward, smashing windows and beating Italians and Slavs who were still dressed in street clothes.
Sporadic street fighting and raids continued for several days until
Governor Robert Emory Pattison (who had taken office only a few days earlier) called out the state militia to put down the insurrection.
Before the bloodshed was over, three people had died and dozens had been injured, many of them when anti-gorilla suit protesters had rushed a line of
Coal and Iron Police guarding the W. Dewees Woods Iron Works.
Until the redevelopment of the First Ward in 1960 to expand U.S. Steel's National Tube plant, a plaque commemorating the deaths was on display at the corner of First Avenue and Market Street. The present whereabouts of that plaque are unknown.
It would take many years before anti-gorilla suit feelings would subside in the Mon-Yough area. As Chicago
Sun-Times technology columnist Andy Ihnatko has
documented, Italian immigrants had another reason to dislike National Gorilla Suit Day --- fascists back in Italy had co-opted many gorilla suit traditions to repress the working classes. "In my household, a rubber mask trimmed with tufted black acrylic and a set of floppy black latex gloves will always represent baseless human evil, and the triumph of greed over compassion," Ihnatko says.
But by World War I, public gorilla suiting was accepted by all ages and creeds in the McKeesport area, and some of the city's most fashionable and wealthy residents proudly paraded down Fifth Avenue in their gorilla suits each Jan. 31.
Dressmaker Mary Ann Cox, whose descendants went on to found Cox's Department Store, had a booming trade crafting fine gorilla suits (some trimmed in ermine) for men like Edwin R. Crawford, founder of McKeesport Tin Plate Company, and Mayor George H. Lysle.
(Ironically, until 1911, Mrs. Cox could not sew gorilla suits for her usual clients, since state law and local ordinance forbid women from gorilla suiting. Bans on female gorilla-suiting were struck down by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the landmark case
Magilla v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.)
Others, like prominent local physician Dr. J. Clarence Kelly, purchased their gorilla suits from haberdashers like Henry J. Klein. Most middle-class residents and poor laborers contented themselves with cheap gorilla suits from five-and-10s like
G.C. Murphy Co..
Some National Gorilla Suit Day commemorations and pranks became quite famous. Gilbert Myer, Port Vue real-estate developer, created a sensation on National Gorilla Suit Day in 1920 when he purchased a live gorilla and drove him through town in the back of a
Hupmobile touring car. The next day's
Daily News reported that the gorilla --- clad in a morning coat and bow tie --- "doffed his top hat and waved at passing ladies in a manner so convincingly human that all of the passers-by were greatly amused."
The Depression and World War II greatly curtailed gorilla suit activities in McKeesport, and the effort to modernize and "redevelop" the region in the 1950s and '60s led to a lack of interest in National Gorilla Suit Day. The city's last official National Gorilla Suit Day Parade, held in 1958, attracted only a smattering of spectators and didn't even receive any coverage in the newspaper.
According to unpublished reports, the final National Gorilla Suit Day Parade in the Mon Valley area was held in the
Dixon Hollow section of North Versailles of 1961, but since that neighborhood was later demolished to expand the East Pittsburgh-McKeesport Boulevard, no record exists of the festivities.
Indeed, National Gorilla Suit Day has been forgotten for so long in the Mon-Yough area that many residents are unaware of the significance of Jan. 31 --- or even that the holiday exists.
Last year,
Tube City Almanac was pleased to
commemorate this holiday, and we hope that by giving you some of the background of National Gorilla Suit Day, that residents of McKeesport and surrounding communities can create some new gorilla suit traditions that will endure for years to come.
And we hope that when you bring your gorilla suit out of mothballs this year, your neighbors will echo the words of Queen Allequippa, who said to her chief of staff back in 1753, "Etgay atthay othmay-eatenway agray outway ofway erehay" (loosely translated, "Get that moth-eaten rag out of here").
January 30, 2007
So It's Come To This
Neither snow, nor snow, nor snow will keep me from filling up an Almanac with your letters and emails.
Alert Reader D.C. writes:
I would also like to know how Terry Lee is. I was yet a 'tween when my sister and her friend danced on his TV show. Loved watching the show, and as young girls, me and my friends just adored Terry. Read on another blog that Terry is related to one of The Fenways. I got to see them live when I was about 10 years old and got their autographs! I still have my autograph book. Thanks Fenways and I managed to hang onto one of your 45's while moving around the country!
Ah, the whereabouts of
Terry Lee --- one of McKeesport's great enduring mysteries, along with the questions "Why isn't there a left-turn arrow on the Jerome Avenue Bridge at Ramp One?" and "Why would they name Crawford Village after one of
the city's richest men instead of someone who might actually live
there?"
An inveterate concert and record promoter and peripatetic disc jockey best known for his work at WMCK and then WIXZ (1360) in McKeesport, I seem to recall that T.L. last worked around here at WESA in Charleroi before departing the Mon Valley for parts unknown. Rumor has it that Terry Lee is living in Ohio and completely out of the radio business, but your guess is as good as mine.
The
Fenways had one local hit, "Walk," but never charted nationally. They also backed up the Vogues on "You're The One" and later became the Racket Squad, releasing two LPs for
Jubilee Records --- a self-titled album in 1968 and another called "Corners of Your Mind" in 1969. If you have either one of those LPs, congratulations --- I'm sure they're worth upwards of three burgers at Winky's or an all-day pass at Rainbow Gardens.
. . .
Speaking of radio, Alert Reader Bill writes:
I don't know if you have seen the thread running on the Pittsburgh Radio Nostalgia group but Tom Lacko posted a link to his Soundboard site with a collection of Radio Airchecks. I have been listening to airchecks from KDKA in 1976 by Joel Zoell, KQV in 1974 with Jeff Christy who as you know is Rush Limbaugh, WESA in 1983 by Tom Lacko, WIXZ in 1973 with Terry Lee and WKTQ 13Q in 1975 among others. Some really great stuff!
Thanks, Bill! I have and I did see the thread. I occasionally post on the nostalgia board under my clever pseudonym, "jtogyer."
That Soundboard content is wonderful, and it's great that Tom is providing it --- but keep in mind you will need a high-speed Internet connection and a pretty fast computer.
. . .
Remember the Almanac about Brick Alley a few days ago? Alert Reader Patti writes:
After reading your article on Brick Alley, my husband informed me that Brick Alley was a part of Rose Alley, not Strawberry, as his family grew up in the Third Ward.
Oh, yeah, and I'm sure his great-grandfather told him about Brick Alley in between trips to church to read the Bible, right?
I'm teasing --- seriously, I never knew this. Thanks for the information!
. . .
You'll pardon me if I print some fan mail today. I take my ego gratification wherever I can find it. Alert Readers Ken and Susan write:
I came across your website strictly by accident while doing some sort of search on Yahoo. I immediately became fascinated and bookmarked the site until I had more time to view all of it. And you bring back such memories! To put the memories in perspective I graduated from McKeesport High School in 1964.
I love the pictures of the Peoples Bank Building. My doctor had his office there and my dentist also. My father was in the plumbing business (316 Shaw Ave.) and also on the Board of Directors of the Peoples Bank for many years. My fondest memory was visiting the bank and just inside the entrance where he could be seen by all was the bank Cashier, Thomas C. Baird. He was the father of my uncle by marriage ( i.e. my mother's sister's father-in-law). He was a distinguished looking gray-haired banker with a big smile for everyone. He sat at a desk behind a low railing and knew and greeted all the customers as they entered.
But for me the biggest thrill was the nickel that he always gave me for an ice cream cone from Stallings Bakery across the street from the bank -- it was later replaced by Cox's addition. Stallings had a big tall scoop of ice cream in a cone for five cents.
Long-time McKeesporters may be able to figure out who this "Ken" is --- and if you've ever been on Shaw Avenue, you can probably guess, too.
Thanks for the nice words, Ken and Susan --- if we can bring a smile to someone's face, I guess we're doing something right.
. . .
Boy, the mailbag is all about nostalgia this time. Alert Reader Bev wants to know: "Does anybody remember Robert Hall's Clothing Store in McKeesport or have any pictures?"
Bev, do you mean this Robert Hall?
When the values go up, up, up,
and the prices go down, down, down ...
It sure is nice to pay low prices
For more quality
Take your family
To Robert Hall and see!
Save on quality clothes at Robert Hall and you'll agree:
It sure is nice to pay low prices for more quality!
School bells ring and children sing:
"It's back to Robert Hall again."
Mother knows for better clothes,
It's back to Robert Hall again!
No, never heard of it.
Ha!
I keed, I keed.
Robert Hall Clothing was a national chain that had a store in McKeesport on Fifth Avenue at Water Street, directly across from The Palisades. I'm not sure what's in that building now, but it was Tile City for many years.
Specializing in discounts on its own private-label brands, Robert Hall opened in 1940 as sort of the Burlington Coat Factory or Men's Wearhouse of its day. But the company got into financial troubles in the mid-1970s. A check of the
New York Times archives indicates that in 1974, Robert Hall was notifying creditors that it was going to be 30 days late paying its bills.
A story in the
Washington Post from 1977 indicates that the company went out of business on June 30, closing 373 outlets. I have no idea if the McKeesport store was still open at that time. The parent company,
United Merchants and Manufacturers Inc., had planned to have a going out of business sale but instead abruptly locked out employees. According to the
Post:
Robert Hall became a casualty of mall mania. Its outlets, often in poor locations, could not compete with newer stores in shopping malls and clothing discounters. Last year UM & M began an 11th hour attempt to refurbish older outlets and in some cases, as in Manassas, to close freestanding stores and open new shops in malls. But it was too late.
As for pictures, well, that's a tall order. Unless someone who worked there took pictures of the store, I doubt any exist. The building was as plain as a mud-fence, inside and out. Robert Hall was known for "low overhead," with clothes displayed on pipe racks (much like Syms or Gabriel's does today). But I'll put the request out there anyway.
. . .
Finally, here's an exchange of emails between myself and a gentle reader, and I love these, because it proves a long-held belief of mine --- most of us don't pay attention when other people talk to us. Here's the first email I received:
"i have a pizzelle maker that is over 30 years old. one of the wires inside of it has come un-crumpped. i was wondering if you could send me a catalog with parts or maybe you could send a new one or new parts i don't know?"
This person is obviously trying to find out about a product from Berarducci Brothers. You may recall that
Tube City Online used to receive a ton of emails about products made by Berarducci Brothers until I put up
a webpage asking --- begging, really --- people not to write to me.
So I replied to her email like this: "I have no connection with Berarducci Brothers or any company that makes pizzelle makers. But maybe some of
this information will help."
She wrote back:
i just need parts one of the wires broke and it won't heat up maybe you can send a catalog or something or send parts your self i don't know but it is my dads b-day and i wanted to get his old pizzle makerf ixed for himhe has had that since he was a kid
To quote
Mark Evanier: "Do you ever feel like you're George Burns, and everybody else in the world is Gracie?"
I wrote back again: "Please understand: I do not make pizzelle makers or anything else. I
thought that was clear. You might try contacting Villaware, whose address is on the webpage I sent to you. Or you can try seeing if a local repair shop that fixes appliances will take a look at it. Otherwise, there is nothing I can do. As I tried to emphasize, I have nothing to do with Berarducci Brothers or anyone else."
Her final message to me? Verbatim and in full:
"do u know a place hwere i could get a partts"
I didn't respond to that email, but if anyone knows a place where this lady can "get a partts," possibly for her brain, please let me know, and I'll pass the information along. I hate to think that her wires are coming un-crumpped.
Ha! I keed, I keed.
Published weekdays (usually), except holidays (and when we have something better to do) at McKeesport, Pa., by Tube City Online LLC, P.O. Box 94, McKeesport, Pa. 15134.