Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of news from Our Fair City and the entire Mon-Yough metroplex ... this is Tube City Almanac:
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Running For His Life: ESPN's "NCAA On Campus" recently profiled McKeesport Area High School alumnus Aaron Slafka, now a senior at Pitt-Greensburg, who fought his way back from a brain tumor to continue running on the school's track team.
Slafka transferred to UPG from Penn State McKeesport Campus and was about to start classes in the fall of 2004 when he was involved in a car accident. Feeling dizzy a day after the crash, he was sent for an MRI. The scan revealed a non-cancerous brain tumor.
Doctors told Slafka that he'd never be able to run again and banned him from track practice.
But his UPG teammates saw him riding his bike in an effort to stay in shape. Soon Slafka was sneaking in runs at night, in the dark. Though an operation successfully removed the tumor, Slafka developed blood and brain infections and began suffering seizures. It would take three more operations for Slafka to recover.
In the fall of 2005, he re-enrolled at UPG and rejoined the track team. Last year, he was named the captain. "I know he wasn't my No. 1 guy, but it wasn't about being the No. 1 guy," his coach, Joyce Brobeck, told Jennifer Reeger of the Tribune-Review. "It was about his determination, the leadership."
You can view Slafka's interview at the NCAA website (click on "video" and scroll down to "On Campus") or on Google Video.
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Doctor, Doctor: A McKeesport-based physician will be allowed to continue offering his controversial cancer treatments pending review by a panel of physicians at Mon Valley Hospital in Carroll Township.
Using tools he developed, Dr. Jerome Canady has been resectioning --- cutting apart and sewing back together --- the livers and pancreases of patients suffering from cancerous tumors.
But the treatment is not sanctioned by U.S. medical authorities, and on Nov. 8, Mon Valley Hospital revoked Canady's operating-room privileges. The dispute landed in court this week.
A graduate of Villanova University and the Temple University School of Medicine, Canady is the inventor of the Canady Catheter, a device that uses radio waves and inert gas to stop blood flow during certain operations with pinpoint accuracy. His company, Canady Technology, is based at McKeesport's RIDC industrial park.
With his most recent innovation, Canady is using similar technology to cut away cancerous portions of the liver and pancreas, according to the Valley Independent.
One of Canady's patients, Cindy Russell, was given less than six months to live by doctors at the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere; now, she claims, she is cancer free. She's set up websites at cindysmiracle.com and curedoflivercancer.com.
Patients on a message board maintained by Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore rave about Canady's supposedly miraculous results.
But several anonymous detractors on the same message board, some of whom claim to be physicians themselves, have also attacked Canady's methods, claiming that patients often suffer great pain for short-term, illusory gains. One, identifying himself only as "Nick," alleges that Canady's successes are mostly those of "self promotion."
This week, according to Linda Metz of the Observer-Reporter, a Washington County judge ruled that Canady can perform two previously scheduled operations, but is not allowed to use the MVH operating room again pending the peer review.
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Jeannette Hospital Sold: Mercy Jeannette Hospital will become part of the parent company of Westmoreland Regional Hospital and Latrobe Hospital, report the Pittsburgh Business Times and other outlets.
Included in the sale is the Mercy "SmartHealth" outpatient surgery center in Norwin Hills Shopping Center on Route 30 near Irwin.
The former Jeannette District Memorial Hospital is being sold for $16 million by Catholic Mercy Health East, which previously sold Jeannette's parent hospital, Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh, to UPMC Health System.
A Mercy news release says the sale is expected to take six months and must be reviewed by state and Westmoreland County officials.
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Nobody Here But Us Chickens: The North Huntingdon Township zoning board will decide whether a Country Hills family can continue to keep nine chickens as pets, report Patti Dobranski in the Tribune-Review and Norm Vargo in the Post-Gazette.
Though much of North Huntingdon was once farmland and a few farms still exist, a township ordinance prohibits keeping livestock on a residential parcel smaller than 20 acres. The Hensler family is asking for a zoning variance to keep their chickens, but neighbors have complained about the noise and the smell.
While the Henslers claim the chickens are no more livestock than parakeets or other pet birds, one member of the zoning board notes that the family is eating the eggs, which would lend weight to the argument that the chickens are livestock. "I would never eat my cat," Zoning Board Member Jacqueline Willis said.
(Write your own Chinese food joke here.)
The zoning hearing board is expected to rule on the variance request at its Dec. 4 meeting at the Town House.
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Keep a Civil Tongue: And finally, students from McKeesport Area and West Mifflin high schools head to Harrisburg next week to deliver speeches on "what it means to be part of a civil society." They're among more than 100 students selected from about a dozen school districts statewide.
Their remarks will be videotaped for a presentation to the state General Assembly and later broadcast on public TV. Details are in the Post-Gazette.
I've never run my own business, so if it's fatuous of me to hand out business advice, I apologize in advance.
I like small, locally run businesses. Small businesses are run by your friends and neighbors. They return money to the community instead of sending it off to Wall Street.
I always remember what Garrison Keillor said in Lake Wobegon Days: "You should think twice before you get the Calvin Klein glasses from Vanity Vision in the St. Cloud Mall. Calvin Klein isn't going to come with the Rescue Squad and he isn't going to teach your children about redemption by grace. You couldn't find Calvin Klein to save your life.''
Often you get better service at small mom-and-pop businesses, but alas, not always. Some of them dare customers to shop there.
I have known a lot of people who started their own businesses, from gas stations to professional offices, and they all say it's hard work. When the weekend guy gets sick, or the burglar alarm goes off in the middle of the night, or a customer has a complaint, the owner gets the call. Most small business owners combine the duties of chief operating officer, secretary, treasurer, comptroller, sales clerk and janitor.
But all successful businesses share something in common: They're actually open.
You can't be in business if you're closed. And that's not double talk.
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'C' is Not For Cookie: Let me illustrate: There's a little store near my house that's been a number of things over the years, mostly unsuccessful. Two years ago it was turned into a coffee shop and bakery.
One Saturday morning, after it had been open for a week or two, I decided to stop in and get breakfast and some cookies or doughnuts to take with me.
Though the hours on the door said something like "7 a.m. to 7 p.m.," it was closed. I stopped again the next Saturday, and it was closed again.
I finally found it open one Saturday and thought: Great, I'll get breakfast. "Oh, we stop serving breakfast at 11 on Saturday," the guy told me.
Fine, I said, I'll have lunch. "No, we only serve lunch during the week."
It wasn't a big surprise to see the place for sale a month ago.
Or take the drugstore I've been using for about three years. It's an independent, family-owned shop. The advertised hours are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 12 to 5 p.m. Sunday.
Imagine my surprise a few months ago when I stopped after work at 6 p.m. and found the lights out and the store closed. Well, people can get sick or have some emergency. I stopped the following night: Closed again.
The third day I called ahead of time: "How late are you open today?" 8 o'clock. I arrived at 6:35 p.m. Closed.
It happened again the other night. I stopped at 6 o'clock, and the place had closed early.
I'm going to try and talk to the owner and find out what the problem is. But if I don't get a satisfactory answer, I'm going someplace else.
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Still on 'Bankers' Hours': A lot of the businesses that used to line Fifth Avenue Downtown, or Eighth Avenue in Homestead, were open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. A few were open a half-day on Saturday, or late on Thursday nights, but that was it.
That might have made sense in the 1950s or '60s, when men worked shifts at the mill and many women stayed home during the day. By the 1980s, most of their potential customers were at work or school from 9 to 5. Yet their hours didn't change.
I can understand wanting to work an eight-hour day, but why wouldn't they open daily from 12 to 8 p.m., instead of working "bankers' hours"?
When I asked a few business owners, the excuse I heard was that "there's no traffic Downtown at night." Well, if everyone is closed, of course there's no traffic.
It's a moot point now. There are few businesses left of any kind on Fifth Avenue, and Eighth Avenue in Homestead is a dreary row of thrift shops and empty windows, too.
If you've got a small retail or service business, it's almost impossible to compete with Wal-Mart, Target, CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreen's, etc. on price and selection.
I don't understand why so many small business owners handicap themselves further by making it so hard to give them money.
These are just random observations, mind you, but I can also prove that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox does exist:
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Heaven Help Us: Elizabeth Township resident, writer and talk-show host Jerry Bowyer had a thought-provoking op-ed in Sunday's Post-Gazette in which he discussed his faith and his family's experience at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Downtown.
According to Bowyer, over the summer Pittsburgh Episcopal Bishop Robert Duncan asked readers at churches in the diocese to stop praying for Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the U.S. church.
This was in prelude to Duncan's recent move to split the local diocese away from the Episcopalian Church. Asks Bowyer:
If we break with the Episcopal Church in America over gay priests, how can we then align ourselves with African bishops who tolerate polygamist priests? Paul says that a church leader is to be "the husband of one wife." Do we think that the word "husband" is inerrant but the word "one" is not?
It's hard for me to believe that Jesus would be terribly pleased with any of the churches that have been formed in his name. This is a man, the gospels tells us, who flagrantly violated the laws of his own religion, because he believed those laws were perversions of God's will and had become instruments of oppression.
And so how do we choose to worship him? By creating byzantine institutions governed by arbitrary rules that alienate us from one another, and from the love of God.
There are some people who think God is a Christian. Can you tell me, what was God before He was a Christian? Was He Pagan? And what do we say about Abraham, about Moses, about Amos, about Jeremiah. Do we say, 'Sorry, Jeremiah, you are going to the other place.' It's crazy to think that!
God is not a Christian. What a relief! The God who we worship by different names, how wonderful is this God!
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