Sometimes it seems like people around the Mon-Yough area eat dumb flakes for breakfast, and go back for second helpings.
Well, maybe we're not dumb. But we have become as docile as sheep.
. . .
Case in point: Robert Winston, former director of Newman-Winston Memorial Chapel on Jenny Lind Street, whose case is in the news again this week. He's accused of keeping the remains of 300 fetuses in his garage on Evans Avenue.
Winston was supposed to cremate the bodies after collecting them from Magee-Womens Hospital in Oakland. Instead, prosecutors claim he pocketed the money and didn't perform the work.
His defense attorneys say that Winston has health problems and got into financial trouble, and that the situation spiraled out of control.
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Health problems and financial trouble I can understand. Been there, done that. I made $285 a week gross (and I do mean "gross") at my first job. I've sat there at the end of the month with the light bill in one hand and the gas bill in the other, wondering which one to pay.
But I'd like to think that if I had a stack of infant corpses in my garage that I couldn't afford to cremate, I'd say, "Hey, maybe I better not accept any more dead babies."
I might even call Magee-Womens Hospital and tell them, "You know, I don't think I can handle this contract. Can I get out of this deal?"
Or if I didn't want to create trouble for myself, I might even quietly call one of the other funeral directors around McKeesport and say, "Um, can you help me out?"
I don't know that I'd wait until I had 300 corpses stacked in a garage on Evans Avenue, grieving families filing lawsuits, and the coroner's office out in the alley with a biohazard team. Sorry, but that's what I call dumb.
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Or, let's take the Tanya Kach case, which is grinding its way through federal court. I'm not inclined to blame the girl for being kidnapped; I'm never inclined to blame the victim. And the fact that the man accused of holding her hostage and abusing her, former school security guard Thomas Hose, has pleaded guilty leads me to believe that he's guilty.
No, I can understand a 14-year-old girl being intimidated into silence. But for 10 years?
At least part of the time, Kach was confined or locked up. At some point, however, prosecutors say Hose allowed her more freedom.
I think I would have been eying the windows in that house. You could kick out the glass or the screen, jump into the yard and make a run for it. Or maybe I would have picked up the telephone, dialed "0," and said, "Hey, could you send a squad car up here?"
We're talking about McKeesport, not the Gobi Desert or even West By-God Virginia. The houses are about five feet apart. It couldn't have been that hard to dash for freedom.
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We seem willing to sit around and let events unfold around us, with our mouths shut, suffering in silence until some crisis happens.
At what point did people in the Mon Valley become so passive? Was it the collapse of the steel industry? Are we permanently psychologically damaged?
There was a time when we walked tall, talked loud, and fought for ourselves. McKeesport's mascot is a tiger. South Allegheny's is a gladiator. West Mifflin's is a "titan."
You have to go all the way down to New Eagle and Finleyville before you find anyone using a wool-bearing ungulate as their mascot --- and even then it's a "ram."
National Works closed in 1987. Duquesne Works closed in 1985. It's way past time we got past the pain.
Let's start acting like tigers or gladiators, not sheep. Maybe then we'll stop getting herded around by companies, crooks and politicians --- and we'll be less likely to get sheared.
. . .
In Other News: The marketing manager of Century III Mall writes a letter to the editor of the Post-Gazette to protest reports that the shopping center in West Mifflin is in trouble:
"Century III Mall is lively and well. While we do not directly comment on such speculation, what we can tell you is that it is very much business as usual there. The mall has more than 130 specialty stores and services."
A few months ago, I heard a local radio preacher railing against the Internet. "Don't read those blogs," he kept saying, but he was pronouncing the "g" like a "j," so it came out "blahj."
"Don't give into modernism and humanism!" he kept saying. "Don't read those blahjs! Read your King James Bible!"
"Blahjs" sound like some sort of Eastern European food that you might buy at International Village. "Can I have a couple of blahjs?" "Sure. With sauerkraut or sour cream?"
Luckily for you, as a Mary-worshiping papist my eternal soul is already condemned, so I scan blahjs for mentions of Our Fair City.
Grab your flame-retardant Rosary, climb into the handbasket, and down we go:
. . .
About-PittsburghPa: Sorry I didn't notice this earlier; apparently there was an all-night dance party called "Linear!!" at The Palisades on Saturday, Dec. 29: "70's style meets intergalactic! With a great lineup of djs and a dance floor that claims to be the biggest in Southwestern Pennsylvania, come dressed up in your finest space age/disco gear and get ready to dance all night!"
Scheduled DJs included Kevin James, Craig Kavasia, "Transender," "DJ Donkey Punch," Mikey Shanley (formerly "DJ Sirius"), Jae Illa and "MC Akira," Dave Breakwell, "Naoko," and "DVS."
Not exactly my style --- I'm happy to listen to my scratchy Fats Domino 45s, thank you --- but it shows that we're not all nostalgia-sodden geriatrics around here. I would have given it a shout-out ahead of time; mea culpa.
. . .
Ride for Skip Viragh: Cyclists from around the country are planning to pedal from McKeesport to Washington, D.C., to raise money for Make-a-Wish Foundation on behalf of the late Skip Viragh, founder of Washington-based Rydex Investments. Over the past three years, they've raised $85,000:
Mark Hornbaker will be joined by George Andrews and Paul Barrett as the riders will ride 320 miles from McKeesport, Pennsylvania to Washington D.C. in four days. The riders will start off on the Great Allegheny Trail the first two days of the ride. On the third day of the ride the riders will start on the C&O Canal Towpath at Cumberland, Maryland and will ride 100 miles. The fourth day of the ride will have the riders start off at mile post 84 on the C&O Canal Towpath.
The attorney who handled the adoption was Ray A. Liddle, 202 National Bank Bldg., McKeesport, Pa. I've been told by family since the death of both of my adoptive parents that my birth mother's name was Violet Pickens. She was a friend of Anna Williams, a friend of my adoptive father's mother, Rose Brakeall.
I was told that my birth mother had dark hair, fair skin and was tall. Family has also told me that my birth mother was married to a Greek man who did not believe that I was his child and made her give me up for adoption. Pickens would be her maiden name.
It's a Kiss-And-Ride, meaning that there are spaces for idling cars but not commuters.
It's also a modern look on how Port Authority has failed. It used to be a train station for the PATrain, commuter service between McKeesport and Pittsburgh. More info from a model rail fan here. Now it's a starting place for 15 or so bus lines. I believe there's a driver's lounge on the second floor, since I've seen drivers go up there between routes.
The first floor is obviously a former waiting room and ticket office. Now it's just an empty box that the door sometimes keeps warm. That 2001 article describes a vending machine and fountain that are now gone. It also describes availability of schedules, which is also gone. They can't even use Port Authority owned land to tell people about their services. Oh well.
Augment or alternative reality games combine the digital and the physical to create innovative and interactive games. Notable examples could include geocaching games, and games where players decode information on websites to find information on other websites, call or email the "decrypted" phone numbers or email addresses, or any one of many other activities based on the information learned from the digital site. The real play of ARGs comes through in the back-and-forth from digital to non-digital and in the gaming communities these types of games create. While I'm familiar with ARGs from game studies, it seems like some library and archival materials almost invoke the concept with as oddities that seem to need to be used in some way.
The card almost calls out to be used in a game that requires additional research, making it perfect fodder or inspiration for an ARG.
Finances, rather than nostalgia, prevented me from taking the plunge earlier. I got a break, however, because Minolta has exited the camera business, orphaning its well-received dImage line of digital cameras and making them dirt-cheap on the used market.
More importantly to me, pictures and negatives are easy to store, and they never become "obsolete."
These are just a few random observations, but I can prove that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist:
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Mention the year "1968" and almost instantly, a highlights reel starts to roll in people's brains (probably set to Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower").
Needless to say, we're not out of January yet, but get ready for dozens of "40th anniversary" pieces on the civil-rights movement, Vietnam War protests, and the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
. . .
Local oldies disc jockey and rector the Rev. Charlie Appel, former pastor of Good Samaritan Episcopal Church in Liberty Borough, told me years ago that PIttsburgh had comparatively fewer riots after King's assassination than other Northern cities of its size.
Appel contends that's due in part to the fact that white and black Pittsburghers shared so much of their music.
Unlike other cities, where there were exclusively "black" radio stations and "white" radio stations, in Pittsburgh, suburban DJs like Porky Chedwick, Bob Livorio, Zeke Jackson and McKeesport's Terry Lee were spinning soul and R&B long before the music crossed into the mainstream. Whites and blacks also mingled at record hops and nightclubs; don't forget that one of the most popular nightspots of the 1960s was Walt Harper's Attic.
. . .
Of course, one of the record producers who discovered and popularized many of the early R&B pioneers --- including Lloyd Price, Sam Cooke and "Little Richard" Penniman --- was Art Rupe, founder of Specialty Records, who was raised in McKeesport.
Rupe told me that he discovered R&B music by sneaking behind black churches in the Third Ward on Sundays and listening to the songs coming from the open windows.
I'm not saying that conditions here were idyllic; far from it. As noted elsewhere on Tube City Online, the "good ol' days" in McKeesport weren't always so good for African-Americans.
. . .
Anyway, if this Almanac is a little bit disjointed, forgive me; my mental energies Sunday night went to completing this week's installment of the "Monday Morning Nostalgia Fix" at Pittsburgh Radio & TV Online.
It recalls another anniversary we'll be celebrating this year: the 45th anniversary of the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom."
. . .
The most famous part of that march nearly didn't happen. Organizers weren't sure they wanted Dr. King to talk, because they were afraid that he'd dominate the day's events.
So they pushed his remarks to the end of the program in hopes that the TV crews would go home, then told King that he could only speak for four minutes.
He went on to deliver perhaps the most famous televised address of all time.
Besides shaping public opinion on what became the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the March on Washington also changed the future of the TV news business.
Read all about it here.
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