Category: default || By jt3y

I used to cover Wall (population 727) for The Daily News and the Trib. When I started to attend borough council meetings, some of the officials were taken aback --- no one had paid any attention to them for years --- but very friendly and accommodating. (One official in a neighboring community complained because I was writing stories about Wall. "Who cares about them?" he asked me. "People who live there," I said. "Besides, they pay 35 cents for their paper, just like you do.")

Anyway, Susan Schmeichel of the Trib has been paying attention, too: She reports that Wall is about to celebrate its centennial with a street fair Sept. 25.

I guess that will include events at the Wall Municipal Building, also known as the Wall Hall. There's going to be a musical guest at the Wall Centennial; sadly, it isn't Diana Krall, although Diana Krall at the Wall Hall in the Fall would be a ball (I think Krall is a doll, even in Wall), because Wall Hall is nice in the Fall, though if it's cold, wear a shawl.

Now, if they ever build a mall behind the Wall Hall, it would be the Wall Hall Mall. Unfortunately, traffic would stall to a crawl.

If Wall ever got into a war with Wilmerding, they'd have to build a protective barrier: Would it be the Great Wall of Wall?

OK, I'll stop.

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Except that I always wondered what would have happened if Wall and Wilmerding had merged. Would the new town be "Wallmerding"?

I was partial to "Wilmerwall," myself.

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Yesterday, I wrote about how Our Fair City has traditionally gone to great lengths to distance itself from Pittsburgh.

According to a visitor to the Pittsburgh Radio Nostalgia message board, known only as "KW," the anti-Pittsburgh sentiment even extended to one of Our Fair City's two radio stations, WMCK (which later became WIXZ and is now known as WPTT).

Despite a relatively poor signal, KW contends that WMCK had a chance (in those days before FM radio was prominent) to compete with Pittsburgh's Top 40 stations, especially KQV:

The 1958 version of the "Mighty 1360" did 'needle' KQV. It was programed by Legendary Dick Lawrence, and featured on-air talent including Jim White (KMOX), Lou Janis (KQV), Bill Lynch, Jay Morton, Herb Allen and ex-vaudavillian Pat Haley, who'd been the Program Manager at KDKA long before any of us were born. In addition, the station also boasted Cathy Milton. Overnights, the station used an 'automated' Seburg Juke Box, operated by the transmitter engineer, who would 'insert' jingles, spots etc. The overnight program had it's own jingle, "Nightwatch." The jocks at the stations used to promote it as "The Mechanical Monster." This "Mighty 1360" automated overnight far preceeded WHOT's automated "Big Al Knight Show."

According to what was related to me by Haley and Morton, orginally, Lawrence wanted to use the call letters WPGH, which having been abandoned by WILY/WEEP, were available. The local McKeesport merchants who, in 1958, owned the station would have none of that. So, Lawrence just called it "Mighty 1360," and used the "MCK" call letters, buried only in a legal ID jingle.

The primary "merchant" who owned WMCK in those days was the late Robert M. Cox, owner of Cox's Department Stores, who was one of the Mon-Yough area's greatest boosters in the 1950s.

WMCK went on to boast the legendary (some say notorious) record promoter and host Terry Lee, and later (as WIXZ), a DJ named Rush Limbaugh (he called himself "Jeff Christie" in those days).

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I regularly drive through the thick chemical stink that settles over West Elizabeth, and wonder how residents tolerate it. Apparently, they aren't. Beth Hope-Cushey writes in the Post-Gazette that they're going to form a "bucket brigade" this weekend to sample the air quality.

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Speaking of Elizabeth, fellow CMU grad (though he graduated later than I did) and Mon Valley denizen Brad Grantz, who's running for the state house against David Levdansky, is blogging his campaign.

Of course, the "Son of Sam" killer, David Berkowitz, also has a blog. Eeek.

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It had nothing to do with the Mon-Yough area, but I really enjoyed this story by Al Lowe in the Post-Gazette:

Alice Giles had always told her relatives, which include one surviving child, 17 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, that the one thing she wanted to do before she died was to ride on the back of a firetruck.

"They don't even let us do that anymore," said Chuck Cook, acting fire company president.

So riding in the front with driver Jim Smith was the next best thing.

It's no Pulitzer candidate, but it is well-written, and it left me happy.

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Forecasters are predicting snow in hell, while pigs will fly and hail will fall from a clear blue sky and burn as fire upon the ground.

Or something like that. In any event, former New Yorker editor Tina Brown has finally written something witty and trenchant in her column for The Washington Post:

Bob Dole's nasty swipe at John Kerry's war wounds this week made you understand why Viagra has been losing market share to Cialis. The sight of that bitter old face piling on to protest that Kerry did not bleed enough is instant detumescence.

For another take on the same topic, see Ann Telnaes' syndicated editorial cartoon.

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Speaking of editorial cartoons, Alert Reader Jonathan passed along this L.A. Times story about the decline of newspaper cartoons nationally. Some newspapers are dropping their cartoonists to save money.

In addition, some cartoonists have taken the edge off of their cartoons to keep from offending readers. Rather than the rock-'em-sock-'em hard-edged style of Pat Oliphant and Paul Conrad, more and more editorial cartoonists are doing "gag" cartoons with easy punchlines. I'd call that the Jay Leno school of political humor: Make fun of Bush's speech patterns or Kerry being "boring," but don't do substantive jokes based on their avowed policies.

It's not a new trend; left-leaning cartoonists Mike Konopacki and Gary Huck (who lives in Pittsburgh) made the same points in a forum at the old pump house in Homestead last year.

Pittsburgh is lucky to have three editorial cartoonists: Tim Menees and Rob Rogers at the Post-Gazette and Randy Bish at the Tribune-Review. I like all three, though Rogers and Bish often reach for easy gags --- too often for my taste. But they're also widely-reprinted --- Rogers regularly turns up in Newsweek, while Bish's toons often appear in The Christian Science Monitor, whose own cartoonist won the Pulitzer recently --- so the gags must be popular. Menees' cartoons have become very iconoclastic over the years; I find his occasional exercises in visual storytelling (his trip a few years ago on a riverboat, for instance) even better than his daily cartoons.

In the suburbs, the Observer-Reporter and other papers sometimes print Tim Hartman's cartoons, which are usually local and frequently very biting. He's also a good caricaturist (his Ed Rendell is particularly strong).

Lee Adam Herold used to do cartoons for the Valley Independent in Monessen, but lately he seems to be concentrating his efforts on his very gruesome and dark comic, "Chopping Block".