Category: default || By jt3y

My brother called me Friday. "You know that today is grandma's birthday, right?" My unprintable response indicated otherwise.

Her birthday has only fallen on the same day for (mumble-mumble) years. In fact, for my whole life, as it might be apparent. You might think that I could find some space in what's left of my brain to remember it, but no, every year, it's a big surprise. Am I self-centered much? Maybe I should write it down --- with a tattoo on my forehead, for instance.

I was extremely lucky in being able to know all of my grandparents, and remain extremely fortunate in that my grandmothers are both still alive, at somewhere north of age 39. Or as birthday grandma said this weekend, "They say life begins at 40, but they don't tell you what kind of life!"

I learn something new every time I talk to my grandmothers. This weekend, I learned that she saw the infamous Dionne quintuplets during a visit to see my Aunt Marie up in northern Ontario during the 1930s. As grandma remembers, visitors were taken up to a balcony to look down on a nursery where the children were playing.

(As it turns out, her memory is spot-on --- that's exactly how the quints were exhibited.)

She grew up in Our Fair City's East End, in a neighborhood that's mostly gone now, wiped out when Fifth Avenue was widened and an interchange was built at the east end of the McKeesport-Duquesne Bridge. Their house was on Sylvan Avenue, two doors away from Crooked Run Creek --- close enough, as she's told me in the past, that every time it rained, they had to move their furniture to higher floors.

Afterward in those pre-flood control and pre-sewage treatment days, she and her neighbors had the disgusting job of cleaning the muck out of their rented houses. Most of the neighbors were German immigrants, including my great-grandparents; indeed, my great-grandmother learned English by helping her children (including my grandmother) with her homework. The landlady for my grandmother's family was widowed; she lived in one room at the back of the house and worked in a McKeesport department store as a seamstress, sewing beads onto gowns by hand.

Birthday grandma was one of seven children --- six sisters and one brother --- though one sister died as an infant, and another died at age 11 after an accident at the old St. Mary's German School on Olive Street. According to grandma, she was jumping rope when several boys tripped her, seriously twisting her leg. The nuns sent her home in a taxi after she passed out in class.

But the doctor, an incompetent, didn't treat the wound properly, and after several days it went septic. It was only when a visiting nurse from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. came around and realized that my grandmother's sister was dying of blood poisoning that the little girl was rushed to McKeesport Hospital. By then, it was too late.

A third sister died a few years later, shortly after being married and giving birth to two children. Such was life in a Mon Valley milltown before modern medicine.

Yesterday, grandma recalled peddlers bringing wagons of fresh produce around the neighborhood. One peddler might bring nothing but potatoes; another, nothing but watermelons. Often, they'd water the horses in the creek and leave the wagons on Sylvan Avenue.

"The horses would thank us for the water by leaving a mess in the street," grandma recalls, "and the men in the neighborhood would go out and shovel it up and use it for their gardens."

During the Steel Strike of 1919, she says, there were new visitors to Sylvan Avenue --- mounted Pennsylvania State Police, who also watered their horses in Crooked Run.

When my great-grandfather got sick and died, the children were forced to drop out of school and get jobs, although the city required them to attend an alternative school for one day per week until they turned 16. A "waste of time," grandma says. "We sat and read magazines."

Grandma worked at the lunch counter at the old G.C. Murphy five and ten store on Fifth Avenue near Sheridan Street, while her mother took in laundry until she, too, became too ill to work.

When I left, grandma said, "I'm sorry that I tell you these old stories. I know nobody wants to hear them."

I'd never tell grandma she was wrong about anything, of course, but I admit I'm sometimes sorely tempted.

...

Last week I wrote about how addicted I am to Google. On a lark, while I was working on this entry, I "googled" the first name of my cousin's husband in Canada, along with the town he lives in and the business that he used to be in. I didn't even enter their last name, mind you.

Within two jumps I had pulled up a complete family tree, including a picture of my great-aunt --- that is to say, my grandmother's sister, who's been dead now for 20 years.

What a weird world we live in.

...

Speaking of Canada, I'm not a hockey fan, but I have found the whole NHL lockout-slash-strike fascinating to read about.

The Toronto Star says Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky were badly misused by their friends when they were asked to broker a deal between the NHL and the players' union:

What has become apparent is that both Gretzky, a managing partner of the Phoenix Coyotes, and Lemieux, a star player and reluctant owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, worked tirelessly to try to bridge the gap and broker a deal between the two sides after NHL commissioner Gary Bettman cancelled the season last Wednesday. Colorado Avalanche owner Stanley Kroenke and Vancouver Canucks president Stanley McCammon were also said to be working for a deal.

The involvement of Gretzky and Lemieux spiked optimism that the imbroglio could finally be settled.

Going into Saturday, most media outlets in North America were predicting a deal was at hand, largely because they assumed that the two sides wouldn't risk dashing hockey fans' hopes once again.

But when the league and players actually sat down to talk, they discovered that the chasm between the two of them was wider than ever and both Gretzky and Lemieux, both firmly in the ownership camp, couldn't do anything about it.

Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail says that several small-market hockey teams are breathing a sigh of relief that the talks collapsed again. The owner of the Ottawa Senators tells the paper that the proposed $42.5 million salary cap would have stretched his team to "the absolute limit."

Closer to home, the P-G's Bob Smizik says that despite the opprobrium being heaped on the heads of NHL Commish Gary Bettman and the small-market owners by the likes of the Noo Yawk media, they've done the right thing by holding the line:

What seems to be forgotten is that the NHL was something approaching a terminally ill condition before the lockout. Television ratings were a joke, public acceptance -- beyond hard-core fans -- was minimal. Hockey might have been considered by some to be one of the four major sports, along with football, baseball and basketball, but it has long since fallen from that group. Auto racing has a significantly larger following.

To have returned to that status might not have been the death of the NHL, but it would have been the death of the Pittsburgh franchise.

As a backsliding baseball fan, I hate to say this, but I almost wish something similar would happen in that sport. Without a major realignment of the game's priorities, and without someone restoring some sanity to the sport's salary structure, the Pirates, like the Penguins, simply cannot survive. It'll never happen, of course, as long as baseball has the lily-livered Bud Selig at the helm --- and more's the pity.