Category: default || By jt3y

Easter Sunday always seems so anti-climatic --- you spend all of that time decorating the Easter tree, hanging the Easter decorations, going Easter shopping, and then on Easter morning, you drink some green beer, shoot off the fireworks, and it's over.

Or maybe I'm mixing my holidays again. We almost lost an altar boy in church Easter morning; we were sitting quietly while people filed up for Communion when there was a loud "clonk!" at the altar. The church ladies had stacked tulips, daffodils and lilies in pots on the wall at the back of the sanctuary to decorate it.

Well, one of the flower pots tipped over and dropped to the floor, nearly bonking one of the kids on the head. Talk about church abuse!

I can see the sad tableau at the funeral home now: "How did your son die?"

"A senseless Easter flower accident."

That afternoon --- after visiting with the relatives --- I played Betsy Ross. My American flag was starting to become unraveled at one end and was presenting a pretty sorry sight to the neighborhood, so I stitched the stripes back together (insert your own "binding up the nation" metaphor here). My needlework isn't great --- we took metal shop, not home ec --- but it's serviceable. The flag is a little bit shorter at that end because I had to cut away the frayed fabric, but I don't think anyone will notice. Also, I checked the World Almanac, and there don't seem to be any uniform standards for the length of a flag.

After last week's discussion of Bugs Bunny sawing away Florida, I was tempted to remove one of the stars, too, but I didn't know which one was Florida's, so I left them alone. God forbid I should accidentally pull off Rhode Island's star or something by mistake.

Otherwise, it was a pretty uneventful day, which is nice. Alert Reader Officer Jim noted that Our Fair City has apparently got some new police cars, so I made a field trip to the Municipal Building.

Indeed, there were three shiny Chevrolet Impalas parked on Fourth Avenue --- and they're painted in Our Fair City's traditional white with red and blue stripes, not the black-and-white of the previous mayoral administration. Hooray! I'm no fan of the modern new lettering, but it's nice to see the red and blue stripes back on the squad cars. The police cars had those stripes for at least 30 years before the recent change. If I ever get the flatbed scanner hooked back up to the computer at Tube City Omnimedia World Headquarters, I could have even grabbed a photo.

To continue this pointless exercise in nostalgia, I don't remember Our Fair City ever having Dodge or Plymouth police cars. As far as I can remember, they've always been Chevys or Fords. I've even seen photos of McKeesport squad cars from the '50s, and they were Fords and Chevys.

It's not as if Our Fair City didn't have Chrysler dealers; for a while in the 1950s and '60s, we had two --- Standard Auto on Walnut Street (currently the Sunray Electric warehouse) was the Chrysler dealer, and Galen & Jones Motor Company (now gone, it was on Ninth Street, I think) was the DeSoto-Plymouth dealer. I don't know who had the Dodge franchise before Paul Jones (Eden Park Boulevard, it's now the S&S Transit Company garage) took it.

(Fords, of course, were sold by the Red Coats at Eger Motors on Walnut Street, now Mon Valley Plumbing but originally the Hippodrome theater, while Chevrolets were sold by Booth Motor Company on Sixth Street behind the Penn-McKee Hotel. Booth became Deveraux, which moved to Eden Park Boulevard; Devie's location is now Pro Bowl Ford.)

Where was I? Alert Reader Alycia points us to a now-completed eBay auction of sound-effects and music tapes from Kennywood. Sixty tapes covering everything from the Noah's Ark sounds to music for the Lagoon Stage Shows to Fall Fantasy parades going back to 1974 went for $400.

I don't have any of that stuff, but I do have a copy of the "Voice of Kennywood" closing announcements and music that are broadcast over the public-address system 15 minutes before the park closes. One night while I worked there, we tapped a reel-to-reel tape recorder into the PA system and made a dub.

I worked for Kennywood for five summers, yet I never once thought to just sit on a bench for an hour somewhere between the carousel and the calliope and tape the ambient sound. I often think that the sounds of Kennywood --- the music, the roller coasters, the noises of the games, the kids shouting and yelling --- are as much a part of the experience as the sights and smells. If you recorded a tape like that on a June afternoon at about 3 p.m., and played it back for almost any Mon Valley person, they'd only need to listen for about a minute before they'd know instantly what it was.

Alert Reader "Elka Bong" writes to inform us that the Sky-Vue Restaurant on Lebanon Church Road near the Allegheny County Airport has apparently closed. I hope this is temporary. I just ate there a few weeks ago (with two alert readers, come to think of it) and the food was still fine. The Sky-Vue is a great place for a quiet meal, and a lot of lightplane pilots depend on it when they fly into the county airport for a "$500 hamburger."

A first-time alert reader wrote to say that the 1964 photos of Eastland Mall in the History section of Tube City Online "take me from 43 years old to 4 years old in an instant! Wow ... I remember that so vividly. Thanks."

Well, you're welcome. There's lots more to post, if I ever get around to it. Maybe if I spent more time working on the Web site, and less time sewing up old American flags ...

From the Tube City Almanac National Affairs Desk, the word "acerbic" was invented to describe Vanity Fair writer and online columnist James Wolcott, but anyone who likes "Pogo" can't be too bad. Wolcott helpfully pointed to a pop-culture blog called "By Neddie Jingo!" which recently discussed at length the appeal of Walt Kelly's immortal comic strip.

"Neddie" included an audio file of Kelly singing (growling, is more like it) a song called "Go-Go Pogo." I think it's my new favorite song. I downloaded it and burned it to a CD, which I then played about 20 times in the car this weekend:

As Maine go, oh so Pogo go, Key Lar-ar-ar-go,
Otsego-go to Frisco-go to Far-ar-ar-go,
Okeefenokee playin' possum on a Pogo
Stick around and see-ee the show.

Land-alive a band o' jive will blow go Pogo,
I go, you go, who go, to go, parlez-vous go,
From Caravan Diego, Waco and Oswego,
Tweedle-dee, he go, she go, we go, me go, Pogo!

The song is from the 1955 LP "Songs of the Pogo," and you can buy a nice clean digital CD copy of your own.

And finally, Professor Pittsblog points us to a shocking expose of the so-called "blogosphere" (pronounced "blow-gosp-EER"), or as hip teens today say, the "live journal," helpfully provided on Sunday by One of America's Great Newspapers.

Apparently these so-called "blogs" (short for "bologna logs") are sort of online diaries where people (called "bloggers") can write about themselves. According to the sidebar called "Navigating the Blogosphere," they often use so-called "emoticons," animated faces that illustrate the writer's state of mind. (Gee, thanks! Next, can you explain this hippy-hoppy rock combo music that all of the kids are so wild about?)

Because these "blogs" are available on the Internet (a worldwide network of "computers," which are portable electronic calculating machines), anyone with a so-called "Interweb browser" (such as "Microsoft Netscape") can look at them.

By the way: For the benefit of our younger readers "navigating the blogosphere," a "newspaper" is a kind of a version of Google! News edited by poorly-paid, overworked humans and printed on large pieces of paper ("newsprint") made from dead trees. Sadly, it also sometimes turns out to be a collection of yesterday's news tomorrow.