Category: History || By

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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.