The Bridgeville Area Historical Society kicked off its 2024/2025 program series with an interesting talk by Robert Stakeley, Coordinator of the Heinz History Center Affiliates Program. His subject was A Woman’s Place: How Women Shaped Pittsburgh, which, by coincidence, is the subject of the current special exhibit at the Heinz History Center. Mr. Stakeley is an excellent extemporaneous speaker, well versed in his subject. Unfortunately, his slides left a lot to be desired. I continue to be surprised how much more competent our students in the Civil Engineering Department are in putting together a Power Point presentation than many of the professional presenters I have seen recently.
The speaker introduced his subject by enthusiastically voicing his support for feminism, and recommended that the audience visit Heinz Center to see for themselves the impact that women have had on Pittsburgh. He began by listing seven different areas in which this impact has been felt – human rights, journalism, war, sports, the arts, community, and government. In total, about 150 Pittsburgh women are celebrated in this exhibit; time constraints limited him to mentioning only a representative handful, but that handful alone is impressive. Perhaps the one most familiar to the audience was journalist Nelly Bly (born Elizabeth Cochran); it is difficult to top the fact that her statue is at the Pittsburgh International Airport, along with those of George Washington and Franco Harris. Her legacy as a female investigative journalist is indeed remarkable.
In the human rights area, he cited Ginny (Mrs. Richard) Thornburgh and her life-long dedication to improving conditions for people with disabilities. He specifically showed a slide from the burial ground at Polk Institute, where the grave of a deceased disabled child warranted only a numbered monument. For the arts, he featured Peggy Owen Skillen, an illustrator famous for creating Oscar the Grouch and Snuffleupagus for Sesame Street. Her impact on our family was significant; John thought Snuffleupagus looked like a rolled bale of hay; even today when I see a field full of hay rolled that way, I immediately say, “Snuffleupagus”! Another prominent arts figure was Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founding director of the National Negro Opera Company.
For the war category, he mentioned the fictional “Rosie the Riveter” and the real-life Julia Parsons. Rosie typified the women working in factories in World War II; Ms. Parsons joined the Waves during World War II and was part of the team assigned as code-breakers to decipher coded messages sent to German U-Boats. For sports, the speaker mentioned Suzie McConnell-Serio and Swin Cash, two local ladies with outstanding careers as players in the Women’s National Basketball Association, and in coaching and sports administration. His next subject, Lucille Treganowan, was familiar to us old-timers as the brains behind “Transmissions by Lucille”. In 1960, faced with the responsibility of supporting three young children, she took a job as the receptionist in an auto repair shop. She learned enough there to open her own eponymously named facility and become famous as a female mechanic. Stephanie Kwolek followed a different route. After graduating from Margaret Morrison with a degree in chemistry, she started a forty-year career with DuPont which produced twenty-eight patents and was a major contributor to the development of Kevlar.
It is easy to be impressed by all these women who broke barriers in many different fields and made it possible for women to participate on a basis equal to men. Their impact has certainly been remarkable. Nonetheless, I am equally impressed with the cumulative impact of another cohort of significant women – the stay-at-home mothers who focused their efforts on rearing their children properly.
The speaker then discussed the Heinz History Center and its relationship with local historical organizations in Southwestern Pennsylvania. He emphasized the importance of preserving history at the grass roots level, and encouraged the audience to contribute oral histories and artifacts to the Heinz Center. At this point I became concerned about the focus of his approach and began to wonder how the History Center could help our Society. In pursuit of this, I decided to inquire about the speaker’s “Affiliates Program”. Sure enough, the Heinz History Center website has an excellent description of this program and the benefits available to its affiliates. I wondered if this is something our Society should investigate. Then I noticed a list of the affiliates, 125 strong. Very impressive, especially when I realized that the Bridgeville Area Historical Society was already listed! None of the folks at our Society are aware of this, nor are aware of any benefits this affiliation has given us. It makes one wonder how many of the 125 organizations listed are actually actively involved with the Heinz Center.
What I would like to see is a much smaller affiliation, coordinating the efforts of about two dozen organizations in the South Hills, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. The Bridgeville Society is a perfect example; our program series is far superior to any other in this area, but we lack the mechanism to advertise it to the folks in our neighboring organizations. We need a comprehensive calendar listing all the special events sponsored by the various historical societies and by unique institutions like the Neville Experience and the Oliver Miller Homestead. A parallel initiative would be some mechanism to coordinate scheduling and eliminate conflicts. I am annoyed every year when there are three Whiskey Rebellion events scheduled at the same time, at three different locations. I do wonder if Mr. Stakeley’s program could help us get our neighbors to work together with us.
Next month’s Historical Society program will be presented at 7:30 on October 29, 2024, in the Chartiers Room of the Bridgeville Volunteer Fire Department. Local free-lance journalist Bob Podurgiel will discuss the August 25, 1923 Ku Klux Klan rally/riot in Carnegie in a talk entitled The Klan’s Uprising and Fall of the 1920s.