Author: edwolfiv

“On the first of May, it is moving day” is the beginning of the verse for Rodgers and Hart’s wonderful standard, “Mountain Greenery”. It typifies our general perception of May Day as a happy time, an opportunity to proceed to positive things. In the song a young couple is leaving the city for the joys of rural life, anticipating Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor in “Green Acres”. This all changed with the onset of the Cold War with the worldwide Communist expansion following World War II. By 1955 the Iron Curtain had split Europe down the middle, and Communist sympathy…

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When my children were small we enjoyed participating in the YMCA parent-child programs, Indian Guides and Indian Princesses. I particularly enjoyed “playing Indian” and soon found my niche as story teller. Most of the traditional Indian stories for children were of the “Why the ….” Genre, such as “Why the chipmunk’s back is striped”, etc. Typically in these stories some animal performs some beneficial action which is rewarded by the Great Spirit by being awarded some admirable feature or characteristic. Once my daughter Elizabeth and I got into the routine of telling such tales, we began to write our own….

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This past week has been particularly busy for me. Despite losing a full week of school and being forced to function remotely, the graduating Seniors in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Pitt were required to complete all their final assignments this week and take their final exams next week. The most significant of these challenges is the completion of their Senior Design Projects. In their final semester our students are required to participate in a significant “near-real-world” team design project. Before my retirement it was my responsibility to coordinate this program. This term I volunteered to mentor one…

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One positive consequence of being sequestered is the fact that it has provided me with a few more hours each week to devote to reading. My love of reading has always placed high on my list of blessings. An inventory of the pile of books within reach of my favorite chair in the living room would be a good guide to my current interests. The first one I reach for each day is “Jack Frake”, which is the first book in the “Sparrowhawk” series. It was a gift from my former student and dear friend Kevin Abt. There are six…

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An expression heard frequently these days is that “things will never be the same again”. It’s easy to believe that, and indeed it does appear that major catastrophes like our current pandemic do have long ranging effects on many aspects of our lives. However it is also true that gradual evolutionary changes have a similar effect and perhaps an even greater one. Every time our Octogenarian Brunch Club gets together someone brings up incidents from our youth that demonstrate how much things have changed since then. In an effort to shift our intention away from today’s problems, we have decided…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society welcomed back one of its favorite speakers last month, Dr. John Aupperle. His subject this year was Barbara Bush, based on the recent biography “Matriarch”, by Susan Page. Barbara Pierce was born in New York City in 1925 and reared in nearby Rye, New York. Her father was President of McCall Corporation, publisher of popular women’s magazines. If her future husband, George H. W. Bush, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, her spoon was at least silver-plated. Her mother and her older sister, Martha, were both slender fashion plates; in contrast Barbara…

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We have been aware of Judge Henry Baldwin’s illustrious career and his minor place in Bridgeville history for a number of years. We know that he built a summer home, Recreation, in what is now the Greenwood neighborhood in Bridgeville in the early 1800s, which he eventually sold to Moses Coulter in 1818. We know that the eastern end of Station Street was originally a country lane leading from the Washington Pike to Recreation. We know that Coulter sold Recreation to the Walter Foster family in 1842. They in turn sold it to Dr. William Gilmore in 1879, who left…

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We recently had the privilege of meeting with a group of South Fayette Seniors and discussing the pioneers who originally settled what is now South Fayette Township. We have talked and written about early settlers in the general Bridgeville area; this was our first opportunity to focus on South Fayette. We began by revisiting the series of events that led to the establishment of the township in its present form. Pennsylvania’s claim to southwestern Pennsylvania was finally upheld in 1780. At that time Washington County was established; it consisted of all the land west of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers….

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While sorting through some old papers at home recently Alfred Barzan came across a nostalgic artifact that he thoughtfully has donated to the Bridgeville Historical Society. It is an eight-page mimeographed program for the “Bridgeville Grade School Operetta, 1938”. Although its pages have turned brown in the ensuing eight decades, its contents are easily legible and overflowing with nostalgia. Apparently the talented students at Washington Grade School took over the Auditorium at Lincoln High School at 8:15 pm one evening and presented a pair of vintage operettas. Nowhere in the program is the date given; the subject of both operettas…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society opened the new year with one of its rare Sunday afternoon programs. The speaker was a young lady named Dana del Bianco who specialized in studying Stalinism, at Carnegie Mellon University. Her subject was a Soviet hero of World War II, Roza Shanina, a decorated sniper. Miss Shanina was born in Yedna, Russia, in 1924, and educated at a pedagogical college in Archangelsk, Siberia. She was working in a kindergarten when war broke out and she joined the Red Army. Women were treated as equals in the Soviet Union; it is not a surprise that…

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