Category: Water Under the Bridge

I have been interested in sawmills and gristmills for many years. Since we have been spending time in western New York State, I have learned that there is an operating (occasionally) grist mill in Busti, New York, not far from our house at Chautauqua. The Busti Historical Society maintains it and actually grinds grain in it once a month during the late Spring, Summer, and early Fall months for the benefit of historical buffs like me. This Fall it was convenient for us to visit it the last Saturday of September, which coincided with the Society’s annual Apple Festival. Elizabeth…

Continue reading

Last week I went to a “Town Hall” which was advertised as an opportunity for the people currently operating the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PG) to introduce themselves to the general public and to solicit feedback from the community regarding its coverage of local news. This specific Town Hall was conducted at the Mt. Lebanon Library for the benefit of folks in the South Hills. Two other similar events will be held elsewhere in Allegheny County. It was well attended; perhaps one third of the audience were current or previous PG employees. Earlier this year Block Communications, the owner of the PG,…

Continue reading

I am proud of the fact that most of my ancestors are folks who came to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century from Germany and the German part of Switzerland. It may be a stretch to call all of them Pennsylvania Dutch, but that certainly is a convenience. Typical of them are the Smiths, my father’s mother’s family. When my father was growing up, the Smiths lived on the farm next to the Oyler homestead, a farm they had acquired following Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763. When word that year arrived that hostile Indians had entered “the Valley”, most of its residents…

Continue reading

Last week’s column on the replacement of the Commercial Street Bridge described an impressive local engineering project; this week we would like to discuss another equally impressive project, the ALCOSAN Combined Sewer Remediation Project. This project has a much broader significance; cleaning up the Ohio River affects millions of people downstream. It is also significant to the folks who will be footing the (estimated!) two billion dollars bill to pay for it – all of us ALCOSAN customers. ALCOSAN is the acronym for the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, an organization with eighty-three customers – the city of Pittsburgh and eighty-two…

Continue reading

When I learned that PennDOT was going to replace the Commercial Street Bridge, my initial reaction was that somebody had a big problem ahead of him. Located just east of the Squirrel Hill Tunnel on the Parkway East, that location is notorious for traffic jams. The prospect of partially closing down the Parkway for several years to replace this bridge would be a massive headache. Then I learned that a combination of three prominent local organizations – PennDOT; HDR; and Fay, S&B USA Construction– was planning to utilize the Accelerated Bridge Construction concept to reduce the shut-down period to less…

Continue reading

Last week we were treated to a special experience, the opportunity to attend an open rehearsal of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO), an opportunity made available occasionally to long-time patrons. We have been season ticket subscribers for nearly sixty years (initially in combination with two other families). Beth, Mike, Rachael, and I enthusiastically accepted the offer and showed up at the Heinz Hall stage door on Penn Avenue promptly on time. Camilla Pearce, one of the senior members from Development, welcomed us, gave us visitor passes, and led us backstage into the Garden Plaza. She had to keep encouraging me…

Continue reading

I am back home after my second two-week stint at the Chautauqua Institution. The final week was especially memorable since we had our three children and three of our grandchildren together for the first time in several years. Sara and her daughter Claire flew in from Colorado; John and his daughter Lai An, all the way from China. Beth’s daughter Rachael had arrived the previous week after spending the summer in a workshop in New York. The three granddaughters are an interesting trio, each about to enter a new phase of life. Rachael graduated from Bryn Mawr in the Spring…

Continue reading

After spending a week at Chautauqua focused on the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, I am even more deeply intrigued with the story of their initial conception. The discussions included two associated documents – the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights. The consensus of the scholars and historians who discussed the founding of our nation was that these four documents had provided a model for our “Grand Experiment”, the effort to bind together thirteen disparate states into a single republic, founded on the principle (according to Abraham Lincoln) “that government of the people, by the people,…

Continue reading

This summer we are celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States, based on the assumption that our country was born when the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. We know that this was a momentous occasion and that public readings of that document were held throughout the colonies in the next few months, primarily to encourage public support for the audacious activities of a handful of New England patriots that eventually gained support from their neighbors up and down the Atlantic seaboard. The Declaration clearly documented a major shift in philosophy, from resistance to a…

Continue reading

I celebrated my ninety-fifth birthday at Chautauqua nearly two weeks ago. Jonathan and Marsha Maddy drove up from Franklin to help us celebrate. We had a lovely dinner and a magnificent German chocolate cake. Elizabeth had reminded my friends of the significance of the occasion, and I was inundated with phone calls, emails, text messages, birthday cards, E-cards, and letters. I felt like the Rhinestone Cowboy. One of my favorites was a call from my barber, Ted Evangelista, who reported that he was interested in the mathematical equation necessary to fit ninety-five candles on a circular cake. All told, I…

Continue reading