Last week’s column on Dick Gaetano’s talk on Route 66 piqued my interest in the 1960s television show with that eponymous title, particularly in regard to the two episodes that featured Pittsburgh. A little bit of searching on the Internet netted me the opportunity to turn the calendar back six decades and watch both of them. Episode three in the second season was entitled “Good Night, Sweet Blues”; in it Ethel Waters portrayed an aged woman whose dying wish was to re-unite, for a final time, a jazz band in which she had performed thirty years earlier. Episode nine, the same season, was called “Mon Petit Chou” (My Little Cabbage); its story line was a brief encounter between Tod and a French chanteuse in Pittsburgh for a one week engagement.
“Mon Petit Chou” featured many memorable scenes of Pittsburgh in 1961. The show begins with Tod and Buz working as deckhands on a river towboat moving barges up the Ohio and to a landing on the north bank of the Allegheny River. Sure enough, the towboat was the “Charles Z”, queen of the Zubik fleet, and the dilapidated landing was Charlie Zubik’s headquarters, precisely where PNC Park is located today. It was known then as “the floating junkyard”, frequently containing several dozen decrepit barges and towboats. The contrast between the squalor on the North Side when Tod picks his way through the trash, and the Gateway Towers on the opposite side of the river is remarkable. Each time the Allegheny River flooded, five or six of Zubik’s barges would break loose and end up against bridge piers or the Emsworth Dam. The Corps of Engineers would seek bids to salvage them; Zubik was invariably the low bidder and would haul them back to his landing, ready to be washed away again.
Charlie Zubik was a legitimate Pittsburgh character. The manager of Dravo’s Marine Repair Shop on Neville Island was fond of telling the story of the time Charlie arrived to pick up one of his boats that was there for some minor work. He was advised that the cost was $9,530, at which point he promptly pulled out a roll of bills, peeled off nine “Benjamins”, one “McKinley”, and three tens and went on his way
In 1961 the Manchester Bridge had not yet been demolished; the Fort Duquesne Bridge (later immortalized by Rege Cordic as “the bridge to nowhere”) had been constructed with no connection on the North Side. In the Route 66 episode Tod rescues a water skier, who turns out to be a lovely young singer from Marseille, performing at the King’s Garden supper club in the Pittsburgh Hilton, a venue of which I have fond memories. His pursuit of her leads to a confrontation with her Svengali-type manager followed by an overnight stay in “the Emergency Hospital”.
The next morning our heroes learn that Svengali (played magnificently by Lee Marvin) is at a lunch at the LeMont Restaurant (lots of memories there, too!), so they pile into the Corvette, cross the Liberty Bridge, drive down Arlington to Carson Street, and, much to my surprise, drive onto an incline car, and ride up to the top of Mount Washington. This was the Castle Shannon Incline, which operated until 1964. Sad to state, I never rode on it. The LeMont scenes, of course, provided numerous opportunities for showing off the 1960s Golden Triangle.
At Dick Gaetano’s presentation, Lou DeLach reported that one of his relatives, a nurse at Mercy Hospital, had treated one of the actors, victim of a staged fight gone wrong. Although Tod’s fight with Lee Marvin doesn’t rank very high in television violence, I did find a newspaper clipping confirming that actor Martin Milner had accidentally broken Marvin’s nose. Another clipping verified my suspicion that the newspaper reporter interviewing Marvin at a press conference in the Hilton was Post-Gazette Television Critic Win Fanning.
The “Good Night, Sweet Blues” episode didn’t show Pittsburgh off as well as “Mon Petit Chou”, but made up for it with a superior script. In it, Ethel Waters made history by being the first African-American woman to be nominated for an Emmy. In this episode she hires Tod and Buz to scour the country and locate six musicians with whom she had performed in her youth. With great effort they are successful in bringing them together in time to serenade her just before she dies. Three of them were actually portrayed by big-name jazz musicians – trumpeter Roy Eldridge, tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and drummer Jo Jones. The trombonist was played by well-known actor Juano Hernandez. His character was a down-and-out musician reduced to shining shoes in the Gateway Plaza. That is the only real example of Pittsburgh scenery in this episode.
Last week I noted my distinct memory of Tod and Buz popping out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel in their ‘vette and thrilling at the downtown skyline in one of the series’ episodes. I am embarrassed to report that that experience does not occur in either of these episodes. Ironically, in the beginning of “Good Night, Sweet Blues”, they are shown leaving the south end of the Fort Pitt Tunnel and heading up the Parkway West to Greentree Hill.
It was a real treat to be transported six decades back in time and see Pittsburgh as it existed then and to be reminded of happy times at the King’s Garden and LeMont. I kept looking for a skinny kid with horn-rim glasses and a crew cut, in the crowd scenes, or in his Austin-Healey Sprite at a traffic light hoping to drag against Tod and Buz, to no avail. In 1935 Route 66 symbolized the Depression at its worst; by 1960 it represented the optimism we all shared at that time. The Kennedys were ruling Camelot and our future was unlimited. I can’t remember a time since then when things seemed rosier.