“Water Under the Bridge” is a column written by historian John F. Oyler. It appears weekly in the Bridgeville Area News, a TribTotal Media publication, as well as in a more expanded form on his blog.
About the Author: Aside from being Bridgeville’s foremost historian, Dr. John F. Oyler is also an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches classes in civil engineering.
Water Under the Bridge, Copyright © 2016-2020
On December 17, 1944, five hundred and fifty heavy bombers took off from the Foggia complex of air strips in Italy on a long-range mission to destroy Nazi oil refining facilities in the Odertal region of Silesia. Included in the armada were twelve planes of the 727th Bomb Squadron, including a B-24 Consolidated Liberator nicknamed “Sloppy but Safe”. Shortly after dropping their bombs, the two lead bombers of this squadron collided, with the propellor of one cutting off the tail of the other. The tail-less plane then plummeted to the ground. One crew member managed to parachute to safety; the other…
The cardinal rule for general interest columns is “Never discuss politics, religion or sex.” This week I will bend the rule a little by attempting to understand some of the economic aspects of our current political upheaval. The one thing about which my polarized friends at both extremes seem to agree is the necessity that we do something about the annual federal deficit and the ballooning national debt, neither of which makes sense to us micro-economists. We agree they are problems, but don’t understand them well enough to have rational solutions, so we leave that to the macro-economists. We micro-economists make…
Last week’s column on the Chartiers Valley School District jointure got me wondering about the numerous schools that existed in the Bridgeville area in the early years. The principle of free public education for children in Pennsylvania was not mandated in Pennsylvania until the State Legislature passed the “The Free School Act of 1834”. Prior to that, wealthy families hired tutors while the rest of the population relied on informal one-room schools staffed by itinerant teachers supported by the families whose children they taught. There is a report of such an operation, the Higbee School, close to the current location…
This month the Book Club is reading David Halberstam’s Summer of ’49, (subtitled “The Classic Chronicle of Baseball’s Most Magnificent Season”). My initial reaction to the selection was negative. “Nobody cares about baseball anymore. And certainly not in January”. Wrong in both cases. The gentlemen in the Book Club all were enthusiastic about the Pirates last summer, until the Buccos imploded. And, thinking about baseball in the dreary days of winter dates back a century to the days of the “Hotstove League”, when small town fans would gather at the pot-bellied stove in the village store and talk about seasons past…
Among my Christmas gifts this year was a “Bird Buddy” Smart Bird Feeder. My immediate reaction upon seeing the name on the box was the obvious “But what about the dumb birds?” Apparently, we have been feeding them for years, now it’s time to cater to the intelligentsia. At any rate, it has been a big hit so far, both with me and with my feathered clients. Feeding the birds has been a tradition with my family as far back as I can remember. When we lived on Lafayette Street, we had a feeder at the edge of the garden,…
During the summer of 1916 my father worked as part of a survey crew for the Cumberland Valley Railroad (CVRR). The CVRR began operation in 1837 and immediately became a success serving the prosperous Cumberland Valley. Initially linking Harrisburg and Chambersburg, it eventually extended south to Hagerstown, Maryland, and on to Winchester, Virginia, and the Shenandoah Valley. During the Civil War it was a popular target for the Rebels, with significant raids in 1862 and 1863, followed by the burning of Chambersburg by Rebel General John McAusland in 1864. That summer my father had just completed his Sophomore year at…
Last week’s column was much too short to include all of my holiday memories, so I have decided to do an encore. Once again, pleasant recollections of holidays past are tempered by melancholy when I think about the folks who shared them with me and are no longer with us. A couple of Christmas memories/traditions left over from last week deserve to be recorded. One year, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I saved up a dollar and went to Stone’s Five and Ten to find a Christmas gift for my mother. After much deliberation, I settled on a beautiful…
Memories are often bittersweet. We tend to focus on pleasant ones and to block out the unpleasant ones. At the same time, for folks of my age, most of the participants in the ones we remember are no longer with us. This dichotomy is certainly exaggerated when I think back to the Christmases of the past. My earliest holiday recollections are of Christmas on Lafayette Street when my brother Joe and I were young. Fortunately for us, our parents went all out to ensure we had memorable Christmases, even during the darkest days of the War. I don’t think our…
It is time for my annual Christmas column/letter. All told, I have had a very pleasant year. I did manage three trips away from home. In May I flew to Fort Collins to visit Sara’s family. The trip included attendance at an excellent performance of “Inherit the Wind” in Boulder, a play in which Ian had several bit parts. He is now in his final year at the University of Colorado where he will earn a Fine Arts Degree in Theater. Last summer he was part of a group of thespians who went to Scotland and filmed two short movies…
I have been involved with the Senior Design Project program at Pitt’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department for the past three decades in varying roles, including coordinating it for twenty years. Since retirement I have kept in touch with the program by serving as a mentor for a succession of teams. This week I watched this term’s six teams give their final presentations. A team of transportation students was given a significant challenge by the Allegheny County Engineering Department – to evaluate the feasibility of replacing problem intersections with roundabouts, and to identify several good candidates for such replacement. They…