The first Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concert of 2024 featured an excellent performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”. Mussorgsky wrote this piece originally as a piano concerto in honor of his dear friend Viktor Hartmann, a prominent Russian architect and painter who died from an aneurism at the age of thirty-nine. “Pictures at an Exhibition” became an international favorite when Maurice Ravel orchestrated it, adding all the rich colors of a full symphony orchestra. Today it is perhaps the best example we have of program music, “instrumental music that carries some extra-musical meaning, some program of literary idea, legend,…

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I have been a fan of college football since 1941, when I saw my first game at Pitt Stadium. The Panthers were upset by Duke, 27 to 7, with future Steeler Steve Lach catching two touchdown passes. That was a different era – players played “both ways”, offense and defense; the single wing was still in vogue; and professional football took a back seat to the college game. In those days my loyalties were equally divided between Pitt and Penn State. Even then there were questions about the amateur status of the players. There were many rumors of scholarships being…

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It’s bad enough that the Steelers have only won one playoff game in the last thirteen years; now their namesake, US Steel, is about to be purchased by a Japanese steel company. Talk about adding insult to injury! The recent news that Nippon Steel is in negotiations to purchase US Steel for something a little less than fifteen billion dollars has caused massive consternation locally and has attracted significant interest nationally. In 1901 J. P. Morgan orchestrated the merger of Carnegie Steel, Federal Steel, American Steel and Wire, and a number of smaller companies, creating United States Steel, the largest corporation…

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I have been a fan of model railroads since Christmas 1936 when my parents gave me a vintage Lionel “O” Gauge freight train. I still have it and still cherish it. The locomotive is a 2-4-2 385E tin plate model, equipped with a matching tender, an orange side-dump car, a flat car with a pile of wooden planks on it, and a classic caboose. Each cars has two single axles and four wheels. The following year my train was expanded by the addition of a pea-green hopper car equipped with a pair of four wheeled trucks. This was one of…

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When my wife was still alive, the chore of writing notes on Christmas cards was her responsibility, and, like everything else, she was good at it, customizing them for each recipient. She usually started in November and completed the task early enough in December to ensure they would all arrive well before the holiday. We regularly criticized those folks who resorted to standardized printed letters with a scribbled autograph at the bottom. Now that I have inherited this privilege, I have reconsidered this criticism. It turns out that most of the people on our Christmas card list are primarily interested…

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The first week in December is a busy time for everyone involved in Pitt’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Senior Design Project program. For years this has served as the Capstone event of the students’ academic career, their opportunity to demonstrate their education and the fact that they are ready to take on entry level positions in the “real world”. At the beginning of their final semester they are subdivided into teams and assigned challenging “near real world” problems. The result of their work on these projects is a formal, forty-five minutes long, presentation which is video-taped and made available to…

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In recognition of Native American Heritage Month in November, the Bridgeville Area Historical Society gave the podium to yours truly, to deliver a presentation reporting on their presence of these people in this area, down through the years. Since they never developed a written language, the information on which it is based is largely speculative, but is based on an impressive body of archaeological data. The speaker began by tracing this presence from its earliest days through colonial times, up to the end of the eighteenth century. About twenty-five thousand years ago primitive people from Asia, accidentally perhaps, found their…

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The forty-five minutes it took me to drive “over the river and through the woods” to Elizabeth’s house for Thanksgiving dinner provided me with ample time to reflect on the things for which I am grateful at this stage of my life. I am using the term grateful, rather than thankful, because I think it implies something more comprehensive, implying acknowledgment of the involvement of other persons or influences. My first thought was gratitude for the handful of trees that still retained their leaves, in stark contrast to the rest of the barren wintry scene, as a reminder of the…

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The holiday season is upon us. It is ironic that I am sending out a column discussing a German Christmas Market on Thanksgiving Day. Nonetheless Elizabeth and I did indeed spend a lovely Sunday afternoon in mid-November at Harmony’s annual Weihnachtsmarkt. Harmony is a delightful village any time of year; it is particularly special on this occasion. Harmony was established on Connoquenessing Creek in 1804 by the Harmony Society, a sect of pietist Lutherans who had fled Germany to avoid religious persecution and purchased 4,000 acres of land in southern Butler County. By 1814 they had constructed a prosperous village…

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A series of significant recent events have combined to get me thinking about buffalo (hereinafter I will use the scientific term, bison, despite the fact that they will always retain my boyhood name for them). Recently my daughter Sara became involved in an ambitious project, the 2020 DOI Bison Conservation Initiative; her participation in it has spiced up many of our frequent telephone call visits. Last month PBS presented an excellent two-part series on “The American Buffalo”, produced by everyone’s favorite documentarian, Ken Burns. And this month, of course, the celebration of Native American Heritage month in Bridgeville has renewed…

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