“Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there” is the first line of Robert Browning’s popular poem, “Home Thoughts from Abroad”. Written in 1845 when the homesick poet was visiting northern Italy, it is the ultimate tribute to Spring and to home. As I was enjoying Spring in Western Pennsylvania this morning, that refrain came to mind and I realized that there really isn’t anywhere else in the world I would rather be this time of year. The occasion was a morning hike in the woods across the street from my home, on a lovely May morning. I had…

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Like most local sport fans, I was intrigued by this year’s NFL draft, curious to see if the Steelers would draft Kenny Pickett as a replacement for Ben Roethlisberger or run the risk of missing out on “another Dan Marino”. Consequently I elected to invest a few minutes watching what turned out to be a TV extravaganza. This year’s draft was programmed from Los Vegas and eventually took up two evenings and one afternoon of prime-time television. The attraction that professional football has on our entertainment dollar is unprecedented. Not only do the televised games dominate our interest over a…

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For its April program meeting the Bridgeville Area Historical Society was treated to an excellent presentation by Glenn Flickinger, focusing on the impact that President Theodore Roosevelt had on our country. He specifically emphasized TR’s role in two distinct areas – the evolution of our nation into a global power and the redefinition of the power of the President and the Executive Office. The speaker began by reviewing Roosevelt’s early life – childhood illnesses eventually overcome by a heavy regime of exercise, education at Harvard, success as a naval historian, a career in New York Republican politics, a “sabbatical” as…

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At the end of each term, as I watch the Civil and Environmental Engineers at Pitt present their final reports after a semester of participation in the Senior Design Project program, I feel optimistic about the future. If these students are typical of young adults across our country, we will prosper. The program is structured to permit multi-discipline teams to provide design solutions to “near-real-world” problems. This semester they had ten five-person teams working on a broad variety of projects. Two of them were based on future PennDOT projects; in both cases PennDOT District 11 representatives provided valuable service as…

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Eighty years ago one of our favorite radio programs was the Chesterfield Radio Show, featuring the Glenn Miller orchestra. Faced with the challenge of squeezing as much music as possible into fifteen minutes, they regularly played medleys of four songs following the “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue” format, appropriated from an old wedding gift tradition. Sure enough, I recently was able to find a legitimate example of this on YouTube, with Glenn announcing each selection before it was played. “Something Old: Melancholy Baby”; “Something New: Johnny Desmond with Moon Love”; “Something Borrowed (from our old friend Benny Goodman): Stomping at…

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I recently had the privilege of giving a talk to the Senior Mens Club at the Sewickley YMCA, in response to a request from an old Dravo colleague, Earl Edwards. The title of the talk was “Pittsburgh’s Heritage Buildings”; it was based on a chapter I contributed to the American Society of Civil Engineers, Pittsburgh Section, book “Engineering Pittsburgh”. The summary of the talk included a timeline of the completion date for each of the buildings that succeeded to the title of “Pittsburgh’s Tallest Building”. First in this long list is the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, located on Sixth Avenue between Smithfield…

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The March program meeting for the Bridgeville Area Historical Society featured author/raconteur Chris Rodell discussing his book The REAL Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: Life Lessons from the Heart of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. A fellow resident of Rogers’ home town, in the book he explains “how Latrobe influenced a young Fred Rogers, how the adult Fred Rogers influenced Latrobe, and how both combined to influence him and the world”. Rogers was born in Latrobe on March 20, 1928. His father was the owner of several successful businesses and a pillar of the community. As a boy Fred was shy, introverted, and suffered from asthma. Somewhat overweight, he was…

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While researching for my recent talk on the early history of Upper St. Clair and Bethel Townships, I came across a map of Upper St. Clair in 1851, a print of which was for sale on the Internet. I immediately ordered it and have been quite pleased with what I received. Turns out it was a small portion of a map of Allegheny County “with the Names of Property Holders from actual surveys by Sidney S. Neff and S. McRea”. It does indeed have sufficient detail in the area that would eventually become Bridgeville to be of considerable interest. Like…

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My enthusiasm with the Iditarod stems back to a memorable vacation my wife and I had in Alaska eighteen years ago, when we visited several sled dog kennels and actually met Susan Butcher and Jeff King. Coverage of the event was minimal in those days, but today it is possible to follow it almost in real time, thanks to the Internet. The combination of GPS tracking, frequent video interviews, and daily blogs almost makes up for the fact that there is no conventional national media coverage of this fascinating sports spectacle. The nearly prohibitive favorite for this year’s race was…

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My undistinguished career as a columnist began with an article entitled “The Chartiers Street Bridge” that I submitted to the Almanac in November, 1993, lamenting the imminent demise of the bridge carrying Chartiers Street over the railroad in Bridgeville. Marsha Maddy, wife of my nephew Jonathan, was so impressed with the fact that they had actually published it that she encouraged me to write a weekly column and find someone to publish it. Sure enough, the Bridgeville Area News took me up on the offer, and “Water Under the Bridge” was launched. The column had a nice run until March 2020 when Gateway Publications…

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