My previous column dealing with Lafayette Street in 1939 described a “frontier” neighborhood full of newly constructed houses and numerous vacant lots. As I promised, this week I have imported my brother Joe and our mutual friend, Dale DeBlander, to help describe a much more mature neighborhood, fifteen years later in 1954. By this time I was off in Japan, defending the free world against the Communist menace, so I am happy to have their help. One of several errors in the 1939 column was my reporting that the DeBlanders were already living at 1073 Lafayette Street; Dale refuted this…

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Thanks to an old friend, Gary Davis, I recently had the opportunity to participate in a workshop dedicated to the federal trials at the end of the Whiskey Rebellion. One of the younger members of our “Elderly Gentlemen’s Book Review Club”, Gary is an attorney obligated to earning Continuing Education Credits in jurisprudence each year in order to maintain his license to practice law. Last week the Historical Committee of the Western District of Pennsylvania, of the Women’s Bar Association of Western Pennsylvania put on an event entitled “Spirits of High Treason: Legal Consequences of the Whiskey Rebellion”. Attendance at…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society celebrated Halloween last month by deviating from its normal subject matter and wandering off into the supernatural. Bob Cranmer made an interesting presentation based on his book, “The Demon of Brownsville Road”. He prefaced his presentation with an explanation of why he wrote the book, which documents the experiences his family had in their house at 3406 Brownsville Road in Brentwood. In his mind these experiences prove conclusively the existence of God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, and Angels and Demons, and he is committed to bearing witness to the presence of Evil right here…

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I have just returned from a delightful trip to Colorado to visit my daughter Sara and her family. The official rationale for the trip was to see my grandson Ian perform in their high school play, “Clue”. However, the beautiful weather there encouraged Sara to take me into the mountains and soak up the magnificent scenery. The first day we drove up Poudre Canyon. When Jim and Sara first came to Colorado, they lived in La Porte, a small town a few miles northwest of Fort Collins while they attended Colorado State University. La Porte is close to the point…

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I recently had the good fortune to be invited to give a presentation to the Historical Society of Collier Township. My subject was a summary of the seven workshops the Bridgeville Area Historical Society just completed, dealing with George Washington’s seven visits to Western Pennsylvania. Coming up with a title for the talk proved to be easy; a common theme running through the workshops was the way these experiences helped convert an ambitious, athletic twenty-one-year-old into a world-renowned statesman. Hence, “Forging a Character”. The audience was impressive. In addition to Sal Sirabella, Gene Czambel, and a nice group of Collier…

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Family history is a subject that regularly attracts my interest. I am not sure what kicked it off this time, but recently I decided to take another look at the Oyler family tree and see if I can add any information to it. For many years our family has maintained and updated a master copy of our own genealogical history. It actually is a descendancy chart recording all the descendants of Adam Douglas and Annie Malinda Smith Oyler (my grandparents) and a trail of Oyler ancestors back four generations to Johan Georg Euler. At each family reunion we make a…

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I recently received the “Official Democratic 2020 Presidential Survey” in the mail, accompanied by a request that I share my priorities for 2020 with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. My first reaction was quite positive – they really are interested in my opinion! Although I consider myself a moderate, probably leaning more to the conservative side than the liberal, I am registered as a Democrat. Living in Allegheny County there really isn’t any point in voting in the primary election unless you claim to be a Democrat. I commend the Committee for being upfront about the real purpose of the…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society kicked off its 2019/2020 program season with an interesting presentation on memorabilia from past Presidential political campaigns by Mr. Stephen E. Mihaly, based on his collection of over 20,000 items. When he was a child, his family was addicted to garage sales and flea markets. One weekend they bought him a collection of campaign buttons, introducing him to a hobby that soon became an obsession. He began his presentation with the 1896 election which pitted Republicans William McKinley and Garret Hobart against Democrats William Jennings Bryan and Arthur Sewall. The Populist Party also nominated Bryan…

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One of my current projects is compiling a history of the neighborhood where I have lived for the past fifty years. It was developed in 1939, and we are having difficulty finding information about its early days. This has prompted me to record my recollections of Lafayette Street, the neighborhood where I grew up eighty years ago. In 1939 I was eight years old; my brother Joe, two. We had moved into our new house at 1053 Lafayette in 1937; the neighborhood was still a combination of new houses and vacant lots. Lafayette Street runs, in a general north to…

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One advantage of reading this column is its unprecedented record of presenting exclusive scoops, reports of significant events that no other journalist is covering. This week’s scoop is a critical review of the eagerly anticipated premiere of the Noh play, “Gettysburg”, in the Charity Randall Theater on the University of Pittsburgh campus. Because of my daughter’s role in coordinating the event I have been somewhat apprehensive, apprehensive that the performance would not live up to expectations and apprehensive that it would not attract a significant audience. Fortunately neither apprehension was realized. The performance greatly exceeded my expectations and was enthusiastically…

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