Every year, when Father’s Day arrives and I begin thinking about my father, I realize I should record what I know of his life in a column. This year I planned ahead and was able to compile a modest biography of him. Francis Marion Oyler was born in Quincy Township, Franklin County, Pennsylvania in 1891, the youngest of eight children, six of whom (five boys and a girl) survived childhood. Before he was a year old, his father was killed in an accident while working for the Cumberland Valley Railroad. His mother was left with a farmhouse, some outbuildings, and…

Continue reading

I spent an extended Memorial Day weekend in Champaign, Illinois, attending the celebration of my grand-daughter Rachael’s Bat Mitzvah. Although she and her parents are in the process of moving here from Champaign, logistically it was much easier to have it there than here. Rachael, her mother Elizabeth, and I made the eight hour drive to Champaign one afternoon and evening after Rachael came home from school. When Elizabeth and Mike were married they were living in St. Louis, both teaching at Washington University. That was a ten hour drive from here, following I-70 to Indianapolis, then on to St….

Continue reading

For the past forty eight years it has been my privilege to live across the street from a fifty acre park, much of which is woods in its natural state. Thirty years ago my doctor, concerned about cholesterol, prescribed two things for me – some magic pills to be taken each evening and a brisk two mile walk once a day. I compromised, replacing the brisk two mile walk with a pair of nonchalant one mile walks in the woods each day, accompanying our dog. That dog is gone, plus her two successors, but my walks have continued. Mentioning the…

Continue reading

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society’s “Second Tuesday” workshop this month focused on the early years of Bridgeville High School in the first of a series of programs dealing with the history of the school, which graduated its final Senior class in 1960. The facilitator began the program by reviewing what we know about the first school buildings in the Bridgeville area. According to research done by Dorothy Stenzel, the first school was on Presley Road; it was destroyed by a fire. Next came one on McLaughlin Run Road, close to the location of the McLaughlin Run Park today. It operated…

Continue reading

Old scrapbooks are valuable sources of historical information. Ed Wolf, the very capable archivist for the Bridgeville Area Historical Society, recently found one in the Society’s archives that is a treasure house of information. The origin of the scrapbook is unknown, but the old newspaper clippings it contains tell us a lot about many of the legends upon which our current perception of Bridgeville’s early history is based. All of us history buffs realize that we never do know the true story of what happened in the past; instead we know what our predecessors have told us, orally and in…

Continue reading

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society program meeting for April was a presentation on the Roberto Clemente Museum by Vince Mariotti. Located in the rehabilitated Pittsburgh Fire Department Engine House 25, in Lawrenceville, the museum houses “the world’s largest exhibited collection of baseball artifacts, works of art, literature, photographs, memorabilia, and related materials which focus on Roberto Clemente, his teammates, his personal life, and his humanitarian causes.” The engine house was originally acquired by Duane Rieder and renovated for his use as a photographic studio. When the Pirates hosted the 1994 All-Star Game at Three Rivers Stadium, they decided to sponsor…

Continue reading

One of my responsibilities with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh is coordination of our Senior Design Projects program. In their final semester our Seniors are required to participate in a semester long team design project. Ideally these projects are based on real world problems, constraints, and data. Most semesters we have between forty and fifty students each semester, subdivided into six multi-discipline teams. The students specialize in one of six disciplines – Construction Management, Structures, Environmental Engineering, Transportation, Geotechnical Engineering, and Water Resources. Matching the requirements of each project to the specialties available…

Continue reading

The April “Second Tuesday” workshop at the Bridgeville Area Historical Society’s History Center was an exploration of Bridgeville in 1901, at the time the local residents elected to secede from Upper St. Clair Township and be incorporated as an independent borough. The facilitator began the discussion with an in-depth description of Bridgeville in those days – an ambitious community of about two thousand residents that functioned as the commercial and social capital of an area including the adjacent parts of four adjoining townships, Upper St. Clair, South Fayette, Collier, and Scott. Located at the extreme northwest corner of Upper St….

Continue reading

During his presentation on the “Great Castle Shannon Bank Robbery” last month the speaker projected a map of Castle Shannon in 1917 on the screen. When I realized it showed several railroads, my interest peaked. I am in the process of writing a chapter on local railroads for an upcoming book on the Civil Engineering Heritage of Western Pennsylvania, and I need all the help I can get. I immediately resolved to corner the speaker after his talk and request a copy of the map he was showing, then realized that this is indeed 2017. I promptly pulled out my…

Continue reading

The March program meeting for the Bridgeville Area Historical Society was a very entertaining talk by retired Keystone Oaks middle school history teacher Edd Hale, entitled “The Great Castle Shannon Bank Robbery”. When I first heard the title, I thought it would be more appropriate for a British comedy starring Alec Guinness or perhaps an Abbot and Costello film, rather than for a presentation to an audience of history buffs. Turns out I wasn’t far wrong. Although the event was tragic – five men eventually died – it was peppered with absurd incidents that did indeed, as Mr. Hale commented,…

Continue reading