We nonagenarians are frequently criticized for living in the past and failing to appreciate the pleasures that are available to us today. I certainly plead “Guilty” to that criticism; I am firmly convinced that all the cultural experiences of my young adult life are superior to those currently available. When I turned ninety, I assumed that my opportunities to see and hear world class jazz musicians in person were all in the past. How wrong I was! Since then I have been treated to live performances by Bill Charlap at Chautauqua and John Pizzarelli, at Hartwood Acres. Similarly, I assumed…

Continue reading

Last week’s column on Dick Gaetano’s talk on Route 66 piqued my interest in the 1960s television show with that eponymous title, particularly in regard to the two episodes that featured Pittsburgh. A little bit of searching on the Internet netted me the opportunity to turn the calendar back six decades and watch both of them. Episode three in the second season was entitled “Good Night, Sweet Blues”; in it Ethel Waters portrayed an aged woman whose dying wish was to re-unite, for a final time, a jazz band in which she had performed thirty years earlier. Episode nine, the same…

Continue reading

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society reverted to its Winter schedule the last Sunday in January with an entertaining presentation on historic Route 66. The speaker, Dick Gaetano, began his talk with an explanation of his lifelong fascination with that highway. In 1949 his family acquired their first automobile since pre-WWII days and christened it by driving to California and back, primarily on Route 66. Dick recounted memories of the excitement of the trip, including visiting the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon and crossing the desert with a Lister bag hanging in front of the car’s radiator. I recall Ed…

Continue reading

As I begin this column, we are in the throes of winter. At our latitude winter is just severe enough to give us a taste of what northern climes experience, yet short enough to normally serve as a pleasant distraction. We may have brief episodes in late November and December, or later on in February and March, but most years our taste of a continuous spell of freezing temperatures and repeated snowstorms is limited to a period lasting ten days or two weeks sometime in January. This year’s period arrived on Monday, the 15th, and lasted till the middle of the…

Continue reading

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,…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading