Play ball

The start of the 2011 Major League Baseball season is an appropriate time to show off this antique photograph of players in the Mon Valley, Pa., area circa 1910. All I know about the shot is that I pulled it from a newspaper editor's trash in the 1990s while we were cleaning out the files at the old Daily Herald in Monongahela. Some of the guys, shown above, might have played for nearby Donora, given the "D" sewn on a couple of their shirts. Click here to look at a bunch of other old or vintage photos in my collection.

A town is born

This photo was shot July 1, 1900, in the center of what was about to become the bustling steel town of Donora, Pa. (Monongahela Area Historical Society)

More inclusive histories, finally

By Scott Beveridge

Local historians are including the contributions and struggles of black people for the first time in the things they publish about their communities.

Record keepers in Washington, Pa., have been collecting the oral histories of older black people who lived during the Civil Rights Movement, including those about segregated movie theaters and swimming pools.

Until then, the black story had largely been overlooked there, unless told through the eyes of prosperous white people who helped escaped slaves seeking freedom on the Underground Railroad, said Tom Mainwaring, a professor at Washington & Jefferson College.

The folks in Donora, Pa., have followed suit.

The Donora Historical Society has included a number of photos of black people in a new book on the Washington County borough’s history in what probably is the first time an integrated story has been told there.

The photo that stands out, above, shows a dozen Boy Scouts in uniform posing outside their Baptist church in 1940 with their leader and troop and country flags at a time when the United States was poised to enter World War II.

The paperback photo album also includes a head shot of U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton, a black Donora native who served as a federal drug czar and also presided over the perjury trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to former Vice President Dick Cheney. Meanwhile, the book holds a portrait of Loretta Ross Jones, a black woman who has spent her life working to help improve the lives of troubled local children.

The book also shows off a fantastic collection of photographs that tell the story of how the town grew up around steel. It’s only because the society was fortunate to have inherited the remarkable collection of a professional photographer, Bruce Dreisbach, who spent most of his life in Donora after locating there in 1906.

The book is a project of Charles Stacey, a retired public school superintendent, and two other historical society members, Brian Charlton and David Lonich. It can be purchased at local retailers, online bookstores or through its publisher, Arcadia Publishing at www.arcadiapublishing.com

(The society will officially launch the book at 1 p.m. April 10, 2010, at the Donora Smog Museum, 595 McKean Ave.)

The after-Christmas party

Sometimes wonderful light sculptures develop on their own when such struggling towns as Donora, Pa., wait too long to take down their Christmas decorations. (Scott Beveridge photo)

Teamwork needed to tackle blight

One of many examples of blight in Donora, Pa.

By Scott Beveridge

PITTSBURGH, Pa. ¬ – A nonprofit in Pittsburgh that promotes smart growth is suggesting the formation of a panel to address the growing problem of residential blight in the region.

Sustainable Pittsburgh this month released a report, Southwestern Pennsylvania Blighted and Abandoned Properties Solution Project, that identified a staggering list of 67,886 abandoned housing units in this corner of the state.

“The report substantiates that addressing blight and abandonment offers the chance to build assets in a community and deliver economic, environmental, and social equity benefits for both community and the region as a whole,” the report states.

However, there is no regional plan, decision-making body or coordinated effort to deal with this crisis that has impeded economic recovery.

Teamwork would foster and environment that would help create jobs, including those associated with demolition, and increase the value of properties whose owners still take pride in them, the report shows.

Here in the mid-Mon Valley in such municipalities as Charleroi and Donora, there is a perception that blight is epidemic and that local, county and state officials are not adequately addressing the problem. Houses are added each year to demolition lists through a complicated and costly system of obtaining legal permits to tear down ugly, decrepit buildings.

However, such municipalities typically do not see the real value in buying these houses, Sustainable Pittsburgh has concluded. A municipality’s property assets can increase their bonds, and it stands to gain significant sums of taxable income by putting vacant lots back on the market.

Someone with a good job might also want to invest in a house in one of these dying towns if the blight was erased. That is preferable to every other house being stripped of their copper by thieves after their last occupants move elsewhere.

The Donora Hotel - two versions

In its heyday:


And today:


The Donora Hotel was dressed in bunting for a fireman's convention when the postcard, shown at the top, was produced. Someone in the crowd fell to the ground during the festivities, and the spot where he stood before the accident was marked with an X.
These days, the hotel that later became a community center and library stands in the heart of a downtown in decay 50 years after the steel industry collapsed in thist Pennsylvania borough.

A Judy sky

The skies in southwestern Pennsylvania have been quite unusual and especially fantastic this summer.
This is the glow of ball lightening tonight over Donora.

She had a way with hair

By Scott Beveridge

DONORA, Pa. – The historical society in this town doesn’t know Mrs. Koehler’s first name, but it keeps her dead relatives’ hair preciously preserved under a glass dome.

The woman took the Victorian art of weaving such hair into art to a higher level by turning it into intricate flowers, sprays and springing doodads attached to an 18-inch-tall black wooden cross.

“It just gets creepier and creepier,” a volunteer said last week at the Donora Historical Society’s museum at 595 McKean Ave. where the sculpture is proudly displayed near the front door.

This type of folk art became widely popular in the late 1800s when people seemed to care more about how they wore their grief in public than about returning to a normal life following the death of a child or spouse.

So while British Queen Victoria made mourning fashionable by wearing black clothes every day after her husband died, her many adoring fans opted to turn the hair of their loved ones into jewelry or framed art.

Some of them created such things as a picture of a weeping willow tree leaning over a tomb, a crown or ribbons to adorn a photograph of the dearly departed.

We’ll probably never know why Mrs. Koehler left Donora, Pa., with this bizarre gewgaw or whom it was intended to memorialize.

The grand morbidity of this fashion, though, makes it clear why the art form fell completely out of style after cheap photographs made it much easier to remember the dead.

Threatened Mon River bridges admirered

A few people who attended the Historic Bridges Conference in Pittsburgh last weekend admire the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge, a closed span that is under threat of demolition. Meanwhile, major improvements to Locks and Dam No. Four continue in the distance.

By Scott Beveridge

DONORA, Pa. – The aging Donora-Webster Bridge appears to be in better shape than many spans its age in the United States, a group of bridge experts agrees.

“This bridge has a coat of paint on it,” said Luke Gordon, a construction inspector from Michigan who visited the historic span Saturday with other bridge enthusiasts. “It’s 10-times better than most I’ve seen.”

Organizers of the Historic Bridges Conference in Pittsburgh included weekend stops in southwestern Pennsylvania at the Donora-Webster Bridge and the similarly built, nearby 103-year-old Charleroi-Monessen Bridge because both of their futures are uncertain.

Outside of Allegheny County, the bridges are among just four Pennsylvania through-truss, pin connected spans still standing along the Monongahela River. The others are in Point Marion and Brownsville, and all are on the National Register of Historic Places because they were pinned together using technology borrowed from the Pennsylvania Railroad.

But, within a year the Charleroi-Monessen could be demolished. A new bridge would then be built on the same site if the plan clears the scrutiny of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The Point Marion Bridge will be gone, too, after a new replacement span opens in November.

“Bridge heritage is at risk,” said Eric DeLony of Santa Fe, a retired chief engineer for the National Park Service who also attended the bridge conference.

He was among a dozen such experts attending the conference who toured the 101-year-old Donora-Webster Bridge. Some took photographs, while others said they admired its graceful lines.

The span became the first toll free bridge to open on the Mon, allowing the older community of Webster to share in the new wealth of Donora after a sprawling steel mill opened within its borders. The bridge was originally painted black for the coal in Webster’s hills and gray for the smoke that billowed from the mills.

The bridge also stood alongside the infamous Donora zinc works, which contributed to a 1948 smog that killed at least 20 local residents and became the catalyst for America’s first clean air laws.

“Donora, probably more than any other town, has the history as to why people would want to come see this bridge,” said Todd Wilson, a civil engineering consultant from Pittsburgh who helped to organize the conference. “This bridge was here and it did play its part in that story.”

It appears the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has done a good job maintaining this bridge. It’s guard rails were not attached its main vertical beams to protect the superstructure from damage by vehicle accidents, Gordon said.

However, there is speculation PennDOT will begin scrutinizing this bridge after it completes the historical review process on the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge that has been closed to traffic since February. The closure of that span followed an inspection that discovered a badly deteriorated pin joint supporting a deck.

People in the struggling Mon Valley towns need to band together to save these historic spans if there is any hope for the area to become a historic tourism destination, said Nikki Sheppick, a historian in Charleroi.

“If we don’t keep these assets, we’re dead,” Sheppick said during the conference stop in Charleroi.

Light show on the Donora-Webster Bridge

Donora museum rolling out military exhibit

The town of Donora is lucky a local postmaster became the first president of its historical society.

Roman Koehler, who managed the Pennsylvania borough’s post office from 1905 to well into the 1940s, saved everything the government gave him, including posters he displayed to help sell World War I bonds.

“We’re very fortunate,” said Brian Charlton, curator of the society’s new musem at 595 McKean Ave.

His favorite wartime relic is a Gerrit A. Benker (1882-1934) poster, the artist’s most famous, titled, “Sure We’ll Finish the Job.”

Like many of the American portrait artist’s paintings, it features a workingman in the uniform he wore on the job. Nearly 3 million of the Impressionist-style posters were sold in the drive conceived to drum up support among labor for the war effort.

Charlton is putting together a military exhibit in approach of Memorial Day in what opened last year as the Donora Smog Museum. In a former Asian restaurant in the town’s blighted downtown, the museum has a remarkable collection of old photographs relating to the killer smog of 1948 and the town’s steel and zinc mill.

The museum is open from noon to 3 p.m. Wednesday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. The society that formed in the 1940s is training volunteers to open the museum more often as summer approaches.

A hero rises from the smog

Donora fireman Bill Schempp was a gentleman who defined volunteerism. This is his obituary from the pages of the Observer-Reporter:

Bill Schempp emerged as a small-town hero, going door-to-door as a volunteer fireman with oxygen in Donora, Pa., during the nation’s deadliest air pollution disaster.
This week Schempp, who died Sunday, December 14, 2008, at age 91, is being remembered as a father figure to young firefighters whom he trained over the years.
“He always welcomed us at any time to his home and loved to talk to us about the olden times,” said Casey Perrotta, 27, a borough fireman and local code enforcer.
Schempp was just 31 when he answered a call from his fire chief, Charles Cumberland, to take an 18-inch oxygen tank to offer fresh air to people who were gasping for their breaths during the Donora smog of 1948.
It took him nearly an hour to walk up Donora’s steep Sixth Street with the tank in one arm and using the other to feel his way through the thick smog linked to stagnant air and pollution from the local steel and zinc mills.
The nation’s first clean air laws were spawned from the event that claimed at least 20 lives over that Halloween weekend.
And through the years, reporters from all corners of the United States have called on Schempp to retell his story about the disaster.
On the famous mission, he offered an oxygen mask to the sick to take just two or three breaths before he had to move on. The calls just kept mounting. At some houses, people clung to him or shouted to keep him from leaving.
“There wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it,” Schempp told a reporter with Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service for a story on the smog’s 50th anniversary.
“There were too many calls to help everyone,” said Schempp’s friend, Paul Brown of Donora. “I worked in that mill. I know how bad it was, so I know what he went through.”
Schempp went on to work for 23 years as Donora postmaster. He was known to tinker with his antique red fire engine that bore his name, and often drove it through local parades.
He granted his final interview last summer to a producer of The Weather Channel’s docudrama, “Killer Smog,” that premiered in November.
Donora firemen gathered last night beside his coffin in James A. Rabe Funeral Home in Donora for a firefighters memorial service.
“He is a hometown hero,” said Perrotta, who portrayed Schempp as a young man in the Weather Channel show.
Schempp is survived by his wife of 67 years, Gladys Balmer Schempp, and a daughter, Annie Schempp of Donora. He will be buried Thursday in Monongahela Cemetery.

(Caption: Donora fireman Bill Schempp about a decade ago in the passenger seat of his antique fire engine.)

Donora makes inaugural visit to Donora

Casey Hanner and her brother, Jake, of the Pittsburgh band oddly named Donora, shown above, stopped by the Borough of Donora Saturday to play a few songs to mark the 100th birthday of the Donora-Webster Bridge. So did Bob Menzler of the new Donora duo, Rhyme and Reason, to sing a few cover tunes. (He's in the video clip, below)

Unfortunately, bitter cold weather forced part of the celebration from the bridge to a fire truck house at Rostraver Volunteer Fire Department No. 1 in Webster. But these are talented, dedication musicians who proved to be troopers for a worthy occasion.

In previous years, folks in Donora and Webster dressed up in frumpy period clothing to celebrate milestones on the bridge.

“Let’s start our own traditions,” said DeAnne Pavelko, an organizer of the birthday party, reacting to the notion to celebrate the bridge anniversary with music that appeals to today’s generation.

Here’s an excerpt from a story about the bridge program in today’s Observer-Reporter:

The rusting Donora-Webster Bridge was built a century ago within seven months at a cost $200,000, connecting a borough with hulking steel mills and a village rich with coal.

"That wouldn't be enough to paint the bridge right now," said Charles Stacey of Donora during a ceremony Saturday to mark the span's 100th birthday.

Yet this bridge remains special to residents of these two towns, so much so that two couples stood in a light snowstorm to renew their wedding vows at the rededication service.

"It was exciting, something everybody else doesn't get a chance to do," said Kathie Chadwick of Donora after exchanging vows with her husband of 41 years, Ron.

The Chadwicks and the other couple, Thomas and Carol Stoffel of Monongahela, arrived at the bridge in a horse-drawn wagon to exchange vows before Donora Mayor John Lignelli.

"We were really happy to be here," Carol Stoffel said. "I'm a Donora girl."

Weddings have become a tradition on the bridge, dating to its opening Dec. 5, 1908, when Webster resident John Witherspoon married Harriet Binley before an overflowing crowd. Two other local couples were married on the span Dec. 5, 1986, when it reopened after extensive restorations.

Saturday was the first time the Hanners made a trip to Donora, and they drove around town after singing with plans to shoot some promotional photos there.

“We’re Donora and so are you,” Casey Hanner said before leaving.

Expect big things from her band.

Donora is set to release its first album, one that is self-titled and produced by Rostrum Records, at a party about 8:30 p.m. Dec. 19 at Rex Theater in Pittsburgh’s South Side District.



Last, but certainly not least, the Observer-Reporter's online editor, Harry Funk, braved the light snow storm to introduce the program on the bridge. I'm sorry that I didn't get the chance to run a clip of the entire song.

Donora "Man of Steel" grave was a hoax

DONORA, Pa. – It seems that nearly everyone in this town bought a story about the burial of a “man of steel” who died tragically in a crucible of molten metal.

Until their deaths, even Andrew Posey’s 10 siblings held tight to their belief that U.S. Steel created a special grave in Donora, Pa., beside the open hearth for the steel that instantly devoured him in the 1920 accident.

“I think there was a lot of pressure from the family put on the mill,” said James McKenzie, a retired North Dakota University English professor who grew up in Donora, and, for a time, believed the tale.

But evidence surfaced this week that suggests the burial was nothing more than a hoax at a time when the life of a steelworker meant little to America’s steel barons.

The Mon Valley Progress Council Inc. released a report to the Observer-Reporter on an excavation it conducted in 1995 at the site that revealed nothing more than undisturbed earth in a section 8 feet deep around Posey’s tombstone.

“This completes all work toward (the) memorial site investigation and we conclude that this site is a memorial only and no slab or ingot of steel is located within the area of our investigation,” the engineer, Samuel M. Bitonti, noted in his report.

“We were very interested in finding it,” said Joe Kirk, the council’s executive director, who went in search of the steel while trying to sell the site to a new manufacturer.

“I wonder if it was all graveyard PR theater to make the family feel better,” said McKenzie, who wrote an essay about Posey that was published in Notre Dame Magazine’s winter 2006-07 edition.

Posey, who was born July 4, 1898, had just returned from service in World War I when he was hired as a ladle stopper checker in the open hearth. His job required him to climb down into the 100-ton ladle on Jan. 8, 1920, when an explosion in the back of the furnace covered him with 3,000-degree steel, McKenzie, of St. Paul, Minn., wrote in his essay.

Posey’s brother, Joe, built a low, yellow firebrick wall 20 feet wide and 15 feet long around the “grave” after the family was told the entire fatal 65-ton ingot was buried at the site, McKenzie added. A small concrete cross holding a bronze plate containing the steelworker’s name in raised letters rests on the ground.

Each year, war veterans place an American flag on a medallion beside the cross. Others have been known to decorate the stone with artificial floral arrangements.

The local newspaper, The Valley Independent, had earlier repeated the myth, unquestioned, in a 1968 article that pondered the fate of the memorial after the mill closed.

“After the accident, the entire heat of steel containing the remains of Posey was placed into a grave on a plot of ground on the steel firm’s property,” the article states.

And the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission even honored the “grave” as eligible for protection under the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. It went as far as to send a researcher to Donora to interview former mill boss Glen Howis, who repeated the burial story as truth.

“The young man’s remains sealed within the steel were loaded from the open hearth area onto a rail car and carried via a rail spur to the vacant area … where the mass was buried,” the narrative of the PHMC research states.

Now, in light of the Progress Council report, the agency is unsure whether the Posey site can survive the National Register, said April Frantz, a commission survey coordinator.

“I don’t know … just because a whole hoax was perpetuated and the story was that good,” Frantz said.

She said it could survive the distinction because it sheds light on the way “the company operated and how it treated its workers.”

When he revisited the site Tuesday, McKenzie, 67, said a bigger mystery exists as to why Posey was afforded any special attention by the company in an era when as many as 900 steelworkers died on the job a year in the Pittsburgh region.

The company could have been attempting to keep peace with workers who had just returned to their jobs from the bitter first labor strike against U.S. Steel in 1919. During the walkout, a band of Donora steelworkers set off dynamite at the homes of two of their coworkers who crossed their picket lines. Another angry mob of striking workers, their wives at their sides, assaulted and disarmed the police chief when he escorted mill bosses through the gate to the Donora zinc works.

The labor dispute was marked by other riots, one of which involved 50 men who threw bricks at black scab laborers, according to headlines pulled from The Donora American.

“This is the only 'grave' of its kind in America,” McKenzie said.

“I wonder if there was any ceremony at that site at all? Did they move in a rail car for theatrical purposes? Blade up the surface a little to fool the grieving rubes? We’ll probably never know.”

Regardless, Jeff Huff, who manages a nearby warehouse for Elizabeth Milling Co., regularly mows the grass around the Posey plot out of respect for any relatives who still may live in the area.

“There was a time family members would come to visit,” said Dave Felgar, manager of Elizabeth Milling, which doesn’t own the Posey land. “Less and less, they’ve been coming.”

(Caption: Former Donora residents James McKenzie of St. Paul, Minn,, right, and his friend, Paul Rank of Rock Cave, W.Va., visit the so-called Andrew Posey grave in their hometown.)

First published in the Observer-Reporter

Donora paintings hold deep messages

In the top corner of Todd Pinkham's colorful new mural about the Pennsylvania borough known as Donora, an entrepreneur named Frank Donner is depicted among blazes of sun.

Nearby is a likeness of Nora Mellon, the wife of Andrew W. Mellon, a Pittsburgh industrialist and banker who invested heavily with Donner in a giant steel mill in the town in 1901.

But the main focus of the painting is a rendition of an old photo of Beanie Huhra, an eccentric Donora resident who appeared in parades on a surrey pulled by a donkey. He used the getup to promote the Society for Better Living, which had formed in nearby Webster to protest pollution from Donora's zinc mill that was blamed for 20 local deaths during a smog in 1948.


The only difference in the mural between then and now is that Huhra is surrounded by flowers instead of dead soil thanks to the society's complaints that were partly responsible for the first federal clear air regulations in the 1960s.

"I tried to give them a work that reflects today," said Pinkham, 39, a painting professor at California University of Pennsylvania.

He included Donner and Mellon in his scene because their names were joined to create the borough's name. The large painting is among two that Pinkham created for a new museum that is being developed in Donora for the 60th anniversary of the smog in October.

And, other works of art in a Donora theme will be presented to the town, free of charge, by Cal U. students after their classes resume in the fall, Pinkham said.

He is using Donora and its troubled economy to inspire his students to reach out and do something good for the world around them.

The theme of "social justice" is gaining popularity among artists in the United States, he said.

"Basically, Donora is a community that would benefit from getting a little bit of notice," Pinkham said.

In addition to the smog, Donora became famous in the early 1960s for being home to the first major steel mill in the nation to close permanently. And the borough is poised for some new attention about dirty air because "times are changing" as the green cause keeps gaining momentum, Pinkham said.

He strives to include images in his works that inspire people to use mental associations about things that are otherwise concealed in society.

“Looking at my paintings becomes a sensory adventure of discovery that started when I began to paint it and continues with the act of viewing it,” Pinkham stated on his Web site.

His Donora projects work to pull the story of the town together, said DeAnn Pavelko, a member of a committee organizing events for the smog commemoration.

"I think when you look at them, you see Donora, the episode, the whole story," Pavelko said.

The committee plans to hold a parade and football game between Donora and Monongahela. No one was able to see those events in October 1948 because of the heavy smog, yet they went on as scheduled.

(Portions reprinted from the Observer-Reporter)

Casey and the two Jakes are rocking Pittsburgh

The new garage-rock band, Donora, is putting on a bashful front as it heats up Pittsburgh’s music scene.

“We don’t like to talk about ourselves much, really,” drummer Jake Hanner said Sunday while the trio from Gibsonia, Pa., took the mini-stage at the Three Rivers Arts Festival.

And they don’t. It takes some digging into Google to find a reference that Hanner and his sister, Casey – the lead vocalist – are the children of Dave Hanner of the Corbin-Hanner Band, a local country group that became popular in the 1980s.

The new band likes the name Donora, which is a gritty, blighted former steel town south of Pittsburgh that is famous for having had an air pollution disaster, Jake Hanner said in a e-mail to this blog.

Another Jake – Jake Churton – plays the bass behind the music that tends to replay in your head long after the plugs are pulled from the band's Fender Musicmaster.

Casey Hanner is particularly spellbinding when she drops her voice to a sexy, quiet range for one of the group’s signature songs, “Shh,” before she notches it up to a rocking finish.

Locals agree that this group turns out a great sound, as readers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette voted it the second best band in the city in a newspaper/Web promotion this spring.

A video of the band featured on the blog, PostSecret, held the number one spot on YouTube for two consecutive days in February. And MTV likes Donora’s sound, too, enough to include two of its songs in the show, “I Remember Chloe.” This group also does a fantastic cover of Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded.”

Casey and the two Jakes have arrived with gusto, but they should come out of their shells and do more to promote themselves with slick bios, photos and videos.

They are worth noticing in a bigger way. Remember, some 20 people died from air pollution over a smoggy 1948 Halloween weekend in Donora, an episode that practically wiped the borough off the map. The band using that name deserves a better legacy.

A tale forged in steel

DONORA, Pa. – In a far corner of former mill property, behind a loading dock to a modern milling company, lay “the remains” of a steelworker who met his death in a ladle of molten steel in 1920.

Just home from World War I, Andrew Posey, 21, was working as a stopper setter when he was killed in the open hearth at U.S. Steel’s American Steel and Wire Co. Donora works, a mill that would disappear from the landscape in the 1960s.

Legend has it that, behind a blast furnace, U.S. Steel buried the entire 65 tons of steel that consumed Posey. And his 10 siblings bought the story, as did many others in the borough along the Monongahela River.

As it turned out, developers of a new building in what is now the Donora Industrial Park considered relocating the grave site in the 1990s because it stood in the way of progress.

The Mon Valley Progress Council had experts drill and dig into the “grave” protected by a 20-foot wall of crumbling yellow bricks and marked off by steel pipes forged at the mill. The grave turned up empty.

A historian was also consulted who theorized that the Posey family had probably been duped by the company into thinking that a big chunk of expensive steel had been buried as a fitting tribute to their loved one. These kinds of tales have been told for decades in the many mill towns that dot the Pittsburgh region, where the life of a steelworker once had much less value to a company than an ounce of steel.

In the end, the road was routed away from the Posey monument that also is hidden behind an outcropping of weeds. Stop by to pay your respects if you can find the site just north of the Donora-Monessen Bridge, but poor Andy Posey’s memory is more likely part of a bridge over a different valley.

Donora is spooky without "TV tunnels"

DONORA, Pa. – A popular television thriller series about the “ghostly” otherworld is making a star out of Donora.

CBS’s "Ghost Whisperer” is set in the fictional town of Grandview, which is actually a section of Donora, and at least one plot line involved mysterious tunnels that are supposed to be under its downtown.

Most likely, however, the Donora underground exists in the vivid imagination of one of the show’s executive producers, Kim Moses, who grew up in the borough, locals say. She also was once married to professional football legend, Joe Montana, who grew up in nearby Monongahela.

“That has to be fiction,” said Donora photographer Chuck Muia, 75, who knows the borough inside and out.

Moses is an incredibly gifted woman who has often incorporated Donora in the plot lines of her productions, said borough council President Karen Polkabla.

“Ghost Whisperer” stars Jennifer Love Hewitt as the fictional Melinda Gordon, who communicates with spirits and ghosts that have unfinished business on earth. An earlier story line involved a war memorial in a town park that was inspired by one that existed in Donora.

Polkabla never heard of the tunnels, either, and laughed at the thought of a mysterious underworld in the borough.

“Cool. Maybe that’ll bring visitors,” she said.

Muia said many houses in the Mon Valley have tunnels in their basements where people used to mine coal to feed their home furnaces. Others were known to tunnel into basements to create a personal fallout shelters during the Cold War, he said.

There is a creepy old network of large sewers leading to the Monongahela River from the former U.S. Steel mill that once dominated the riverfront, Muia said. Those sewers were sealed, though, because children were known to climb into them, he said.

But as far as tunnels under the businesses, “There’s nothing to that,” Muia added. “If that were the case, (a bank) would have been robbed a long time ago.”
(Photo caption: A still night along Donora's main street otherwise known as McKean Avenue)
Observer-Reporter

Swept out the door

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 9

By Scott Beveridge

U.S. Steel Corp. delivered the news on a muggy July 1962 morning that its Donora works was shutting down forever, leaving the borough’s fate in the hands of its citizens. The company was sweeping its nearly 3,000 Pennsylvania workers out the door as if they were dust bunnies that had been allowed to collect for too many years in the corners and under the beds of an unkempt house. In keeping with tradition, the Donora Herald-American newspaper showed itself as a mouthpiece for the corporation and took sides with management. Never was it more evident than in the lines of an editorial that was printed in bold letters under the front-page story about the mill closing that July 24:

AN EDITORIAL

A Time for
United Decision

American Steel and Wire Division’s announcement today that the steel making and the obsolete Number Three Rod Mill operations will be discontinued permanently in Donora is not, or should not have been, a surprise to Donora and the Monongahela Valley.

Those who have read carefully the annual report of United States Steel Corporation who have followed the development of technological changes in steel-making in this country and abroad, and who, indeed, watched only yesterday the European television networks showing steelmaking operations in the industrial Ruhr Valley of Germany know what has happened.

As a woman housecleans her home and discards articles which have outlived their usefulness, so steel companies, or any other industry for that matter, must also houseclean for efficiency of operation.

Donora has been without these operations for more than two years now, and has continued to survive, as already has been proved, but it also can and must go forward. Progress, however, will depend more than ever before on an intangible commodity which Donora has in abundance – good people, working together toward a common goal.

The Telstar broadcast yesterday pointed out that the world is becoming more highly competitive daily. Today’s worker produces products which must compete, not only with products of immediately surrounding industries and the country, but also with products on the common world market. No longer may he be satisfied with “good enough.” He must produce highest quality goods or see the goods he has produced unsold in a highly competitive market.

He also must compete to keep the very industries for which he produces these products. No longer may he be complacent and content to let his community remain a one-industry town.

Donora, therefore, would be wise to heed the ancient Biblical handwriting on the wall, “Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.” Translated freely it reads, “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” It is time now for Donora’s people to weigh the situation in balance and determine that Donora shall not be found wanting, and that its united people are ready to begin rebuilding for the future – starting today.

Strangely, the folks in Donora didn’t believe the company was telling the truth, said John Lignelli, who was a grievance man in the blooming mill and would go on to serve as mayor of Donora three decades later.

“We all thought it was nothing but a threat,” Lignelli said last week.

U.S Steel, he said, had just overhauled the blast furnace at great expense. Nearly everyone was praying that the announcement was a ploy to sucker the union into giving back benefits or wages. But the company wasn’t attempting, that time, to manipulate anyone in Donora.



Introduction

Chapter 10


(The photograph and editorial were published with permission of the Observer-Reporter, Washington, Pa., which owns the rights to the old Donora newspaper.)

Bad boys of Webster

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 7

By Scott Beveridge

As curious kids, we often sneaked into the abandoned two-story redbrick schoolhouse across the alley from our new home in Webster. It was a breeze to get inside because the rotten kids in the neighborhood had smashed many of the building’s windows and pried the padlock off the side door before we got there.

Inside, forgotten children’s books were scattered about the hardwood floors of the four empty classrooms. Plaster was peeling off walls that had been layered with many coats of green World War II Army surplus lead-based paint. Each night at dusk, bats circled the sky above its chimneys and, in circular formation, they dipped toward the streetlights.

When winter turned the corner, we grabbed our sleds and steered them down the snow-covered hill beside the school that was a perfect double for some of the creepy buildings in Alfred Hitchcock films. When spring turned the corner, we played hoops on the crumbling asphalt paving of the basketball court with some of the strongest kids the steelworkers produced in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The boys talked tough and played tougher, sometimes too tough.

On A hot summer afternoon in 1967, when I was a chubby 10-year-old, one of the roughest kids in our poverty-stricken village came running, out of breath, to the schoolyard to announce that a street brawl was brewing.

“The niggers are coming across the bridge. Let’s go. There’s gonna be a fight,” the boy yelled.

You were taught early in that part of the Mon Valley steel belt to put yourself above black people. There were no black kids in my grade school, or living in our neighborhood.

I didn’t like to fight, either, and was afraid of most of the kids from across the Monongahela River in Donora, regardless of their color. But on Webster’s scrappy streets, you’d get your ass kicked for sure if you didn’t stick with your kind in times of trouble. So I trotted along with the crowd, barely able to keep up with legs that were shaking with fright.

We stood our ground at the foot of the sidewalk that followed the steep ramp up to the camelback spans that supported the Donora-Webster Bridge deck. A small band of angry black kids made their way across the line that separated our towns, hoping to reclaim the stolen bicycle that started the mess. To my surprise, they took one look at us and ran home.

They obviously knew it was a bad idea look for trouble in Webster. There had been too many crosses burned on starless nights on the barren hillsides above our village.

Some of the fathers on my street even flipped the channel on their television set when a black person appeared on a show. The homes were where these lessons began, ours included.

A few years earlier, our mom, June, and her live-in mother-in-law had one of their legendary arguments after a black woman spent the afternoon at our house. Mom had taken a low-paying job as a clerk at a scrap yard five miles upriver in Monongahela, where she befriended a black coworker who labored among the discarded automobiles that were being scrapped there for steel. Mom soon invited the man’s wife over for lunch while my two brothers and I played Army on the hill out back with the black woman's two sons who were close to our own ages of 7, 5, and 3, with me in the middle.

When the yell came out from the kitchen to eat, I blurted, “The last one down the hill is a nigger.” Mom wanted to crawl under the table, and would later give me the dickens for being so stupid.

Meanwhile, Grandma Madge Sine Beveridge maintained her cool over lunch, even though she grew madder by the minute about who was at the table. She had always paraded herself as a blue-blooded Johnny Bull with ancestors from the House of Stuart of the Kingdom of England. In reality, she came from a poor hillbilly family in Mt. Morris in Greene County, Pa.

Her mother was half Indian and her father a drunken Englishman who only came around long enough to create another baby. Even so, Grandma Madge didn’t think there was a woman good enough for her oldest son and our father, Jim.

Blessed with movie-star good looks, black curly hair and deep blue eyes, Jim didn’t deserve a wife who entertained “colored people” in her kitchen, grandma protested. Moments after our company left, grandma stormed to the kitchen sink, drew out the plate that mom’s guest had used and dropped it in the trash. Mom reached into the garbage, grabbed the plate and placed it back in the sink in a show of defiance. Grandma, who was big boned and bossy as hell, took back the plate and slammed it to the floor in shards. The words got louder between the two women who often vied for control of the house.

It took many years before I first heard the word "racism" used in a sentence. But on that day in 1962, I understood the concept and knew it was wrong.

The same year, U.S. Steel Corp. announced the permanent shutdown of the mill in Donora, where just about everyone depended on the steelworkers’ paychecks for survival. While most parents scrambled to put food on the table, their kids found themselves with twice as much time to make trouble.


Introduction

Chapter 8



(Captions, from the top: Our cousins from the Webster area playing King of the Hill behind our house in 1967; Grandma Madge Sine Beveridge with her oldest grandson, Skip, during Christmas of 1954. A glamor photo of our mom, June, is in the background; and Jim Beveridge on his wedding day in July 1952)