How to bare the soul with a smile

Lorys Crisafulli acting silly on a recent photo shoot for her upcoming charity calendar featuring scantily-clad old people.

By Scott Beveridge

MONONGAHELA, Pa. – The zany Lorys Crisafulli sums up her many successes with a common sense positive attitude.

“It comes back to how you treat people,” said Crisafulli, 83, of Carroll Township, Pa., who has had at least two great careers and a busy retirement that sent her name around the world.

The retired schoolteacher and antiques dealer is best known for taking off some of her clothes, and convincing 11 of her old female friends to do the same, and posing for a 2008 charity calendar that caught the attention of news organizations from Japan to Washington, Pa.

She’s at it again, in production for a mildly naughty 2011 calendar, one that also will feature a dozen male senior citizens in photographs with the ladies known as the “Vixens of the Valley.”

The first calendar sold 3,000 copies, earning $15,000 for the money-strapped Monongahela Area Historical Society. It also drew sneers from younger people who think old people are ugly.

Here is one example:

“I may be branded a shallow bitch for saying this … but there are certain types of folks who should never pose nude… old people,” a much younger Pittsburgh blogger, Virginia Montanez, stated on her blog, That’s Church, about these models.

Well Montanez branded her personality with that statement, so I won’t use this platform to do the same, although she missed the point in a big way.

These women did something good for their financially strapped community, while also having some oddball fun to make a statement that old people can feel sexy, too. At the same time, they brought themselves a lot of happiness through a vehicle that made them global role models for seniors who want to stay active and give back to the community.

Crisafulli has it right when she says success is best earned by treating people with kindness, generosity and spunk. You won’t hear her snark rudely, or, tell an unattractive person to hide in a closet from the pretty people. That kind of attitude turns to gold.

Click here to read more about her new calendar project. (The link will not last forever)

Drive-up Santa

Santa's helper, Terry Slebodnik, said he grew tired of waiting for visitors in Monongahela, Pa., so he turned to waving at passing motorists, many of whom stop to say hello. He calls himself the "Drive-up Santa" along W. Main Street, where no one seems to be following the yellow footprints that were stamped on the sidewalk for an unrelated summer event also sponsored by the Monongahela Area Chamber of Commerce.(Photo: Scott Beveridge)

Spreading around Thanksgiving

Josh Smith of Bethel Park, Pa., was among a core of caring volunteers who prepared nearly 500 Thanksgiving dinners at St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church for the poor and lonely in the Monongahela area. The leftovers were then shared with police officers and ambulance service employees who left their families on the holiday to go to work. These cooks and servers even went to a dive bar to feed the local drunks.

Those silly Mon "Calendar Girls" to appear on Japan TV

TV producer Chie Berkley monitors filming of the Mon "Calendar Girls" Friday for a travel show to be televised this month in Japan.

By Scott Beveridge

MONONGAHELA, Pa. – My friend Lorys Crisafulli calls two weeks ago and can barely stop laughing.

She’s giggling because a Japanese television program heard she posed semi-nude for a charity calendar in 2008 and is soon coming to her home in Monongahela, Pa., to film her story for a travel piece.

“I can't wait to hear the voice that pretends she's me when it comes out in Japanese,” Crisafulli, 82, said Saturday, a day after the two-day shoot wrapped up.

The retired schoolteacher and antiques dealer came up with idea for the calendar after watching the 2003 movie, “Calendar Girls,” starring Helen Mirren. It’s a British comedy about older women who showed it all for a calendar to benefit a friend with leukemia.

Crisfulli and 11 of her friends kept on most of their clothing and only flashed their bare shoulders in their photos. She posed as Miss January in a black convertible appearing to just be wearing pearls while sipping champagne.

“I thought we’d sell a couple (calendars) to our relatives,” she said.

But the women ended up printing 3,000 of them because of the demand and raising nearly $15,000 for the struggling Monongahela Area Historical Society. Along the way, they became somewhat of local celebrities and also captured national headlines over the project.

The producers of Japan Broadcasting Corp.’s “World Traveler” surely chuckled, too, after catching wind of the story on the Internet. They will include a segment about the women otherwise known as the “Vixens of the Valley” in a show dedicated to extraordinary senior citizens around the globe, said the U.S. producer, Chie Berkley of Washington, D.C.

“Her personality, that’s what made it so interesting,” Berkley said, referring to Crisafulli. “She’s a magnet. She’s smart and funny. Everyone wants to be around her.”

To my surprise, she also turned the camera on me for an interview because I write for the Observer-Reporter in Washington, Pa., a newspaper that broke the zany story in 2007.

The hour-long program will air Sept. 20 on what is known in Japan as Nippon Hoso Kyokai, the small island nation's version of America's PBS. We will attempt to gain permission from Berkley to post Crisafulli’s segment in the show on this blog.

Let's party at the river

By Scott Beveridge

MONONGAHELA, Pa. – This antique photo is among an assortment of quirky items on display this weekend to celebrate the 40th birthday of an odd riverfront arena in Monongahela, Pa.

It shows Maywood Kesterson posing beside a wagon once used by J. E. Long Dairy, and on the reverse side of the postcard, someone scribbled a message to take note of the Bell Telephone lettering on the vehicle.

Kesterson’s image is tacked to a display beside a number of photographs of the old Monongahela River falling into the Monongahela River with the help of dynamite about 20 years ago.

Nearby are a few T-shirts on sale bearing hand-drawn sayings spouted by a guy named Earl who thinks you never lived until you had a snake on your head. This exhibit in the old Monongahela Ford showroom at Fourth and Chess streets pays perfect homage to something named the Noble J. Dick Aquatorium.

The stage between Third and Fourth streets where they meet the Mon has wooden plank seats painted red, white and blue to look from the sky like a U.S. flag. People go there to feed ducks or, up until recently, exchange money for drugs until the dealers were scared off or arrested by the “new sheriff in town.”

The aquatorium is in bad shape and scheduled to close after this party to undergo more than $1 million in rehabilitation work.

So hurry down to the river here at noon Saturday to witness the main event. It will feature local actors playing out an old folk song, “Monongahela Sal.” The tune is about a riverboat captain who tosses a pretty girl named Sal overboard after a night of wild lovemaking when he promised his everlasting love. Sal swims ashore and returns to shoot him in the head and then beat the rap.

This only gets better. A couple celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary are supposed to stop by the nearby Chess Park at noon p.m. Sunday to renew their marriage vows in a hippie-theme ceremony. We pray they keep their clothes on their bodies.

The straight-laced guitar man

Harold Weaver, a gentleman and musician who taught scores of kids to play guitar in Monongahela, Pa., is shown, seated, second from left, in this photo taken in the 1920s.

By Scott Beveridge

MONONGAHELA, Pa. – Harold Weaver was barely noticed in his hometown of Monongahela for decades, even though he taught more than 18,000 kids how to strum a guitar.

He accomplished that by quietly walking his students through their lessons in the basement of an old apartment building in the southwestern Pennsylvania city’s downtown, almost until the day he died in September 1997.

Occasionally, people would see him nod a smile while he climbed the stairwell from his studio to the sidewalk on Main Street, and dropped out of sight.

“I just wanted to play,’ Weaver stated in an article that appeared in 1996 in the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa. He told its reporter he never smoked or drank alcohol before or after he got his first gig at age 18.

That job didn’t last long because his mother, Susan, sent the police after him to keep him away from musicians who partied too heavily. He immediately obeyed her, borrowed 20 cents and to caught the next streetcar home.

It’s possible Weaver’s tucked-away business and gentlemanly demeanor could explain why this city along the Monongahela River waited until the year before he died at age 92 to recognize him with its lifetime achievement award.

He hasn't been forgotten, though. A photograph of an all-black band in the 1920s with Weaver holding a banjo is part of a slide show that will be featured next month to celebrate another milestone in the historic town. The presentation will highlight Monongahela's best collection of photographs through the ages, including some that date to the Civil War era.

That gathering will mark the 40th birthday of the Noble J. Dick Aquatorium, an unusual park along the banks of the Monongahela River. A number of related events are planned before the arena with seats painted to appear like the American flag undergoes $1.3 million in renovations.

The slide show will begin at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 7, in a National City Bank branch at 318 W. Main St. Admission will be $5, with proceeds benefiting the Monongahela Area Chamber of Commerce. Reservations are not required.

The voice of the valley

MONONGAHELA, Pa. – Be Be Bell has a stage name that sings.

She also has a comic style that kept audiences alive between acts at a once-popular Monongahela nightclub.

"I stripped once. ... They told me to put my clothes back on," said the 86-year-old New Eagle woman, telling the kind of one-liner that would have ended with a few drum beats and the clamber of a cymbal during live shows.

Known in real life as Be Be Bell Barantovich, she has been a fixture at countless banquets, Democratic rallies and veterans celebrations in the Mon Valley. At each event, she always sings "God Bless America" somewhere between the invocation and the first course.

She claims to have sung the lyrics to "God Bless America" more times than songstress Kate Smith, who turned it into a pop song in 1938 through her radio hour.

"If I would have kept track, I'd be in the Guinness Book of World Records," she said, while volunteering recently at the senior citizens center in Monongahela.

Barantovich was born into show business, learning how to carry a tune beside her brothers, Frank and Harvey, who were well-known entertainers in Uniontown.

The youngest of eight siblings, she became forever known as Be Be because that was how her Italian immigrant mother pronounced "baby" in English.

She left high school and turned to a career on the stage, singing with the George Silvers Orchestra, a big band from Pittsburgh. It was George Silvers who taught her the art of wooing a room as master of ceremonies.

Her career path took a different twist after World War II broke out and nearly every draft-age man went off to battle, leaving big bands without audiences. She toured along the East Coast entertaining troops with the USO in 1942 and sold "war bonds for bullets," she said.

At war's end, she sought work through the American Guild of Variety Artists, and her agent booked her at Danceland in Monongahela.

"I said, 'Where in the hell is Monongahela?'"

She was under contract for one week at the club about 25 miles south of Pittsburgh, a popular nightspot among returning veterans. It served up burlesque in between performances by dance bands, comedians and crooners.

"I ended up there for three years. The place was like New Year's Eve every night. I met my husband there."

She and her husband, Ed, "The Baron," became inseparable. She left the stage when her ball gowns no longer fit her while pregnant with the first of her two daughters, and later opened a snack bar.

Eventually, the couple took over Danceland, operating it as Club Be Be Bell, and held on to the place until television killed the supper clubs. Then they purchased Elite Grill in Monongahela, and by that time, they had befriended just about everyone in town.

Any Democratic candidate with a brain knew it was important then to win over the Barantoviches in order to win an election. They knew all the movers and shakers, said Washington County Commissioner J. Bracken Burns.

"It's very important when you are running for office," said Burns, who refers to Be Be Bell as "the Mon Valley's songbird."

"She can still belt it out at every opportunity," Burns said. "She lights up. She will sing like, right now. She'll come right through the phone at you."

The highlight of her career came in September, when she was asked to sing for Joe Montana when the Ringgold football stadium was named in honor of the Monongahela native and NFL Hall of Famer.

"It felt so good. I knew the Montana family."

She said she will leave the stage the day she forgets the words to "God Bless America."

"I'm tickled to death they still ask me to sing."

Observer-Reporter

Join them for tea, if you dare....

Warning: This photograph could scare little children. I mean the glare in the eyes of the woman, seated, third from left, had to seem downright frightening to her friends when they saw this portrait. She was either mad as a hornet while posing with them or holding back a ton of gas.

They were a group of uppity women from the late 1800s that was known as the Friday Conversational Club of Monongahela, Pa. The ladies got together once a week to share their appreciation of music, sewing and reading. But some have been known to say they didn’t accomplish much other than sharing the latest gossip and sneers about what the others happened to be wearing that particular week.

The tiny city about 25 miles south of Monongahela dates to 1769, and it quickly became a bedroom community for the wealthy. However, many of the moneybags moved to Florida after the stock market crash of 1929, unable to afford the upkeep of their stately Victorian homes. The club lived on until 1975, having disbanded after shifting interest in maintaining a local historical society.

Skull tells no tale

MONONGAHELA, Pa. – Imagine finding an adult human skull stuffed in a box when you’re packing up and moving to a new home. Well members of a historical society in Southwestern Pennsylvania found one covered with a coat of shellac, and missing the lower jaw, while they were moving to a new headquarters. No problem. There was a substitute jawbone tucked away in the same box.

The Monongahela Area Historical Society has no information concerning the story behind the head bones. It’s possible a Knights of Columbus chapter once owned them as a creepy emblem of man’s humanity, the society president acknowledged.

“We don’t know where it’s from,” said Sue Bowers, society president.

The city is the oldest in the Mon Valley, dating to the time of the American Revolution, one with many “skeletons in its closet.” And the historical society does keep a list of titillating ghost stories that are retold during walking tours to haunted houses at the end of each October.

“At Halloween, I’ll put him out and say, ‘Velllllcome,’” Bowers said, rolling her eyes in a slow sinister sort of way in the direction of the skull. “People need to know their roots,” she said.

The new museum at 230 W. Main St. is expected to open in three weeks, and have limited hours. Stay posted for additional details, and at least one more story about a weird object in this collection.

Needs a weed whacking

This couldn’t have been the kind of greenery the Wickerham family had in mind for its plot of graves in Monongahela, Pa., a city its members helped to settle in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
If you worked your way through the tall weeds, you might be able to find out if this tiny cemetery holds the grave of a horse.
An Adam Wickerham buried his stallion, Bully, in the family cemetery in the city about 25 miles south of Pittsburgh after returning home from serving in the Civil War. Bully was shot in battle, he survived his wounds and was eventually given a full military funeral when he finally met his maker.
It’s understandable that abandoned cemeteries fall into disrepair when no one is around anymore to give them the respect that they deserve. But this overgrown group of tombstones sits in the heart of a small city, beside a Greek Orthodox church parking lot and streets lined with tidy houses. Does anyone in this neighborhood have a weed trimmer and a few extra hours to burn or know a Boy Scout in need of a public service project?

The Twelve Commandments

While Christian tradition gives the world the Ten Commandments to live by, the God-fearing people of Monongahela, Pa., have an even dozen of them. A monument in the city’s Chess Park mistakenly lists number one, “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” twice for good measure. And, the last one that instructs followers to not covet thy neighbor’s wife and house appears in two versions.
One of the oldest settlements in the Mon Valley that dates to the 1760s, Monongahela might be in need of extra spiritual guidance.
A lightening strike many years ago blasted the steeple off a red brick Roman Catholic church two doors down from the park.
About 10 years ago, the spire atop an African Methodist Episcopal church needed to be replaced next door following another lightening strike. Two other old churches along Main Street have suffered similar fates.
In all fairness to the Eagles Club that gave the city its commandments in 1957 on a granite tablet, there have been several official versions of this list over the centuries, one of which included 21. Maybe the artist who the Eagles hired to design the tablet was confused, as well.

These grandmas are hot property

(Miss March, Dot Krol, poses for a calendar featuring mature women from the Southwestern Pennsylvania. Photo by Chris Grilli/Grilli's Studio)

Grandmas in Monongahela, Pa., are becoming a media sensation after making local headlines two weeks ago for dropping some of their clothes for charity.

“Tonight Show” host Jay Leno poked fun at them last night during his monologue, suggesting that people might want to donate to the cause, rather than look at their slightly naughty 2008 calendar.

Comcast TV’s “Retirement Living” has offered the “pinup girls” an all-expense trip to Washington, D.C., for a taping. That will have to wait because the models promised an exclusive national debut to ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“Everyone wants us,” said Lorys Crisafulli, 80, who coerced 11 of her friends to pose and raise money for the financially strapped local historical society.

Even a Canadian pharmaceutical company has joined the fun, offering the girls a good price on Viagra.

“Everyone is laughing,” Crisafulli said.

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(Former nightclub owner Be Be Bell Barantovich at her photoshoot for a calender featuring the spunky ladies, the youngest of whom is 68. Photo by Chris Grilli of Grilli's Studio)