What's the big secret? Part 1

News reporters who are more than bodies in newsrooms being spoon-fed information by public officials can fill a book with stories about the troubles they have obtaining public records.
One of my favorites involves a Chartiers-Houston School District office clerk’s reaction in 1998 when I asked for the salaries of the principals at the public schools in her district in Washington County, Pa. She said she understood that the salaries were public information, except, in her opinion, they were to be kept private. My request was denied in what was then a test the print media launched into Pennsylvania's conflicting right-to-know law.
And then there was the case of police in Beaver who trailed me out of town while running a check on my driving history after I asked to see the police blotter, records that Pennsylvania’s courts have ruled should be readily available for inspection by residents. I will be writing more about that later.
My experiences were nothing when compared to what happened after Jim Parsons, an investigative reporter for WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh, sought to inspect the travel expenses of officials with the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, which provides grants and loans to offset the cost of a college education.
Parsons eventually got to see the documents after the station and other media owners spent $70,000 on legal bills to force PHEAA to shed some light on its books. But he was hit with a nearly $30,000 bill for the cost of making copies and the time it took PHEAA officials to black out what they didn’t want him to see in the receipts. He has not paid the bill.
PHEAA, meanwhile, incurred $400,000 in legal expenses.
The reporter uncovered abuses at the agency that left many people wondering how many kids could have been put through school had the agency been a little more responsible with its expense accounts.
Parsons told his story Saturday at a workshop on open government at the University of Pittsburgh. It was sponsored by the Pittsburgh chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition.
The groups are holding such discussions across Pennsylvania while lawmakers debate three amendments to the state’s Open Records law, which is among the worst in the nation. It doesn’t even presume that all documents that are paid for with tax dollars are worthy of public scrutiny, or provide an clear definition of those that can be kept secret.
The Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, which printed the postcard shown above, is collecting stories at a new blog from people who have had trouble getting a peek at records kept by their elected officials. Drop the association a note as it lobbies for stronger measures to let the sun shine on just how your tax money is being spent.

A related post.

UPDATE: PHEAA boss resigns

Dome dons raincoat

The top of the historic Washington County Courthouse in Pennsylvania is looking more like a phallic symbol these days. Workers have encased the dome in scaffolding and a plastic sheath while they restore its terracotta covering.
R.J. Friday Inc. of Pittsburgh was awarded a more than $500,000 contract to repair damages that resulted in a bad restoration job two decades ago. The dome was encased then with a rubber-based paint that has cracked over the years, allowing rain to batter and rot the roofing materials. Now, the coating must come off and be replaced with something more durable to protect the 107-year-old national landmark built by the F.J. Osterling Co. of Pittsburgh. To make matters worse for the laborers, the interior of the dome is plop full of pigeon poop that must come out. This time, the restoration contract requires that netting be placed around the dome openings for the sake of clean justice.

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)

Bringing the dead to life

The city of Monessen would be dead without its zombies. Its creatures are living students, however, who are learning how to apply gory makeup and mold together robotic aliens in the style of low-budget creep movies. They study at Douglas Education Center, which was a near-extinct business school before sci-fi film icon Tom Savini joined its faculty. The award-winning special effects makeup artist from Pittsburgh attracts hundreds of students from across the United States to his school in the small city in Westmoreland County, Pa., whose economy has suffered greatly since Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp. permanently idled a steel mill there in the 1980s. Today, the Douglas school is the largest employer in Monessen where goth students have replaced blue-collar workers on the sidewalks. Over the past week, they have been filming a cheap movie about the walking dead on the crusty Donora-Webster Bridge for a class project. Heads were turning in more ways than one when characters like Mike Meeker of Ohio, shown above, showed up on the set.

A railroad to disaster

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 6

By Scott Beveridge

U.S. Steel Corp. picked the wrong time to load a train in September 1960 with machinery to modernize its mill in Donora, which was employing decades-old technology in deplorable condition. Before the haul could reach the town 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, trainmen walked off their jobs at the 111-year-old Pennsylvania Railroad, crippling the nation’s transport industry for three weeks. Commuters in New York and Philadelphia were left stranded by the labor dispute that affected some 30 million people. To add insult to injury, members of the union representing workers on the Donora Southern Railroad - a U.S. Steel subsidiary that moved goods and refuse in and out of Donora - joined with 1,300 others at the company’s rail lines in Pittsburgh in a work stoppage over wages and benefits. Steel production then came to an abrupt halt in Donora, Duquesne, Clairton and Homestead because union steelworkers refused to cross the picket lines that were set up by the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen union. So the flames at blast furnaces and open-hearth furnaces were dimmed to prevent equipment damage during the strike that put 30,000 U.S. Steel employees on unpaid vacations.

Temperatures flared, however, outside the gate to the Donora mill when the company began moving goods onto the property by truck. The trainmen caused a ruckus that sent the steel-maker to Washington County Court for an injunction to prevent the striking workers from blocking the flow of traffic into the mill. The company won that battle, but, it eventually caved and gave its railroad crews raises of 14 cents an hour over two years, better pensions and vacation and holiday pay to get back to the business of making steel. Donora and its 380 acres of steel factories were another matter.

The company had seen more than its share of bad times in the borough. Its laborers there had rioted during a strike in 1919 that drew gunfire. Dynamite had been set off at the houses of scab workers the company hired during that labor dispute.
Meanwhile, nearly every house in town was held together with nails that the steelworkers smuggled in their lunch buckets out the doors of the nail factory. And then, there was the smog of October 1948 that hovered over Donora and its neighboring town of Webster for three days that killed at least 20 people, and for the first time, caused physicians to link ill health to pollution. Everyone pointed fingers at the zinc works as the cause of the disaster, a top-secret plant that produced alloys to armor American soldiers in World Wars I and II. The company finally closed that toxic plant in 1957, putting 1,000 workers on the unemployment lines. It immediately toppled the row of smokestacks at the smelters while a crowd watched from behind the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire that separated the town from the mill and Monongahela River. Some applauded when the chimneys were reduced to rubble while others mourned the loss of jobs in a town that depended solely on steel for its wealth.

The Donora Southern strike sent U.S. Steel officials over the edge. Without question, they decided that Donora was not going to receive its new technology after the Pennsylvania Railroad strike ended on Sept. 12, 1960, one whole week before the Donora Southern trainmen went back to work. Little did the Donora railroad union know that the trucks its members had prevented from crossing their picket line contained some of the new equipment that was meant to upgrade the mill. The company threw up its hands and rerouted that investment to its Cuyahoga Steel and Wire Works near Cleveland. By that time, 1,200 men had already been laid off in Donora because of a downturn in the market and the growing cost of forging steel at an obsolete mill. The company made up its mind; steel production would never resume at the two, barely smoking blast furnaces that had pumped gold for 60 years into the fancy stores lining three blocks of the borough’s downtown. U.S. Steel executives began to walk away from the boom town the company had built from a patch of farms in 1901. The borough was set firmly on a course to whither without the strong, fatherly guiding hands of the industry. But no one would know that for sure for at least another two years.



Introduction

Part 2: Bad Boys of Webster Chapter 7

(Caption: What little remains today of the Donora Southern Railroad near the 99-year-old Donora-Webster Bridge)

Dying for fresh air

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 5

By Scott Beveridge

The slip under my mother’s dress would go from white to charcoal gray by the time she walked across the Donora-Webster Bridge to her job as an office clerk in 1948. As a 19-year-old single woman in those days, June Hart was met by steady puffs of smoke from locomotives that passed under the open-grate steel bridge as they followed the rails on both sides of the Monongahela River. Towboats coughed and sputtered black plumes of smoke while pushing coal-filled barges to the many steel mills up and down the river in Southwestern Pennsylvania. And then came the grittier smokestack emissions from Donora’s steel and zinc mills that sat along the Mon at the base of the deep valley it carved into the hills.

Like most of the area's nearly 20,000 people whose lives depended on those mills, June had grown accustomed to the air because she needed a paycheck. She had to help feed her five younger siblings in a family that was still crawling out of the Great Depression. June had just blossomed into a beautiful woman after shedding 50 pounds and undergoing surgery to correct her crossed left eye. She was ready to set the world on fire. To her, the smoke meant money that would put her on her journey.

June’s parents, Howard and Iva Dail Hart, were drawn to Webster in 1943 because its housing was dirt cheap and Howard wanted to be closer to his job on the railroad in Donora. Howard’s father, Mack Kelly Hart, had been a general contractor who built much of Uniontown, the Fayette County seat, including the Union Trust Building, the city’s tallest skyscraper. Mack Kelly, whose family had been in America since Colonial times, died shortly before the stock market crashed in October 1929 and left his heirs penniless.

Luckily for Howard, he began to rise out of poverty after landing a job as a conductor on the Donora Southern Railroad pulling train pots filled with red-hot mill slag through the haze to a dump on the outskirts of town.

Nothing seemed to have been out of the ordinary on Oct. 27, 1948, when the fog thickened because the winds disappeared. And it was dead still for the next three days save for the production of wire, nails and zinc and a Friday night high school football game between Donora and Monongahela, teams that were bitter rivals. No one could see the ball that night nor tell who won the game. The local newspaper was even scooped as the smog story unfolded by Pittsburgh newspapers that couldn't ignore the fact that people in Donora and Webster were dying and filling the local hospitals to capacity. But then again, U.S. Steel Corp., in addition to owning the Donora mills, also controlled the local government as well as the headlines in the Donora "Herald-American."

There have been discrepancies as to the number of people who suffocated during that Halloween weekend. The Donora newspaper cited 20 deaths, a few of which took place in Webster as it was downwind of the zinc smelters that produced alloys strong enough to bulletproof tanks for World War II. Another source claimed the death toll climbed to 70 by taking into account the number of people who never recovered from exposure to the toxins. When the pollution was at its thickest, Iva Dail Hart tried to find fresh air in the cool, damp basement of her soot-stained Victorian in Webster. It was in that cellar that night where the gentle woman whose long fingers had comforted her children and grandchildren suffered her first heart attack, one that would contribute to her death in 1960. After the smog cleared, she and her husband joined their neighbors at secret meetings in the Webster schoolhouse to find solutions to the acidic air that, over the past four decades, had stripped the paint from their homes and the vegetation from their yards. They called themselves the Webster Society for Better Living, hired an attorney and won nonprofit status in Westmoreland County. Some of its members eventually sued U.S. Steel for damages. As the lawsuits trailed the courts, brutes from Donora crossed the bridge, rounded up some of the Webster troublemakers and beat them to a bloody pulp for opposing the mills.

The U.S. Public Health Services, meanwhile, launched an investigation into the smog, one that placed most of the blame on the weather and recommended a warning system for alerting residents about stagnant air. The mill later settled with the Webster landowners in federal court, and members of the Webster society established themselves as having been among the nation’s earliest environmentalists. Their battle later became part of the impetus for the first federal clean air laws of the 1960s.

But when November turned the corner in 1948, there was steel and zinc to produce at the company that employed technology that seemed to be out of control, almost like a second atom bomb waiting to explode. My grandfather went back to work on the railroad, too, without ever mentioning those closed-door meetings that he was attending across the Mon. But in less than 10 years, his union railroad crew would walk off the job for the third time in seven years and set the stage for the company to finally end its long, bitter relationship with Donora.



Introduction

Chapter 6


(Captions, from the top: Webster resident Beanie Huhra at a parade in 1950 to celebrate the first street lights in Webster; June Hart, second from left, with her sister, Shirley, and parents, Iva Dail and Howard, on their porch in 1952; The floor at the entrance of the Donora Southern Railroad headquarters at 410 McKean Ave.; and a photo circa 1949 that was staged to illustrate how pollution from Donora's mills had stripped the vegetation from the hillsides across the river in Webster)