Random local music

The Depressionaires perform at the Black Cat Bar in California, Pa., on a Thursday open stage. The alternative-country band members are: Todd Edwards, vocals, guitar and harmonica; Bob Houston, bass guitar; Scott Kennedy, banjo, guitar; and Tom "Catfish" Johnson - drums.

An Irish lassie

Vintage St Patrick's Day Art - 8, originally uploaded by OldPixels.com.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, 1907 style.

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.)

Ageless beauty

A photographer over at Flicker had something interesting to say the other day about this old portrait of an unknown young woman on my photostream, offering this statement:

"Too bad that most contemporary portrait photographers aren't up to this level," he commented.

He made a valid point when considering all the tacky, over-staged, poorly-lit and ridiculously-expensive photographs that are mailed out every high school graduation season.

The photographer who staged the photo, above, shunned fancy backdrops and silly props to capture this portrait that I found in an old family album. Instead, he brilliantly used lighting that captured the entire grayscale, drawing the eye straight to her face and beautiful smile and eyes.

The Peeps® game is on

The Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa., is hosting an online Peeps® show contest, each Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Easter. Unless, of course, breaking news gets in the way of the game.

Readers can play along and attempt to identify the locations where its photographers snapped pictures of the sugar-coated Marshmallows around Washington and Greene counties.

The rules will be posted online, with winners receiving such O-R gear as an umbrella or ice scraper.

A flood on the Mon is anyone's guess

The flood gauge in Belle Vernon, Pa., as the Monongahela River was on the rise this afternoon. (Scott Beveridge photo)

ALONG THE MONONGAHELA RIVER, Pa. – Over the last few days, as rain melted a massive snowmelt in the headwaters of the Monongahela River, the flooding forecast has been all over board.

The National Weather Service in Pittsburgh issued flood warnings for the Mon in Charleroi, Pa., which have ranged from expectations of minor damages to major problems and back to nothing to be of concern by Sunday. In the service’s defense, it has no way of knowing how the river will behave until this rain passes.

The forecast was pulled back as the region missed heavy rain that threatened to turn February’s historic snowfall known as Stormageddon into Floodageddon.

This new storm and strong winds hit the Northeast coast hard today, knocking out power more than 450,000 customers in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, the 2-feet of snow that fell here in the hinterlands last month killed the power to nearly half as customers, but that didn’t make headlines beyond these borders.

And tonight, as we Appalachians sit on pins and needles wondering what tomorrow will bring on the Mon, the weather service’s Web site with the latest local flooding forecasts has crashed. It is either getting too much traffic or possibly relying on a Web guru near Philadelphia whose office has lost its electricity.

That’s OK because those of us in southwestern Pennsylvania have grown accustomed to being left in the dark, and relying on each other in times of need.

That said, many people around here have been discussing the other big floods along the Mon and attempting to recall the dates, crests and records.

Here is the list, thanks to a cached Web copy of that dead link to the weather service’s current flooding forecast:

Flood categories in feet at Charleroi:

Major flood stage: 35
Moderate flood stage: 31
Flood stage: 28

Historic crests
1. Nov. 5, 1985 – 42.7
2. March 9, 1967 - 41.1
3. March 18, 1936 – 39.9
4. Jan. 20, 1996 – 39.8
5. March 5, 1963 – 39.4
6. June 4, 1941 – 39.2
7. Feb. 19, 2000 – 38.5
8. Oct. 16, 1954 – 38
9. Aug. 6, 1956 – 37.2
10. March 28, 1963 – 36.1

(It ended up being a significant flood that wasn't - with a 25.3 foot crest Sunday morning in Charleroi)