Periodic postcard

Dear Miss Elizabeth S. Murray of DeHaven, Pa., from Rachael: "We had a very nice trip."
July 26, 1908. Mackinac, Mich., aboard The D and C Line

Goodnight Joe

There wasn’t a grittier bar in Pittsburgh steel country than Chiodo’s Tavern. It sat near the gates to the long-gone and infamous U.S. Steel Corp. plant in Homestead at the west end of the Homestead High Level Bridge. Inside the dusty bar, you could practically smell the sweat of the many steelworkers who had walked through its doors for a beer and pierogies. Hung from its ceiling were the things that tipsy patrons gladly handed over to the bar’s cheerful owner, Joe Chiodo, including hundreds of bras that came off while their wearers sat at the barstools over the 58 years that he ran the place.
Chiodo, who died Sunday at age 89, is probably the only bartender in Pennsylvania to have his own historical marker. It stands at the same corner where his bar was located before it was sold in 2005, torn down and replaced with a Walgreens. In life, Chiodo was almost as famous as some of the many Steelers who stopped by his bar to say hello. And judging by the flowers beside his marker, he still has some good friends who remember him in Homestead.

A cantankerous boom town

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 4

By Scott Beveridge

The hardscrabble Pennsylvania borough known as Donora wasn’t even a speck on a map in 1900. Four plantations consumed the land hugging the 4.2-mile stretch of the Monongahela River for more than a century before a new steel town came to life. Along with wheat and barley, the farmers planted walnut groves and weeping willow trees to separate their property lines in what was once part of Carroll and Fallowfield townships.
The sharp curve in the river at the base of a foggy valley would never look the same after entrepreneur William H. Donner of Indiana surveyed the area’s rich coal deposits that he could turn into steel and boost his fortunes. Donner had no trouble convincing Andrew William Mellon, a Pittsburgh banker and industrialist, to invest in his scheme to establish a new wire mill there because of his success in a budding tin mill across the river in Monessen. As a result, Union Steel Co. was born along these banks of the Mon to compete against steel baron Andrew Carnegie. The borough would be incorporated in 1901 with a name that was inspired by combining the Donner family name with the Christian name of Mellon’s wife, Nora. Within two short years, Carnegie's successors bought out Donner and folded the Donora project into a monopoly they were creating with U.S. Steel Corp.
And the world was watching.


Land speculators camped beside the stakes that marked vacant lots the night before they were sold at an auction that began with the sound of a gunshot sharply at 10:30 a.m. Sept. 10, 1901. By nightfall, more than $100,000 changed hands over 200 parcels of property while Donner was carving up the land along the riverfront.
U.S. Steel later announced plans to invest $20 million to build the world's largest rod, wire and nail mills in the borough. Within a year, there was a severe housing shortage as immigrants scrambled for some 10,000 jobs that were supposed to be created. The housing famine worsened after 1915 when the corporation unveiled a $3 million zinc works, the size of which had no rival. Local health officials were worried about the spread of disease because families and borders were practically sleeping on top of each other.


(The zinc mill as it looked in the 1940s from the village of Webster)

In some ways, Donora was much like the many other wealthy mill towns that were sprawling across the Pittsburgh region. There were 147 businesses in the borough, that combined, were doing more than $3 million in sales a year at the end of the Great Depression. Everyone either worked at the mill or toiled to feed and clothe its laborers. Work was especially tough in the zinc plant, which employed many Spanish men because they had the stamina to withstand three-hour intervals beside its 120-degree smelters. They had to lift 60-pound ingots to keep their jobs, and stock a steady supply of new clothes because their shirts and trousers disintegrated almost overnight from exposure to acid.
But historians have never been able to explain why the town became a magnet for some of the most violent and radical immigrants from Europe. As early as 1902, local police were stationing themselves at Slavic weddings because of the shootouts that were taking place at their receptions. Police officer Clarence L. Eaton was shot to death that same year at a dance grove. Three years later, borough officials were launching crusades against gambling and attempting to shut down bars over fears of violence when the mills closed for repairs. As the nation entered World War I, 40 percent of the mill workers in Donora gave the draft a false address in a show of protest against the federal government. It was an unusually high number and a further indication that the town was home to rebellious Socialists who sympathized with Germany.
During the first U.S. steel strike in 1919, a band of steelworkers even 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 zinc plant. The labor dispute was marked by other riots, one of which involved 50 men who threw bricks at black men who the company had hired as scab laborers.
Work resumed, but, the dark clouds never lifted above those cramped houses that climbed the steep hills beyond the smokestacks at the river's edge.
Introduction

Chapter 5


(The blast furnace photo is published with permission of the Donora Historical Society. The aerial photo: Observer-Reporter
The Donner photo credit: William H. Donner Foundation)

Washington and Johnson

A new bronze statue of U.S. Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson at a college bearing their names has students laughing because, from all angles, it looks as if there is a serious man crush between the country’s founding fathers. Students and alumni at Washington and Jefferson College have been posting comments on an Internet group at Facebook that one of the school’s mascots appears to be involved in some self-gratification, too.
The self-taught sculptor responsible for the design, Alan Cottrill of Zanesville, Ohio, included a rolled up version of the U.S. Constitution in Jefferson’s hand and made the two presidents appear to be strolling arm-in-arm at the corner of Beau and Lincoln streets in Washington, Pa. But many people in the small city have also been sharing in the joke that the placement of the scroll, when seen from points east and west, looks a bit like an giant baby-maker held comfortably in Washington’s hand.
Cottrill said it was not his intention to craft something that would make the esteemed presidents appear as if they were gay. “No, no, no,” he said, adding that anyone who sees something erotic in his work is “stretching it.” It’s not the first time that Cottrill received wide attention over the nature of his figures. About 10 years ago, students were aghast because his rendition of Cro-Magnon man at nearby California University of Pennsylvania had an exposed dart of love, the size of which was grossly exaggerated. Before that work was completed, Cro-Magnon’s private parts were covered with a vine.
What really makes the touchy-feely George and Tom statue odd is the fact that history tells us that the men were not even friends in life to begin with.
Washington and Jefferson College spokesman Bob Reid said he was aware that people were whispering about the 10-foot-tall statue shortly after it was unveiled May 18. The school, however, had not received any complaints about its appearance, he said.

Steel wives were desperate

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 3

By Scott Beveridge


By early 1962, the wives of hundreds of steelworkers in Donora were lucky to scrape together a few bucks to buy a cheap cotton dress from the local department store.
Some 1,200 workers had been laid off for 20 full months from the furnaces that fueled U.S. Steel Corp.’s Donora Works about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pa. Another 500 had been without paychecks for a year at the rod mill, bringing a near halt to business at the fine shops along McKean Avenue, two blocks up from the mill. At least 1,000 men had already lost their jobs in 1957 when the zinc mill was shuttered because the company had depleted its ore reserves. The 1960 furloughs were blamed on competition in the industry from the Ruhr Valley in West Germany and a sluggish market for wire. They couldn’t have come at a worse time. Nearly 550,000 members of the United Steelworkers of America were threatening a seventh strike since 1946 against America’s Big 11 steel producers. President John F. Kennedy urged a settlement, as he feared another walkout might lead to the stockpiling of steel and further unemployment. That was a calling for the Donora women to leave their “men home changing diapers and baking bread” and take a break from gossiping on the telephone to fight unemployment, the local newspaper joked about what these wives were cooking up.

More than 300 of them called a series of meetings and packed the auditorium of a local public school to save the mill. They demanded an ear with Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg and an audience with U.S. Steel executives. They wore bright green as a symbol of resurrection and hope, taking inspiration from an ancient Egyptian custom. They pinned homemade buttons bearing their slogan on their purses because that was where the layoffs hurt them the most. Similar signs were posted in storefront windows. Worse yet, they attacked the union.

The bold ladies scolded the workers for threatening a wildcat strike, believing one would surely spell the death of the Donora mill. There came demands that the men abstain from drinking alcohol at labor meetings and union dues be paid into an unemployment fund. It also was time for union officials to quit paying off politicians. Within a few weeks, Donora Local Union 1758 accused the women of obstruction for their malicious remarks. The steelworkers also denied the accusations that were aired by their wives, all of whom remained anonymous in the stories and photographs that were being published in the Donora Herald-American.

Oh, how it was getting hot in the town. There were four major fires in the months before the housewife crusade. Two Donora women and a local man went on an armed robbery spree that targeted service stations before they were nabbed by state police. Meanwhile, a local bank clerk embezzled $50,000.

On April Fool’s Day of 1962, the industry and union reached what Time magazine called the “most moderate labor agreement of the post war era.” The workers received raises of 10 cents an hour and the mills won the right to encourage early retirements. The pay increase would take the average wage in the mills to $3.27 an hour.

The outraged women of Donora did win a few meetings with labor officials in Pittsburgh during the steel talks, as well as mentions in newspaper articles across the nation. But in the end, there was nothing they could do to help their husbands, who, like them, were descendants of some of the most radical immigrants in the region's steel belt.

Introduction
Chapter 4

(Photos courtesy of the Observer-Reporter of Washington, Pa., which holds the copyright to the old Donora newspapers)

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?