Picksburgh grub

Nowhere baby will you find food like this except in Pittsburgh, Pa. Looks like I'm off to Bloomfield for a Polish platter.

The seedy side of town

Welcome to nowhere, Chapter 8

By Scott Beveridge

Once we worked up the nerve, my brothers and I took the quarter-mile hike to the bad end of Webster to find the baseball field. Everybody in town believed that the better families lived around us, to the north of the Donora-Webster Bridge, and that the elite owned the few rows of houses up on the hill. So we were on a "dangerous" adventure in June 1962 to find the rocky ballpark beside a junkyard and railroad tracks, where trains carted coal from the mines to the steel mills.

As we neared our destination, two girls who were close to our ages but younger, probably 5 and 4, jumped off their porch, ran into the dusty street and pulled down their britches. They marked their territory with a few turds as traffic approached, and, as quickly as they appeared, they slipped back into the creaky wooden duplex where they lived. Their prank was enough to convince me that our neighbors were right when they gossiped about the seedy side of our village along the eastern banks of the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania.

The real trouble on that end of town began at Dolfi’s corner, a concrete slab that was a hangout for delinquents with all day to waste. That sidewalk led to a three-room store in a shack with well-worn asphalt linoleum on its floors and a pot-bellied stove in the middle of the front room.
Felix Dolfi, a craggy Italian immigrant, made his living there collecting coins from the jukebox, pool table and two pinball machines, while selling children cigarettes for a nickel apiece with their penny candy. He occasionally muttered, “vaffanculo, your mamma your seester, too,” and we would all laugh.
Some days, we pretended to fight and broke our empty 12-ounce Coke bottles on purpose to get him spitting mad so we could hear him rattle off that Italian command for, “go f&#@ yourself.”

Things only got worse when a circle of girls with chips on their shoulders started hanging out with higher-class boys from the big town just up the river. The girls, who were of high school age, started a feud between a handful of guys from Webster and Monessen, a small city that had the highest crime rate per capita in the United States in the early 1970s. To scare us off our corner, the Monessen dudes made a weekly habit of pelting us with stones and quart-size bottles of beer that from a speeding blue convertible Ford Mustang. At other times, they were abusing the Webster girls in a different manner in the backseat of that car.

It was the summer of 1972. Old man Dolfi had retired by then and sold his store to Joe “Big Flea” Flemming, a pudgy steelworker from Webster. I was 15 when it became time to get even with the rich boys with a fancy sports car from Monessen. Two carloads of our friends waited for several nights in the dark alley across from the store until the Mustang made its final swing by Dolfi’s. As soon as it passed, big Joe walked to the middle of the road and fired six rounds from a black revolver at the car. We then trailed the car for five miles straight to Monessen High School, where those city boys learned a hard lesson for messing with Webster.

A photograph of the Mustang appeared the next day in the local newspaper above a cutline that suggested that the vehicle had met up with the likes of Bonnie and Clyde. Thank God no one was shot that night, but Flemming would find himself facing a weapons charge after one of the Webster girls ratted him out to Monessen police.
Dolfi’s corner became our hard-luck symbol of what happened to a one-industry town after the company vanished, leaving everyone without the guiding hands of educated executives.
Too blind to notice in 1960, we became the first links to corrode America’s rust belt with the idling of U.S. Steel Corp.’s American Steel and Wire division across the river in Donora. It was the first major steel mill in America to shut down permanently, news that came in a July 24, 1962, announcement from the corporation.
In slow order, U.S. Steel handpicked a few of the men in our neighborhoods for jobs at its mills in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago. Many others who were overlooked for work felt betrayed by the company, while they waited patiently for the mills to reopen, as if they were part of a big joke to soften the labor union during a soft market for steel.

We were being welcomed to a place that was going nowhere in the fast lane. Webster’s fate had been sealed decades ago because it bore the brunt of the filthy smokestack pollution and the bulk of its residents had moved on to cleaner places. Faced with massive unemployment in the 1960s, it was Donora’s turn to gasp for air.


Introduction

Chapter 9



(Caption: Dolfi's corner in the 1950s)

What's the big secret? Part 4

Here is an editorial from today's edition of the Observer-Reporter:

An IQ test to see a public record?

We thought we had heard every excuse in the book for denying citizen access to public records until we read the front page story on Sunday. The executive director of the Washington County Conversation District balked at giving our reporter a copy of a report because he would be too dumb to understand it.
It was only after County Commissioner Bracken Burns visited the office to explain the county’s policy on open records that the director, Gary Stokum, agreed to make a copy available to us. Burns noted that the county does not require an IQ test to view a public document.
Stokum correctly pointed out that none of our reporters is a trained geologist. Thus, he argued, there was no point in giving us the report because we couldn’t properly interpret it and might in fact misconstrue it and report on it inaccurately.
In the real world, that shouldn’t be a problem. Journalists frequently have to report on complex subjects in fields where they have no background - in science, medicine, law, even religion. In order to adequately inform the public, they have to interview competent people who have expertise in these matters. The notion that a reporter would take a technical geological study and try to interpret it in print himself is nonsense.
But the whole argument is beside the point. Public officials are not the owners of public documents, only their caretakers. The owners are the citizens - the people who pay for them - and they don’t have to satisfy the records’ guardians that they are smart enough before they can see them.
The first request to examine the estimated 40-page report that was funded by the state came from a community activist concerned about a power plant in Robinson Township and whether it can treat water from abandoned and flooded mines to cool its towers. When she went to the office, she was given just eight pages of the report and was allowed to read the rest of it only if someone stood over her.
But the government shouldn’t be allowed to control how much information citizens groups can have on the basis of how well-prepared its members are on the subject. Even if, heaven forbid, a public report is misunderstood, the agency always has the opportunity, if not the obligation, to set the matter straight. It may be a messy process, but it’s the way things should be done in a free society.
Then there was a footnote to the Conservation District story. On Tuesday, an estimate arrived in our newsroom of how much it would cost for a copy of the study. It came with the letterhead not of the agency but of a local company that does digital imaging, printing, copying and the like.
The total would be $219.23 for a total of 138 pages, counting all the bells and whistles, none of which we asked for. Most of the pages would be printed on “Williamsburg white” paper, but some others would be printed on “Mohawk color” or “Engineer white.” There are charges for “special drilling, “hand fold,” “tab typesetting” and “hand insert tabs.”
For Heaven’s sake, doesn’t the county own a copier it would let the Conservation District use? We asked for a copy of a public document, not a customized printing job. But this is an old story: Make access to public records as expensive and difficult as possible. Maybe the public will go away and leave the public agencies in peace.


UPDATE: We obtained 100 + pages of the mine water report Friday, Sept. 28, at a cost of $29.50.
It came with a fee of $25 cents per page under the terms of the Washington County policy on releasing public documents. The director of the Conservation District, which is an independent state agency housed in the county courthouse, agreed to adhere to the county policy Wednesday in a letter to the editor and publisher of the newspaper. The letter also falsely accused me of being rude and demanding to his staff. One of the things that I learned a long time ago when asking for records is the importance of pouring on the honey to clerks who hold the keys to the files.

Part 1

What's the big secret? Part 3

In our continued effort at the Observer-Reporter in Washington, Pa., to obtain a copy of a mine water report from the Washington County Conservation District, we were hit today with an estimate of $219.23 to reproduce the 158-page document. The bill showed costs for such things as hand folding and typesetting, which were not part of our right-to-know request.
You can view the bill here, and read the related stories at this link.
The newspaper responded to the Conservation District today in writing that the bill was unreasonable and that a simple copy from its copier would have been sufficient, at a reasonable cost, as stipulated in Pennsylvania's Open Records law.
Had the staff looked at its policy on producing such records, it might have realized that there shouldn't have been a charge for the first 10 page. The policy was written with the guiding hand of the state Department of Environmental Protection to include a fee of 15 cents for each additional copy. The price, then, would have worked out to $22.20. Stay tuned....

Part 4

What's the big secret? Part 2

Last week I posted something about the problems members of the media have faced with obtaining public records from civil servants. Before the week was out, I was met with a brand new excuse from an executive director of a government agency who didn't want to give me a copy of a feasibility study on bringing water to a new waste coal power plant being developed in Washington County, Pa. In a nutshell, the executive director of the Washington County Conservation District denied my request because he didn't think I would be able to understand the report. Here's how it went:

Gary Stokum, executive director of the conservation district office, appealed to a reporter with the Observer-Reporter to “be reasonable and use a little common sense” when he denied the newspaper a copy of the Erie Langeloth Francis mines report Friday.
“I have no idea what it costs to copy that report,” said Stokum, adding that the state Department of Environmental Protection had given him the impression that he does not have to provide copies of reports the agency generates.
Stokum said it would take a geologist to correctly interpret the report, and that it might be “misconstrued” and reported inaccurately in the newspaper if he wasn’t present to explain the document to a reporter.
“What good is it to you if you don’t understand it?” he said.
Ron Ruman, spokesman for the DEP in Harrisburg, said Friday afternoon that he also would investigate the newspaper’s complaint that it was unable to obtain a copy of the report.
Stokum’s salary is paid with taxpayer money, but he is not technically a county employee, said Washington County Commissioner J. Bracken Burns. County conservation districts are funded through a variety of sources, including money from the state Department of Agriculture.
Burns said he paid Stokum a personal visit to explain the county’s liberal open records policy Friday afternoon after becoming alerted to the difficulties people were having with getting a copy of the study.
Burns said it’s not necessary to “run an IQ test” on someone or judge their competence before making copies of public records available to residents.
Stokum then called the newspaper shortly after 3 p.m. Friday to say that the report was at a copying company and would be available to a reporter as early as Thursday.
“Well, you managed to rattle enough chains,” he said.
Observer-Reporter

Part 3

(The sunshine logo belongs to the Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition)

Justine Ezarik interview

Justine Ezarik of Pittsburgh discusses her fascination with technology and that 300-page bill she received in a box for a month of calls on her iPhone. (Observer-Reporter)