It's "Snuggie Time"

This is a silly video put together by Harry Funk, the online editor at the Observer-Reporter, and featuring staff members at the newspaper in Washington, Pa.

Click here to read the story it promotes.

Newspaper launches photo blog

WASHINGTON, Pa. – We’ve started a new blog at the Observer-Reporter newspaper as a place to showcase interesting vintage and antique photographs with a hyperlocal focus on our circulation in Washington and Greene counties.

For now the blog is named the Picture Box, and it’s designed to be a place for local historical societies and museums to share their old photos while also winning some much-needed publicity on the Web for their organizations. Readers also are welcome to send along their favorite photos from their scrapbooks. We're also tossing in photos from our newspapers archives and occasional goofy shots of ourselves.

Many people, including myself, are fascinated by studying such old photos and the one, above, is among my favorites.

It was shot in an unidentified glass factory in Charleroi, Pa., a borough that grew up around that industry and the many Belgium immigrants who came there for work a century ago.

The shot captures the well-dressed and seated managers there separating themselves from the dirty laborers with a wooden fence. But, the picture is especially interesting because it’s among just a few old local photos I’ve come across that included black people in the image.

The photo survives thanks to the Charleroi Area Historical Society .

Anyone interesting is participating in this project is welcome to send good quality, larger format digital images with some background information to: E-mail Scott

51 Things in the Newsroom

The publisher, writers, editors and young reporters known as Flipsiders at the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa., share their favorite things in the newsroom in this silly video.

iJustine for old people

My silly, silly podmates at the Observer-Reporter think I have an obsession with Justine Ezarik, otherwise known as iJustine.

Retiring with style

By Christie Campbell

One of the classiest ways to walk out of your place of employment for the last time was accomplished here Tuesday, thanks to the family of Mario Mullig.

Mario, who is 81 years old and has never looked his age, retired Tuesday after working 29 years at the Observer-Reporter as an editor.

As Mario said his good-byes in the third floor newsroom, his family pulled up outside the office in Washington, Pa., in a white, stretch limousine.

Mario walked out the employee entrance to see his three granddaughters, Sydney, age 3, Livia, 5, and Maria, 2, hanging out the limo’s back window, yelling “Hi Pappy!” His daughters, Suzanne Scott and Amy Antonio, took photographs as a chauffeur from Southpointe Limousine held the door for Mario to join his wife, Virginia. The family, including son-in-law Craig Antonio, then departed for dinner at Monterey Bay Fish Grotto on Mt. Washington in Pittsburgh.

Quite a sight! The newsroom was watching out the front windows and heard Mario say, “I think I’m going to cry!”

We’ll miss Mario.

As we were reminiscing with him yesterday over lunch, editor Liz Rogers recalled she hated coming to work when he was on the night desk because he was such a stickler for details he made her work extra hard. But as much as she resented it then, it made her a good reporter and that translated to her being a good editor.

He was that way at home too, Suzanne said. Her dad would whip out his pencil and correct her papers for school and if one of her siblings brought up a word at the dinner table and was unsure of its meaning, Mario would make him or her look it up in the dictionary.

(Caption: Mario Mullig waives goodbye to his coworkers. Photo: Christie Campbell)

A little magazine that rocks

With covers like this one, it’s no surprise that our newspaper took home a first-place journalism award this year for having an outstanding niche publication.

The current issue of the by-monthly magazine, Living Washington County, features an illustration by Observer-Reporter photographers Jim McNutt and Greg Tarr for a story about Christmas train displays in this corner of southwestern Pennsylvania. This geek likes it even more because we used for a prop my Mike’s Train House train set. Call me a geek for playing with trains, and also digging MTH over the more-expensive Lionel toy train sets.

The cover jumped to this story about these rather cool miniature train displays:

In the glory days of model railroading, all the downtown department
stores had miniature train displays at Christmastime.

And it was a big deal to pack up the family and take the streetcar to
Pittsburgh to see the model railroad villages and purchase a train set
for Christmas, said Scott Becker, executive director of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Arden.

"That was the whole idea when we first started," said Becker, while discussing the museum's holiday train display, which turns 15 this year.

The children who visit love the trains, Becker said, but their parents seem to enjoy them even more.

"They get nostalgic and remember their dads setting up trains around the Christmas tree," he said.

To complete the experience, visitors get to take a ride on an old-fashioned trolley operated by volunteers in period costumes.

The train exhibit is among two that are open to the public this holiday season.

Retired railroad worker Joe Jack and his friends are taking at least eight toy train sets to Canonsburg and setting up a village in the Rakoczy Building.

Jack, 66, has been toying with trains since he was a kid.

"I don't do the normal things like hunt and fish," he said. "It's a natural thing for me as a retired adult to go on with the hobby and show the kids ... the little kids just go crazy."

Jack, who retired as a clerk in a Norfolk Southern freight yard, became hooked on trains at a time when much of the nation's goods were moved by rail.

The toy versions when Jack was a boy "were as common as computers are now," he said.

In Canonsburg for a third consecutive year, the display will include a large canyon, town, modern rocket site and a circus.

"Many of the children's favorite cartoon and storybook characters will fill the display also," Jack said.

At the trolley museum, the train village is staged low enough for children to see it while standing, and they have a chance to operate the controls.

"Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a train," said David Woods, 61, of Washington, who puts the museum's display together.

"I'm into model trains," he said. "I call myself the toy train engineer."

People Woods' age make up most of the business these days at the dwindling number of stores that sell trains in America, said Sonny Russo, owner of Trainland in Charleroi.

Russo said children and young adults would rather play computer games than take the time to put together a miniature train and village.

"Sales are down everywhere," he said.

He said stores like his mostly deal with "serious-minded, middle-aged" collectors or grandparents who have a notion to purchase their grandson his first train set.

"They want to remember the good old days," Russo said.

Canonsburg Christmas
Railroad and Village

Rakoczy Building, 102 W. Pike St.

Open: Dec. 6 through Christmas from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, 3 to 8 p.m. Saturday, and 1 to 8 p.m. Sunday.

Admission: Free; donations will be accepted for the Greater Canonsburg Library construction fund.

Pennsylvania Trolley
Museum Trolleys and Toy Trains

1 Museum Road, Washington

Open: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Monday through Friday

Dec. 12, 15, 19-22, 27-30 and Jan. 3, 4, 10, 11

Admission: $8 adults, $5 children, $7 senior citizens

A photo that screams, wow

WASHINGTON, Pa. – Photographer Christie Campbell steals the show in a retrospective exhibit that opened today in celebration of a daily newspaper’s 200th anniversary.

Her shot for the Observer-Reporter in Washington, Pa., captured a man’s raw emotions in 1988 as he slammed his fist on the hood of a car that collided with his brother’s motorcycle, and killed his sibling on the spot.

“It’s the best photo we’ve ever run,” said Tom Northrop, publisher of the mid-sized family-owned newspaper.

The staff selected 60 photos to include in the show at Washington and Jefferson College, including one slick birds-eye view of a huge crowd that came to Main Street to celebrate the first fluorescent streetlights in Pennsylvania. Their glow cast eerie shadows on the buildings and people in the small city named after the nation’s first president.

The newspaper was founded in a partnership of two entrepreneurs from Greensburg, Pa., William Sample and William Brown, one that lasted just 18 months. It appeared Brown had issues that weren’t good for business, Mr. Northrop said during the opening reception for the photo exhibit.

“He was a man of unfortunate habits,” he said.

The Northrop family has owned the newspaper for more than half of its history, which is something to be proud of in today's climate of shrinking newspaper circulations. In 1970, there were 1,200 family-owned daily newspapers in the United States, he said. Today, there are fewer than 150.

Fortunately, there are working O-R staffers such as Campbell who remind readers of the lasting power of a still photograph during times when citizen journalists and the Internet are putting so many other newspaper employees out of their jobs.

The show is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. through July 25 in The Rossin Ballroom, 60 S. Lincoln St. (Route 19), Washington, Pa.