Props to senior citizens

Jeff Nystrom, a commissioner for the newly-organized National Senior League of Wii bowling, left, awaits the results of its championship match that left the Charleroi, Pa., team, whose members also are shown, in a disappointing second place.

By Scott Beveridge

CHARLEROI, Pa. – We are excited to announce it’s senior citizen week at this blog.

Yesterday, Travel with a Beveridge visited a senior citizens center in California, Pa., where older Americans were giving their brains a workout while singing Christmas carols in the German language.

The excitement peaked today in nearby Charleroi where members of Riverside Place Senior Center lost to Florida in the first National Senior League Wii bowling championship games.

Here is bit of the reporting of the match pulled from the Observer-Reporter newspaper:

Sighs of disappointment swept across (the room) when the four bowlers and about 30 of their fans learned Charleroi had fallen by 20 points.

“We did our best. We were the underdogs,” said Charleroi Wii bowler Cathy Martini, 52, of Roscoe.

No one cried. Rather, they immediately began to make plans to practice more and assemble a better team for next year’s championships.

The NSL was organized by Dennis Berkholtz of Atlanta, Ga. He played team handball in the 1972 and 1976 Olympics and wants to turn the senior Wii games into a business to provide more exciting activities for seniors, said Jeff Nystrom, an NSL commissioner who also lives in Atlanta.

Berkholtz may be onto something because, while the video gaming industry has been in a recession-era slump, Nintendo’s Wii grew in popularity among senior citizens, National Public Radio reported in July. The championship games even caught the eye of editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper, which dispatched a reporter and photographer to this small borough in the big city’s hinterlands to record the excitement.

Meanwhile, these new video bowling leagues attracted 186 teams from 24 states without a fee this year. Next year, though, it will cost $400 for a team to enter the contests.

“Wii makes it easy,” Nystrom said. “It keeps them active and it’s a great way for them to mingle.”

Larry Maraldo, 67, emerged as the most-valuable player for Charleroi, having “bowled” two perfect games. Cathy Cochran, 57, who has blurred vision, scored a number of strikes, too, despite her handicaps that also require her to use a wheelchair.

They had loads of fun. That’s all that counts. This blog will be hard-pressed to top this excitement tomorrow unless those kooky old ladies from Monongahela decide again to bare their shoulders for a naughty calendar to raise money for a good cause. It could happen.

Landmark Colonial house has important hinges

The landmark John and Presley Neville House, a Colonial gem in southwestern Pennsylvania, is hidden behind an unnatural wraparound porch addition along Washington Pike in Bridgeville.

By Scott Beveridge

BRIDGEVILLE, Pa. – It turns out a pair of closet hinges in the entrance hall are the most-valuable architectural details in the oldest house still standing in the county where Pittsburgh makes its home.

That’s the opinion of experts from Colonial Williamsburg who visited the John and Presley Neville House in Allegheny County and deemed the rustic hinges the oldest of their kind known to exist in North America.

“Who would have thought?” said Rob Windhorst, president of Neville House Associates, the nonprofit organization that owns the National Register of Landmarks property also known as Woodville Plantation in Bridgeville.

The 1 ½-story Colonial frame house is significant because it was built in 1774 by John Neville, a friend of President George Washington who came to the area to briefly claim Pittsburgh for Virginia.

However, Neville would soon make history as chief collector of a tax on whiskey Congress enacted to help pay down to then-new nation’s Revolutionary War debts. The local farmers who turned their rye into whiskey were quick to revolt in what became known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

When the insurrection was at its peaked, John Neville had relocated to an estate on nearby Bower Hill, a house that was burned down by the rebels during a two-day attack that began July 16, 1794 and resulted in a few casualties.

Neville and the women and children of his household were permitted to take refuge at Woodville, which had been given to his son, Presley.

“That’s probably what saved this house,” Windhorst said. “They really behaved with all the virtues of war.”

It is believed that Neville had a good relationship with the 13 slaves he owned because he armed them and they protected his family against the army of 500 rebels, Windhorst said while hosting a recent tour of the house. The slaves likely were skilled craftsmen and responsible for building the some of the house and carving its woodwork, he said.

The 6-room house is special because it’s the only country home built for the frontier-era gentry that is open for tours in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Aside from those rare foliated T-shaped cross garner hinges with leaf-like designs, the house’s living room is dressed in period furnishings and reproduction carpeting and wallpaper. Meanwhile, volunteers in Colonial-type costumes tend to a garden and chickens in a fattening pen off the kitchen in attempts to create an authentic 18th century Pennsylvania farm.

“This is truly exceptional,” Windhorst said.

The house at 1375 Washington Pike is open year around for guided tours from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, closing only from Dec. 14 and Jan. 2. For information, call 412-221-0348.

This old brush truck is a keeper

Charlie Ward admires his 1955 Willys Jeep fire truck.

Members of a tiny fire department in Webster, Pa., didn’t want to forever part with their 30-year-old Willys Jeep brush truck when they retired it in 1985.

So they stored the 1955 1-ton truck in a garage until the right person came along to put the tiny vehicle back on the road.

Vintage fire truck enthusiast Charlie Ward, who lives nearby, took possession of the Jeep for a dollar after it sat under roof for 18 years. Part of the deal requires him to offer the truck back to the Rostraver Township Volunteer Fire Department No. 1 in Webster for the cost of his repairs should he ever decide to put it up for sale.

“It’s one of America’s first brush trucks,” Ward says. “It’s the oldest fire truck still in operation in Rostraver Township.”

The fire department purchase it for $8,700 from Buck’s Garage in Webster at a time when fires often swept through Buffalo grass that had spread across the hills above the village about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. The grass was the first vegetation to reappear on the hillsides after a heavily polluting zinc mill closed in nearby Donora. Webster needed such a 4-wheel-drive pumper truck to reach those fast-moving fires on the steep hills above the Monongahela River.

The truck was equipped with a 226 cubic inch super hurricane engine and a 200 gallon water holding tank. When connected to a larger water source, the pump had the ability to spew 500 gallons a minute.

The pump no longer works because it cracked from frozen water that was left inside the assembly over a winter. Ward said he chose to keep the pump as is rather than replace it with a modern version that would not match the truck’s original appearance.

Most of the green paint and hand-painted lettering on the vehicle is original. There were just 50 vehicles of this model produced, and Ward surely has one of the sharpest of them still moving.

A nice restaurant with a not-so-sweet view

BEAVER, Pa. – Lock 6 Landing is a restaurant in an impressive industrial building with a bizarre view.

Food and drink are served inside the ornate Victorian former lock and dam powerhouse whose south arched windows have a view of a messy-looking zinc plant on the opposite banks of the Ohio River.

During our stop, the floor manager appears proud to tell us the zinc plant is one of only two in the United States.

Also within view is a coal-fired power plant just up the road in Beaver County from FirstEnergy’s nuclear generating station in Shippingport.

The short driving tour of the river roads in this area has to be one of the strangest in America. Motorists heading west on Route 68 can cross the Shippingport Bridge and cruise within a stone’s throw of scary-looking cooling towers. Further ahead, a sign welcoming visitors to town proudly features a painting of the plant below clear skies and beside green trees.

Back at the restaurant near Vanport, we are seated at a table facing the river and order slices of cake oozing with chocolate syrup. We marvel at the ornate, original tin ceilings while making a chocolaty mess of the white linen tablecloth. Suddenly, a large volume of water gushes out a pipe at the zinc plant toward a container at the riverbank.

“That doesn’t look like it should be happening,” I say, before noticing there is chocolate of my knife, spoon and two forks. My friend later said chocolate was on my chin, too.

This massive brick building constructed about 1892 once contained the machinery to operate Merrill-Lock No. 6, the second of 10 that were built to improve navigation on the river in Pennsylvania. The lock and dam was abandoned, along with the house, in 1936 when new locks and a dam were constructed nearby in Midland.

The powerhouse has since been listed on the National Register of Historic Places and used as a restaurant, on and off, for the past decade. We’ll definitely be back for dinner. I have a craving for the crab cakes on the menu.