A village about to lose its identity

Former Webster, Pa., Postmaster Bee Hodgson poses outside the old post office under a zip code facing extinction. (photographer unknown)


By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. – The news Tuesday about the U.S. Postal Service’s proposal to close the tiny post office in my hometown will likely lead to a new dateline on stories I write about the village.

The demise of the 15087 zip code as early as December has the potential of wiping the small Southwestern Pennsylvania town off the map. In all likelihood the few hundred people who call Webster their home will receive mail at their street addresses, with Webster being replaced on the envelopes by Belle Vernon.

It really doesn’t make sense for the federal government to keep open the 3,700 small post offices on the list for review if they are losing money. It especially makes sense to close them when the government is so heavily in debt and facing public demands for cutbacks in spending.

What doesn’t make sense, though, is the rational Congress has used in the past to establish zip codes.

For example, people who live in parts of Centerville in Washington County, Pa., have mailing addresses in Brownsville, Fayette County. Some of my neighbors in Forward Township, Allegheny County, receive their mail under addresses of Monongahela, a small city in Washington County.

It would make better sense to give people addresses in the municipalities where they reside. Sometimes I wonder if the people who made these decisions about postal logistics were using LSD during brainstorming sessions.

And if things proceed as they appear, the Westmoreland County village of Webster in Rostraver Township would next year be given an address associated with a small borough that doesn't even have a post office 10 miles away in Fayette County.

If you are having trouble following along it's understandable because this system of addressing is insane. It's no wonder Comcast and the electric and gas companies have trouble finding my house when those utilities black out. 


The post office needs to catch up with the times. The privately owned FedeX and ups figured out this nightmare a long time ago, before global positioning satellites added better layers to finding destinations. And those companies do a great of finding my house to deliver things when I order products on the Internet.

What's even sadder for Webster is the post office is the last public door in town where residents can enter and mingle, exchange greetings and feel connected to a community, except for a fire hall and smokey bar.

And if the state Department of Transportation ends up demolishing the old, closed Donora-Webster Bridge over the Monongahela River, Websterians won't even be able to walk to a store to purchase a newspaper, quart of milk or loaf of bread.

Jesus it was hot

The relatives in July 1952 on the front porch of this old, weather-beaten house that would become home eight years later to my family.

By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. – The extreme Pennsylvania weather and how it seeped into our old, rundown house was seared decades ago into my childhood memory.

That’s because the clapboard siding protecting our two-story frame house was weathered and pollution-beaten to the point where the outdoors easily swept through its cracks. The only insulation between the outer and inner walls there were the papery nests of wasps that seemed to breed like rabbits.

Our family of five struggled on a good day in the 1960s in that poor pocket of Webster, Pa., along the Monongahela River 30 miles south of Pittsburgh.

And attempting to fall asleep in the then-60-year-old house was nearly impossible on hot-August nights without a fan in the bedroom windows, let alone air conditioning.

I’d moan in bed as a kid with the doors wide open to our three bedrooms while we prayed for the air to circulate.

"Close your eyes and think of Jesus," my mom, June, would respond, as if our family were bidding goodnight like the TV Walton family would do a decade later. "It'll help you fall asleep," she would add.

Mom’s advice offered little solace under the blanket of a hot, humid night. Neither did divine intervention.

Her words weren't received much easier during a January freeze, while the basement furnace died down and no one got up to stoke its embers with new lumps of coal.

Fortunately we had indoor plumbing then, water pipes that were pressured by an ancient, electric pump that kicked on a few seconds after a faucet was opened.


However, the bathroom in a renovated kitchen pantry was soooo frigid in the dead of winter that it took extreme courage to park flesh atop the bitter cold commode seat.

I nicknamed that tiny room the indoor outhouse, and would go on to rejoice the day when dad finally bought a window fan for my bedroom.

That brought a new problem, though.

The fan's blades didn’t seem to help much on those breathless summer nights, whether they were used to draw the stale indoor air out, or more of the muggy outdoor air inside.

Mom's garden blooms

Larry Callaway, a Rostraver Township, Pa., employee, sets in place today a sign honoring the memory of my mom at a new garden near the local municipal building.

BELLE VERNON – It's with a heavy heart tonight that I offer appreciation of my mother's former coworkers at Rostraver Township, Pa., for their having created a memorial garden in her name at the local municipal park.

They obviously understand the importance of the legacy of June Hart Beveridge, who served her beloved hometown of Webster, Pa.,  and larger community for decades by volunteering to ensure children had a safe place to play under her watch.

Even better her friends at the township - where she also worked as a police clerk - have given our family at permanent monument to remind us of mom's ability to nurture loving and trusting bonds with the people within her circle.

She died May 21, 2010, following a long battle against cancer and emphysema. As someone who never liked to draw attention to herself, she surely would have been humbled, and probably embarrassed, by all of this attention.

This town really is nowhere

By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. – It would seem today as if little has changed in my hometown since a photograph was snapped as a joke five decades ago of a sign here welcoming traffic to the village of Nowhere.

My neighbors in our tiny town otherwise known as Webster, Pa., will agree that most utilities and ambulance and delivery drivers still can’t find our houses even in this high-tech era when Google maps can almost locate an ant hill.

Yet, global positioning systems routinely take newcomers to the wrong addresses more a mile away as if Webster is situated on some distance island in the Pacific Ocean. It comes to those drivers' surprise when they eventually get here to find the town sits in the midst of 10 or more municipalities along the Monongahela River with a combined population of more than 40,000 people.

My problems with deliveries yesterday, last week, last month and over the years have been so small in comparison to those here who have either suffered heart attacks or other serious health concerns that required immediate medical attention.

The Internet in my house died Tuesday for 10 hours during a great recession when it has been critical to my ability to continue earning a paycheck as media employees like me rely more and more on the Web to avoid the breadline.

So I turned to a cell phone to call Comcast, my Internet provider, only to discover that I can’t get through the first prompt because the robotic voice on the other end doesn’t recognize the telephone number linked to my account. I call again only to be disconnected by "her" for a second time in this era of outsourced customer service supplied by impersonal rudeness.

Tonight, I finally got through to the company on a cell after many precious minutes count down and am greeted by an especially kind service representative. However, she is unable to handle this issue because of a number of glitches, one of which includes my account having an address that does not match the one that I furnish. No surprise there.

She then nervously tells me we cannot discuss anything else on the line because the last four digits of my social security number she needs as a gate to my account do not match the company’s records. That is really scary, given the growing threat of identity theft.

Then she instructs me to visit a Comcast center in person with photo identification to correct these problems 20 years after this company hasn’t had one single problem with accepting my money for its services. I also have to submit a DNA sample to get through the door. OK that last sentence is a joke now that an online connection has been re-established at this destination.

The next phrase is a mild exaggeration: I still have to stand on my head at the front door with one leg pointed due west to place a call on my Verizon cell phone.

Threatened Mon River bridges admirered

A few people who attended the Historic Bridges Conference in Pittsburgh last weekend admire the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge, a closed span that is under threat of demolition. Meanwhile, major improvements to Locks and Dam No. Four continue in the distance.

By Scott Beveridge

DONORA, Pa. – The aging Donora-Webster Bridge appears to be in better shape than many spans its age in the United States, a group of bridge experts agrees.

“This bridge has a coat of paint on it,” said Luke Gordon, a construction inspector from Michigan who visited the historic span Saturday with other bridge enthusiasts. “It’s 10-times better than most I’ve seen.”

Organizers of the Historic Bridges Conference in Pittsburgh included weekend stops in southwestern Pennsylvania at the Donora-Webster Bridge and the similarly built, nearby 103-year-old Charleroi-Monessen Bridge because both of their futures are uncertain.

Outside of Allegheny County, the bridges are among just four Pennsylvania through-truss, pin connected spans still standing along the Monongahela River. The others are in Point Marion and Brownsville, and all are on the National Register of Historic Places because they were pinned together using technology borrowed from the Pennsylvania Railroad.

But, within a year the Charleroi-Monessen could be demolished. A new bridge would then be built on the same site if the plan clears the scrutiny of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The Point Marion Bridge will be gone, too, after a new replacement span opens in November.

“Bridge heritage is at risk,” said Eric DeLony of Santa Fe, a retired chief engineer for the National Park Service who also attended the bridge conference.

He was among a dozen such experts attending the conference who toured the 101-year-old Donora-Webster Bridge. Some took photographs, while others said they admired its graceful lines.

The span became the first toll free bridge to open on the Mon, allowing the older community of Webster to share in the new wealth of Donora after a sprawling steel mill opened within its borders. The bridge was originally painted black for the coal in Webster’s hills and gray for the smoke that billowed from the mills.

The bridge also stood alongside the infamous Donora zinc works, which contributed to a 1948 smog that killed at least 20 local residents and became the catalyst for America’s first clean air laws.

“Donora, probably more than any other town, has the history as to why people would want to come see this bridge,” said Todd Wilson, a civil engineering consultant from Pittsburgh who helped to organize the conference. “This bridge was here and it did play its part in that story.”

It appears the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has done a good job maintaining this bridge. It’s guard rails were not attached its main vertical beams to protect the superstructure from damage by vehicle accidents, Gordon said.

However, there is speculation PennDOT will begin scrutinizing this bridge after it completes the historical review process on the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge that has been closed to traffic since February. The closure of that span followed an inspection that discovered a badly deteriorated pin joint supporting a deck.

People in the struggling Mon Valley towns need to band together to save these historic spans if there is any hope for the area to become a historic tourism destination, said Nikki Sheppick, a historian in Charleroi.

“If we don’t keep these assets, we’re dead,” Sheppick said during the conference stop in Charleroi.

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 hero story from Webster, Pa.

Former Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Ernest P. Kline, standing third from right in the middle row, is shown with fellow classmates at Rostraver High School in 1987 at their 40-year class reunion.

A poignant story was told to me the other day about Ernie Kline, a former Pennsylvania lieutenant governor who died Wednesday of heart failure.

Shortly after taking office in 1971, Kline was confronted with an urgent matter involving women barricading a dangerous road in his hometown of Webster, Pa., a tiny village about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, his daughter, Monica Kline, said while we chatted for her father's obituary.

The small crowd of women was demanding a traffic signal at an accident-prone intersection approachin the Donora-Webster Bridge. A state representative at the time, James Manderino of nearby Monessen, was quick to recommend to Ernie Kline that the state police be summoned to arrest the women.

“Then someone said to my dad, ‘Your mother is in the middle of them,’ ” Monica Kline said for the article that appeared in the Observer-Reporter of Washington, Pa.

My mother and I were there, too, standing off to the side watching a news camera capture the protested. The threat of state police making arrests leaked to the women, and it only seemed to infuriate them all the more.

The police never came, but Kline made sure the traffic signal was installed while also leading the charge to establish the Pennsylvania Commission for Women.

The same traffic signal still hangs above that intersection, while it hasn’t done much to prevent accidents. Today, many of the people in this speck of a town also have no idea that it was once home to Ernie Kline.

But in 1971, the Webster mothers and grandmothers who picketed the intersection were empowered by knowing a man from their ranks had achieved something that, until then, was unimaginable in their neighborhood. For years, people from neighboring communities looked down on folks from Webster, where our family also lived, because many of them were poor, and, some had earned themselves and the town a bad reputation. This is the same village that had its vegetation striped from the land by pollution from a zinc mill, leaving many of the houses to fall into disrepair. So there wasn’t much to take pride in until Ernie Kline became the second-in-command in Harrisburg.

A year before he took office, he made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for governor.

He chartered a bus to bring his suporters from Webster to a rally to hear him announce his candidacy for the office, and I went along as a 13-year-old supporter proudly wearing one of his campaign badges. I don’t remember much about the speech because everyone’s cheers drowned out most of what he said. When we returned home, he sponsored an all-you-can eat pizza and Coca-Cola party at the Webster fire hall. By nightfall, there was no denying his status as a hero in his hometown.

Four years later, Shapp came under criticism for overlooking corruption in Harrisburg that led to numerous indictments against state and party officials. Shapp and Kline were never indicted, but I remember my dad saying then that Kline’s political career would be finished because of his association with Shapp.

Kline’s friend, Bill Northrop Sr., of Washington, Pa., said Kline once admitted to him that he “was a bit naïve” when it came to working early on with those in command of Harrisburg politics.

“He did know how to get things done and was on the up and up, even as an insider,” said Northrop, 74, formerly publisher of the Observer-Reporter.

Kline retired from public office after his second term was up in 1979, and started a second career as a lobbyist.

A six-sentence story about the this morning's funeral for Ernest P. Kline moved a few hours ago on the Associated Press news wire that noted his devotion to faith and how mourners wore blank blue buttons to honor his habit of handing out blank campaign buttons.


Ernie Kline and his wife, Josephine, pose with Barack Obama on a campaign swing last year through Pennsylvania.

Heroin addiction hits home

The scrappy village of Webster, where I’ve lived for five decades, might be called the best-kept secret in the mid-Mon Valley.

The property taxes there are incredibly low, yet local kids attend Belle Vernon Area School District, which has long been considered the Cadillac of schools in the area. About the only time Rostraver Township police are called to town is when vehicles collide at a confusing set of traffic signals at the entrance to the Donora-Webster Bridge.

We don’t need a newspaper to keep up with weddings or obituaries because most of our 164 neighbors know each other on a first-name basis.

However, we have a dirty little secret that few people whisper about. In the past decade, according to unofficial statistics, we have buried five neighbors who succumbed to their heroin addictions.

It seems that every family, including mine, has become a victim of the tragedies that surround those chasing this drug.

The addicts all seem to be reinventing the wheel by being unable to hold down a job, so they steal from relatives to support their habits. Their families fall to pieces, while some relatives deny the problem exists altogether and others are too embarrassed to face up to the fact that someone they love is skidding out of control.

Along the way, these family members become enablers by their failure to deal with the problem.

The news that neighbor Gerald L. Szakal Jr. had been arrested last month on charges of double homicide left many of us wishing we could have done something to get him the help he needed to quit heroin.

But most of us didn’t know him in the year or so that he lived around the bend and before he was accused of shooting coin dealers Howard and Nancy Springer of Carroll Township.

It wasn’t until the details of the crime began to leak out that I learned that his mother was the former Christeen Mackey, someone I’ve known since she was a girl.

It appears that her 25-year-old son, sick for drugs, decided to kill the Spingers to prevent their records from proving that Szakal had sold them jewelry and coins that he stole from his mother. The day before the murders, he reportedly told his co-defendants that his mother was going to turn him in for the thefts unless he entered drug rehabilitation.

Now, her son’s relatives on his father’s side of the family are blaming her for Szakal’s arrest. It’s a shame, because her heart bleeds for her son, whom she still loves, a son who faces the death penalty in the case.

Justice will be served, no doubt, but no one is going to come out better from this tragedy. If only someone could give us the right approaches for dealing with heroin addictions.


(Caption: Gerald L. Szakal Jr. is led to his preliminary hearing in March to face charges in a double slaying.)
Observer-Reporter

Webster, now and then

In many ways, it seems as if time has been standing still in Webster, a tired small village along the Monongahela River about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. The shot above was taken in March 2008 from the top of the ramp to the Donora-Webster Bridge. The one below was taken in the 1960s by Monessen photographer John Hurrianko. Have fun comparing the differences.......

The search for plant life

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 11

By Scott Beveridge

The elementary school essay assignment sounded easy to some of my classmates who lived in neighborhoods with tidy lawns. Our schoolteacher instructed us to go into our yard, find something interesting growing there and write a short report on the plant. Surely, though, our teacher at Lebanon Elementary School in the village of Fellsburg, Pa., knew that the kids like me who hailed from over the hill in Webster during the mid 1960s didn’t live among rhododendrons, flowering dogwoods and azaleas. Looking back, she must have been playing a cruel joke on the handful of kids in the classroom from our poor village.

Practically everything in our town was coated with a black sheen, as it sat immediately downwind of the smokestacks at a sprawling American Steel and Wire mill in Donora. The coal furnaces that heated our houses left our porches, yards and family cars covered each cold morning with a layer of tiny black soot balls. The pollution, no doubt, had created enough sour air to suck the paint off houses and kill just about every blade of grass, ornamental bush and tree during the decades before my family arrived in the fall of 1960.

I can’t remember the name of the teacher responsible for the botany assignment at the country school, where farm kids received the foundations of math, English and brushed-over history beside those whose fathers were steelworkers. All the teachers seemed to form the same character of a stern woman wearing a proper cotton suit who was bored of reciting the same lesson plans year after year while pacing floors covered with a chessboard of green-and-tan asbestos tiles.

The teachers wouldn’t dare let you use the restroom until you peed your pants and then had to stand naked in a bathroom stall until your clothes dried on the steam radiator. They reddened your knuckles with wooden rulers if you giggled in class and sent you home with more respect for the classroom and better control of your bladder.

So off I went through our back door in search of a plant one spring Saturday afternoon, only to be reminded that there was little more growing from the ground around our house than a few clumps of crabgrass. Mom had managed to keep alive a red rose bush with yearly applications of store-bought peat moss. By then, the mills had been idled for nearly five years and the ground was beginning to turn green again. Honeysuckle vines sprouted from the parched earth along the front porch but I wasn’t about to turn in a report on flowers and looked to the ugly mountain behind our house for something green to study.

The first ledge rose nearly 50 feet straight up and was reachable from a dusty path around outcroppings of large, blackened boulders. A field of waist-high buffalo grass spread across what was once a farm with fertile soil. I doubted the teacher would believe such a thing grew in anyone’s back yard and continued, alone, toward a sparce forest of trees nearly 100 yards in the distance. It was a sickly group of sumacs and sycamores that kids once tried to climb but the branches were too frail to support their weight.

Ahead lay a ravine at least 30 feet deep and with a trail that cut diagonally to its base, one where you had to dig your heels deep into the ground to slow your slide through shale to the bottom. It took the strength of Hercules to make the climb out of the gully. This was a landscape that was avoided, even by the birds and whitetail deer.

There, above the rise, was a hillside of ducky stones covered with green moss tinged with orange, white and yellow that looked like miniature mushrooms from Mars. Later, a trip to the public library and an Encyclopedia Britannica would identify this plant as lichen.

Like it or not, my teacher was getting a report about this fungus that was taking over my “back yard.”

Introduction

Chapter 12

(Caption: That's me in the top photo, standing in the middle of the third row and wearing glasses like those worn by President Lyndon Baines Johnson)

A storm was brewing

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 10

By Scott Beveridge

We were too busy being kids to notice that Donora’s economy was crumbling during the summer of 1962 under the weight of its vanishing steel industry. My playmates across the Monongahela River in the village of Webster, Pa., were more interested in the great adventure that the barren hillsides offered our imaginations than whether our fathers would have jobs tomorrow.

Webster was known as the place where nothing grew on the ground that had been scorched for six decades by pollution from the upwind U.S. Steel mill.

But our dusty brown gullies became Army trenches for boys pretending to do battle with Nazis during World War II. Some days we were cowboys scouting a new trail to the West and dodging pretend arrows from Indians on the warpath. In short order, the war game would turn to real fighting between the kid who wanted to play John Wayne and those who were assigned to be the enemy. The Hollywood movies we watched had already told us who was going to lose the pretend battle. The losers quit and went home while the brave went on to explore the dusty mountain that lay ahead.

When storm clouds approached, it was time to run home. Heavy rain always caused flash floods that deepened the gullies because there wasn’t any topsoil for miles to absorb the water. Anyone was a sitting target for a bolt of lightening. And, to frighten us home, our parents had often told us a story about a kid who barely survived after being swept to the river one summer day by the runoff water that flowed like brown-water rapids. To scare us even more, the adults were always warning about a girl who forever went missing after falling into a well next to a house that had been demolished. There were ghosts of many houses on that hill.

The stories we didn’t hear then were being discussed by our parents behind closed doors. They argued about where they would go, or how to pay the bills, because the Donora steel production was being transferred to a $55 million plant under construction in Gary, Ind. Some adults turned to crime. There was a burglary at the Victor Emanuel Beneficial Society in Donora, followed by another at a local Eat ‘n Park. Adults whispered about a young Donora mother who was arrested for abandoning and neglecting her four small children in her cockroach-infested apartment. Proud parents worried about the shame they would face if they joined those who asked welfare that summer for new shoes for 118 children before school resumed in August.

Just about everyone was beginning to lose friends and neighbors as a cloud of depression settled over our valley. My pal, Ralphy, who taught me how to hit the head of a nail with a hammer, went to Fairless Hills, Pa., when his father was transferred to a job in a working steel mill. Kevin, who liked to play marbles with me during first-grade recess, relocated with his family to Chicago. And Lois’ parents took her family to Harrisburg, even though we were engaged by the age of 6. Those of us who stayed behind were going to have to get used to goodbyes. We would even say so long to the abandoned black houses that we used as playhouses. Some were torched while others were torn down by neighbors who were sick of seeing them next door.


Introduction

Capter 11


(Caption: Relatives pose for a photo behind the Beveridge house in Webster)

Dying for fresh air

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 5

By Scott Beveridge

The slip under my mother’s dress would go from white to charcoal gray by the time she walked across the Donora-Webster Bridge to her job as an office clerk in 1948. As a 19-year-old single woman in those days, June Hart was met by steady puffs of smoke from locomotives that passed under the open-grate steel bridge as they followed the rails on both sides of the Monongahela River. Towboats coughed and sputtered black plumes of smoke while pushing coal-filled barges to the many steel mills up and down the river in Southwestern Pennsylvania. And then came the grittier smokestack emissions from Donora’s steel and zinc mills that sat along the Mon at the base of the deep valley it carved into the hills.

Like most of the area's nearly 20,000 people whose lives depended on those mills, June had grown accustomed to the air because she needed a paycheck. She had to help feed her five younger siblings in a family that was still crawling out of the Great Depression. June had just blossomed into a beautiful woman after shedding 50 pounds and undergoing surgery to correct her crossed left eye. She was ready to set the world on fire. To her, the smoke meant money that would put her on her journey.

June’s parents, Howard and Iva Dail Hart, were drawn to Webster in 1943 because its housing was dirt cheap and Howard wanted to be closer to his job on the railroad in Donora. Howard’s father, Mack Kelly Hart, had been a general contractor who built much of Uniontown, the Fayette County seat, including the Union Trust Building, the city’s tallest skyscraper. Mack Kelly, whose family had been in America since Colonial times, died shortly before the stock market crashed in October 1929 and left his heirs penniless.

Luckily for Howard, he began to rise out of poverty after landing a job as a conductor on the Donora Southern Railroad pulling train pots filled with red-hot mill slag through the haze to a dump on the outskirts of town.

Nothing seemed to have been out of the ordinary on Oct. 27, 1948, when the fog thickened because the winds disappeared. And it was dead still for the next three days save for the production of wire, nails and zinc and a Friday night high school football game between Donora and Monongahela, teams that were bitter rivals. No one could see the ball that night nor tell who won the game. The local newspaper was even scooped as the smog story unfolded by Pittsburgh newspapers that couldn't ignore the fact that people in Donora and Webster were dying and filling the local hospitals to capacity. But then again, U.S. Steel Corp., in addition to owning the Donora mills, also controlled the local government as well as the headlines in the Donora "Herald-American."

There have been discrepancies as to the number of people who suffocated during that Halloween weekend. The Donora newspaper cited 20 deaths, a few of which took place in Webster as it was downwind of the zinc smelters that produced alloys strong enough to bulletproof tanks for World War II. Another source claimed the death toll climbed to 70 by taking into account the number of people who never recovered from exposure to the toxins. When the pollution was at its thickest, Iva Dail Hart tried to find fresh air in the cool, damp basement of her soot-stained Victorian in Webster. It was in that cellar that night where the gentle woman whose long fingers had comforted her children and grandchildren suffered her first heart attack, one that would contribute to her death in 1960. After the smog cleared, she and her husband joined their neighbors at secret meetings in the Webster schoolhouse to find solutions to the acidic air that, over the past four decades, had stripped the paint from their homes and the vegetation from their yards. They called themselves the Webster Society for Better Living, hired an attorney and won nonprofit status in Westmoreland County. Some of its members eventually sued U.S. Steel for damages. As the lawsuits trailed the courts, brutes from Donora crossed the bridge, rounded up some of the Webster troublemakers and beat them to a bloody pulp for opposing the mills.

The U.S. Public Health Services, meanwhile, launched an investigation into the smog, one that placed most of the blame on the weather and recommended a warning system for alerting residents about stagnant air. The mill later settled with the Webster landowners in federal court, and members of the Webster society established themselves as having been among the nation’s earliest environmentalists. Their battle later became part of the impetus for the first federal clean air laws of the 1960s.

But when November turned the corner in 1948, there was steel and zinc to produce at the company that employed technology that seemed to be out of control, almost like a second atom bomb waiting to explode. My grandfather went back to work on the railroad, too, without ever mentioning those closed-door meetings that he was attending across the Mon. But in less than 10 years, his union railroad crew would walk off the job for the third time in seven years and set the stage for the company to finally end its long, bitter relationship with Donora.



Introduction

Chapter 6


(Captions, from the top: Webster resident Beanie Huhra at a parade in 1950 to celebrate the first street lights in Webster; June Hart, second from left, with her sister, Shirley, and parents, Iva Dail and Howard, on their porch in 1952; The floor at the entrance of the Donora Southern Railroad headquarters at 410 McKean Ave.; and a photo circa 1949 that was staged to illustrate how pollution from Donora's mills had stripped the vegetation from the hillsides across the river in Webster)

The murders killed our reputation

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 2

By Scott Beveridge

Old man Schultzie lived in the biggest black house in Webster, one perched at the edge of a steep cliff with a view of the entire village.

His dark clothes, small stature and long nose made him every bit as creepy as his mansion that was stained dark by emissions from coal furnaces and the sprawling steel and zinc mills across the river.

Everyone for miles would become convinced that George L. Schultz was off his rocker when, on Christmas Day in 1961, he shot and killed his lover and her husband.

A former garbage collector, Schultz fell hard for Mary Evich after she began keeping house for him upon the death of his wife. But to her misfortune, she refused to leave her husband, Steve, a steelworker who toiled at a Monessen wire mill.

As the love triangle continued, Schultz became obsessed with the woman he would never have to himself. He watched her with binoculars from Webster’s hillsides. He paid local boys to keep tabs on her, too. They took his money but did little if any spying.

As his jealousy deepened, he began to pop NoDoz to stay awake. In fact, his addiction to the over-the-counter caffeine pill grew so strong that there wasn’t a drugstore in the area that had any left on its shelves. The 62-year-old Shultz had bought them all.

By that fateful Christmas, he had had it with 46-year-old Mary because she refused to accompany him to deliver Christmas gifts to his grandchildren.

He marched up the steps to the Evich apartment above Naylor’s Grocery in Webster and blasted Mary with a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with pumpkin balls while she was standing between her dresser and bed.

A minute later, and with the same weapon, he killed her 62-year-old husband in his bed at dinnertime. Police had Schultz in custody within two hours, and he soon pleaded guilty to the murders.

(The Eviches lived in the second floor apartment of this building as it looked in the 1950s)

Schultz later recanted his guilty plea in the slaying of Steve Evich and would face a quick trial in Westmoreland County. It took the jury three hours to reach a guilty verdict and just minutes to sentence him to life in prison. The old man eventually won an early release because of his declining health and was placed into the custody of a son.

But, his legacy would not be easy to shake in town, long after he was taken away in handcuffs. Some parents tried to scare their kids straight by yelling, “Schultzie is going to get you if you don’t wise up.”

Our babysitter, Delbert Kolodziej, used to lead kids from the neighborhood on field trips to Schultz’s abandoned Victorian with a Queen Ann turret and tell them stories about how the murderer had also killed his four wives there. (My two brothers and I were so rotten that our parents couldn’t find any local girls with the courage to sit for them).

His stories went something like this: Schultz choked his first wife in this room in the attic where the window faced west and overlooked the Monongahela River. He hung the second, shot the third and poisoned the fourth, consecutively, in the adjoining rooms. One by one, the women were tossed out the windows that were three stories above the bare ground.

Of course, Schultz never had four wives, or faced any other murder charges. Even so, Delbert was convincing enough to make some of the kids piss their pants and run home in tears.

Those brave enough to stay behind in the house pretended they were the part of the Three Musketeers engaged in sword fights with spindles they yanked from the ornate, curved stairway that connected the foyer to the upstairs hall. That fun didn’t last long because an arsonist soon took a torch to the house, creating an inferno that lit up the night sky.

By that time, most out-of-towners were turning their noses up at the people from Webster.

In many ways, it was no wonder they thought we were white trash.

Our town laid in ruin with so many derelict houses that had taken a beating from six decades of air pollution.

The town actually had developed a bad reputation since at least the 1940s as the kids from Webster who attended Rostraver High School then were not even permitted to join some of its civics club.

The arrogant children from the better neighborhoods were just showing their stupidity because a Webster boy who graduated from the school in 1947 - Ernest P. Kline - went on to become lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania from 1971 to 1979 under Gov. Milton Shapp. The snooty students at Rostraver might have learned a thing or two from Kline about civic responsibility, had they let him into their club.

The people in Donora seemed to hate us the most. The kids over there would jump us and try to steal our bicycles if we rode them across the Donora-Webster Bridge.

The good Donora housewives - the ones who wore Jacqueline Kennedy bouffants – must have shuddered at the shocking news of the Schultz murders.

But, those women were about to create a scandal of their own in 1962 when they tried to save their husbands’ jobs at the U.S. Steel Corp. American Steel and Wire Works.

Introduction

Chapter 3

Charleroi Area Historical Society assisted in researching the Schultz murders

Where the houses turned black

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 1

By Scott Beveridge

Our new home in Webster was a short walk across a bridge from Donora, a bustling steel mill town in Southwestern Pennsylvania with city water, public sewers and a downtown lined with sidewalks and ornate buildings. There were squatters living in creepy old black houses on our new street. At night, my down-on-their-luck neighbors burrowed into rags stuffed into corners to keep warm because they didn’t have enough beds to go around. In no time, a boy over there whose father had run off welcomed us to town by sharing his head lice. The culprit was corralled, dunked into a metal tub filled with hot soapy water and disinfected from head to toe with a scrub brush by men who lived across the road. Thank goodness we had two parents, a coal furnace and a bathtub connected to piping-hot water, as well as warm blankets on our beds.

The Beveridges included my older brother, Skip, who was 6 when we moved and mad as hell about leaving Charleroi. That was a borough founded in 1891 by Belgium glassmakers. It was about 10 miles down the road, and known in the 1960s as one of Pennsylvania’s richest retail districts, thanks to the steelworkers and coal miners and their paychecks. Charleroi had attractive houses along tree-lined streets, and many adults who planned wholesome activities for children. They buried us in huge piles of leaves in the fall and ran sprinklers above the brick streets to cool us down on muggy summer afternoons. Our other brother, Kelly, was 2 and ornery as a catfish. He never seemed to care much about how the teachers and richer kids at our grade school up over the hill in the village of Fellsburg poked fun at Webster children for coming to class with dirty ears. As the middle child, I often had to make more noise to be heard at home. But outside, I made every effort to steer clear of the many bullies in town.

(Kelly with Spot on the street outside our house about 1965. He is on the far right in the group photo beside Skip, center, and Scott)

The first thing that I remember asking our mom, June, was how to find the playground. She attempted a smile and said, “Go play on the hill.” There was no ordinary hillside out back, or a grassy area with swing sets and a sliding board, either. You had to walk a half-mile to find a clump of sickly-looking trees if you wanted branches to climb. The yards had no topsoil. Instead, they had shale and clumps of crabgrass that you had to chop with a sickle as if you were giving the weeds a crude haircut.
Our father, Jim, was a hard-working and beer-guzzling pipefitter in a wire mill in Monessen, another industrial town three miles to the south and around a horseshoe curve in the river. Smoke from its steel and coke mills blew our way, too, making the air even harder to breathe and the houses all that more black. Some guys tried to paint the clapperboards, but a fresh coat never seemed to adhere to them, even if they died trying.

After stepping foot for the first time in our two-story, six-room Victorian on Webster’s top street in October 1960, I was frightened out of my mind. “Who’s upstairs?” I whispered upon hearing hollow-sounding voices. An adult who was helping us move into the drafty place laughed and said the sounds were echoes of our own voices bouncing around the empty bedrooms. I was convinced there were ghosts up there.

Mom loved Webster and the old house because it had been in her family for two decades. She was a self-taught, under-paid bookkeeper whose earnings were needed to keep us fed and clothed. But our new house smelled of death. Mom’s mother, Iva Dail Hart, had died too soon of cancer and a heart failure a year earlier, having never recovered from the heart attack she suffered during the killer smog of 1948. And the memory of mom’s sister, Nancy Muia, never seemed to fade. Aunt Nancy turned up pregnant at 17 and married the child’s father, Paul, a two-bit crook from across the river. She was overweight. She also lacked self-confidence and was easily manipulated. The newlyweds skipped town in 1957 for California because Paul Muia had stolen bank checks from a relative and was about to be arrested. Aunt Nancy returned home a short time later with barely a dime to her name. She died at 20 of a broken heart, starvation and influenza in the bedroom at the top of the steps that led straight to our front door. Paul Muia disappeared, only to return in the 1980s and boast about spending time in the Folsom and San Quentin prisons. He later went to a Pennsylvania prison for shooting a man in the leg in a Donora bar, and died of cancer after an early release. It was easy to meet up with the wrong crowd in the Donora area. A Webster woman and her husband would fall victims to murder at the hands of her crazy lover a year after we unpacked our belongings.

Introduction
Chapter 2