A Tour of Fallingwater

Divine intervention with a punch

CHARLEROI, Pa. – The New York-based Guardian Angels is looking for brave men to conduct foot patrols in drug-infested neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, and even in the tiny borough of Charleroi.
Members of the nonprofit crime fighters are touring such neighborhoods as Pittsburgh’s Hill District and McKees Rocks soliciting members to help police rid the communities of crime.
“Rather than think of us as Hells Angels or vigilantes … we’re the biggest (police) cooperators, the biggest rats out there,” said the group’s founder, Curtis Sliwa, while speaking to a crowd of nearly 70 people at a town meeting Friday in Charleroi.
Sliwa founded the group in 1979 to attack crime and violence in New York’s subways. It has since grown to include chapters in 11 countries and 86 cities. A new chapter was being trained Friday in Mexico City.
But the visit to Charleroi, at the invitation of Mayor Frank Paterra, had caused a rift between council and the mayor over concerns that advertising a drug problem might hurt local businesses.
“We have a crime problem like everyone else,” said Paterra, whose borough is home to just 4,800 residents.
After Sliwa finished speaking, one middle-aged man stood up and announced that he would “be the first to volunteer.” Retired Charleroi police Chief Armand Costantino, meanwhile, announced his support of the Guardian Angels. Donn Henderson, a supervisor in neighboring Fallowfield Township, said he wondered how a local chapter might be formed.
Sliwa said he would need a professional who is trained in self-defense to head up a local chapter. If local police cooperate, they would perform background checks on applicants before new members undergo three months of training.
The volunteers would then dedicate 8 hours of their time a week to patrol in groups of four outside crack houses or bars where fights often break out. The angels carry no guns, he said, but get physical when necessary, Sliwa said.
“This is all on the cuff for free,” he said.
Observer-Reporter

On better days....

Tombstones that carry photographs of the people below them have always freaked me out.

While that is one handsome couple buried in St. John’s Cemetery in Monaca, Pa., most of the photos that I have seen at cemeteries did little to flatter the dead. There is one corpse buried in Indiana, Pa., below a marker that bears a headshot of the dead guy with an ugly comb-over head of hair. Why on Earth anyone would want to be remembered in the afterlife on a bad hair day is beyond me.

Just think - your dear old uncle Rupert might, at this moment, be scanning his photo album to find the perfect pose to put on his grave.

Muffler Man is "The Man"

Motorists entering Uniontown from the south are once again greeted by a giant roadside attraction known as the Muffler Man.
The Paul Bunyan lookalike, which stands 20 feet, 6 inches tall, reappeared last month in the Fayette County, Pa., county seat after spending nearly six months in the repair shop.

“He’s back in service,” said Dave Thomas, an employee at Import Export Tire Shop, where the landmark lumberjack stands alongside Route 51. “He looks brand new,” Thomas added.

The fiberglass statue was among many that popped up in the 1960s outside muffler shops across the United States. But last year, the one in Uniontown had begun to look a bit tipsy because its steel skeleton was rusting away.
“He was starting to lean over,” Thomas said.

Originally, these odd advertisements gripped mufflers and tailpipe in their muscular hands instead of hatchets. As those shops closed over the years, their “men” would take on as such appearances as a cowboy, Indian, pirate, Viking and spaceman, according to Roadside Magazine.

The Uniontown Muffler Man has a fresh coat of paint, and retains much of his original, tough-guy style. Somehow, he pulls off the look with his pant legs tucked in his boots. But without a muffler, this Muffler Man resembles a jiggy redneck rapper.

A sunny promise

Pennsylvania Sen. Jim Ferlo, shown at the table above, testified today at a hearing on amendments to the state’s open records law, where we were reminded, once again, that the state’s access law is about as bad as those in Communist nations.

Ferlo, D-Allegheny County, said a Better Government Association study ranked Pennsylvania 40th in the nation when it came to quality of its Right-to-Know law.

“It’s time for us to clean up state government,” Ferlo said before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee at the hearing in Uniontown.

Those of us in the news business don’t need rhetoric on how difficult it can be to take peek at such things as police blotters, reports paid for with taxpayer money or coroner’s records. Reporters fight this battle on a daily basis, and often meet up with ridiculous denials.

But state lawmakers are promising to add teeth to the law, that the hearing was not just another “dog and pony act.”

Adult viewing recommended

WQED-TV will feature the Monongahela “Calendar Girls” Wednesday (Oct. 10) in a segment on its Emmy-winning news magazine.
The group of older women from Southwestern Pennsylvania who posed semi-nude for charity will appear when OnQ airs at 7:30 p.m., the public television program announced Tuesday.
The women, the youngest of whom is in her late 70s, have sold nearly 3,000 of their 2008 calendars to benefit the Monongahela Area Historical Society. Their story is expected to air in repeats.

(Caption: Calendar models Lois Phillips, left, and Kathleen Bordini at a fireman's parade in Monongahela.)