Madea Goes to the Beer Store

So far this Halloween season I've walked behind Jesus on a parade float tossing candy to children in Charleroi, Pa., and passed a cow on Rollerblades speeding down East Carson Street in Pittsburgh's South Side.

Then tonight I bumped into Madea, also known as Tyler Perry, in the 6 Pack Station in Donora, Pa.

Not Halloween, but close enough

Mock prom death, originally uploaded by Scott Beveridge.

She was posing for this photo at her mock funeral after a make-believe, post-prom vehicle accident involving alcohol and students at Bethlehem-Center High School in Deemston, Pa.

Please drive sensibly this weekend, and always.

Egyptian King of Toilet Paper

Luke Martin, 9, of Charleroi, Pa., is wrapped in toilet paper as a prank that was part of a Halloween magic show in his hometown.

Steelers' kicker cited once more

Pennsylvania Rep. Tim Solobay, a Democrat from Canonsburg, presents Pittsburgh Steelers kicker Jeff Reed with a citation from the House of Representatives for community service at the Washington Crown Center mall.

By Scott Beveridge

WASHINGTON, Pa. – Pittsburgh Steelers kicker Jeff Reed has been cited again, this time for good behavior.

Reed, who was charged over a confrontation with Pittsburgh police following the Cleveland Browns game two weeks ago, was given a citation Tuesday from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for turning out for a charity to feed the poor at Thanksgiving.

“Oh, this is a good citation. This is the only one that won’t get you into trouble,” Pennsylvania Rep. Tim Solobay, a Canonsburg Democrat, said while presenting the citation to the player at the Washington Crown Center mall in North Franklin Township.

Reed, who is contesting his recent brush with police, smiled and appeared to blush when he accepted the gift from Solobay. He also got into trouble with police last summer for beating up a paper towel dispenser in a Westmoreland County convenience store.

Some people brought him paper towel dispensers to sign at the mall, and he did so while charging double the price for an autograph to raise money for the Greater Washington County Food Bank.

The food bank is the repository for money raised through the annual 2000 Turkeys campaign in the area that provides Thanksgiving turkeys for low-income families.

More than 200 people turned out an hour early and stood in a long line to pay $10 for an autograph from Reed. It cost those who waited another $10 for a signature from his teammate, Chris Hoke, a starting nose tackle.

Donations also are being accepted at 2000 Turkeys, P.O. Box 2000, Washington, PA 15301.

Here's to you Harry

OK... here is your beer!, originally uploaded by Now and Here.

“How does it feel?” - Robert A. Zimmerman

By Amanda Gillooly

I was newly 21, and in love with a guy named John when I first stepped into Harry’s living room.

As a Point Park College student walking to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I sauntered past the River City Inn every Friday, at least, and it always seemed so warm. From the picture window peeking out onto the Boulevard of the Allies, I could see businessmen donning loosened ties perched inside on their bar stools, their hands wrapped most often around mugs of draft beer.

It was far past Happy Hour those Fridays, but they always looked exuberantly joyful. “Must be the beers,” I muttered to myself, jealous, more than once, ambling to another night taking football scores for extra cash.

Wrong. Oh, how woefully wrong, I was. And I realized it as soon as I met the bartender.

We immediately were drawn to Harry Patterson, and he was disarming. With brown hair peppered gray, he wore a button-down dress shirt with the top two buttons undone. The sleeves were rolled up carelessly as he maneuvered behind the bar, boisterously singing whatever chorus Bob Dylan was crooning at the moment.

I’d invited John for a drink there that Thursday. And the Thursday after that. And then the next Thursday.

Harry showed us that if you muted the scene in the movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” when Jesus turned the water to wine and put on the Bee Gees, it is a hell of a dance party. And John showed me how to drink beer.

Looking around the bar and noting several Post-Gazette staff writers drinking nearby (some of whom had been immortalized in a strange billboard blitz none of us understood but we all made fun of) and told me I needed to start drinking beer. ASAP.

“No self-respecting newspaper reporter gets caught drinking a Zima in a bar, Amanda,” he said, eyeing my girlie drink in distain.

“But I don’t LIKE beer,” I told him.

After inhaling sharply, John ordered me a Coors Light draft and told me I would get used to it – even grow to love it.

“Trust me,” he said, scooting the mug toward me. While there were many other times I couldn’t or shouldn’t have trusted him, I did then. And from that moment forward my favorite cocktail was a shot and a beer.

Just the other night, Sir Harold (my pet name for my favorite bartender) stressed that the River City Inn isn’t a college bar. But that’s how it became my college bar.

And it’s closing.

Harry jokes that there is a poll going, with the winner guessing the day on which he will roll up to the bar to find that his key doesn’t work.

The business has been sold. And while the new owner has insisted on keeping some of the various pieces of art strewn about the place, I don’t know if I will ever again step inside if Harry is not the one dolling out drinks.

With Sir Harold, you always get more than a beer. You get moon dancing. You get sports trivia and movie remembrances. And that doesn’t say anything about the ambiance.

In my imagination, Mick Jagger is belting out, “Gimme Shelter.”

In real life, the playlist is never far off.

A lucky soldier

My father, James R. Beveridge of Charleroi, Pa., left, in Danville, Ill., with an unidentified pal shortly before embarking for Europe with the U.S. Army during World War II.

Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see

By Scott Beveridge

The Queen Elizabeth had the ability to outrun German U-boats during World War II, moving at a speed that qualified it as a troopship for American soldiers destined to reshape the globe.

As the largest luxury cruise liner in the world at the time, it had been painted battleship gray and fitted with magnetic mine detecting devices to double as a warship before it docked March 7, 1940, in New York on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

The ocean liner and its sister ship, the Queen Mary, were capable of carrying fifteen thousand men, nearly an entire division, to wartime service. And my father would eventually become one of them.

Four years later, James R. Beveridge and his fellow troops assigned to the U.S. Army’s 550th Quartermaster Corps, stepped aboard what had by then become a beat up vessel. They were scared, nervous and unsure about where the war would take them when the she shoved off at 5 a.m. December 16, 1944, and arrived in breakneck speed six days later at Glasgow, Scotland.

“That ship was so fast it could make it over in three or four days but, it had to zigzag because it wasn’t in a convey,” dad said, more than sixty years later in the summer of 2005.

“That way a submarine couldn’t hit it, get a bead on it,” he recalled when he was 82 years old.

It was his first call to the war zone after having spent the previous two years in training at Army bases in the United States.

He decided to enlist October 7, 1942, with his best friend, Joe Yoney. They were naive 22-year-old men from Charleroi, Pa., a bustling retail boomtown that lived off the backs of steelworkers about twenty-five miles south of Pittsburgh, Pa.

They briefly considered joining the U.S. Merchant Marines as their hometown on the western banks of the Monongahela River was being stripped of its draft-age men. Beveridge and Yoney had already received their draft notices; service in the war was inevitable.

“I might as well get it over with,” dad said, taking his thoughts back to the first time he visited a recruiter’s office in nearby Donora.

But his mother, Madge, disapproved of his joining the Marines over her fears that he might be killed aboard a boat struck by a torpedo, images she had seen on Newsreels. American moviegoers were kept abreast of the defense effort by those short black-and-white news films that were produced by the major motion picture companies.

“I told Yoney: ‘My mom’s going to have a stroke. Let’s go down to Donora and enlist in the Army,’” dad said. “I didn’t go home and tell my mom anything. I just went and joined.”

He was soon assigned to basic training at Camp Lee, Va., where he earned a paltry fifty dollars a month as a buck private.

It was uncanny, he said, because his father, Robert, had been stationed at the same base for training in World War I.

But dad longed to be home, especially that day in 1944 when he shipped out for active duty in another continent that, to him, was as far away as a Jupiter.

(Click here to read Part II: Stirring the memories of war.)

(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)