Articles Archive - Page 119 of 156 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Marcia Davenport and Shirley Temple Black had one, and only one, common interest: Czechoslovakia. Their dynamic paths crossed once, and only once, there. But that was at the end of the story. In the beginning… Everyone knows Shirley, who recently passed away at 83. Hollywood’s most beloved child star later metamorphosed into a skilled diplomat …

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Science

The Awe of Night

by Ben Schmitt

For nearly three centuries, a scientific debate lingered about the brilliant rings rotating around Saturn: Were they solid discs or made of some other matter? [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”83″ display=”basic_thumbnail” thumbnail_crop=”0″] The debate finally came to rest in Pittsburgh, of all places. Astronomer James Edward Keeler, using a spectrograph attached to a refracting telescope with a …

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Region

Bike city

by Julia Fraser

Courtney Ehrlichman makes the commute to her Carnegie Mellon University job with her young daughter on an Xtracycle fitted with a Hooptie. That’s a bicycle designed to haul cargo with a child carrier attached. And it’s part of the changing street scene in Pittsburgh. More people are biking in Pittsburgh, according to data and similar …

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Regional News

Is Better Good Enough?

by Jeffery Fraser

A standing-room-only audience has packed the Avalon Municipal Building on a rain-soaked April evening to hear Allegheny County Health Department officials explain the latest consent decree to correct air quality violations at the coke works across the river. It’s a tough crowd. Most live in the north boroughs near the Shenango, Inc. plant. They know …

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Education

Working to Keep The Promise

by Sean D. Hamill

It is 5:30 a.m. on a Thursday in early June—one of the last days of the 2013–14 school year—and Joseph Graham is tired, but awake. It’s about an hour before most of his Allderdice High School classmates in Squirrel Hill have awoken, and Joseph is getting ready to start an hour-long, two-Port-Authority-bus trip across town …

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Food & Wine

Rudy’s Bar and Grill

by Joseph Sabino Mistick

His real name is Frank, but most people call him Gus, except for those who call him Rudy, and a lot of folks call him Rudy. For 40 years, Frank Aiello has operated Rudy’s Bar and Grill in McKees Rocks. Frank has been loafing here even longer, since original owner Rudy Gerger took the young …

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Health

Who’s Afraid of Obamacare?

by Kelly Casey

In 1998, Bob McCafferty set out to start a business that would pay the bills and give him more free time to go camping. He bought a run-down funeral parlor dating to the 1850s. For the next several years, he spent nights restoring the building while holding down jobs as an archaeologist and bartender. He …

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Birds

Soaring majesty

by PQ Staff

It’s only recently that bald eagles have been able to call Pittsburgh home. For 200 years, obstacles such as habitat loss, pollution, persecution and pesticides have kept them away, but as the region’s environment improved, so did the chance of bald eagles successfully roosting here once again. [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”80″ display=”basic_thumbnail” thumbnail_crop=”0″] Though a pair …

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Business

The Export Dilemma

by Seamus McGraw

As the Shale-driven production of natural gas has expanded in recent years, so too has the demand from much of the industry to unleash that resource on the world market. And that chorus of voices calling for the United States to use gas from fields like the Marcellus to tap into the world market has …

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Education

High Tech + Higher Ed = ?

by PQ Staff

Editor’s note: For this special feature, we invited the presidents of the region’s leading colleges and universities to respond to the following: Technology is presenting unprecedented challenges and opportunities for higher education. While Internet-based learning threatens the existence of some traditional, campus-based institutions, for many others, emerging technology provides opportunities to enhance learning in ways …

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Opinion

The sweet trouble of success

by Lara Bruhn

The hazards of good fortune in business are many: the physical toll of the added work, the mental toll of rethinking everything you’ve come to know, the psychic toll of raised expectations. They combine for a perfect storm that one feels guilty begrudging because the upsides of fame and fortune, while perhaps fleeting, seem so …

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Business

A century of safety

by Evan Pattak

It was June 1914 when John T. Ryan Sr. and George Deike, two federal mine rescue engineers horrified by the carnage they’d seen in coal mine explosions, formed a company dedicated to making the industry safer. Ryan and Deike enlisted the services of no less a luminary than Thomas Alva Edison to design an electric …

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Obituaries

Binai, Carlough, Maazel, Werner, Noll, Kimmel, Lovette, Mellon Scaife, McDevitt Rubin

by PQ Staff

Paul Binai, 81 A former curator of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Binai was a renowned painter whose work has been exhibited throughout the world. Binai was a quiet, erudite man who also served as curator at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Art. His art was greatly influenced by …

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Nature

McConnells Mill State Park

by Thomas Saunders

In southwestern PA, it is a challenge to find remote and scenic hikes. But one is only about an hour’s drive north of Pittsburgh, just off of Rt. 422 in eastern Lawrence County, in McConnells Mill State Park. The focus of this park is Slippery Rock Creek and its 400-foot-deep gorge. While you can stop …

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Opinion

Welcoming Midsummer’s Eve

by Douglas Heuck

At the end of may last year, my son and I drove into Groningen—the Netherlands’ northernmost city. By chance, we arrived on the first warm, sunny day they’d had after an unusually long, cold and dark winter. By early afternoon, business stopped, and everywhere, jubilant people of all ages poured into the parks and outdoor …

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Opinion

Stocks & Pedestal, Summer 2014

by PQ Staff

When the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra musicians started seeing an increasing number of empty seats in Heinz Hall during their concerts for students, a group of them started making inquiries. They learned that, because of funding cuts, a number of schools could no longer afford to hire the buses to bring youngsters Downtown for the concert. …

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Arrivals

Gallagher, Fernandes, Barron, Finger, Suzik, Wilmer, Carey

by PQ Staff

Patrick D. Gallagher will become the 18th chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh on Aug. 1. A native of Albuquerque, N.M., he comes to Pittsburgh from the greater Washington, D.C., area, where he has been serving as acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce and director of the National Institute of Standards and …

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Profiles

Richard V. Piacentini, Botanist and Innovator

by Jeff Sewald

I was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island, practically across the street from a several-thousand-acre state park in which we played all the time. I loved being in the woods as a kid. I was always interested in plants and animals—mostly plants, to be honest—during my early years. I used …

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Sports

The Greatest Sport?

by Marino Parascenzo

As far as I’m concerned, the summer of 2013 was a bust. It was supposed to be the summer of the 17-year cicada, humming with a biblical infestation of the things. But there wasn’t so much as a chirp or whirr, and not one gawking husk on a fence post. And I waited 17 years …

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Books

Bend of the ‘burgh

by John Allison

Pittsburgh has enjoyed some nice national media buzz in recent years. We’re so livable, we’re hipper than Portland, we’re the next foodie destination. But Pittsburgher Jacob Bacharach’s debut novel could blast the city’s profile into an otherworldly dimension. “The Bend of the World”—a highly enjoyable comedy of modern manners—imagines our cozy town as the fulcrum …

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Birds

The house finch

by David Liebmann

It’s no surprise that a city defined by former immigrant neighborhoods would be the gateway for yet another group of newcomers forced to gain a foothold in unfamiliar terrain. Such is the case with Carpodacus mexicanus—the house finch—which was often called the California linnet and the Hollywood finch before it was smuggled to the eastern …

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Food & Wine

Berry Bounty

by Sherrie Flick

It’s an early spring morning and my neighbor mike and I work in our gardens, just a shaky chain-link fence between us. We garden for a while as if we’re both alone, just grunting and digging and pulling at weeds as the birds sing their heads off. Every so often one of us starts a …

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