Articles Archive - Page 4 of 139 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

A month or so ago a reader of these pages wrote in to let me know she had concluded that my essays had been written by “a particularly dim-witted Artificial Intelligence bot.” Well! I’ve received many critical and intemperate responses to these writings over the years, but that was the first time I’d been accused …

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Sports

Ralph Kiner, Frank Thomas and Greenberg Gardens

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

At the end of the 1946 season, the Detroit Tigers placed Hank Greenberg on waivers. That season, he had led the American League in home runs and RBIs, but the Tigers they felt they couldn’t afford Greenberg’s $75,000 salary. The 35-year-old Greenberg cleared waivers in the American League, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, under new ownership, …

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Culture

Pittsburgh Opera’s Laced/Unlaced Fashion Show

by PQ Staff

A capacity crowd of 275 recently filled the Bitz Opera Factory for Pittsburgh Opera’s ‘Laced/Unlaced’ fashion show. The event combined ‘Gothic romance’ opera fashion assembled from pieces in Pittsburgh Opera’s costume shop vault with elegant, accessible luxury fashion from Skye Douglass’ House of Couture Designs, and seductive lingerie from Pulchra Intimates. Pittsburgh Opera’s Resident Artists and local tenor Ben Werley sang dramatic operatic …

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Arts Culture

Pitt Stages’ “Seven Guitars” Gives Life to a Dream Deferred

by Stuart Sheppard

It has been said that the sign of great actors is that they don’t care if you watch them perform or not – as they disdain “playing to the crowd” — and I would argue that the same can be said of great playwrights, who write in a way that invites you to listen to …

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Creative Capital

Lord Joe Hardy

by Greg Curtis

I’d assured Joe Hardy that his vision for Nemacolin was flat-out nuts. But Joe was as good as his word and over the years Nemacolin blossomed into a first-class destination resort. Joe’s hotel gained Triple A 5-Diamond status, the resort’s wine cellar grew into the largest in Pennsylvania, and his restaurant became the most expensive …

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Sports

When Wampum High School was Small Yet Big

by Bruce Zewe

In the well-trod regions of the sportswriting firmament, there is a progression in cliches used to describe successful coaches. It starts with “winning” and escalates to “renowned” and culminates with — ultima gloria — “legendary.” With justification, sportswriters in Lawrence County, which borders Pennsylvania and Ohio about 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, reflexively apply the …

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Culture PQ Poem

Homewood Poem

by Doralee Brooks

Stranahan, steepest hill in Homewood, pulls my primary-school bones like iron filings across an etch-a-sketch from Belmar at the top to flat Apple Street running across its base near 7101, Mystery Manor. Bought by Woogie Harris, the gangster banker, in the 30’s. In rabbit fur maxi-coats, chinchilla-draped shoulders, jewel-studded t-straps, and wingtips, people stepped from …

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Home & Lifestyle Homes

Passion and Purpose

by Marylynn Uricchio

Those who know Anne Dickson are at once astonished and not the least bit surprised by all she has accomplished in such a short time. With her husband, Andrew, she is raising three young boys and the evidence is everywhere in the Fox Chapel home the couple purchased seven years ago. They bought the house …

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Creative Capital

Joe Buys the Place at Auction

by Greg Curtis

“I guess that all I can hope for is that, when people think of me, they think, ‘Hey, that jackass started out with only $5,000 and made a fortune. Maybe I can, too!’” Joe Hardy to Jeff Sewald in Pittsburgh Quarterly Previously in this series: Firings All Around! The Nemacolin property was being sold at a bankruptcy …

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History

An Overdue Obituary – The McKeesport Daily News

by Tom Waseleski

When I was growing up in Elizabeth, a small town in the Mon Valley, and uncles, aunts and neighbors learned that I wanted to write for a newspaper, I would hear this common refrain: “Maybe you can work for The Daily News.” Although my sights were set elsewhere, I knew their words were less about …

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Sports Sports & Outdoors

Our Football Fascination: Here’s The Thing

by Jerry Thompson

As the Chiefs and Eagles prepare to battle in the next Super Bowl, with all the attendant passion, pain and pageantry, let’s take a time out for a moment of reflection. Not on the game’s socio-political or human health dynamics, or other impositions on the fans’ enjoyment, but with a dive to the heart of …

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People Profiles

What Do I Know? Sam Hazo

by Jeff Sewald

without a doubt, the course of my life was determined largely by my upbringing. My mother died when I was 6, and while my father was still around, my brother, Robert, and I were taken into the care of our mother’s parents and they raised us, with significant help from my mother’s aunt. My mother’s …

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Books Culture

Small-town Characters Drive “Wings & Other Things”

by Fred Shaw

Story endings can be famously tricky to land, with Hemingway once claiming he wrote 39 different endings to A Farewell to Arms. Yet, when the writer Chauna Craig delves into the messy lives of her female protagonists, the resolution happens so effortlessly it can feel like sleight of hand. The Indiana University of Pennsylvania professor’s …

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Creative Capital

Firings All Around!

by Greg Curtis

I had no choice but to fire “Harry” on the spot – and then have him carefully escorted off the property so he wouldn’t steal the silverware – but that left me with no one to run Nemacolin and four muckety-mucks arriving in a few days. “Don,” the weird private eye I’d hired, promptly offered …

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Culture PQ Poem

February Night

by Ralph Culver

—for Hil Winter rain drummingthe pond ice beyond the gate.One light burns overthe stove, bright enough that hecan make out the easy drift of her hip slopinginto the turned-down blanket.The warm length of her.The warm length of heragainst him. Cold rains. He feeds the fire.

People Regional News

Pandemic Learning Loss

by Julia Fraser

For decades, educators fretted over how to prevent “summer slide,” the learning loss that students often experience over summer vacation. The COVID pandemic raised the stakes. Mounting evidence suggests that periodic school closings, the abrupt shift to remote learning and other disruptions profoundly set back students’ education, accelerating learning loss into a national crisis — …

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Creative Capital Money

The Plot Thickens

by Greg Curtis

I’d hired a guy named “Harry” to run Nemacolin for me, and a private eye named “Don” to check up on Harry, but I wasn’t a completely hands-off boss. As Harry began improving the ambience of the place, I got involved, changing the named from “Nemacolin” to “Nemacolin Woodlands” and sketching out a logo that …

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Sports

To Run or Not to Run in the Pittsburgh Marathon

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, there were four movie houses on my working-class South Side, so I saw plenty of movies. I loved then all — the war movies, the romantic adventures, the musical comedies, the biblical epics, the baseball biographies, the hour-long oaters starring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but my favorites, …

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Arts Culture

Pittsburgh Opera’s “Ariodante” – A Sublime Marriage of the 18^th and 21^st Centuries

by Stuart Sheppard

Nearly a century ago, the iconoclastic dramatist Bertolt Brecht wrote that “Since it is precisely for its backwardness that the opera-going public adores opera, an influx of new types of listener with new appetites has to be reckoned with; and so it is.” This is a felicitous way to describe what Pittsburgh Opera has done …

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Nature

Less Lawn, More Native Plants

by Daryln Brewer Hoffstot

When my mother-in-law was ill 28 years ago, my husband began to build a stone wall on our front lawn. Each rock he handled three, maybe four times: plucked from the woods, thrown into the back of a pickup, dropped onto the grass to decide placement, or set directly atop a dry wall. One stone …

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Creative Capital Money

Joe Hardy, Nemacolin and Me

by Greg Curtis

Some years ago I became the head of a family office for one of America’s wealthiest families. Very near the top of my to-do list, which the family had unceremoniously handed me on my first day, was something that read, “Sell Nemacolin.” As far as I knew, Nemacolin had been a famous chief of the …

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Books Culture

Fitting into West Virginia

by Fred Shaw

In writing, place can be both problematic and inspirational. Take James Joyce’s troubled relationship with his Irish homeland. Ireland’s Catholic, nationalist values were reasons enough for him to never enter his native land after 1912. And though he died in 1941, his masterpieces remain redolent of Dublin. In her captivating debut memoir, Another Appalachia: Coming …

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