2006 Spring/Summer Archives - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Deschapelles, Haiti – From the window of a small, private plane, the island of Hispaniola came into view in the middle of the vast, blue Caribbean. Haiti and its neighbor on the island, the Dominican Republic, looked like two countries on a globe in a library, set apart by two different colors. The Dominican Republic was …

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Region

Gambling a Boon to Travel Industry

by John G. Craig, Jr.

The public discussion about the pending arrival of casino gambling in the region has been largely preoccupied with one tangential, if related, subject. Is there enough money to be made from a slot machine operation within the corporate limits of Pittsburgh to fund the construction of a new civic auditorium to replace Mellon Arena? This …

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Business

Outsourcing

by Sunil Wadhwani

Outsourcing: it’s a topic where everybody has an opinion, but few have the facts. Yet it’s a most important subject — one that has the potential to alter the fabric of the global economy. It’s particularly important for us to consider in southestern Pennsylvania, at a time when our regional economy is at a crossroads. …

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Innovation

The Software Business Manual

by James H. Morris

As the computer and Internet business emerges from the collapse of the bubble, the most successful companies seem to be following a new set of rules. Some rules are old and obvious, but the combination is striking. As a professor at Carnegie Mellon, the world’s premier educator of software engineers, I have been trying to …

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Profiles

A Medical Giant in Our Midst

by Jeffery Fraser

The year is 1958. Northwestern University nominates one of its bright young physicians, Thomas E. Starzl, for a prestigious Markle Scholarship. He is told to come up with a big idea to propose during his interviews with the selection committee. Something that would be recognized as a remarkable achievement in medical science. Something to build …

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Homes

Modern English

by Marylynn Uricchio

From the outside, the stone and shingle cottage could easily be perched along a bucolic lane in the Cotswolds instead of a quiet road in Fox Chapel. That’s what makes the inside all the more remarkable. Eschewing the more traditional approach suggested by such architecture, designer Kathleen Clements devised a sophisticated interior that purifies modern …

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Opinion

Stocks & Pedestal, Spring/Summer 2006

by PQ Staff

There is a tide in the affairs of leaders. A rising tide, the saying goes, lifts all boats. It’s a low tide that you have to survive, and rare is the leader who doesn’t face one. Jim Rohr’s low tide came in 2002. After the stock market bubble had burst, America was looking for people …

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Arrivals

Kelly, Hines, Germain, Casillo, Manto, Sekiya, Dell’Omo, Goodfriend, Hilson, Katzner

by PQ Staff

Robert P. Kelly is chairman, president and CEO of Mellon Financial Corp. Kelly, 51, took over Feb. 13, after serving as chief financial officer and senior executive vice president of Wachovia Corp., the fourth-largest bank holding company in the U.S. based on assets and the third-largest U.S. full-service brokerage firm, based on client assets.Kelly has …

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Opinion

From the Publisher, Spring/Summer 2006

by Douglas Heuck

Before we get to the second issue of Pittsburgh Quarterly, I’d like to thank the many people who have passed along ideas and kind words either in person or in letters or e-mail about the first issue. All considered, we couldn’t have been happier with it and with the response. The magazine is resonating with …

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Opinion

Three Places That Found Redemption

by Mark DeSantis

A story of redemption is a story of profound change that we make ourselves. Time won’t redeem us, nor will promises or fond memories. When our cherished world has collapsed in front of us and we stare into the abyss, the choices are stark: keep walking straight ahead and fall into oblivion, take one tentative …

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Opinion

The Pace of Progress

by Douglas Heuck

In the game of Monopoly, sometimes you land on Community Chest. If fate smiles, you draw a little yellow card that says “Advance to Go” or “Bank error in your favor,” and you collect $200. The worst card shows the mustachioed Monopoly man stooped over, carrying a pick and shovel with the words “You are …

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Profiles

Andy Russell, Businessman and Former Steeler

by Jeff Sewald

I grew up with a father who had come over on the boat from Scotland. We moved around a lot. My parents convinced me that every move presented an opportunity to meet new and different people. By the time I entered college in 1959, my father was running Monsanto in Europe.I got a B.S. in …

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Nonprofits

An Experience

by Jeffery Fraser

Inside a red brick Victorian in Aspinwall, on computer hard drives and forms stacked high on the desks of the Tickets For Kids Foundation staff, opportunities are gathered daily that will transport the region’s neediest children to places never seen and worlds never experienced. The Grand Lobby of Heinz Hall. A summer camp in the …

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Opinion

Whatever Happened to the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit?

by Chris Allison

In 1955, Sloan Wilson wrote a groundbreaking novel on the trials of working in the 1950s. “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” became a hit film starring Gregory Peck and tells the story of how a young executive works tirelessly in what would become known as the white-collar world. Wilson’s protagonists are Tom and …

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Food & Wine

Creative Dinners and More

by Barbara Eichenlaub

With careers, carpooling and volunteer work, making dinner can be a challenge for busy families! If Stouffer’s is “home cooking” and at tax time you can claim the pizza deliveryman as a dependant, it might be time for a change. Enter a new concept in cooking — meal preparation centers. Creative Dinners and More provides …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods

Song of Squirrel Hill

by Barry Paris

“Jews are just like everybody else, only more so,” Wyoming Benjamin Paris* liked to say. He was an authority on the subject of chutzpah, and the star of his Hill District basketball team — a team with no uniforms or name. In 1919, the year of his bar mitzvah, he hopped a streetcar from Downtown to …

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Opinion

The Story of Society

by Marylynn Uricchio

“What rage for fame attends both great and small. Better be damned than mentioned not at all!” So noted John Wolcott in the mid 1800s, and not much has changed since. But today Wolcott might wonder what rage for society news has taken the nation by storm. One is hard pressed to open a newspaper or …

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Books

Ukiah: In Pittsburgh!

by Sandra Levis

Of the thousands of materials that fill the Pennsylvania Room of the Carnegie Library in Oakland, all are of local interest, being by or about Pennsylvanians. Hundreds of these are works of fiction; nearly a third of which take place in Pittsburgh. A surprisingly high percentage of the same are mysteries.

Arts

Art Collector G. David Thompson

by Graham Shearing

What might be described as the great collections built up by Pittsburghers — those of, say, Henry Clay Frick, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Duncan Phillips, Andrew and Paul Mellon respectively, and Walter Arensberg — are perhaps best understood as being financed by Pittsburgh. The actual collections were built up elsewhere. That is not true of …

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Sports

The Tracy Method

by Gene Collier

On the afternoon of Sept. 21, 1980, a rookie outfielder for the Chicago Cubs cracked his first major league home run over the centerfield wall at Wrigley Field. Four days later, he hit his second homer, and two days after that, a third. “I was on pace,” said Jim Tracy, laughing the knowing baseball laugh …

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Obituaries

Smith, Detre, Ringer, Marshall, Hodges, White, Kerr, Patrick, Halpern, Hazo, Stautner, Lowenthal, Irvis, Hodges, Walton, Turner

by PQ Staff

James Ignatius Smith III, 74: Smith became the first executive director of the Allegheny County Bar Association and built it into one of the most vital in the country. He was in charge from 1963 until 2001 and built membership from 1,900 to 6,500 and staff from seven to 70.Smith was dedicated to the association …

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Sports

Pittsburgh’s Claim to Fame

by Dan Fitzpatrick

In honor of the midsummer classic’s July reappearance in Pittsburgh, I pulled out some interviews I did years ago with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Dan Fitzpatrick got many new ones of great National Leaguers of the past and their recollections of the Pirates and Pittsburgh. Many remember the eccentricities of old Forbes Field. Some recall …

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