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2023 Spring From the Editor

Get Ready for Pittsburgh Tomorrow

by Douglas Heuck

In the spring issue three years ago, I wrote a long essay about the need for a big plan to reverse Greater Pittsburgh’s downward economic and demographic trends. A Pittsburgh friend called it my Magnum Opus, the product of 35 years of journalistic efforts here, much of it aimed at moving this region ahead. In …

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A Sailing Odyssey, Part II: Peril on the Seas

by Douglas Heuck

It is said that no two trips to the North Channel are ever the same. With a maiden voyage behind me, though, I felt confident about my second trip, which I would undertake with three college classmates, all 60 years old. I put the boat in the water early, eager to push the engine a …

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A Sailing Odyssey, Part I

by Douglas Heuck

When I was a boy during summers in northern Michigan, there was one adventure that dwarfed all others: sailing to the North Channel. It was a distant, mythic place of pristine beauty and wrecked boats where intrepid sailors matched their skills with the forces of nature — where islands had rattlesnakes, fish were huge, and …

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A Sailing Odyssey, The Conclusion

by Douglas Heuck

Killarney was our eastern apogee, where we spent the rainy day in the Killarney Mountain Lodge, had drinks by the fire and I taught the guys to play bridge. From there we started the long trek back, exploring the North Channel’s most beautiful places by day and playing bridge in the cozy cabin each night. …

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A Final Chat with Franco

by Douglas Heuck

My wife and I were at a party Friday night at the History Center, and after a cocktail, chit chat and getting our picture taken with Santa, we were going to check out the John Kane painting exhibit before the seated dinner. As we were making our escape from the crowd, however, I saw Franco …

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Culture Opinion

A Pittsburgh Wedding

by Douglas Heuck

It all started in March of 2020, when my daughter’s boyfriend flew to Pittsburgh for lunch to ask for her hand. Liking him a great deal, I said yes, not knowing that, thanks to the vagaries of COVID, we would have 30 months to think and rethink the wedding, and experience all the drama accompanying …

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Let’s Take “the Pits” out of Pittsburgh

by Douglas Heuck

In my spring column, I wrote about the borough of Wilkinsburg, encouraging Pittsburgh City Council to vote in favor of annexing the failed municipality. When I wrote it though, it had been years since I’d veered off of Wilkinsburg’s main drag — Penn Avenue — and actually explored the borough. Last month, I drove all …

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Needed: City Leadership

by Douglas Heuck

Until yesterday, in 60 years, I have only called a political representative once to try to persuade him to vote on something I thought was important. It was in October 2008, when Congress was again considering the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Days earlier, the bill failed to pass the U.S. House by 13 votes, …

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Into the Woods

by Douglas Heuck

June 15th was crisp and cloudless. carrying a chainsaw, orange surveyor’s tape and a compass, I started walking in a straight line into the pathless woods. Trailing me was my Airedale, Hawkins, and behind both of us was the little cabin that a group of friends and I built the previous summer on an island …

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A Lifelong Friend

by Douglas Heuck

I’ve been lucky to have many close friends. But as I look back, it’s clear to me that, of all of them, my life has been most closely intertwined with that of my friend Chris Bentley. Chris and I were born less than two months apart, in early 1962, and we met before either of …

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The Year of Fear

by Douglas Heuck

The first time the phrase “stay safe” stuck in my memory, I was watching a TV news broadcast. After the correspondent gave his report, the anchor thanked him and then with a concerned look said, “Stay safe out there.” It was actually jarring to me because I’d been a reporter and editor for decades and, …

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Civil Discourse

by Douglas Heuck

As I consider the divided state of our country, I imagine my father’s voice repeating an old adage to me. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” We can all agree that America has problems, though we’ll likely differ on what they are. Some will say the mob that former …

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Finishing the Cabin

by Douglas Heuck

In the Fall issue, I wrote about how five friends and I escaped the hunker-down COVID malaise last summer by building a 16-by-20-foot cabin on a remote island in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (U.P.). None of us had done it before, and by the time they left July 25, the footers, subfloor and four walls were …

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My Summer Vacation

by Douglas Heuck

It all started back in April, when the virus was young… I had big plans for making this the summer of exploration, intent on getting away from the quarantine/hunker down mentality and surrounding myself with the beauty of nature. The first plan was renting an RV in June and driving to Alaska via the Alaska …

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Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

by Douglas Heuck

By chance, in early January, I watched a Netflix series called “Pandemic,” so my sensors were attuned early for the virus news from China. I was initially surprised that people were slow to give it credence and that financial markets blithely reached all-time highs Feb. 19. Soon enough though, as virus news swept the globe …

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Pittsburgh Tomorrow: Facing Facts and Seizing Opportunity

by Douglas Heuck

I arrived in Pittsburgh on July 5, 1985, for a 12-week internship at the old Pittsburgh Press. I expected to stay that long. However, from my entry through the Fort Pitt Tunnel to my first front-page story on one of the last big steel strikes, Pittsburgh was a fascinating place. It was also a place …

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The Migrations of Hunting

by Douglas Heuck

“Nature is a wet place where large numbers of ducks fly around uncooked.” —Oscar Wilde I didn’t grow up in a hunting family. When it came to wild animals, we enjoyed simply seeing them, not killing them. And the least likely kind of hunting for me might have been ducks. I liked the book “Make …

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Lost and Found

by Douglas Heuck

Some days are memorable for obvious reasons: births, deaths, weddings and funerals. Occasionally, however, a day is noteworthy not for any dramatic event but for what you suddenly understand. For 58 summers in a row, I’ve gone to a little town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula called Cedarville. What has turned out, in retrospect, to be …

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The Seeming Vastness of Summer

by Douglas Heuck

During a 15-minute break from a recent Friday night poker game, a friend and I were discussing medical things when the question arose: What would you do if you found out you had two years to live and would be in basically good health until the end? The conversation soon attracted a wider group, and …

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Fairy Tale or Future: The Choice Is Ours

by Douglas Heuck

The Amazon HQ2 spectacle was a grand 21st Century fairy tale. It had everything: the world’s richest company promising happily-ever-after status to the city that would win its second headquarters, $5 billion in investment and 50,000 jobs. For 17 months, people murmured throughout the land. Some whispered that Amazon’s move was a brilliant marketing stratagem; …

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A Turning Point for Troubled Times

by Douglas Heuck

By almost any objective measure, life in America has never been better. We’re not at war. Poverty is low, unemployment’s even lower, and stocks are sky high. Homicide rates are about where they were in 1950 and half of what they were in 1980. And medical care is better than ever with dramatic breakthroughs occurring …

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The Last At-Bat

by Douglas Heuck

Early one morning this summer, I was fishing with my friend in northern Michigan. The fog was thick, and Dave asked if I could tell where I was going. I know those waters and predicted that in about 30 seconds a point with a white boathouse would come into view. It did, and we rounded …

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