Feb. 14, 1948: Bobo Rockefeller, coal miner’s daughter

The coal miner’s daughter many people think of is Loretta Lynn, the country music singer whose autobiography inspired a memorable movie in 1980.

But Western Pennsylvania has its own famous coal miner’s daughter and her name was Barbara “Bobo” Rockefeller.

On Valentine’s Day of 1948, she won the marriage lottery when she wed Winthrop Rockefeller  at the Palm Beach estate of Winston Guest, a socialite and polo player. Guests included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The beautiful blonde bride wore a simple dress, a square-cut diamond set in platinum and a wide smile. The groom, a grandson of John D. Rockefeller, a founder of Standard Oil, was one of the richest men in America.

Here’s how the daughter of a Lithuanian immigrant went from a gritty existence in a mine patch to living la dolce vita in a six-story New York City duplex with 15 rooms on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Her parents divorced when she was a child and while her father, Julius Paulekas, continued mining coal, she grew up with her mother, Eva Neveckas near the Chicago stockyards. At age 17 in 1933, she won the beauty pageant  title of Miss Lithuania.

Born with the hard-to-pronounce name of Jievute Paulekiute, she changed it to Eva Paul by the time Montogmery Ward hired her to model for its catalog. That was her stage name, too.

In a touring production of  the play “Tobacco Road,” she met Richard Sears Jr., a man from a prominent family in Boston’s Beacon Hill. After they married in 1941, she changed her name to Barbara Paul Sears and landed in Boston’s Social Register. For awhile the couple figured prominently in the cafe society of Paris, where Mr. Sears served as third secretary at the American embassy. By 1947, the couple divorced.

With her sister, Mrs. Sears began sharing a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in a tenement building next to New York City’s Third Avenue train tracks. In those far from genteel surroundings, Winthrop Rockefeller’s arrival in a chauffeur-driven limousine caused neighbors to stare. The couple met at a dinner party.

After the 1948 wedding, the couple had a son in 1949. They separated after less than two years of marriage. Mrs. Rockefeller pawned her large diamond ring for $30,000, living off the proceeds for five years as she waited for the divorce settlement. When it arrived, it was a record-setting $5.5 million.

Winthrop Aldrich Rockefeller served as governor of Arkansas from 1967 to 1971. His son, Winthrop Paul Rockefeller, served as Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas from 1996 until his death in 2006. Two years later, Barbara Paul Sears Rockefeller died at age 91 at her home in Little Rock, Ark.

(Top photo: Winthrop and Bobo Rockefeller talk with the Rev. Winslow S. Drummond after the clergyman performed their marriage ceremony Feb. 14, 1948.)

— Marylynne Pitz

1990: "Chatham students protest a proposal to admit men"

Soon one of the oldest women-only educational institutions in the U. S. located in Pittsburgh may no longer be women-only.  This year, Chatham, the 145-year-old college, is likely to undergo a historical change: to start allowing men into its undergraduate programs.

"Is that necessary?" some students wondered. "Why?" 

The reaction to the news varied from negative comments by the alumni association protesting the move to one student’s tweet, “WHY DON’T YOU WANT BOYS HERE?!”

It’s not the first time that Chatham considered going co-ed.  On February 16, 1990, Chatham students like Michelle Weber gathered on the steps of Jennie King Mellon Library to protest an announcement by Chatham President Rebecca Stafford that in the 1991-1992 school year the school would begin admitting male students. Our Steve Mellon, then the photographer for The Pittsburgh Press, captured the Chatham sit-in.

The signs captured the sentiment: “Better Dead Than Co-Ed” and “Save Women’s Education.”

Five days later, a group of professors who had each taught at Chatham for at least 20 years drafted a letter to the President reaffirming their support of the “concepts, aims, and practice of single-sex education for women” and intention to protest “any action to alter the college’s mission to accept male students, taken so precipitously as the present plans call on us to do,” the Post-Gazette reported.

In September 1990, the Chatham Board of Trustees voted to delay the decision on co-education indefinitely.

Since the 1960s the total number of women-only colleges in the United States had been drastically reduced. For many of them the co-ed option was an effort to alleviate financial difficulties. Chatham had also considered co-education in the 1980s.

The recent speech by Chatham’s president Esther Barazzone sounded more alarming than the speeches of her predecessors proposing the drastic change. The climate for single-sex residential colleges has gotten precipitously worse in a bad economy, she said. 

Will Chatham go coed? It may have no choice this time. 

— Mila Sanina

"Pittsburgh from the air"

Pittsburgh’s skyline is one of the most photogenic in the country. Day or night, images of the Golden Triangle’s towers bordered by the city’s rivers are striking.

Even before the current set of skyscrapers went up, photographers loved taking images of Pittsburgh from the air. For many of them,  Pittsburgh has always been about scale.

We recently found at least seven folders in the PG’s archive — from 1930 to the 2000s — packed full of beautiful images of Pittsburgh from elevated angles. We’re sharing some of the best ones here.

And over the next few months, we’ll add more to this series.

For now, enjoy this sequence of images that shows the city from high above. Many were taken by Pittsburgh Press photographer Stewart Love, who was an expert in capturing such angles.

The Pittsburgh Press claimed that Stewart Love was the newspaper’s “aerial” photographer. Love’s pictures were published in publications such as Life, Time, Look and Saturday Evening Post. He made history with his camera and friends with his personality. “Stu,” as Stewart Love was known among his friends, loved Pittsburgh.  Obviously, he was not the only one.

Andrew Carnegie said, “Pittsburgh entered the core of my heart when I was a boy and cannot be torn out.”

Wiz Khalifa echoed his statement a century later, “Just growing up in Pittsburgh and knowing different neighborhoods, having family there and just loving it, it’s like no other place.”

And Willie Stargell once said, “I would always reserve a special place in my heart for Pittsburgh.”

And so would we, and we hope, our readers would, too.

—Ethan Magoc

Do you love these photos? Purchase them on PG Store:

Pittsburgh aerial 1
Pittsburgh aerial 2
Pittsburgh aerial 3
Pittsburgh aerial 4
Pittsburgh aerial 5
Pittsburgh aerial 6
Pittsburgh aerial 7

October 1937: Pittsburgh’s extraordinary mail order detective

Earle Waugh’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw the advertisement in one of those crime magazines he loved so much.

“Be a detective in 16 easy lessons at home!” the ad read. “Help America combat the scourge of crime. Start now!”

Waugh lowered the magazine. A dreamy look came to his eyes. He envisioned the headlines:

Waugh Nabs Killers

Waugh Nips Crime Wave

Soon, he sprung from his chair and mailed $10 to Capt. Aloysious Duffy, director of the Wide World of Crime Detection of Scroggins, Wyo.

The end result was a wacky, days-long series of newspaper stories detailing Waugh’s attempts at learning detective work by mail order. Waugh was a night police reporter for The Pittsburgh Press, but he also was a wonderful goofball, as this series clearly demonstrates.

We at “The Digs” are astonished that the ever-serious Press turned over the front page of its second section for six straight days to Waugh’s bizarre tongue-in-cheek adventure tale.

Waugh started off by shadowing his postman. Why the postman? Well, thought Waugh, you never know who might be a criminal. So he hid behind a tree on his street early one morning. Four hours later, along came the postman.

Waugh dashed through alleys, ducked behind hedges and hopped from pole to fence to doorway while following the postman along his route. None of this escaped the notice of the postman, who scratched his head and wondered if Waugh had lost his mind.

“Earle,” said Waugh’s wife, “you’ve got to get a grip on yourself.”

But Waugh was just getting started.

He opened his 48-page instruction book, entitled “An Encyclopedia of Crime Detection,” and tackled the next lesson, a test of observation skills. “Describe in detail someone you know,” read the book.

Waugh decided on his landlord.

Name: J. Brown

Occupation: Chiseler and loafer

Color: Florid

Hair: None

Shape of ears: Batwing or Aileron type

Teeth: Store

Any missing: Upper plate

Clothes: Yes

Waugh was then instructed to engage a suspect in conversation and gain his confidence. So he wrote Capt. Duffy, “What am I supposed to do with the suspect’s confidence after I’ve got it?”

Interrogation is serious business, so Waugh invented what he described as the “infallible Waugh Persuader Method.” It involved a two-foot length of rubber hose. The suspect would first be seated in a darkened room, then Waugh would sneak up behind him and blow through the hose like a trumpet.

“It frightens some of ‘em almost to death and makes lots of them break down and confess right away,” he bragged.

Next, Waugh needed fingerprints. His plan: Carry with him a highly polished beer mug. He entered taverns, asked the bartender to fill the mug, then handed it to a suspect, who was happy to accept a free beer.

Afterward, Waugh had trouble distinguishing the suspect’s fingerprints from his own and the bartender’s. His solution: “Getting some gloves for myself and an extra pair for slipping to the bartenders just before the trap is sprung.”

Finally, after six days, Waugh announced he’d received a package, sent by special delivery. “It’s my diploma,” he raved. “Gilt-edged, it is, too, with my name typed on the dotted line. I’m a detective — a DETECTIVE!”

Criminals across Pittsburgh cheered. Postmen shuddered.

— Steve Mellon 

1977: “Police strikes Pittsburgh jaywalkers with fines”

Jaywalking is treated in the sports town of Pittsburgh as both a birthright and participatory sport, and judging by photos found in our archive, this has been the case for a long time. Columnist Phil Musick of The Pittsburgh Press put it nicely in 1986 in a piece describing the city’s character quirks.

"For example, unlike the less sophisticated residents of such paradises as, say, Cleveland, we both chop our ham and chip it… We originated and continue to make heavy use of the mangled but innovative pronoun ‘yuns.’ And our favorite outdoor sport is jaywalking, which we have long since raised to an art form."

There were times when authorities tried to put a halt to Pittsburgh’s long-running jaywalking history.

In 1977, Mount Lebanon police started dropping $15 fines on pedestrians spotted jaywalking; few were amused.

“I’ve never been so angry in my whole life,” resident Stuartie Merrill told a reporter of The Pittsburgh Press. “I refused to sign the citation, so they wrote ‘refused’ on it, and for a moment I thought they would cart me off to jail.”

Business owners were unhappy about the crackdown as well, seeing it as a harassment on customers.

Traffic patrolmen interviewed by The Pittsburgh Press in the 1970s said jaywalking wasn’t against the law in Pittsburgh, “thus proving a 1932 ordinance on the subject is one of the best-kept secrets in town.”

Through the years, there has been an ebb and flow here to jaywalking regulation.

In the late 1970s, Pennsylvania’s General Assembly mandated enforcement of its jaywalking ban. But in Pittsburgh, enforcement rarely went past a warning — only if the pedestrian caused an accident.

Often, it was just too pervasive to bother. As a 26-year-old jaywalker from Spring Hill once told a Press reporter, “The only people in this town who don’t jaywalk are the ones who ain’t fast enough…”

—Ethan Magoc

March 1969: Miss Smiling Irish Eyes

One of the stars of Pittsburgh’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade is the young woman crowned Miss Smiling Irish Eyes. The honor,  presented for more than 50 years, promotes Irish culture and heritage.

Applicants must be between the ages of 17 and 22, of Irish birth or descent and of good moral character. Involvement in the community and Irish culture is a must. Of course, winners march or ride in the annual parade.

One of the earliest recipients was Mary Madigan Kennedy, who was active with the Irish Society for Education and Charity, the parade’s umbrella organization. She died in 2012 but her sister, Peggy Cooney of Green Tree, still runs the competition.

Miss Smiling Irish Eyes of 1967 was Patti Burns, who became a respected news anchor at KDKA-TV. Ms. Burns died of lung cancer at age 49 in 2001.

Patricia Ann Cloonan, 22, of Ross, won in 1992 and was invited to compete for the title of Maiden of the Mournes. That event, designed to promote tourism in Northern Ireland, is still held in the seaside town of Warrenpoint,  near a mountain range called the Mournes.

“Since then, we have sent our Miss Smiling Irish Eyes every year,” Mrs. Cooney said. The young women participate in a week of events and meet people from all over the world. Ms. Cloonan is married, has four children and owns a local restaurant.

Laura Allison, another Miss Smiling Irish Eyes, became the first American woman to win Maiden of the Mournes. She received 500 pounds, a lovely piece of jewelry, some Irish china and an invitation to return the following year as a judge.

In 1993, Maura Jennings Stacey of Penn Hills was Miss Smiling Irish Eyes during the blizzard that descended on the St. Patrick’s Day Parade of that year. Snow was falling heavily when the parade started at 10 a.m. By day’s end, more than 23 inches of snow blanketed the city.

“For some reason, I had tennis shoes on,” Mrs. Stacey recalled. Film footage of the parade appeared on  television news broadcasts in Philadelphia.

“There were a few bagpipers. No one stopped because you just wanted to get done,” Mrs. Stacey said.

Later, she traveled with her family to Ireland to compete in the Maid of the Mournes contest.

“My mom had never been to Ireland. My Dad got to reconnect with his family. All of his cousins are over there. It turned out to be a blessing,” Mrs. Stacey recalled.

Others who have worn the crown include Meredith McDonough, now a television news caster in Orlando, Fla., and Megan Schiller, a news caster in South Bend, Ind. Rita Allison earned a doctorate in English literature and is teaching.

Lauren Byrne, crowned in 2002, is executive director of Lawrenceville United, a community organization. Her sister, Bridget Byrne, won in 2009. She is a teaching associate at the Neighborhood Academy in Stanton Heights.

This year’s winner is Ciara Scanlon Crossey. She’ll be crowned today at the Rivers Club, Downtown.

Finally, Margaret Philbin, crowned in 1974, jokes that she was three when she won. Now a public information officer with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, she joined other women who have worn the crown for a reunion in 2012 by marching in the parade together that year.

“I did it in heels. That’s what I’m really proud of,” Ms. Philbin said.

— Marylynne Pitz

May 1951: Breakout at Western Penitentiary

Andrew Kaczynski’s romp of freedom lasted exactly four weeks. It began on a warm afternoon in early May 1951, when Kaczynski and four other prisoners at Western Penitentiary overpowered a 78-year-old guard, shimmied up a pipe, then climbed a workman’s ladder to the prison roof.

There, the prisoners used a rope made of strips from a mattress cover to lower themselves 60 feet to the ground. That was the plan, anyway. Kaczysnki went first. When he hit the ground, he took off running. He was spotted by a state police trooper driving out of the prison grounds. The trooper turned on his siren.

This alarmed one of the other escapees, James “Mojo” Woods, a member of the notorious zoot-suit gang that preyed on motorcyclists stopped at red lights. Woods was halfway down the rope. Startled by the alarm, he lost his grip, fell to the ground and was knocked unconscious.

The three other prisoners never left the roof. Kaczynski, a safe-cracker serving a 36-year term, got away.

The next day, he showed up at a Downtown hotel restaurant to see his wife, a 19-year-old waitress named Rose. Unfortunately, she was off-duty. An unrepentant romantic, the 34-year-old Kaczynski handed a cigarette lighter to a co-worker and asked her to give it to Rose. “I probably won’t see her again,” he said. He walked out the door and disappeared down the street.

Kaczynski remained free throughout May. Then, late in the month, police received an anonymous tip that he was hiding out in his sister’s Lawrenceville home. As they prepared to enter the house, police saw Kaczynski peering from a bathroom window on the second floor. They instantly recognized him. Kaczynski had an unforgettable face. His police mug shot elevates the scowl to an art form. It’s the Mona Lisa of crime.

Police rushed inside with guns drawn and stormed to the upper floor. Kaczynski flung open a window, climbed onto the roof, jumped eight feet to the porch roof of the home next door, then made a running jump into a vacant lot.

As he dashed through an alley, officers opened fire. Kaczynski staggered momentarily before crashing through a fence and darting out of sight through a maze of alleys.

Police set up roadblocks and descended on the Lawrenceville homes of Kaczynski’s relatives.

The search narrowed on his sister-in-law’s house on Mulberry Way. A squad of 20 policemen surrounded the house while Inspector Michael Daugherty and a handful of officers made their way inside.

They found Kaczynski “cowering under a bed on the second floor,” reported The Pittsburgh Press.

“When he refused to come out, inspector Daugherty grabbed his legs and a patrolman grabbed his arms. In pulling him out, they upset the bed.”

Blood seeped from gunshot wounds in Kaczynski’s knees.

Soon he was hauled before a judge. Assistant District Attorney Samuel Strauss called Kaczynski “a hardened criminal — perhaps the worst ever before us.”

Then he reminded the court that Kaczynski had tried to escape from the county jail in 1950 by sawing through jail bars.

“That was a frame-up,” Kaczynski snarled.

Then Strauss reminded Kazcynski that he’d been found with a saw blade in his shoe.

For his four weeks of freedom, Kazcynski drew 10 to 20 years.

— Steve Mellon 

1918: "Daylight Saving Time hits Pittsburg"

"Spring forward, fall back," — that’s a helpful trick to remember when you are wondering what to do with your watches and wall clocks when it’s time to adjust to  Daylight Saving Time. If you rely on your smartphone or your laptop to keep track of time, you will not have to worry about manually adjusting the clocks, they will "spring forward" for you. 

Things were not always that easy. When Daylight Saving Time was first introduced in the U.S. in 1918, Pittsburg was ‘h’-less and television and smart gadgets were not around yet, so Pittsburgh newspapers obsessively reminded the city dwellers to shift the clock. There were front-page articles and a cartoon in The Pittsburg Press showing Pittsburghers on a promenade at Market Square with a headline, “HOW DAYLIGHT SAVING HITS PITTSBURG TODAY!” 

The sun is depicted smiling and, looking down on fashionably dressed Pittsburghers, it says, “Yes, more time to display their Easter toggery. And tomorrow more daylight for work!”

The article on the front page of the Sunday edition, on March 31, 1918, pointed out the historical significance of the change:

"For the first time in 22 years, at 2 a.m. today, the master clock in the department of public safety  building was regulated. The hands were put forward one hour to comply with the daylight saving law, which went into effect at that time. Twenty-two years ago the clock was found to be a few minutes ‘off’ and was regulated, and since that time no change has been made in it. 

A great many persons sat up until 2 a.m. today to set off their clocks forward at the official hour. But the majority simply turned their clocks forward before they went to bed at their usual retiring hour last night. 

In the courthouse and all county offices, the clocks were turned forward when the employees left at noon. County Commissioner Myer made a little speech when the change was made in the commissioner’s office.”

Today, we hear some dissent, people argue that the concept of Daylight Savings Time does not make sense, but back in 1918, most folks supported it:

"The unanimous approval given the observance of the law makes it an easy one to enforce. Everybody apparently sees the wisdom of securing an extra hour of daylight, especially as the war garden season is at hand." 

After World War I, the U.S. Congress repealed the Daylight Saving law. However certain cities and states kept observing the practice until President Roosevelt signed a year-round “War Time” DST in 1942. It lasted until September 1945. 

From 1945 to 1966 there was no federal law regulating  Daylight Saving Time, so it was completely up to cities and states whether they wanted to adopt DST or drop it entirely. Mayor David L. Lawrence, for example, made Daylight Saving Time official in Pittsburgh in 1948 and even demonstrated how to move the clock’s hands in a photo that appeared in The Pittsburgh Press a week before DST was to go into effect. 

Only in 1966, President Lyndon signed an act into law “whereby Daylight Saving Time begins on the last Sunday of April and ends on the last Sunday of October each year.” President George H. W. Bush as part of the energy policy bill changed the DST law to say, “Beginning 2007, Daylight Saving Time begins at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday of March. Daylight Saving Time ends at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of November.”

So, here comes the sun and the excited tweets, marveling at the fact that it’s still light out. And in case you are still into candles, you are probably happy to save on your candle wax.

1929: Allegheny County Morgue on the move

A few months before the October 1929 stock market crash, the Allegheny County Morgue finished rolling.

The 450 tons of steel, stone and lumber needed to be moved from Forbes Avenue (then called Diamond Street) to Fourth Avenue. It was much cheaper that way, the county said, than to build a new morgue.

And inside the morgue that summer, work continued as usual.

“People were killing and dying every day,” one of the men involved in the undertaking (no pun intended) told the Post-Gazette in 1987. “The coroner’s functions couldn’t be stopped.”

One hundred years before that story, there was no county morgue system here. Local undertakers raced to recover reported dead bodies and the accompanying $12 in fees from the county (about $300 today).

In this story, Heber McDowell played an important role.

McDowell was coroner from 1887 to 1899. During his tenure, he helped draft and push through legislation to help counties statewide fund and standardize morgue duties.

At the time, Philadelphia had the only morgue in the state. In 1893, McDowell’s effort passed, and Allegheny County began to subsist in a makeshift facility on Eighth Avenue.

That wasn’t good enough for McDowell in a time when taller building construction and steel mill work were not safe at all. “With progress, you always have fatalities,” he told The Pittsburgh Press in 1929, on the occasion of the morgue’s move.

The new morgue took two years to build and was completed on April Fool’s Day in 1903. Less than 25 years later, 60 men and two teams of horses moved it 235 feet to its current resting place.

The entire operation took about three months.

—Ethan Magoc

View this story on our map of “The Digs.”

Circa 1900: Jimmy McKay’s ‘capital of crookdom’

Carrie Nation stormed into Pittsburgh one day in 1908, took a look at the city’s taverns and declared, “This is the worst place I’ve ever seen and the saloons are in terrible condition.”

You can insult Pittsburgh’s air and rant about its roads but, as Nation soon learned, the city doesn’t take kindly to those who denigrate its taverns. The fiery temperance crusader was arrested.

At the police station, she continued to roar: “All the young men in this city are going to hell. The young women, too, are awful, and all this is caused by the saloon.”

During her tirade, a spry man entered the station. This was Jimmie McKay, owner of a North Side tavern. McKay listened attentively while Nation ranted. She was looking for a fight. She wouldn’t get one from McKay.

In fact, McKay told her he’d learned a few things from her diatribe. “This seemed to gratify the little woman very much,” one newspaper reported.

It was classic McKay. He judged no one. “About the only thing I ever did was to take pretty literally that business about ‘live and let live,’” he once said.

His saloon reflected this attitude. It was a haven for safe crackers, thieves, mill workers, newspaper reporters and crooked politicians — people with names like the Albany Kid, Big Swede and English John.

Before annexation by Pittsburgh in 1907, the North Side was known as Allegheny City. Folks called it “Little Canada” because extradition treaties didn’t extend there. Parts of Allegheny City were quite raucous.

McKay’s tavern in Allegheny City was the “capital of crookdom,” the PG’s Ray Sprigle wrote in a 1948 remembrance of the man. Sprigle described McKay as “one of the most lovable people on the face of the earth.” McKay’s obituary in The Pittsburgh Press on Jan. 4, 1944, indicates he was an Irish immigrant whose family settled on the North Side in the 1870s. McKay worked in a steel mill before opening his tavern.

We searched the PG archives for photos of McKay and unearthed none. Sprigle’s story, found on microfilm, was accompanied by a faded image of an aging man with tousled hair. It is McKay, casually holding a pipe to his lips. His eyes are at once playful and sad. 

The PG holds no file of newspaper clippings mentioning McKay. He remains one of those legendary Pittsburgh characters that seem just out of reach for those of us trying to pin facts to tales.

One of the more interesting McKay stories concerns an organization called “The Piano Mover’s Association,” headquartered in McKay’s saloon.

The organization sprung into action each time the Allegheny River overflowed its banks and flooded portions of the lower North Side. This, coincidentally, was home to Allegheny City’s red light district.

When waters rose, madams and “working girls” quickly moved their establishments’ gaudy furniture to safety on upper floors. But they needed help with their unwieldy pianos. That’s when McKay’s piano movers stepped in.

The association gathered together newspapermen, cops and businessmen for the difficult job of hauling the heavy, ornate instruments up brothel stairways. Membership to the association came with an official card and was considered a privilege, costing as much as $100, according to one report.

We at the Digs have given these facts considerable thought and we’re certain our forebears in the newspaper business considered piano moving a vital public service.

— Steve Mellon 

1920s: Mary Roberts Rinehart, Pittsburgh novelist and mystery writer

With the publication of  “The Circular Staircase” in 1908, Mary Roberts Rinehart established a national reputation as an author of mysteries when her book sold more than a million copies.

A charming, dark-haired storyteller, the Pittsburgh native was prolific, producing a total of 60 books and seven plays. During World War I, she was a war correspondent based in Belgium for The Saturday Evening Post. When the armistice was signed in 1919, she was in Paris.

Success made her a celebrity and her wealth paid for an elegant home in Sewickley, a 24-room seaside retreat in Bar Harbor, Maine, and a posh New York apartment on Park Avenue. Kenneth Parker of The Parker Pen Company created a snub-nosed fountain pen for the author after she complained that she could not find a writing instrument to capture her thoughts on paper as quickly as they spilled from her mind. (She wrote in longhand.)

In a Victorian era when most women aspired to be wives and mothers, Mrs. Rinehart began studying nursing at age 17. Many of her patients were factory workers who were mangled by machinery. What she saw imbued her with compassion for human suffering and a strong distaste for social injustice.

At Pittsburgh’s Homeopathic Hospital, she met Dr. Stanley Rinehart. While the hospital prohibited friendships, let alone romances, between doctors and staff, the couple became secretly engaged in 1894 and married in 1896. It was a fresh start for Mrs. Rinehart, whose father, a frustrated inventor, had committed suicide in 1895.

The young couple gambled in the stock market, lost all their savings in a 1903 crash and wound up $12,000 in debt. While Dr. Rinehart continued to make house calls, Mrs. Rinehart began writing verse, short stories and articles.

By 1907, the Rineharts had three young sons — Stan Jr., Alan and Ted — and had moved to a larger home in the 900 block of Beech Street on the North Side.

A year later, publication of “The Circular Staircase” launched Mrs. Rineharts’ career as a novelist and mystery writer.

In 1920, “The Bat,” a play she wrote with Avery Hopwood, was a smash hit on Broadway. Touring productions featuring a costumed criminal were staged throughout the country. In 1946, Life Magazine reported that more than 10 million people saw the play and that it grossed more than $9 million.

Mrs. Rinehart loved to climb mountains, fish and ride horses.  She also smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. Her day typically started with breakfast in bed. She then wrote from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and took tea at 5 p.m.

Dr. Rinehart died in 1932. In his absence, his widow traveled often and worked obsessively.

In 1947, Mrs. Rinehart’s life became a melodrama when Plas Reyes, a chef she had employed for 25 years, tried to kill her at her summer home in Maine. The gun he used misfired. Mrs. Rinehart fled and was rescued by her chauffeur, who threw Reyes to the floor. The chef later hung himself in jail.

In 1954, the author published “A Light in the Window.” That same year, the Mystery Writers of America gave her a special award. By then, she was too ill to attend the dinner staged in her honor. At age 82, she died in New York City in 1958.

— Marylynne Pitz

1974: "The Pittsburgh Public Theater"

Everything old is new again. Take, for example, Pittsburgh Public Theater’s 2014-15 season, which celebrates four decades by opening with the production that started it all, Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” 

“I wanted to find a way to honor the accomplishment of reaching 40 years, and what better way than to put on a play?” said current producing artistic director Ted Pappas. “Well, the play is eternally beautiful, and ‘The Glass Menagerie had a very successful revival in New York, we’ve never produced it in the O’Reilly. It’s the perfect way to acknowledge the past for those who are seeing it again, and it’s ready for a new generation.”

Forty years ago, the climate for top-notch professional theater in the city appeared to be changing, and to counteract their concern, three lovers of theater — Joan Apt, Margaret Rieck and Ben Shaktman — founded Pittsburgh Public Theater. That first season, which commenced in September 1975,  also included Pittsburgh’s Tom Atkins in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” — a year before the film version — and Leonard Nimoy as Malvolio in “Twelfth Night.”

With Pittsburghers embracing the programming mix of classics and premieres, the seasons quickly grew from three productions to the current six.

The Public claimed the North Side as its home back then, in a high-ceilinged space with a flexible thrust stage, The landmark building in Allegheny Square had been erected in 1889  and rescued from demolition in the 1960s, when  the community renovated the theater space to include movable scaffold seating. It became the New Hazlett Theater in 1980, named for Theodore L. Hazlett, a civic leader and supporter of the arts.

The Public enjoyed 24 years in the building and brought the thrust-stage style with it when it moved to the brand-new O’Reilly Theater in December 1999. The venue was created just for the company on Penn Avenue in the heart of the Downtown Cultural District and opened with the world premiere of “King Hedley II” by Pittsburgh’s own Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, August Wilson.

Audiences followed the Public from the North Side to Downtown, as the company continued to revitalize classics by the like of Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare and champion works by contemporary writers. Two-time Tony winner Mark Rylance brought the much-ballyhooed “Twelfth Night” to Broadway last year — a production he first brought to the States and the Public stage a decade ago. The company also is known for producing new works, including the pre-Broadway run of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn’s “By Jeeves” and the upcoming “L’Hotel,” a world premiere by Ed Dixon. 

In the mean time, season No. 39 is still under way. Next up, a work that combines several themes that have emerged over the past 40 years. The play “An Iliad” is a modern retelling of Homer’s tale from Ancient Greece. It’s the Trojan War with Achilles, Hector, Agammemnon and Helen of Troy, all rolled into a solo tour-de-force.

—Sharon Eberson

"Yellow Cab, Pittsburgh’s oldest taxi service"

Almost every Pittsburgher has a Yellow Cab story. Usually it’s not a story with a happy end… or, as a matter of fact, a happy beginning. 

You know how these stories go: My cab never showed up. 

I had to wait three hours for my cab. 

Yellow Cab is a joke, I missed my doctor’s appointment and had to reschedule. If you don’t have the cabbie’s cell phone you will wait all day.

My cab showed up after I already reached my destination by bus… after giving up on waiting and getting any sort of response from the Yellow Cab dispatcher. 

It was so expensive and my cabbie actually showed up late with another passenger still in the car — I was just shaking my head in disbelief. 

In the past few weeks following the announcement about ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft entering the Pittsburgh market, we have heard many enthusiastic comments from Pittsburghers about how the city needs a better cab service and how the new alternatives could solve a problem of inadequate supply and poor customer service.

Yellow Cab is not the city’s only taxicab company but it is the biggest and the oldest one, thus, it gets all the blame. But we heard from Yellow Cab drivers too. They tell us  it’s hard to support a large fleet and make profit, do small trips and make profit, rely on Pittsburgh’s traffic and provide impeccable customer service. 

We get it. It’s never easy. Change is hard but Yellow Cab lived through some hard times. Let’s take a look in the rearview mirror on the history of Yellow Cab in the city. 

Yellow Cab began its operations in Pittsburgh more than a century ago and initially was  known as Pullman Taxi.  It was the first cab company in Pennsylvania, and to this day it remains the largest taxi company in the state. The Pittsburgh newspapers documented the company’s progress, interviewed the cabbies about security and dress code, witnessed the introduction of a cell phone into operations, studied taxi routes and how the meters worked and reported on the companies during major strikes.

Ironically, in its early days, the company faced resistance from the Public Utility Commission for trying to establish and maintain a monopoly. In 1947, according to the Post-Gazette, “Yellow Cab offered to put 425 new cabs on the street if the PUC turned down an application from Peoples Cab Co. to operate in Pittsburgh. The PUC denied Yellow Cab’s request, and Peoples Cab later became part of Pittsburgh Transportation Group.”

Yellow Cab had never faced fierce competition, it grew by purchasing several competing companies such as Owl Cab Co. and Airlines Transportation Co. These days, Yellow Cab has about 335 sedans, shuttle vans and wheelchair-accessible cabs in service.

Things used to be worse on several fronts for Yellow Cab. The company was on the verge of collapse in 1980, having a pretax loss of $213,000. Its fleet was made up of rickety old Checker cabs and its telephone system was antiquated. The negative image was at its peak. Yes, it was worse. Then the company changed hands and things got better, the fleet and equipment were renovated, some of the security concerns have been addressed and the image of Yellow Cab was “headed in the right direction,” as the Post-Gazette put it in 1991. 

And here we are, 23 years later debating the fate of the company that just last year celebrated its 100th anniversary and became Pittsburgh’s institution. History is an unpredictable and rarely smooth ride, isn’t it? 

In 1991, the Post-Gazette quoted a cabbie working for Yellow Cab and using cellular phone (a new gadget back then) to supplement the company’s radio dispatch, “When I pick you up, I’ll listen to any horror story about the service you had before and say, ‘That’s all behind you now. Call this number…’”

… or, maybe, as we would say these days, use an app? Not if you choose Yellow Cab. Not yet… at least. Update: In May 2014, the PUC approved Yellow Cab’s request to launch Yellow X.

In any case, we hope you enjoy your cab rides. And have a story with the happy end.

The day before Fort Pitt Tunnel opened in August 1960, The Pittsburgh Press editorial page suggested that it will help the city “get rid of some traffic headaches…” Yep. You read that correctly.

In all fairness though, the editorial’s author maintained a grounding in reality by finishing his piece with “… and perhaps acquire some new ones.”

For those involved these days in a daily morning traffic snarl on the Parkway West through the tunnel and into the city, the state’s effort toward a passage under Mount Washington in the late 1950s might now seem a folly.

The tunnel cost $10 million and was part of a larger $32 million state-funded highway program announced in October 1956.

At the time, it was the most expensive project in Pittsburgh history.

The idea of making the tunnel a toll passage garnered support from the Automobile Club of Pittsburgh and city residents. The notion was ultimately scrapped when state funding came through. Pennsylvania politicians such as Sen. Frank Kopriver Jr. said charging tolls was not fair since Squirrel Hill Tunnel drivers paid no tolls.

Construction of Fort Pitt Tunnel began in spring 1957. Just before Thanksgiving that year, Fred Jones of The Pittsburgh Press explored the construction site. The job of the drillers was made more difficult by the fact that when you exit the tunnel in the city, you’re 20 feet higher than when you enter.

It took workers six months to drill the 3,600-foot tunnel at an average of about 46 feet a day, Jones wrote.

A year later, when the tunnel was completed, David Kelly of The Pittsburgh Press characterized the view coming out of the tunnel as “a canyon-barrel view of Pittsburgh’s steel and cement canyons.”

That much, at least, has not changed.

—Ethan Magoc