August 1932: Mourning the bloody end of a racketeer husband

All Rose Bazzano knew was that her husband John was on a business trip to New York. It wasn’t John’s habit to tell his wife about his business. So it naturally came as a shock to Rose when her husband’s body, wrapped in a burlap bag, was found near a refuse pile called Tin Can Mountain in the infamous Red Hook section of Brooklyn. John Bazzano had been stabbed 20 times with an ice pick. A rope used to strangle him was still tightly twisted around his neck. His tongue had been cut out and his lips sealed with tape.

John Bazzano dead? Rose couldn’t believe it.

“John, come home,” she pleaded while sitting in the darkened drawing room of the luxurious Bazzano home at 1287 Washington Road in Mt. Lebanon. She wept so fiercely, newspapers reported, that no physician’s prescription would calm her.

John Bazzano was listed in the 1930 census as a retail merchant and confectioner. Newspapers identified him as a member of an underworld outfit run by the eight Volpe brothers. The Volpes were racketeers from the Turtle Creek Valley. They were swaggering, arrogant men who lived in cheap apartments and flashed wads of money in nightclubs.

At the time, racketeers were doing a booming business in the Pittsburgh area. They’d stepped in to supply alcohol after Prohibition became the law of the land. By the early 1930s, mobs had become thoroughly entrenched in many parts of Allegheny County. Bazzano was considered by the newspapers to be an underworld “czar” who controlled the county’s yeast racket, which took in an estimated one million dollars each year.

The Volpe brothers were in the process of expanding their affairs into East Liberty and the North Side. This didn’t set well with Bazzano. He wanted the Volpes out of the picture.

The hit took place at a dingy coffee shop that Bazzano owned on Wylie Avenue in the Hill District. On the morning of July 29, 1932, gunmen opened fire while the Volpes were inside. Three of the brothers died, one while eating a bowl of corn flakes.

Unfortunately for Bazzano, the hit was unsanctioned by New York’s mob bosses. Within days, the bosses summoned Bazzano to a meeting. Bazzano had to know this wasn’t good news. Refusing the invitation, however, wasn’t an option.

Bazzano checked into New York’s Pennsylvanian Hotel and, on Aug. 6, attended a gathering of underworld big shots at an empty building in the city’s Red Hook district. For Bazzano, the meeting didn’t go so well.

His mutilated body was returned to his palatial Mt. Lebanon home and placed in a $5,000 casket. After a quiet service at the home, Bazzano’s body was blessed by a priest. A procession of 75 cars followed the hearse to a cemetery in Arnold. Seven autos were loaded with flowers.

A few days later, police in New York arrested 14 mob members, but couldn’t find enough evidence to charge them with killing Bazzano. Instead, they were charged with loitering.

— Steve Mellon

Aug. 30, 1985: High wire act at Three Rivers Stadium

On a hot August night in 1985, Walter J. Lascola was seated in the stands watching the Pittsburgh Steelers play the New York Giants.

With two minutes remaining in the game, Lascola, 24, made a bet with a friend and began a high wire act that enthralled fans and stopped the pre-season contest. He began crawling across a guy wire strung across the fifth level of Three Rivers Stadium. 

The wire, which was about 60 feet above the ground, held up a net behind the goal post. The wire was directly above members of a band and authorities immediately moved them out of the way.

Play stopped and the crowd, as well as the football players, watched Lascola inch his way across the wire for about 10 minutes. Security guards followed underneath him, carrying a large white cloth to catch him if he fell.

Once Lascola reached the middle of the wire, he was able to shinny safely down to the top of a dugout. As he did, the crowd cheered. 

He raised a hand to the crowd for one last round of cheers before police took him into custody and charged him with disorderly conduct and recklessly endangering another person.

As police led Lascola away, he was overheard saying, “When I was one-quarter of the way across, I got scared and started praying.”

The Steelers lost to the Giants, 24-14. Coach Chuck Noll frustrated by a string of pre-season losses, remarked after the game, “We didn’t exhibit anything.”

The Steelers might have lost their nerve but Lascola put on quite a show.

—Marylynne Pitz 

1985: Our ’80s hair and other painful memories

Those of us who came of age in the 1980s sacrificed greatly as we waged a costly war on prudent judgment. The wounds remain. We dig deep into our clothes closets and tearfully gaze upon our well-worn parachute pants and “Members Only” jackets. Flashbacks of Urkel haunt us. At night we awaken in terror, screaming, “Where’s the beef?”

When that happens, we repeat our battle cry, “Don’t worry, be happy.”

Why have you deserted us, Rick Astley and Duran Duran?

Hair was the weapon we used with most tragic results. Proof is found in the PG files, in a folder labeled, “Hairstyles, 1980s.” Our arsenal included big hair, punk hair, weaves, asymmetrical wedges, big bangs and perms. We employed Aqua Net to forge hair into shapes resembling great natural disasters. Volcanic eruptions and catastrophic hurricanes come to mind.

Sadly, our enthusiasm led us to employ tools of such inhumanity that we now hang our heads in shame. Scientists continue to study the long-term psychological damage caused by a decade of exposure to the mullet. International treaties now bar its use.

We propped our well-coiffed heads on enormous padded shoulders and walked like Egyptians into the pop culture fray.

After humiliating setbacks, such as Toni Basil’s “Mickey” video and countless Journey ballads, all of which were insipid even by ’80s standards, we simply bought more hairspray and followed in the footsteps of Howard Jones, who proved to us that gravity didn’t matter. Then all of his hair fell out.

We were cool until Nirvana came along. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” rendered us irrelevant. Poison and Cinderella were banished to the county fair circuit. Our hip hair became ridiculous. Within a few years it turned gray.

Perhaps we never had a chance. We ’80s warriors bore the burden of having our ranks spoiled by the likes of Mr. T and Papa Smurf and young Madonna.

But weep not for us of the Pet Shop Boys generation.  It could have been worse. At least we didn’t come of age in the 1970s.

(Top photo: Students at the Fashion Institute of Pittsburgh show off their new wave style. Pittsburgh Press photo by Bill Wade)

— Steve Mellon

April 30, 1989: “Mario Lemieux”

Mario Lemieux might – might – be able to laugh at this picture and his Teen Wolf playoff beard now, two dozen years after it was taken. But at that moment, there was nothing amusing to the 23-year-old Penguins captain as he faced the press just after his team was jettisoned from the 1989 Stanley Cup playoffs.

The post-season appearance was the first for Pittsburgh’s French-Canadian sauveur and the team’s first since 1982. Led by Lemieux, whose 199-point regular season stands as  the franchise’s record and the fifth-most all-time, the Penguins were poised for a deep playoff run after an opening round sweep of the New York Rangers. 

Notoriously rugged cross-Commonwealth antagonists the Philadelphia Flyers were the Penguins’ Patrick Division Finals opponents. Pittsburgh opened the series with a 4-3 home victory and the teams traded wins to the tune of a 2-2 series tie.

Then, in Game 5, Lemieux went positively nuclear in a 10-7 win with a five-goal, eight-point night that set or tied four NHL post-season single-game records – most goals in a game, goals in a period (4), points in a period (4) and points in a game – and remains as one of the single greatest playoff performances in hockey history, all while dealing with a nasty neck injury.

The Post-Gazette’s Penguins’ beat writer Tom McMillan, now a vice president with the team, wrote:

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an athlete come up with as potent a game as he did tonight,” said center Dave Hannan, one of the Penguins’ blue-collar players who stood in awe. “He started so fast, and everyone else just picked it up because they wanted to be a part of it. It was unbelievable. Wow.” 

“Lemieux, who couldn’t move his neck when he awoke Monday morning, reported less pain and considerably more range of motion when he showed up at the rink last night. “I felt pretty good,” he said. No kidding.”

With momentum and a 3-2 series lead a trip to the Wales Conference Finals – and perhaps beyond – seemed imminent. But sometimes destiny takes the scenic route.

McMillan wrote:“At least now, Mario Lemieux will shave his playoff beard.”

“It was a scraggly little thing anyway – several weeks worth of determined facial growth that, in the end, reminded us how young these Penguins were. If you can’t put forth a full playoff beard, you’re not quite mature enough to win a Stanley Cup. These things take time…”

“It’s tough to accept right now, but we have to learn from this,” Lemieux said … “Hopefully we can regroup next year and go as far as the finals.”

He was off by a year. The Penguins missed the playoffs the next season, but they’d win two consecutive Stanley Cups after that, with Lemieux earning back to back Conn Smythe trophies – sans playoff beard. 

— Dan Gigler

Frank Lloyd Wright, the organic architect

In 1991, the American Institute of Architects recognized Frank Lloyd Wright as “the greatest American architect of all time.” Talented, radical and passionate about his vocation, Wright was a visionary master. He defied architectural doctrines of his time, challenged the tyranny of the skyscraper and was recognized as a true iconoclast believing that form and function in building should be “joined in a spiritual union.”

For Wright, American cities of the 20th century were a bad dream come true: stagy grandeur, disruptive of surrounding environment, flashy, and dwarfing the human spirit — they represented everything he despised.  Wright once referred to New York as “a great monument to the power of money and greed… a race for rent.” He didn’t care much for Pittsburgh either. In 1935, he was quoted saying, “If I were remaking this city, the first thing I’d do would be get rid of that damned smoke.” 

His philosophy of architecture was reflected in the Prairie School movement. The movement focused on the importance of harmony and aesthetic congruence between humanity and the surrounding environment. The philosophy embraced structures that grew organically, shaped by their natural surroundings and the needs of their human inhabitants, buildings that ‘hugged the Earth’ and merged with the landscape rather than dominated it. 

“Simplicity and repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work of art,” Wright said. Simplicity was his mantra and the ability to simplify, he believed, was the hardest skill for an architect to perfect. ” ‘Think simple’ as my old master used to say — meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles,” he said.  It was for the simplicity and elegance of Wright’s creations that he received international praise from Germany to Japan. 

Wright designed more than 500 structures, 300 of which survive.

Robie House, which he built in 1910 in Chicago, was recently included in the list of “Ten buildings that changed America.” 

But the people’s favorite is, of course, the famous Fallingwater. It was built from 1934 to 1937 for the Kaufmanns at Mill Run, Fayette County. Constructed over a 30-foot waterfall, Fallingwater is unique; its design defines ‘organic architecture.’

Frank Lloyd Wright also had projects that were never meant to be. When his plans for a building in Yosemite were rejected, he was unhappy with the government; when Venice tabled his proposal for a glass and marble palace on the Grand Canal, he was mad at the tourists.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal life was tempestuous, filled with adventures, struggle and turmoil. Wright was married three times and fathered seven children. He died in 1959 at age 91. 

He mentored a lot of successful architects and left behind many bits of wisdom in books and lectures. One piece of advice he tried to sear into the minds of his apprentices was, “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”

— Mila Sanina

1944: “Mother’s Day.”

Mother’s Day has been celebrated for almost 100 years. In the United States, it became a recognized holiday in 1914 because of Anna Jarvis. Born in 1864 in Webster, W.Va., Anna Jarvis, inspired by her mother, started a campaign in 1907 to make Mother’s Day an official holiday two years after her own mother, Anna Reeves Jarvis, passed away. 

In 1910, the governor of West Virginia officially proclaimed Mother’s Day an official holiday in the state. “Our days of youth may be over, and the closer ties that bound us to our mother may have been loosened, but not a link in the chain of affection that bound her heart to ours has been broken, and we are thinking of Mother today as we always did, the noblest, sweetest and best of all God’s creatures.” In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a Congressional resolution proclaiming the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

Although Ms. Jarvis achieved her goal of making Mother’s Day an official U.S. holiday, she grew disappointed by its commercialization.

“A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother — and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment,” Ms.Jarvis said in disillusionment.

In 1948, Anna Jarvis died in West Chester, Pa., but Mother’s Day survived. And Pittsburgh newspapers have been honoring mothers from the community for many decades. Every year, there is a mention of Mother’s Day in Post-Gazette, and until 1992, The Pittsburgh Press covered it, too. Some mothers’ stories are quite remarkable. The story of Helen Manz is one of them.

In 1944, Ms. Manz, a North Side woman, received “a mother of the year award” from the armed services. The award was given in recognition of her own sacrifice and her family’s war effort. Seven of her 10 sons were in the service during World War II. “She was so proud of the seven stars on her window, each star representing a son in the service.”

In an interview with The Pittsburgh Press, her son Charles said, “My mother had more sons in the war than any other mother in Pennsylvania. My brothers Adam, Raymond, Richard, James and Joseph were all in the Army. Vincent and John were in the Navy and Frank, Bill and I were in defense work.” As part of Ms. Manz’s mother of year award, she travelled in 1944 to Atlantic City, N.J., to reunite with her son, Richard, who was wounded at the Battle of Anzio in Italy. All of her sons returned safely, but John was killed in an auto accident years later. 

In 1980, The Pittsburgh Press ran a special for the 90th birthday of Helen Manz. At that point, she had a family of 31 grandchildren, 25 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

Born on the North Side to German immigrant parents, Ms. Manz said that her family was widely known in the soap industry. In those days Staab soap was a household name among many German families in that area. Helen married a German immigrant who was a well-known meat cutter on the North Side. The couple had 10 boys and two girls. The Manz children were raised during the Depression and they remembered their mother scrubbing floors and doing all her baking and canning to keep the family going.

Ms. Manz taught her children to work hard, live right, speak softy, but carry a big stick. “I was tough with my children. I never let my boys get the upper hand. When I thought they needed it, they got a good tanning,” she said in the interview with The Pittsburgh Press.

Keep it real, dear mothers! And have a wonderful Mother’s Day!

— Mila Sanina

1969: “Mean Joe Greene”

If it was Chuck Noll’s task to resurrect a moribund football franchise when he was hired as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1969, then Charles Edward “Mean Joe” Greene surely was the rock on which he would build his team.

“Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway and his career”

On Nov. 7, 1991, Army Gen. Colin L. Powell with a delegation of U. S. Senators visited the Fox Chapel home of Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway.   

That day, Gen. Ridgway, 96, a hero of World War II and the Korean War, received the Congressional Gold Medal and the infantryman’s combat badge. Powell, then chairman of the Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented the medal valued at $25,000 to Gen. Ridgway. To this date, it is considered to be the highest civilian honor Congress can bestow.     

While Ridgway was thrilled with the medal, he was especially delighted with the infantryman’s combat badge, the other honor he received that day. During World War II, only infantrymen who had served a minimum of 90 consecutive days in a combat zone wore it. He did not fit that criterion but an exception was made in his particular case.

Sixty-eight years ago this week, along with the rest of the world’s freedom-loving citizens, Gen. Ridgway celebrated the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II. He knew many heroes of that conflict, including Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.      

A true Army brat, Gen. Ridgway was born at Fort Monroe, Va., where his father, Colonel Thomas Ridgway was stationed. In 1913, Ridgway entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.     

Before dawn on D-Day, Gen. Ridgway made a combat jump into Normandy on June 6, 1944. Risking his life, he directed soldiers to secure the bridgehead over the Merderet River.     

By 1951, Gen. Ridgway was in Korea, where he rallied United Nations forces to seize strategic territory.     

In 1953, Ridgway became U.S. Army Chief of Staff, the most frustrating assignment of his career. He disagreed with President Dwight Eisenhower’s decision to emphasize the threat of nuclear bombs over investment in maintaining a strong army of foot soldiers. Gen. Ridgway opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War. He also did not believe that women should be admitted to the U.S. service academies.    

After his death at age 98 in 1993, Ridgway was buried with full military honors in Arlington Cemetery.

—Marylynne Pitz 

1956: Marte Latham, “Queen of the Jungle”

Marte Latham was warned against venturing into the remote, unexplored jungles of Colombia without a military escort. It’s too dangerous, state department officials said. But she got tired of waiting. Giant earthworms could be found in those jungles. There was no time to waste.

So into the rugged rainforest went Mrs. Latham, packing a Winchester 88 rifle and accompanied only by native Colombians. Experts scoffed and said this housewife from Mt. Lebanon would never find the worms. It was the summer of 1956. The last reported sighting of the worms had come 26 years earlier.

High in the Andes Mountains, Mrs. Latham hired one of the native Colombians to dig a hole. Six feet down, Mrs. Latham found what she was looking for: worms that measured as long as 5 feet. She found 11 of the slimy beasts, packed them in crates marked “Precision Instruments” to ensure safe handling, and brought them to the United States, where they ended up in places like the Smithsonian Institution.

Mrs. Latham, a Pitt graduate, was described in Pittsburgh newspapers as an explorer, a research scientist, a naturalist, a “huntress,” a dealer in wildlife and “Queen of the Jungle.” By the mid 1950s, she was living with her family along Pearce Mill Road in Wexford and making frequent trips to South America to find rare animals. Her travel kit contained a toothbrush, a machete, a .38 snubnose revolver and lipstick.

Her Wexford house became a sort of menagerie that included animals such as an anteater, a slender loris, a boa constrictor and a variety birds and turtles.

By the early 1960s, Mrs. Latham had written a book titled “My Animal Queendom” and was appearing on television programs such as “To Tell the Truth” and “The Tonight Show.” Newspapers reported that she’d discovered a tiny frog that produced one of the most powerful poisons on Earth, and had them sent to scientists seeking new drugs for human ailments.

But it wasn’t all science and research for Mrs. Latham. She had a flair for fashion. On her head, Mrs. Latham sometimes wore live plumage. She trained canaries, parakeets and an Australian cockatiel named Sir Topper to perch nearly motionless atop spring hats. She claimed she’d worn such a hat into department stores and had walked through crowds without ever losing a bird.

— Steve Mellon

1906: “Pittsburgh’s Liberty Avenue”

In Amsterdam, it’s called De Wallen. In London, it used to be King’s Cross. And in Pittsburgh, in the 1970s and ’80s, it was Liberty Avenue, the red-light district of Downtown, the center of vice and crime. Prostitutes and gang members worked the streets. There were strip clubs, gay bars, adult novelty stores and movie theaters showing X-rated films. But that was Liberty Avenue in the ’70s and ’80s.

During the pre-industrial era, Liberty Avenue was the most desirable residential area of Pittsburgh. It had become the center of city’s trade activities, hosting local brewers, small manufactures and food suppliers.  In 1894, the construction of the Joseph Horne Co. department store marked a new era for Liberty Avenue and Downtown — the advent of retail in Pittsburgh.

Industrialists, such as Henry Phipps, invested into building Downtown. The gigantic Fulton Building, the Clark Building, the Midtown Towers, the Second National Bank and others fascinated the eyes of Pittsburghers, especially newspaper photographers. These new grandiose constructions were punctuated by inception of the cultural life in the area — the Stanley Theatre, the Lowe’s Penn and the Harris Theatre. In their own right, they were an early effort to transform Downtown into a cultural center of the city.

But then came the 1930s with the Depression, then the famed St. Patrick’s Day Flood. Liberty Avenue, as a result, endured significant damage and subsequent decay.

In 1984, the hope for Liberty Avenue renewed when The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust started working to transform much of the area into what it has become today — a center for the arts — the Cultural District.

— Mila Sanina

1954: “Branch Rickey, Pirates’ general manager”

As a catcher, Branch Rickey was mediocre. As a manager of baseball teams, he was innovative and his ideas improved the game we know today. 

His decision to sign Jackie Robinson helped alter Americans’ attitudes toward black athletes. On April 15, 1947 — 66 years ago this month —  Jackie Robinson strode onto Ebbets Field, joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke the game’s unwritten color barrier. Robinson had promised Rickey he would not fight back when racial epithets were hurled at him.

Rickey grew up on a farm in Ohio and was raised as a Methodist. Out of respect for his faith, he never attended a baseball game on Sunday. Owlish, rumpled and folksy, he had bushy eyebrows and an ever-present cigar in his hand.

He developed the farm system for the St. Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers, a model adopted by all other Major League teams. He also pioneered the use of baseball statistics. An ownership change at the Dodgers brought Rickey to Pittsburgh as general manager of the Pirates. In the 1952, 1953 and 1954 seasons,  the team lost 100 games, prompting local sportswriters to call the players “Rickey Dinks.”

Rickey also traded the best player on the Pirates — Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner, a left fielder and home run champion. Rickey traded Kiner in 1953 when the star slugger had a salary dispute with the Pirates. 

“If I can finish last with you, I can finish last without you,” Rickey told him.

Rickey signed Curtis Roberts, the Pirates’ first African-American Major League player. The second baseman played his first game with the team in April 1954. 

A year later, Roberto Clemente debuted with the Pirates in the first game of a double-header against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey was partly responsible for choosing Clemente in the rookie draft.

Also during the 1950s, Rickey became the first general manager in baseball to order every player on the team to wear a batting helmet. He owned stock in the company that made the helmets.

—Marylynne Pitz 

Dec. 31, 1969: “Murder of the Yablonskis”

Three small-time burglars from Cleveland celebrated New Years Eve in 1969 by sitting in a car on a lonely road near Clarksville in rural Washington County. They drank beer and whiskey and waited for the lights to go out in an old brick farmhouse they were watching not far away. Perhaps the men were building up their courage. This was no routine theft job. This was the big time — murder for hire.

At 1 a.m., the farmhouse went dark. The three men — Paul Gilly, Aubran Martin and Claude Vealey — approached the house, flattened the tires on two cars in the driveway, cut telephone wires, then entered the residence through a back door. After taking off their shoes, the three crept upstairs.

They carried two weapons — an M1 carbine and a revolver. Martin wielded the revolver. He snuck into the bedroom of  Charlotte Yablonski, 25, and shot her two times in the head. Vealey and Gilly entered the bedroom of Charlotte’s parents, Joseph (known as “Jock”) and Margaret Yablonski. Vealey attempted to fire the carbine but the clip fell out. Gilly picked up the clip, inserted it into the weapon and managed to fire one shot at Joseph Yablonski. Then the gun jammed.

By then Martin had entered the room. Joseph Yablonski was making a move for a nearby shotgun. Martin fired four shots with the revolver, killing both Joseph and Margaret.

So went the final political assassination of the bloody 1960s.

Joseph Yablonski died because he was considered a threat by W.A. “Tony” Boyle, a cantankerous bully who served as president of the miners union, United Mine Workers of America. Charlotte and Margaret died because the killers wanted no witnesses left behind.

Three weeks before the murders, Yablonksi had challenged Boyle for the union presidency but had lost his bid by a nearly 2-1 vote. Yablonski felt the election was fixed and said so. Federal authorities were looking into the matter.

Mining was a tough business. The UMWA was a tough union run by a tough guy — Boyle, who was corrupt and out of touch with the miners he represented. Yablonski believed changes were needed. He’d been working in mines since he was a boy. His involvement in the union began after his father was killed in a mine explosion.

Yablonksi met with Boyle in June of 1969, and the two ended up shouting at each other. About this time, Boyle decided Yablonski had to go. For good. Gilly, Martin and Vealey were hired for the job.

Police would later classify the three men as “clowns.” They left fingerprints all over the Yablonski place and were soon captured, tried and convicted.  Before Boyle was to appear in court on charges of instigating the murder plan, he tried to kill himself by overdosing on drugs. He failed, only to die later in prison while serving three life sentences.

At a funeral mass for the Yablonskis, Msgr. Charles Owen Rice called the murders an “echo” of the killings of John and Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Joseph, Margaret and Charlotte were then laid to rest on a windswept hillside in subzero temperatures.

Major reforms were soon enacted in UMWA politics and in miners’ health and safety. The changes sought by Joseph Yablonski and others finally arrived. The price: $1,700 offered to each of the three inept assassins and the blood of the Yablonski family.

— Steve Mellon

1905: “Antique Cars of Pennsylvania”

They may look bulky, clunky and even awkward to a modern eye, but antique cars have their charm and occupy a prominent place in auto history of Pittsburgh. Car races dating to the beginning of the 20th century, antique car shows and powerful Pittsburgh capital holders able to afford the elite automobiles are part of Pittsburgh’s auto history.

The story of antique cars in Pittsburgh unfolded in parallel with developments in the automobile industry in the United States starting in 1895, when the first automobile patent was approved.

The antique era in auto history covered the period from 1895 to 1920. 

The earliest photo of antique cars found in Post-Gazette’s library was published in 1905 by the Sun-Telegraph. It shows three of Pittsburgh’s progressive physicians lining up their cars during a Sunday afternoon drive near Freeport. The photo caption identifies them left to right: Dr. George A. Urling and family; Dr. John A. Hawkins and family; family and Frank D. Saupp, and Dr. H. W. Urling and family.

Before 1920, only the wealthy owned automobiles in America. According to the Horseless Carriage Club, “Ownership required a pioneering spirit, inventiveness and superior mechanical ability to keep these early automobiles functioning. These early automobiles were called horseless carriages as they were capable of transporting people and freight faster and longer distance without the need of a horse to pull them.”

“Unlike a horse, the automobile did not require feeding or veterinarians to maintain health when not in service, but like a horse they often got a lecture in a colorful language by the owner when they would not perform.” 

Pittsburgh had its own Chapter of the Horseless Carriage Club of America. The Sun-Telegraph captured its president Gene Connelly (second photo on the right) at the helm of a 1915 Stanley Steamer Mountain Wagon. It was the first station wagon in America. The automobile hauled guests from railway stations to mountain resorts in the East.

The unique characters of antique automobiles continued charming wealthy Pennsylvanians years later. Cadillacs from 1910, Regals and 1909 Pierce Arrows took part in the Glidden Tour to Pennsylvania’s prestigious Bedford Springs resort in 1948 (third photo). 

In 1951, the trend continued. The Sun-Telegraph photo from that year (fourth on the right) shows the 1910 Regal, one of the sportiest cars in the annual Glidden tour, piloted by James C. Sutton of Bristol, Pa., and Stanley Wilkinson, Philadelphia. According to the Sun-Telegraph, Sutton bought it in a junk yard for $75.

The American Automobile Association established the Glidden Tour in 1902. The tours took place yearly until 1913. The event was terminated because of the poorly developed road system in the U.S., recurrent problems with accidents and public complaints. Long before the Dakar rallies, these tours were usually tests of endurance for the participants: the roads were terrible, accidents were numerous, cars broke down all the time and drivers had to be prepared to repair their horseless carriages on the run. Residents of the communities were not very happy when the tours crisscrossed their land, damaging property and scaring horses. The Veteran Motor Car Club of American brought the Glidden Tours back in 1946.

— Mila Sanina

1970: “Steelers draft Terry Bradshaw”

Among the most romanticized of turns of fate, a coin toss takes seconds and has dead even odds, yet can be the linchpin for ramifications that span decades.

Not to be melodramatic or anything.

But it is hardly a stretch to say that the Pittsburgh Steelers — the most successful franchise in the modern history of the National Football League and an internationally recognized sports brand — owe everything to a coin flip.

All those Super Bowls, Terrible Towels, and immortal moments, it can be argued, came down to a coin flip between Dan Rooney and his Chicago Bears counterpart Ed McCaskey that awarded the Steelers the rights to draft Terry Paxton Bradshaw, a 21-year-old quarterback from Shreveport, La., first overall in the 1970 NFL Draft.

Jack Sell’s Post-Gazette story from Feb. 14, 1970, explains: “… Chuck Noll isn’t superstitious. Neither is he a winner as last season’s 1-13 record affirms. That was the worst in the club’s 37 seasons of futility.”

“Actually it was because of Noll’s 13 that Bradshaw was here yesterday. The Steelers tied the Bears for the poorest mark in the two big leagues, then won a coin flip for first choice two days before the Super Bowl in New Orleans. The Bears blew a chance at No. 1 when they chewed up the Steelers for their lone victory in Wrigley Field, an ancient arena where the Gold and Black has never won a ball game.”

Sell wrote the story on the occasion of Bradshaw’s introduction to the Pittsburgh media a few weeks after his selection. “On Friday the Steelers entertained Quarterback Terry Bradshaw of little Louisiana Tech, their No. 1 draft pick. The red carpet was rolled out for a press reception and dinner in the LeMont Restaurant atop Mt. Washington where the young gridder could gaze down at Three Rivers Stadium, the battlefield he will be entering this year.”

That would never, ever happen today. One closely monitored press conference with the new pick at the team’s facilities is all the media would get.

But the Steelers weren’t sold on the Blonde Bomber until they saw him in person, as Sell reported in the Jan. 28, 1970, Post-Gazette, the day after the pick. “A personal scouting trip by Coach Chuck Noll of the Steelers to practice sessions preceeding the North-South game in Miami and the Senior Bowl in Mobile convinced him that Quarterback Terry Bradshaw, the 6-3, 215 pounder from Louisina Tech, was the top college football player in the nation. So he was drafted No. 1.

“‘Terry is an extremely accurate drop back passer and he can take off and run with the ball if necessary,’ Noll declared yesterday in a lull during the annual pro lottery proceedings in Hotel Roosevelt.

”’… You have to get closeups to judge accurately. Terry convinced me that he was the most valuable piece of property in the college ranks.’”

“Vice President Dan Rooney explained yesterday that his club delayed making their final decision on Bradshaw until late Monday night.

“‘We had numerous trade offers for the No. 1 pick but most of them were for a lot of junk,’ Rooney said. ‘But three or four were legitimate and we considered them carefully. However, we felt none offered us enough talent to equal the worth of Bradshaw.’

“… The 21-year-old Bradshaw is the first No. 1 draft pick from a college division school. The Little All-American QB lacks the glamour of O.J. Simpson, last year’s first choice by the Buffalo Bills from USC, but Bradshaw is being tabbed as a sure fire pro star.”

It’s entirely possible that the Steelers would have been good without Bradshaw. Dan Rooney had taken over operation of the team from his lovably losing father in 1969, intent on building a winner. That same year he hired head coach Chuck Noll to carry it out and they drafted Mean Joe Greene.

They added another Hall of Famer, cornerback Mel Blount, in the third round of the same draft as Bradshaw. They would add six more eventual Canton enshrinees — Jack Ham, Franco Harris, Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth and Mike Webster — plus countless other role players over the next four years before winning Super Bowl IX.

But there’s something about a golden boy quarterback. Could the Steelers have become a football dynasty if Rooney had lost the coin toss and Bradshaw became a Monster of the Midway?

As Bradshaw is alleged to have said: “you can lose with me, but you can’t win without me.”

And win the Steelers did. With him. 

— Dan Gigler