Porky Chedwick : 92nd Birthday Party

As an outsider, I still have a lot to learn about Yinz history.

The Post's Brian O' Neill, interviewed 92 year old, local radio legend,
Porky Chedwick, the "Daddio of the Raddio" after a call from Pat McArdle.

Seems Pittsburgh played a big but little known (outside of Pittsburgh) role in Rock and Roll history. From the Wikipedia.

"He began his career at WHOD in Homestead (which took the call letters, WAMO--an acronym for the rivers Allegheny, Monongehela and Ohio--in 1956), when the low-power AM signed on, August 1, 1948. When he responded to an ad in a local paper, advertising for on-air talent at the new radio station, his popularity as a play-by-play announcer won him a 10-minute Saturday sports and music show. The music portion was gradually exapanded, in response to the public's reaction. WHOD, known as "The Station of Nations," was created to serve the diverse European and eastern bloc immigrant population that worked the Pittsburgh area mills."

There he became one of the first DJ's in America to play R&B and Gospel, by both white and mostly black artists. Known at the time as "Race Records", but today as early rock and roll. At the time WHOD competed against stations like the 50,000 watt KDKA, with only a 1000 watts in power, yet soon drew a strong audience.

"Chedwick is given credit by numerous R&B/rock and roll legends, including Bo Diddley, Smokey Robinson, Little Anthony and myriad others, for giving their recordings their first airplay. Porky Chedwick is responsible for making Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania "The Oldies Capitol of the World", and for making the city a testing ground for new R&B from the early 50s through the 70s. The impact of Porky Chedwick's contributions far transcend the boundaries of the Steel City. He never received the notoriety-- or the paycheck-- of many DJs who followed in his footsteps, however his accomplishments are an indelible part of the local and national music and culture."

In 2008, Porky and his wife planned a move to Florida. In 2009, they were back.

"She told how they moved to Tarpon Springs near Florida's Gulf Coast in the summer of 2008, figuring they'd stay. But they went to the pool one day and he turned to her and said, "Did we just walk into the cemetery?"

She tried to shush him but he said, "These people are old." So when they came back to Pittsburgh that December, and he had to deal with some health issues, they decided to stay put. It's hard to leave a place where, as his wife puts it, "Porky walks in and the waters part."

From what I can tell Porky, didn't have the knack for either becoming rich or nationally famous. But he is the only Pittsburgh DJ in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I found this quote.

“Any entertainer of my era who say they don’t know who Porky Chedwick is— they’re damn lyin’! That’s the cat that played the records. I know.”

-- Bo Diddley

92nd Birthday Party For Porky Chedwick @
Spencers Down Under
West Miflin

From 7-11
No cover charge

Rhichard Thompson @ Carnegie Library Music Hall In Homestead Tonight

OK, as freaked out about the economy as I am, I am still springing for this.



Site indicates a few tickets left.

"RICHARD THOMPSON: Named by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of 2003's Top 20 Guitarists of all-time and the recent recipient of both an Ivor Novello Award for Songwriting and the 2006 BBC Lifetime Achievement Award, the iconic British folk rock legend is one of the world's most critically acclaimed and prolific songwriters."

Read more about the venue here.


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Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town part 2

"The corporation was said Life in 1946, "the most fabulous giant yet produced by the industrial revolution." Steel was the basic metal on which the development of America, and the building and rebuilding of the post war world, depended. The steel making facilities in Germany and Japan had been destroyed in the war and those in Great Britain substantially damaged. since no other countries had had a sizable steel industry, the corporation and the rest of the American steel industry faced almost no competition. There were no steel imports to America and American companies dominated the export trade."

The result was astronomical profit and sleepy complacency. "In 1950, the corporation produced 31.4 million tons of steel, surpassing it's war time high of 30.8 million tons per year. It's workforce in 1950 reached 288,265, the highest level in it's history except for the war years. Profits were immense. In 1950, the corporation made 215 5 million (that was real money back then folks-- multiply by something like 20 to come up with what that equals today) three times 1946 earnings and the largest amount since 1917, during World War I, when earnings were 224 million."(Page 243)

In spite of a string of additional acquisitions, mostly of new plants built during the war and the clear intent to create a safe monopoly environment, U.S Steel's market share had dropped dramatically from the 65% it had at it's creation to 33% in 1950. The company's lazy nature breed competition from smaller American firms like Bethlehem and Republic and also soon from a few foreign competitors. The basic oxygen furnace was developed in Austria, but there was no need to worry and more than enough business to go around.

And, the workers and their union's shared the prosperity with substantial wage increases in the 1947 contracts as well as new efforts to study plant safety and provide worker health plans. The succeeding contracts grew ever more generous and the once militant union grew into a stagnant giant resembling the industry it operated in.

It seemed like the problems of production had been "solved" once and for all. The plants were looked at as giant money trees that could never die or fail and perhaps could bear fruit with little water or fertilizer. The big issue was sitting down and sharing all the fruit. Investment and invention were a dangerous, disruptive hassle, best left to somebody else. New foreign mills adopted continuous casting technologies and new management methods based on continuous improvement. In fact, most USS plants were running on obsolete equipment, but that wasn't seen as an important issue like providing higher and higher salaries and increasingly large health and pension benefits for which to little was set aside. The patient was fat, happy and terminally ill. The union and management wanted one thing--- stability and a nice even lifestyle free of change or strikes.

A new sick culture had developed in the mills. " The notion of "getting it at the mill"was now a way of life---pencils:toilet paper; hammers, wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers; nickel, brass and other metals which could be sold to scrap dealers--- almost anything people wanted, they took, blue collar and white collar workers alike." Some workers slept on the job and golf became the universal path to success among management.

"The 1963 contract contained a new item-- an extended vacation plan that gave every worker with more than five years of service a thirteen week vacation with pay every five years. The plan was extremely costly and no other American industry had anything like it. But it was, for the most part, not questioned and highly praised." One worker called the situation in the early 1970's as " harvest mode". " Take everything out you can get and abandon the rest. And when you just take out and don't put anything back in, well pretty soon your holding pieces together with baling wire." The truth is that the company was eating it's seed corn leaving future workers to starve. The union's new goal was "total job security"; the only path to anything close to that meant producing the best possible products at at the lowest possible price and it looked like that hadn't been a priority in years.

A few years later when the reckoning came, both labour and management bent over backwards to act shocked at the company's condition and to shift the blame. Kind of looks like America today, doesn't it? We were in harvest mode for too long, most of our seed corn is gone and if we don't wake up we will starve.

Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town

I had a long list of books related to the region's history and culture, I wanted to get around to reading. One of them that, I'm so glad I got around to was a book called Homestead: Tragedy of an American Steel Town written in 1992. It was written by a the former labour and workplace corespondent of the NY Times during the tragic and tumultuous years between 1979 and 1986 which saw the death and near death of much of industrial America. The writer's deep association with the industry and committed work talking to people in the town over many years really pays off.

The first few chapters and the last are in some sense, not that interesting to me---The massive pain of catastrophic job loss in all it's devastation are laid out in painful detail. Several other chapter's paint a vivid picture of the incredibly tough and insanely dangerous life in one of the world's largest steel mills-- a place where the author estimates more than 1000 workers lost their lives in the the works more than 100 year history.

The middle of the book holds a somewhat more dry but clear and concise history of both the massive Homestead works and the company of which it was a central part-- U.S. Steel as well as the birth of the American labour movement.

While, Pittsburgh had been a central part of the American iron, glass and industrial history almost from it's birth, the scale of the massive industrial complexes in the Mon Valley that kicked off with Carnegie's Edgar Thomson works in Braddock in 1873 were unprecedented. Carnegie copied the new Bessemer process used by a few new English mills, to build a company marked by an almost brutally competitive nature, quick to innovate in new technologies, aggressive in sales and driven to be the lowest cost producer. Soon other mills followed, opened by both Carnegie and a host small host of other operators. The business was very tough on everyone and required massive amounts of upfront investments in fixed capital. Miscalculations in projected demand or disruptive new innovations can and did bankrupt many, but the potential profits were huge. Workers in a Carnegie Mill and most competitors worked 12 hour shifts, six or seven days a week. Not surprisingly, both the managers, investors and workers dreamed of an easier way.

Carnegie bought the new Homestead mill across the river from Braddock from it's financially strapped competitor and and in a few years new mills were built by Carnegie in nearby towns on the Mon as many of the smaller competing mills were bought out and consolidated into companies controlled by JP Morgan. The stage was set for a tragedy that few saw coming. Carnegie was ready to retire from the brutally competitive industry he had worked so hard to dominate through pricing and relentless innovation and Morgan who never could take the strain. " Although he was regarded as the archetype of the American capitalist, Morgan was in many ways not a capitalist.... but as as Joseph Frazier Wall wrote: " He did not really believe in the free enterprise system.. Like most ardent socialists, he hated the waste, duplication and clutter of unrestricted competition". It was for this reason that he had been so intoxicated by Schwab's portrayal of a combined, efficient steel industry."

Morgan made Carnegie an offer of a massive payment in gold for Carnegie's mills to create a company controlling 65% of the existing industry and once and for all stop the unpredictable, competitive free for and replace it with a stable comfortable and reliable business that would run almost as a perpetual machine. The deal was done and most of the rest of the book deals with the results. The combined company seemed indestructible and the only central issue seemed to be one of dividing the profits among the owners and also increasingly with the workers. Problem solved-- capitalism was just too much work!

"By 1936, the stagnation at U.S. Steel was such that Fortune magazine "recalled that the Corporation's policy had once been summarized as 'No inventions: no innovations'" (p. 132) and Charles M. Schwab reported that "the chairman of US Steel admitted to him that the Corporation, in fact, had missed every 'new thing' in steel" (p. 132). Under Carnegie's reign, Pittsburgh-based steel facilities had competed successfully against growing location-based advantages of other regions by relying on innovation, efficiency, and superior management. U.S. Steel under Gary did participate in the geographic dispersion of American steel-making but its "Pittsburgh Plus" pricing (an artificial attempt to exercise industry price discipline by linking prices across America to steel prices in Pittsburgh plus freight from Pittsburgh) led to a hobbling of the corporation's growth into new markets and eventually shrank the region in which Pittsburgh-area steel was competitive. Even in its infancy, U.S. Steel was an illustration of inertia and captivation by sunk-cost investments."

A further quote from an industry expert was even more honest about the results.

"Actually the operation of basic processes has not changed significantly in either theory or fundamental design of equipment in the past 75 years. While automobiles were being made better and cheaper with ever newer processes.... tonnage steel as distinguished from the specialty or the alloy steels grew neither cheaper or better"
Charles Ramsayer 1935

Much of the rest of the book deals with the struggles of workers to attain a larger and larger share of company output. In fact-- it sort of looks as if distribution of profits was the primary thing people thought about more and more as the years went on. The post WWII period ushered in what seemed like a golden age, culminating in what were increasingly cosy relations between workers and management. There was more than enough money to go around, seemingly little prospect of competition from abroad and no need to sweat. The company spent big-- but rarely, if ever took the lead and often built new plants and expansions with equipment that was obsolete from the start.

Anyway, great book, well worth reading. I hope to get back with more thoughts about it.

ODE TO THE 53F

One of the Many Bus Routes in Pittsburgh Whose Service May Be Cut

One Saturday in early December I headed to a Christmas party in West Mifflin, from Squirrel Hill by way of Munhall. I knew I’d never been to West Mifflin, but I thought I’d been to Munhall before, and technically I had. My favorite donut shop is on 8th Avenue in Munhall; if you follow 8th Avenue from Homestead, the road makes a curve and somewhere after the curve you look up at the street signs and they say Borough of Munhall. The donut shop is pristine and many decades old, with display cases of glass and wood, a tiled floor, and a formica counter. It’s not big enough to have a U-shaped penisular counter like the donut shop on 8th Avenue and 23rd Street (Manhattan, not Homestead) or the one on Manhattan Avenue (Brooklyn, not Manhattan), although they’ll serve you coffee or Lipton tea in the same type of coffee cup, the two-piece kind with one paper cup inside a plastic holder complete with handle. No, Munhall has only two slabs of counter, at a right angle to each other. They have three kinds of cinnamon rolls, chocolate or coconut or blueberry cake or jelly-filled or any number of other kinds of donuts, nutrolls for which they are known, and pies for only $4.69 though at the holidays please order early. Day old goods are half price.

But I’d never been to the Munhall around the corner. At McClure Street, before you reach the bakery, the 53F turns up the hill and then turns parallel to 8th Avenue but turns up again at West Street and just keeps going up and up. Is it a small mountain or a big hill? I wouldn’t have predicted such a height from what I could see from the flats of 8th Avenue. The bus went up West Street and then turned onto Main, up past the gas station, up past the huge cemetery I didn’t know was there, up past Fran’s School of Dance, up past the Munhall Boro Fire Department, up past the Hair Cottage and Carmine’s Barber Shop, up past the pharmacy, up past the funeral home, up past the corner bars, up past lawns decorated with signs for Steelers Country or vinyl Santas or lights in the shape of Reindeer, up and up into the Western Pennsylvania sky which was cold and clear and blue.

I got off at the corner of C___ and M________ Avenues, now in West Mifflin and firmly inside a residential neighborhood of compact brick and cinder-block post-war homes. They were not at all identical, but the further I walked up the hill (for the end of the bus line was still a good ten minute walk from my destination), the more identical they felt. They had varying details, mostly in terms of the front porches--a porch or no porch, a porch that covered the whole width of the facade or half, if half which direction did it extend from the front door, right or left, was the porch glassed in or open.

There were no sidewalks here but there was no traffic, either. For a moment I noticed the emptiness of people and the complete silence. Then behind the silence I heard the noisy chatter of the birds, gathered in a laughing party in a tree in some backyard. I followed the noise, and peeked behind a house to see could I see them, but the birds eluded my view. I became briefly mesmerized trying to decide whether a backyard deer was real or a convincing statue, when a brown-haired lady came out onto her porch and said, “Did you want to cut through?” Her tone sounded kind of stern, but then she seemed really lonely to me. And I thought, if I saw a pedestrian in such a quiet neighborhood, I’d talk to them from my porch, too.

A few more houses up the hill and the vista beyond started to command my attention. I realized that in between the houses I could see to rolling blue mountains stretching out wide when I looked either to the south or north. I felt like I was on the highest peak for miles around. Far below, I could see the hospital complexes of Oakland and U.S. Steel headquarters downtown, but from this height anything manmade looked very small and a little silly.

http://www.portauthority.org/PAAC/Portals/0/ServiceChange.pdf