Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You Review of If Instead of Apes We Had Come from Grapes Review of Anson County Review of Dissolution of Ghosts Crossword (Solution Posted in July. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) Mar/Apr Crossword Solution Creative Nonfiction 1998 By Samuel Hazo Booing the Pope By Matthew D. Taylor Sgt. Robert Starbuck, USMC: Elegy and Essay By John Guthrie Shrink Wrap, Diet Cokes and a Kazoo By Sara J. Ford Poetry And the Time Is By Samuel Hazo In His Winter By Wanda D. Campbell Lester By Thomas Reynolds Generation Gap By Valerie Lauria Stanske Two Poets By Gary C. Wilkens Mongolia, 1930 By Gary C. Wilkens Fiction A Death in the Family By John Speeking Letters By Suzanne Abbot Among the Briars By Pat Tompkins Filling in the Angles By Jessica DelBalzo Miss Mary By Beth L. Block Cover Art Photography by Seth Brown About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/volunteer.html.

1998 Excerpt from The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You By Samuel Hazo I begin this section by paraphrasing what I wrote six years ago. Ask me where I was born, and I will say the place exists no more except within me – literally inside of me. Where else is history but there in each of us? Tens of thousands of Pittsburghs (each drawn reveals a similarly different city) have come into existence since I arrived on the scene. And many thousands will follow. No city (or no country, for that matter) stays the same. Granted, a city may remain within certain geographical boundaries, but within those boundaries there is continual destruction, construction and reconstruction. Some of the destruction may be due to entropy, but most will be the result of the desire within us to get rid of the no longer functional or beautiful or serviceable and replace it with something else – hopefully but certainly not always something better. In this sense Pittsburgh does not differ from other American cities. But if you’ve lived in Pitsburgh all your life, as I have, and if changes continue to happen all around you, you often are overwhelmed, not by the reality but by the unreality of it all. As a teenager when I went downtown I could see a multiplicity of movie houses: the Alvin, the Barry, the Warner, the Loew’s Penn (now Heinz Hall), the Stanley (now the Benedum), the Newsreel on Fourth Avenue where only newsreels were featured, and the Art Cinema where films like the birth of a baby were shown as if childbirth were the most risqué thing imaginable in those Jansenistic days. The Stanley was my favorite. In its prime I could go there and see all the big bands and their bandleaders perform on its stage – Benny Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Artie Shaw, Fats Waller, Harry James, Vaughn Monroe, Gene Krupa and Glenn Miller, to name only the most prominent. And then there were the indispensable and absolutely reliable department stores – not only Kaufmann’s and Gimbels (now gone) and Joseph Horne’s (now gone) but Frank & Seder’s, Boggs & Buhl’s and Rosenbaum’s. Yet even as I write these names and think of the names of other stores, moviehouses, downtown shops of long standing like Volkwein’s (now off the Parkway West) and restaurants like Dutch Henry’s where the corned beef sandwiches were inimitable and where photographs of President Roosevelt or of Billy Conn and Fritzie Zivic (both in fighter’s togs) stared at you from their sacred positions above the cash register, I cannot help but wonder if all these places ever existed. Of course, there remain permanent reminders of Pittsburgh’s past that have not to date disappeared. The most prominent examples are the county jail and courthouse. Designed by Henry Hobbs Richardson and completed in 1887 (Richardson did not live to see the completion of his last and, in his opinion, his most accomplished architectural commission), the complex of jail and courthouse gives a sense of medieval gravitas to the downtown area. The courthouse is still in daily use, but the jail has been succeeded by a new jail of apartment-like proportions between Second Avenue and the Parkway bordering the Monongahela River. Richardson’s jail, which is made entirely of granite, has the look of a European fortress, and even the casual observer cannot help but note the size of the granite blocks and then wonder how the construction engineers lifted and levered them into position. There is talk of converting the jail into a museum. It would make an excellent one, particularly if it could preserve for posterity a history of Pittsburgh’s architecture, including the incomparable river architecture of its bridges. But more about bridges later. In the meanwhile, Richardson’s granite buildings are there to remind us that some things can and do defy change, if only for a time. On second thought, why should this strike me as such a mystery? Shouldn’t I realize that life is synonymous with change and that city life is certainly not exempt? But just as something in all of us yearns to be what we were (with some exceptions, of course), there is also something within us that wants the familiar landscapes of memory to remain forever as we first knew them. When they don’t (and they invariably don’t), we feel slightly disoriented and even more than slightly alienated. One of Pittsburgh’s most salient aspects of change is its growing cosmopolitanism from mid-century to the present. Foreign nationals were not as plentiful in the city in the fifties. Now they are so evident that their presence has become commonplace, not only among students but in the professional classes as well. One hears numerous foreign languages spoken openly where formerly they were spoken only within residences. Restaurants now cater to a myriad of tastes, and each cuisine has its devoted clientele: Northern Italian, Spanish, Middle Eastern, German, Indian, Chinese, Irish, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Jewish, Peruvian, Taiwanese, Calabrian, and French. The make-up of student bodies has changed. A university like Duquesne used to draw the decisive majority of its students from the tri-state area. Now it openly and proudly announces that all fifty states are represented in its student body as well as students from eighty-one foreign countries. I have no doubt that other universities and colleges in the area would be able to come up with similar statistics. This has caused many educators in all these institutions to wonder if the change in the student population will presage a change in the very character of higher learning in the city and how it is “marketed” to draw prospective students here. Proponents of diversification argue that such cosmopolitanism is the only way universities and colleges can survive in the current climate. Those with reservations say that universities run the risk of adulterating their basic disciplines by creating programs that cater only to the vocational interests of students in order to attract them, regardless of their states or countries of origin. They say that Pittsburgh’s collegiate institutions are becoming more and more corporately structured so as to draw and keep undergraduates and graduate students who in effect are often there not to engage in the dispassionate quest for truth but to earn a degree that will be their ticket to job security and professional advancement. Too often in such circumstances the students are seen as customers while the faculty tend to be regarded simply as employees in the service of the corporate goals of their respective institutions. In this respect it is appropriate to recount an incident that occurred during Dwight Eisenhower’s first meeting with the faculty at Columbia University shortly after he was installed as its President. He began the meeting by addressing the gathered professors as “Employees of Columbia University….” One professor rose and said, “President Eisenhower, we are not employees of Columbia University. We are Columbia University.” One cannot help but wonder if such a spirit is on the wane in universities generally as well as locally, and, if so, what effect this will have on higher learning in the country as a whole. In the January 4, 1998 edition of The New York Times James Shapiro warned of the consequences of this radical change in what a university should be: “The danger today is that the administrations that now set policy at most universities are increasingly tempted to act as if they are running a business – letting profit motives drive educational policy. In such a climate, revenue-generating programs and inexpensive part-time professors are winning out over a committed faculty, good libraries and small classes. American universities have achieved their international prominence precisely because they have, until now, recognized the value of free inquiry, open expression and discovery that is driven not by financial gain but by broader social ends. The crisis on today’s campus is not, as the news media would have it, about the culture wars but about the almost impossible choices that will have to be made if universities are to lead, not merely imitate, a rapidly changing society.” Further accenting Pittsburgh’s cosmopolitanism are the number of industries in the city and county that are foreign-owned. Currently there are more than 150 industries that so qualify. Of these, 62 are German-owned, 27 British, 14 Canadian, 12 Japanese and sundry others whose owners are Australian, Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, Czechoslovakian, Danish, Finnish, French, Indian, Israeli, Italian, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Swiss. These firms deal in everything from mining machinery and metal products to glass containers, cements, locks, chemicals, alloys, optical equipment, wood veneer, stainless steel, cookies, printing presses, plastics, pharmaceuticals, television sets, windows, window shades, ceramics and office furniture. Any Pittsburghers who persist in believing that they are still provincial and living an insular existence need only look around to be disabused of this illusion. In December of 1992 Pittsburgh, like too many other cities in the country, became a one-newspaper city. The Pittsburgh Press ceased to exist, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went on alone – or at least historically alone since the Tribune-Review, based in Greensburg, tried to capture its share of the Pittsburgh market by publishing a Pittsburgh edition of the paper. At last count the Review’s circulation was notably in arrears of that of the Post-Gazette. The P-G’s daily circulation is approximately 243,000 while its Sunday circulation is slightly over 424,000. In contrast the Greensburg-based paper has a daily circulation of 84,000 while its Sunday circulation is under 145,000. What does this prove? It shows, I believe, that readers keep a habitual loyalty to what they have gotten used to over the years and do not automatically accept replacements. And it also tends to show that Pittsburghers, though conservative in the slow-to-change-without-thinking-something-through sense, are not as conservative (some say reactionary) as the spirit of the Tribune-Review’s editorials and the philosophy of the owner and publisher, Richard Scaife, are known to be. But circulation and political orientation notwithstanding, the question to be asked (and hopefully answered) is whether Pittsburgh is better off without having two newspapers of longstanding influence and comparable stature. It should also be kept in mind that the Press was an afternoon and not a morning newspaper. (It is possible that the Tribune Review’s smaller circulation in Pittsburgh at the moment is because of the fact that it is competing with the Post-Gazette in a market that the latter has had to itself for decades). The absence of an afternoon daily left a real void, despite all that has been and will continue to be said about television as a replacement for print journalism and how most people (regrettably, I think) get most if not all of their news from television. This means that breaking news stories must wait for the morning editions of the day following the event in question to be reported in their entirety, particularly since the newspaper “extra” is a thing of the past. At no time was this more painfully evident than when USAirways Flight 407 crashed in Hopewell Township while coming in for a landing at Pittsburgh International Airport. People woke up the next morning and scoured the Post-Gazette for the names of those on the plane. The officials at USAirways had not by then released the manifest, but they did release the names at mid-day. An afternoon newspaper would have been able to print the names of the doomed passengers and spared many readers the agony of hours of suspense. Those who think that Pittsburgh is better off with only one bona fide Pittsburgh newspaper should consider the example of New York. Is New York a better city, journalistically speaking, since the Herald Tribune closed its doors and left the field to the Times and the tabloids? Also, those who say that major American cities area not really able to support two or more metropolitan dailies should be reminded that the city of Beirut, Lebanon, during the darkest days of its internal strife while it was encircled by an invading army and under siege still managed to publish 35 newspapers daily. Everyone who knows Pittsburgh will admit that it is in essence a city of and for workers. Whether motivated by the Protestant ethic (an honorable code of behavior despite the belittlement that has recently been visited upon it) or the immigrants’ urgency to survive or the desire of the more recent generations to “make it” or the simple and sacred desire of a man or woman to do a “good job,” the reliance upon work as a dominant force in social life is a given. It was not by accident, for example, that the tradition of trade unionism was nurtured here. Nor was it by accident that many of those who became prosperous here more often than not (in contrast to the affluent of more recent vintage) returned a portion of their wealth to the city where they earned it. The names of Carnegie and Mellon come to mind in this regard, particularly the name of Paul Mellon whose munificence not only to the city but in Washington and throughout the United States is almost beyond comparison in the annals of American philanthropy. The tradition of work might explain public resistance to suggestions that riverboat gambling be introduced here on the pretext that it would “provide jobs” for Pittsburghers. The sponsors of this idea used the more euphemistic word “gaming” to make the suggestion more palatable to the public. In addition, one advocate strove to purify the idea further by stating that there was not a word against gambling in the Bible. He saw it as wholesome adult entertainment for those who could afford it. A majority of Pittsburghers saw through this travesty immediately as would anyone who would take it upon himself to read Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler or even casually consider the attendant vices that gambling invariably brings with it, of which the greed for quick and easy money is the least offensive. With or without Dostoyevsky the public rejected the idea out of hand. The current idea of replacing Three Rivers Stadium with two others – one for baseball, one for football – on the North Side has generated both support and skepticism. Supporters argue that football and baseball can survive on a nationally competitive level only if each sport has its own venue. The playing surface (grass instead of artificial turf) is not the key problem, nor is it a question of parking and accessibility. Supporters realize that new venues would contain lucrative corporate box seats and many other assets, generating revenues that the owners of the Pirates and Steelers believe would permit them to meet the rising costs associated with the maintenance of their franchises. The skeptics, who are largely from the tax-paying public, question whether taxes should be used for what is after all in their eyes a pair of businesses – albeit businesses that are an integral part of civic pride. The skeptics are not wildly but only moderately opposed, and this is partly because even the most recalcitrant among them realize at heart that this really may be “a done deal.” In favor of the change are Pirate and Steelers owners, Mayor Thomas Murphy, Governor Thomas Ridge, a majority of county commissioners and various business leaders. Opposed are the aforementioned skeptics and numerous conservatives to whom the whole idea smells of porkbarreling. And there the matter stands at this writing. Regardless of how the stadium matter is resolved, it brings home to me how many proposals for civic renewal of one type or another deal with entertainment – gambling as entertainment, sports as entertainment and so on. Most Americans realize that the need to make entertaining from television news to media advertising to academic learning to religious belief is part of the national mood. But any mature person knows that this is at odds with the nature of life itself, which finds its fulfillment by surviving in the face of struggle and not in the midst of diversions and hurrahs. People who work know this instinctively, and Pittsburgh is a city, as I have suggested, where the work ethic predominates. Newcomers who have attempted to re-make the city in a different image have not had much success over the years. Anything that does not have the smell or promise of sweat about it probably will not survive here, and those who think otherwise are eventually driven to the periphery by the centrifugal force of civic life itself. Of course, we have other problems that cannot go unmentioned. Though Pittsburgh’s crime rate is decreasing along with the national average, there are still too many instances of domestic or gang quarrels settled by gunfire. And drive-by shootings happen from time to time (usually just long enough to be branded “senseless” as if “sensible” drive-by shootings would be more acceptable). And there are many neighborhoods in Pittsburgh that would benefit from revitalization the sooner the better. And the safety of city streets for pedestrians is not yet total. As if in counterpoint to these and other ongoing problems, the city was the scene of a number of happenings, both bad and good, that brought it to the attention of the country as a whole. There was the already mentioned crash of USAirways Flight 407 in Hopewell Township for reasons that are still somewhat a mystery. Imagining a jet suddenly diving nose first into the ground from just a few thousand feet in the air is enough to put a dagger through anyone’s heart. For all of us who remember this event when it happened, that image and that feeling persist and probably will for the rest of our lives. A similar horrific memory was forged when a tornado devastated a street in Mt. Washington on June 2, 1998 and then went on to havoc some contiguous areas in the southwestern section of the state. Three deaths were reported (none in the city), but many people were immediately disabused of the idea that urban and mountainous areas were tornado-immune. I drove by Virginia Avenue in Mt. Washington a day after the storm. Most of the residents had piled downed branches and limbs for pick-up at the curbs, but the numerous destroyed trees that had not yet been cut into sections for removal looked as if some Gulliver had stomped through the neighborhood and ripped them from the roots like to many celery stalks. And then, of course, there was the destruction done to houses and automobiles, i.e., shredded rooftops, brick chimneys wind-sledged to rubble, rooms full of imploding window glass waiting to be broomed away, the dented and gashed hoods of parked cars. KDKA-TV, which preempted its regular programs to keep its announcers on the air continuously, was credited with saving the lives of many by peremptorily telling those in the tornado’s predicted path to take cover in their basements immediately. Not all the news that gained national notice for Pittsburgh had to do with disasters. Martha Rial, a staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, took photographs of the plight of refugees in Rawanda while she was visiting her sister there. The photos were significant enough to earn her a Pulitzer Prize. The city’s writers continue to demonstrate to all who notice that Pittsburgh is literally a city for writers. Novelists, biographers, essayists, fictioneers, playwrights and above all, poets are creating name for themselves that transcend their local addresses. Perhaps in recognition of their achievements the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette initiated a policy several years ago of printing a poem on it op. ed. page every Saturday morning, not as a filler but as a prominent and framed feature. Many readers make a special point of making sure they purchase and read these Saturday poems without fail. And the poets benefit as well. Jim Daniels, an award-winning poet who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, told me that more people had read his op. ed. poem than had read all of his books combined. In the field of sports, the Pittsburgh Steelers under Bill Cowher’s style of coaching and the steady managerial hand of Dan Rooney made a habit of winning division titels but have still been denied the crown of the Super Bowl. Few doubt that these winning ways will not continue. But the fate of the Pittsburgh Pirates was and remains an ongoing saga. Purchased by youthful Kevin McClatchy after other bidders were rejected, the new Pirate management faced and still faces the formidable challenge of convincing a skeptical public that a small-market team can be competitive. McClatchy himself, whose cousin is the editor of The Yale Review and whose maternal grandfather is George F. Kennan, the seminal architect of and most important influence upon our country’s foreign policy from the end of World War II to the present, is not an absentee owner. He calls himself the “younser,” took up residence in Pittsburgh and is invariably seen in the stands behind home plate in game after game. As if in response to some visceral allegiance not only to the city but to the spirit of baseball itself, the Pirates became the talk of the league in the 1997 season. They played commendable baseball with a combination of rookies and journeymen and stayed in spirited contention with Houston for the division title until the very last days of the season. In short, they made the summer of 1997 a summer to remember and caused many to re-think the idea that only well-heeled franchises in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco could dream of championships. All that Pittsburghers needed to be reminded of was the World Series of 1960 when the “dismissable” Pirates defeated the “unbeatable” Yankees in seven games to show that David’s defeat of Goliath was not a fluke and could happen again. In that spirit they supported the team, and they continue to do so. Numerous theories have been advanced about what draws people together. Disasters like tornados certainly do. Pride in sports franchises has the same unifying dynamism. But why pursue each disquisitions? What is integral is that, despite natural upheavals or citizen achievements in sports or academics or the professions, there are overarching considerations that unify a population no matter how contentious the controversies may be that divide them or how persistent the phenomena that distract them. The common denominator of mortality itself is enough to make us realize that we share what all mortals share, in Pittsburgh or anywhere. We hope for the continued well-being of our children and those we love. We fear suffering, violence and death. We admire the beautiful, the truthful and the heroic. And we eventually come to recognize and, if gifted by faith, profess our belief in a power or powers greater than ourselves. Theses bridge all of our temporary differences. Pittsburgh is fortunate to have the very symbols of our unity as people as part of its civic architecture – an omnipresent part. These are its bridges. There are some 800 bridges in the city proper and more than 2100 in Allegheny County. No other county in the country rivals this number, and many of these bridges were designed by some of the most distinguished architects of the time – Roebling, Lindenthal and others. Most of us look at bridges as feats of engineering and nothing more. But they are as much agents of unity as poetry is. Both poetry and bridges spring from the imagination of their creators. They have an inherent grace and power that can stop us in our tracks. Imaginatively speaking, a bridge is a road through and in space. It spans distance by the most direct means possible, stitching together permanently separate shores by the medium of itself. Like poetry, it binds, uniting, uniting, uniting. The American poet Hart Crane saw a bridge as a “communication…a symbol of consciousness spanning time and space.” He could easily have been speaking of poetry. In this sense we Pittsburghers are fortunate to be reminded daily how bridges return us to our common roots just as poetry does. Bridges are example of material designed by man to defy impossibility as gracefully and strongly as possible. If we regard our treasury of bridges not only as an architectural trove but as a poetic one, we can appreciate the poetry of what is bountifully all around us and which is ours for the acknowledging. In the process we just might discover the deeper and more universal self that lives, like history, within each of us. Everytime I see or cross a bridge I find myself ready to be more pleasant. I have no explanation for this. It usually happens to me by surprise, by reflex. Regardless, I’m always grateful for whatever puts me in a better mood whether the cause is a bridge or an incident. One incident that stands out in my recollection occurred at the Pittsburgh International Airport. I was waiting in the middle of a concourse. People were hurrying by on either side of me, and I must have been thinking of something that was making me frown. Suddenly a man sauntered up to me, stopped and said, “Smile, you’re in Pittsburgh.” My frown vanished instantly, and I smiled. Lately, I’ve surprised friend and stranger alike by saying, “Smile, you’re in Pittsburgh,” and the result is always a smile. Try it yourselves, and you’ll see that the result will be the same. Whether this will become a replacement for our usual forms of greeting is unpredictable, but I for one give it my vote. Regardless, it’s as good a note as any on which to bring this book to a close. Excerpt from The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You by Samuel Hazo courtesy of The Local History Company.