I’ve had people ask me why I never moved back to Pittsburgh.
It’s a legitimate question. I loved my family dearly, even if my aunt Betty drove me (and everyone else) crazy, and I will defend Pittsburgh’s reputation against all slurs about it being dirty, ugly, smoky, and polluted to my grave. I have fond memories of the Point, shopping at Kaufmann’s, WQED and WDUQ, the Carnegie Museums, Heinz Hall, and Oakland. My family roots run deep — Dad’s ancestors moved there over two hundred years ago, Mum’s grandparents arrived from the Palatinate via Philadelphia by the 1870’s — and there are plenty of maternal cousins scattered from the South Hills all the way up to Oil City. The cost of living is low, jobs are currently plentiful, and I still get slightly weepy whenever I think of the magnificent view of the Golden Triangle from Grandview Avenue on a warm summer night.
My accent, my appearance, so much of my early memories and thought patterns, my taste in food, so many of my jokes...all of it started where the Allegheny meets the Mon. I’ve lived in Massachusetts virtually my entire adult life, but I am convinced that if you carved me open you’d find “Pittsburgh” engraved on my heart right next to “Smith College.”
So why don’t I move back?
Very simple: I’d have to live in Pennsylvania.
Now, before everyone gets all huffy and starts chastising me for being meeean to my natal state, let me state that there’s much to like about Pennsylvania. The countryside is quite lovely in most areas, there are tons of funny place names like “Snow Shoe” (formerly “Pancake”) and “Scotrun” (often mistaken for “Scrotum”), and there are many, many wonderful historic sites, from the Ephrata Community to Old Economy, the Fort Pitt Blockhouse to the Asa Packer Mansion. Philadelphia has gracious architecture, Pittsburgh has skyscrapers every bit as distinctive as Chicago or New York, there are world class universities and colleges, two fine symphonies, the whole Bucks County arts community, great food and drink, all those rivers and battlefields and quaint little farmhouses.
And that doesn’t even touch on the unusual, distinctive, or outright weird things that make Pennsylvania what it is:
- An oil boomtown, Pithole, that was founded early in 1865, grew to 15,000 people within a year, and was so thoroughly flattened by a financial panic that the population was all of 27 by 1870.
- The tomb of Jim Thorpe, the Sac and Fox tribesman who was hailed as “the greatest athlete in the world” and who had most emphatically not wanted to be buried in Carbon County, Pennsylvania (don’t ask).
- The Youghiogheny River and a nearby school district, both of which are sometimes referred to as the “Yuck” by locals.
- A giant shopping mall, Century III, that began with 200 stores and five anchors, and has been so thoroughly flattened by bad investments and online shopping that it’s down to 17 stores.
- The “Bridge to Nowhere” (aka the Fort Duquesne Bridge), which was still under construction in 1964 when a Pitt student from New Jersey drove his 1959 Chrysler station wagon off one end, flew across the gap, and landed upside down on the other side.
- Olde Frothingslosh Beer, the pale stale ale with the foam on the bottom.
- Several generations of Wyeths, all of them artists.
- Assorted company towns with names like “Homestead” (Carnegie Steel) and “Ambridge” (American Bridge), at least one of which, Ambridge, claims to have a miraculous crucifix where the eyes follow you around like those creepy paintings in creepy horror movies.
- A giant coffee pot in Bedford, which I haven’t actually seen in person but probably should.
All of these are excellent and I love them, every one, except maybe Century III because I grew up nearby and still wish it were the wicked cool slag dump that turned the sky bright orange when they dumped at night the way they did when I was a kid, which was fascinating in a highly polluting industrial way. But I still won’t live there for one very good reason: once you get outside of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and a couple of other cities, the beautiful antique-stuffed countryside is not especially friendly to perpetually annoyed middle aged Unitarians with too many books and a sarcastic streak.
I’m not joking for once. Ask anyone who’s actually lived in Pennsylvania and they’ll tell you the same thing. “It’s just like Alabama,” said one friend, and though the accent, food, and racial mix is different, the attitudes toward religion, social issues, and education aren’t dissimilar. This may be why the western part of the state is sometimes called “Pennsyltucky” instead of “Pittsylvania,” or why the electoral maps have consistently shown that once you get much past the city limits of any place with more than 40,000 residents, it’s about as red as a bubbling pot of freshly ground cochineal dye.
This wasn’t so bad when I was young, and the GOP included the likes of Arlen Specter and Dick Thornburgh. It was possible back then to be liberal on social issues and still be a registered Republican, no lie, and reactionary attitudes could be shrugged aside as unimportant. My uncle voted for Republicans as far back as Herbert Hoover, but that didn’t keep him from criticizing Reagan’s tax policies, and my mother split her ticket to send HJ Heinz III to Congress and Mike Dukakis to the White House. Good governance was more important in the long run.
Alas, the same cannot be said today. Arlen Specter was succeeded by Pat Toomey, who’s marginally better than former senator Rick Santorum, but given that Santorum was only marginally better than the Black Death, this is not saying much. A shockingly large number of my high school classmates are full-throated supporters of the current administration, which makes me very glad I didn’t receive an invitation to our fortieth reunion. Angry, angry people in the old industrial towns blame everyone but the mill owners who refused to modernize their plants for their plight, and city politics in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh is as convoluted and annoying and occasionally corrupt as ever.
And then there’s Dover.
This little town, only two hours from the bustling metropolis of Philadelphia and its world-class museums, symphony, and universities, achieved notoriety about a decade ago not for its quaint old architecture or its proximity to the Susquehanna River or any of the other things that struggling little towns hope will draw visitors and their money. Oh no, Dover became a household word because of a concerted effort to rewrite the laws of biology and science itself, and the resulting brouhaha made a laughingstock not only of the town and its people, but the learned professor they brought in to defend their actions and the bestselling book he’d written explaining his views.
The case was Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. The learned professor was Michael Behe, PhD, author of a little tome called Darwin’s Black Box. And the resulting controversy set a precedent that has yet to be seriously challenged, even though a great many very religious people have tried.
It’s a long, twisted, and occasionally confusing story, far too complex for a single diary. So please indulge me, kind friends and gentle readers, and return next for Part II.
Trust me, it’s worth the wait.
%%%%%