Ehmann Family: Pittsburgh!

For several years we have thought about visiting Pittsburgh, and it worked out that Claire brought Grampa Ed up from DC and we flew in to meet them. We met on the riverboat Explorer, run by the Rivers of Steel NHA. We saw much steel in the many bridges as we cruised up and down the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers alongside the revitalized city.

The river breeze cut through the heat of the day

Although not occupied by the H.J. Heinz company anymore, the buildings still stand where Grampa worked his first job out of graduate school in food science

The senator John Heinz History Center had something for everyone, like a display of Heinz products over the years. There were way more than 57 varieties, like fig pudding from the 1910s and

submarine food

This 1936 stainless steel Ford sedan reminds me of the cubic foot of copper in the Edison museum. An industry was so grateful for the use of its metal that it made something ludicrous out of it.

Anyone recognize this play?

It's Franco Harris's Immaculate Reception from the 1970s Steel Curtain days

My dad always said that a lot of NFL quarterbacks came from Pittsburgh and here's the map to prove it.

Is it a sport? A classic topic for barroom debate. My college friends concluded that to be a sport, it has to make you sweat and people have to want to pay to watch it. Sorry marbles, fox hunting, and steamboat racing, you're not sports.

Among the inventors and inventions from Pittsburgh, George Westinghouse does not get enough credit. After his air brake invention enabled the expansion of safe railway travel, he pursued electricity and eventually won the battle with Edison over AC vs DC current. This is the electric chair that Edison's camp created to smear the reputation of AC and Westinghouse.

Aah coal, in 1920 was there anything we couldn't make from your bounty? Reason number 10,617 I'm so happy not to live back then: we no longer light our houses with illuminating gas, the top left branch on the tree. In fact every bedroom in my house has a detector to protect me from this insidious poison, aka carbon monoxide.

The museum went on and on: the jeep, the Big Mac, the roller coaster: invented in Pittsburgh

Mr. Rogers TV show: from WQED in Pittsburgh

We ran out of steam before we got to the plane and billboard displays. It's always wise to leave something exciting to come back to see.

Pittsburgh even has a Munchen-sanctioned Hofbrauhaus that had the best wurst and metric-sized beer steins. The half-liter was the largest mug that I drank in July, until we visited the home of the Brewers.

I have no memories of it, but Wallingford Dr is where I spent the first 26 months of my life.

The house still stands and Claire was fascinated with thoughts of what our lives would have been like if we had stayed in Pittsburgh. Me, there's no question I would have been an NFL quarterback.

The Allegheny Portage Railroad NHS requires some explaining. Back in the 1830s canal boat era, western Pennsylvanians wanted an east-west canal system to compete with New York and Maryland, but the Allegheny mountains were in the way. At the time steam engines couldn't pull rail cars all the way up the mountain. The solution was to build a system of 12 separate inclined rails each linked to a steam engine that pulled the canal boats up with assistance from the weight of boats going down on the parallel track. Ropes held everything together, and before cables were invented, runaway train disasters were common.

But the transportation system worked, enough to ship 23 million pounds of bacon in 1843. That's 63,000 pounds, or 2-3 packet boats of bacon per day going up and down the railway.

We learned about natural textile dyes. In order there's onion skin for light pink, madder root for orange and red, indigo for blue and cochineal for purple. The royal purple of cochineal is so rare because the dye comes from the extracted shells of a scale insect that lives on prickly pear cacti.

The vintage tavern on the canal had all the fixings, like meat, potatoes, spilled wine,

and parlor games

Right next to the park was one of the busiest freight lines in the US and we stopped for lunch with other railfans to watch a freight train go by

The Johnstown Flood occurred in 1889 when a poorly maintained dam owned by a wealthy club failed and released a lake that hammered the town of Johnstown

What made the flood so horrific was that as it barreled 14 miles towards Johnstown it picked up tons of debris from trees, buildings, railyards, a barbed wire factory (!), and fuel tanks. A stone bridge at the end of Johnstown trapped all the people and stuff, which then caught fire as night was falling. The life-size diorama recounted people's stories of the ordeal. Humanitarian aid for the flood victims came from all over the world and the relief effort was led by Clara Barton's newly formed American Red Cross.

We could hear screaming sounds coming from the site's movie and exiting parents warned us that the video was not kid-friendly, so it was photo time

The new members of the stuffed animal family are Timber Chuck, Sassafras, and Tigerlily

The Flight 93 Memorial was powerful, well done, and more crowded than any site we've been to in the Northeast. In the Jr booklet the kids learned some of the stories of the passengers (quite a few were Hawaiian) and what memorials stand for. The recordings from the passengers were too much for any of us to take.