Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael V. Hayden

Author:Michael V. Hayden [Hayden, Michael V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-23T08:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

GOING HOME

PITTSBURGH, PA, 1945–2014

In the 1997 hit film Grosse Pointe Blank, John Cusack plays an assassin back in town for his high school’s ten-year reunion. Searching for his boyhood home, he discovers that the site is now a convenience store. “You can never go home again,” he phones his psychiatrist, “but I guess you can shop there.”

In my case, I guess I can buy Steelers gear there. My boyhood home was on the site of Three Rivers Stadium and later Heinz Field on the Northside (now called the North Shore) of Pittsburgh. The house was actually torn down to facilitate the construction of the first stadium.

The neighborhood was great, tucked between the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the north bank of the Allegheny River. It could fairly be called industrial, with some light manufacturing (including Clark Candy), lots of truck parks, and a good number of bars.

The place was typically ethnic—Irish, Italian, one square block African American—and old-country identities were still strong. When I jumped onto a board with a nail in it in the second grade, one Irish neighbor stuck the offending metal into a potato to speed my recovery.

The neighborhood was also largely Catholic. You could see most everybody at Sunday Mass at St. Peter’s, and most of the kids—and there were a lot of them—attended the church grade school run by the Sisters of Mercy.

Sports were everyone’s outlet. Throw a ball out, and it would draw a crowd, no matter the season. Not that there were any proper fields. There was nothing anywhere near us that could be called a lawn. There was one small concrete playground, an unpaved parking lot or two, and then there was always the street. “Go deep. Hook at the Buick. I’ll hit you there.”

There was one legitimate field, Monument Hill, that was on top of a four-hundred-foot-high humpbacked hill just north of the neighborhood. The name came from a Civil War memorial that had been moved to, and later removed from, its eastern edge years before. It was nothing fancy. Well cared for with permanent stands, but a skin, heavily oiled field (that means no grass—ever—for those not lucky enough to have experienced it). For us, though, it was the best. Most of my weekend days and weekday nights from May through August were spent there. I got good enough at baseball there to earn a letter and hit .316 as a senior in high school.

There was always enthusiasm for local sports teams or heroes. You could collect enough “pop” bottles around the neighborhood on a weekday summer morning to make enough money for streetcar fare and a $1.50 general admission ticket to sit behind Roberto Clemente in right at Forbes Field. That Clemente was the city’s greatest pro athlete—ever—might be suggested by the precise height of the right-field wall in Pittsburgh’s newest ballpark, PNC Park. The wall is twenty-four feet high to commemorate Clemente’s number as a Pirate.

And then there were the Steelers. Another St. Peter’s parish family was named Rooney.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.