Category: default || By jt3y

On Sunday, I pointed the big Mercury southbound and headed for the Big Mo, Mo-Town, Touchdown City, the Capital of Hoopieland, the ... um ...

Right. Let's start over. On Sunday, I pointed the big Mercury southbound and headed for Morgantown, W.Va., where I was due to meet with someone for a project I've been working on.

It was my first time driving on the new stretch of the Mon-Fayette Expressway between Route 51 and Interstate 70, and what a day for driving it was. There are few things more pleasant than blasting along at 70 miles an hour in a big V-8 powered 'murrcan car with the stereo wailing on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the fall. Not even the congested stretch of 70 between Bentleyville and Little Worshington could spoil my mood.

In retrospect, maybe I should have slowed down a little. From Large to Mt. Morris, where I jumped off of I-79 and onto U.S. 19 south, I must have seen a dozen exploded deer carcasses on the berm of the road. (My buddy Dan calls those "transporter accidents," and if I have to explain it, you haven't watched enough Star Trek.)

There's a simple explanation for all of the deer guts, of course. According to the Morgantown Dominion Post, it's that time of year when love is in the air, and a young buck's fancy turns to thoughts of rut:

The importance of the rut on deer activity is hard to overstate. The older bucks that are almost exclusively nocturnal are suddenly sighted out and about in the middle of the day, making them susceptible to hunting. Many hunters save their vacation days for this prime November period and try to stay in their stands from daylight until dark.

This is also a period when deer are on the move constantly and many are killed on highways. It pays to be particularly on guard when traveling in areas with high deer populations -- which, it seems, is just about everywhere these days.

Man, you mosey out onto the Interstate after a hard day of lovin' and meet your end in the grille of a Buick. But what a way to go! It must be hard for the taxidermists to get the smiles off of their faces.

I had never visited Morgantown until yesterday, and I need to go back. It's a fairly typical college town --- meaning lots of head shops, tattoo parlors, bars and bookstores --- but it's also got a neat Appalachian mining town vibe going on. On Sunday afternoon, Downtown Morgantown was hopping --- I suppose the warm weather brought people out --- and there were lots of folks on the sidewalks. The Mountaineers clouded up and rained on Temple, 42-21, on Saturday, so I suppose folks were still happy about that, too.

I did have the good sense not to wear my "Pitt Panthers" ball cap yesterday, which was wise, because a punch in the mouth can spoil an otherwise pleasant Sunday afternoon. And as it turns out, the fellow I was meeting with was a huge WVU fan --- season tickets for 19 years running.

I stopped in what used to be the big G.C. Murphy Co. store on High Street to buy a couple of notebooks and some blank tapes. It's one of those "everything's a dollar" stores, now, and a Murphy man would have been sick to his stomach. It looked as if the merchandise wasn't so much put out on the shelves as vomited there by a dragon who had eaten a Chinese plastic factory. At least they had the good taste to cover up the good name of Murphy's.

Across the street is the nifty Hotel Morgan, which is an honest-to-John old-fashioned big city hotel, now owned by the Clarion Hotels folks, so it would seem to be in good hands. (Rooms start at $95, so it's no flophouse.) A few doors away is an honest-to-John old-time movie palace --- the Warner Theatre --- which was showing first-run movies and appears to be under renovation.

Back home in less than two hours, thanks to the Mon-Fayette Expressway. I'm still not sure what purpose the stretch that's open right now serves --- I could have taken a nap in the middle of the road yesterday and not disturbed anyone ---- but it sure was convenient.

...

Closer to home, the disputed sale of Our Fair City's historic People's Building is about to land in litigation, reports Pat Cloonan in The Daily News:

"There are now two lawsuits pending, there are investigators in town," Mayor James Brewster told McKeesport City Council this week about the sale and resale of the Peoples Building to West Coast interests. And there's more, literally from coast to coast, in the wake of the transactions 18 months ago that put $600,000 in local hands --- and led, among other things, to a defaulted $2.5 million mortgage. ...

When the sales were consummated, Geneva Equities told state Department of Revenue Strong acted as its agent - so the city of McKeesport was not entitled to a 1.5 percent transfer tax that would have brought in $30,000. City Solicitor J. Jason Elash said he's been talking to state revenue officials now investigating the various deals.

...

And I thought I was nuts: Kurt Tadich, 22, of North Huntingdon Township is commuting back and forth to classes at Dickinson College in an antique fire engine, according to the Carlisle Sentinel:

Although he drives the engine to school on Mondays, he doesn't try to parallel park. He generally parks it in a school-owned lot or along West Street. Most of the time he has his vehicle in a storage garage in Carlisle.

His classmates' reaction to his choice of vehicle is "mixed," Tadich says with a smile. Students recognize him as he's driving to class or taking friends on rides around town. He says the most common reaction is "disbelief." But that's a typical reaction for other people as well.

The good news is that the 1962 American LaFrance pumper only cost $3,000 and, like most fire engines, it's super-extra-heavy-duty, which makes it an ideal vehicle for a poor college kid. The bad news is that it gets six miles to the gallon. Hey, having filled up the Mercury before my trip to Morgantown yesterday, I can sympathize.

At least Tadich is better suited than most people to driving a fire engine around: He's a former member of NHT's Fairmont-Hahntown Volunteer Fire Department who now belongs to the fire service up in Carlisle.