Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 18:00:35 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 21:50:51 GMT Content-length: 5982
Well, I was born in Bethel Park, PA, a large, middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a great place. If you're not convinced by my valuable opinion, then see below:
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Forget the women who were taken to court for praying too loudly. Forget the hunters who hire strippers for their hunting camps after a hard day stalking Bambi. Forget the fish-filled lake where ducks waddle across on the backs of their finny friends.
Forget them all, and western Pennsylvania is still pretty weird.
This is a region, after all, where you can travel from Moon to Mars in less than half an hour, eat sandwiches stuffed with french fries and watch grown men consult a rodent about the weather.
"I think we have a very high intrinsic oddness quotient," said Denny Bonavita, managing editor of the Courier-Express in DuBois, about 80 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. "We're kind of a perverse people. We're backward."
Apart from towns named for celestial bodies or personalities -- Apollo also orbits near Pittsburgh, along with Moon and Mars -- western Pennsylvania boasts what may be the smallest town in the world with the longest name: Slovenska Narodna Podporna Jednota, population 12.
Panic is close to Desire, as it should be (both are in Jefferson County), though Plum and Nectarine are miles apart.
On a smaller scale, Pittsburgh's road system, a crazy-quilt of unexpected twists and turns, and its residents' unusual driving habits are often a source of amusement, if not bewilderment, for newcomers.
Possibly the biggest idiosyncrasy is the "Pittsburgh left," the tradition of letting the first car turn left in front of oncoming traffic after a traffic light turns green.
Once very common, the "Pittsburgh left" is now only sporadically practiced, which makes it even more confusing for newcomers.
"You don't know whether to go or to wait," said Ellsworth H. Brown, president of The Carnegie, a conglomeration of museums in the city. He moved to Pittsburgh from Chicago in 1993. "I'm always fearful of an accident, so I just wait."
Drivers also drive at or below the speed limit and frequently let others cut in -- a bit disconcerting for outsiders, particularly those from less well-mannered regions.
"No one ever honks at you in Pittsburgh or flips the finger at you," said a disbelieving Dawn Keezer, director of the Pittsburgh Film Office and a recent transplant from Santa Cruz, Calif.
That's not the only thing she's found strange about the city, which she nevertheless likes a lot. "The food here is very bizarre," said Keezer.
Pittsburghers love to feast on pierogies, dumplings stuffed with mashed potatoes and cheese and sauteed in onions. (Originally sold by Eastern Orthodox churches for congregants to eat on meatless Fridays, they're now available in the frozen food section of supermarkets.)
Mixing french fries with steak and other meats is another common practice. To make steak salad, a popular dish, chefs pile chopped steak on a bed of lettuce and top the whole thing with french fries.
At Primanti Bros., a restaurant in the city's produce district, a sandwich comes with french fries and cole slaw tucked inside with the meat.
"As far as I know, the restaurant used to be a trucker stop, and the truckers couldn't hold it all so they slapped it together," said cook Don Valentine.
The language, too, is laden with colorful peculiarities. Many Pittsburghers drop the infinitive "to be" from sentence constructions, saying that their cars "need washed" (pronounced "need warshed") and their hairdryers "need fixed." Instead of saying "you," some say "yunz." And they pronounce "town" as "ton."
A chipmunk is a "grinny," a sparrow is a "sputzie" and to clean is to "redd up," as in, "Please redd up the table."
"It's intriguing and different in the sense that you do have words which seem to have no basis in what they describe," said Ken Abel, co-author of "The Tongue-In-Cheek Guide To Pittsburgh."
Western Pennsylvanians' attitudes toward animals are a separate category of weirdness. On one hand, animals are often treated with respect that seems beyond their due. Days ago, in Punxsutawney, a group of top-hatted, tuxedoed men asked a woodchuck named "Phil" to tell them when spring would arrive.
But in an area where the first day of deer hunting is a school holiday, it's not surprising that animals are frequently the objects of violence. The town of DuBois took heat for exterminating a rash of skunks by drowning them, and little Ridgway made headlines for shooting stray cats.
As for the source of the region's peculiarities, some speculate it's a function of geography. Mountainous and heavily rural, western Pennsylvania is mostly made up of small communities that sprang up in river valleys and often remained -- and remain -- relatively isolated. Thus their peculiarities were preserved as the rest of the country melted into homogeneity.
"Most of us live either in a valley or a hillside, so we think the world begins and ends at the top of that next hill," said the Courier-Express's Bonavita. "In other words, to hell with what's on the other side of that mountain."
APTV-01-29-96 0902EST