Dan Rooney Read Online Free Page A

of Pittsburgh, and I’ve always been proud of the fact that Mercy Hospital was the first hospital west of the Allegheny Mountains.
    The Pittsburgh of my youth is hard to describe. The Great Depression of the 1930s gave way to the boom years of World War II. The city of the 1940s was a remarkable mix of natural beauty and urban ugliness, peaceful parks and industrial energy. Here, two great rivers, the cool green Allegheny and the muddy Monongahela, wind through the forested hillsides and rocky bluffs of Western Pennsylvania to merge at the point of land where Pittsburgh was established by George Washington in 1758. The two rivers form a third, the mighty Ohio, one of the world’s busiest and most important waterways. At
the confluence of these three rivers, the city of Pittsburgh grew and prospered, becoming by the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803 the “Gateway to the West.”
    By the end of the nineteenth century it was one of America’s great manufacturing and industrial centers. And by the time I came along, Pittsburgh was the City of Steel, building a worldwide reputation as the “Arsenal of Democracy.” During the war years Pittsburgh forged its steel into shells and ships, jeeps and big guns, and every article and implement imaginable to support the war effort. Towering stacks above the mills and red-brick factories spewed black soot around the clock. As a boy I often thought day and night seemed reversed. Smoke blocked the sun during the day, causing street lights to blink on at noon, while at night, the orange glow from the blast furnaces lit the sky.
    Not everyone saw this industrial energy as a good thing. One early visitor, overwhelmed by the noise and smoke and sulfurous stink, declared Pittsburgh wasn’t a city at all but “Hell with the lid off.” But for Pittsburghers the smell and smoke meant jobs and money. White-collared businessmen gladly changed their soot-grimed shirts in the middle of the day, while hundreds of thousands of blue-collared mill workers walked or rode inclines and trolleys from their crowded hill-side homes to the factories below.
    From around the world—England and Ireland, Italy and Germany, Slovakia and Russia and Poland—men and women migrated to Pittsburgh to build a better life for themselves and their families. They settled in unique neighborhoods—ethnic communities reflecting the language, culture, and character of their homelands. Although their accents hinted of their origins, these newcomers quickly adapted to their surroundings and became Americans. Yet to this day Pittsburghers identify themselves by their neighborhoods.
    My neighborhood, the North Side, was different than most. It was a wonderful coming together of all these immigrant groups, although
when I was growing up, Germans, Italians, and especially the Irish held sway. Sometime in the 1880s, my great-grandparents Arthur and Catherine Regan Rooney came to America from Newry, a small town in Northern Ireland. Arthur worked as a bricklayer in the Pittsburgh steel mills with his son, Daniel, my grandfather and namesake. Daniel married Margaret Murray, and in 1905 they moved with my father, Arthur J. Rooney, and his two younger brothers to the North Side, then known as Allegheny City. This thriving community, situated directly across the river from the Point and Pittsburgh’s downtown, stretched northward from the Allegheny River to the hills beyond. Though the people of old Allegheny bitterly fought to remain an independent city, sprawling Pittsburgh annexed it in 1907. My father and most of his contemporaries refused to recognize the “hostile takeover” and for the rest of their lives continued to call our neighborhood Allegheny.
    I knew it as the North Side, pronounced as one word: Norseside . We thought ourselves separate from Pittsburgh, in fact separate from anywhere. We were different and proud of it. We had our own style and our own