A friend shared this photo on Facebook today. It was taken in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood and appears to date from the early 1930s, based on the cars and the clothing.
I know it sounds like I’m 90 years old, but into my young adulthood — at least the late 1990s, maybe as late as the early 2000s — there used to be a newspaper vendor at the corner of Fifth and Walnut street in McKeesport, and another at Fifth and Sinclair street, selling the McKeesport Daily News.
You’d pull up in a car, hand them 50 cents, and they’d hand you back a newspaper. Or, you could buy a paper before catching a bus. They had wooden newsstands just like this one, painted Kelly green.
I assume that in generations gone back, you might have caught a streetcar instead, or a train to Pittsburgh; I’ve seen photos of Downtown McKeesport from the 1940s, showing stands just like this one: “Read The Pittsburgh Newspapers.”
Beginning in the 1980s, as soon as I got my first camera, I took photos of a lot of things, but I never snapped any photos of the vendors or their stands. They were just one of those things that I thought would be around forever — and now they’re gone, along with the McKeesport Daily News.
Back in the day, I also recorded tapes of radio stations and hosts that I liked — Doug Hoerth, O’Brien and Garry, a few others, but now I wish I’d recorded more, and that I could have afforded a better tape recorder and better tapes.
Who would have thought that WTAE 1250 would someday be gone, and with it, local talk radio that wasn’t political?
Or that KQV 1410 would no longer be “all-news, all-the-time,” with the clickety-clackety teletype noises in the background (hilariously, and anachronistically, long after teletypes had been removed from newsrooms).
What are some things you wish you had taken photos of? Or some things you wish you had a recording of? Bleep-bloop it down in the comments or email me at jaythurbershow@gmail.com.