She might have to try anyway, were it not for the Salvation Army. A log of complaints against the police brims with reports of drunkenness and sleeping on duty. Sometimes, an officer is fined. The Bulletin carries announcements of the rich off on steamer holidays and of college sons and daughters back home on break. From the wedding announcements, readers can picture departing carriages rattling over the cobblestones trailing tin cans and tea kettles.
Movies are a thing of the future.
Amid the noise and clamor of a city on the rise, an old Scotland-born man awakens to a bitterly cold Jan. 1 in McKeesport. His book of days bears methodical recitations of an anxious life. The men at the mines he once supervised no longer expect him to report, but every day in his journal, he attends to his work in spirit, fretting about time lost for want of rail cars, chronicling the tonnage of coal run and the level of the rivers. I am 78 years old. After two years of restlessness, unpleasantness and pain, Martha dies on Nov. 2.