The Mt. Washington Seven: (Revised and Expanded Edition)

By William R. Phillippe

Three strong young men sit at an inn in Colmar, Alsace. It’s 1880 and they are about to graduate from university all with honors and are debating taking ship for the US. After immigration they find the German community in Lower East Side and with their help get train tickets to Pittsburgh where one had an uncle in business. As time goes on they find two more guys and two women all of whom are from the original three. The seven become close in grade and high school and all go to different colleges in America.

After graduation they find each other again, form a corporation, get an office on the top of Mt. Washington and begin careers that make them major owners of much property in the city. They are very successful and become nationally known for their unusual techniques in business.

Bob, the leader, falls in love with Martha, the daughter of the CEO of Douglass Steel, marries her and they have three children. Bob becomes Chair of his District, then Chair of the City Council and finally mayor of Pittsburgh. Martha, MD, becomes head of cancer research and is given several awards for her research.

The seven of them stay close all through their fantastic careers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369421901

William R. Phillippe

William R. Phillippe was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa. He was mostly raised by his grandfather, a politician who, for fifty-five years held the position Chief of the Bureau of Electricity of the City of Pittsburgh.. When he retired he took over the job of raising the boy because his father, an electrician, was going to the night school of the University of Pittsburgh to get his Engineer Degree and his mother was teaching high school English. Dr. Phillippe, a graduate of Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, where he majored in philosophy and ethics, has published four books, a number of articles, and has spoken at several Universities and Colleges..

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Copyright © 2024 by William R. Phillippe.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/17/2024

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part Two   At Seventy He Did What?

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

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CHAPTER 1

Ah, spring. The sweet scent of the blooming locust trees is quietly drifting up the face of the hill. It’s as if someone has splashed an expensive perfume on the railing of my porch. The hill is called Mt. Washington, and it rises suddenly up from the Monongahela River, which, with two other rivers, defines Pittsburgh. Here I sit, alone, on my porch in a cushioned wicker chair in the early evening. Pittsburgh, referred to in early years as old smokey, is clear tonight. I can make out the buildings spread out before me, name them one by one. It still has the power to capture me. I love it. I was born and raised here. It’s twilight, and the city has come alive with all its lights. It looks like a huge floral carpet with a fringe on the west crated by the setting sun’s reflection on some stray clouds, and the east there’s a warm glow from the steel mills great Bessemer Converters.

Mt. Washington was known in ancient days as coal hill, and if you know what to look for, you can still see the remnants of the winding, narrow switchback road where the team of horses pulled their loaded wagons from the face mines full of soft bituminous coal right from the hill down to the steel mills on the river side.

But now I sit alone looking out at the bright lights, the whole city at my feet. Alone because my Martha is no longer with me. I ache for her. For so many years, we had been companions, lovers, sharing all we had, both good and bad. She was a beautiful woman just short of six feet with lovely firm breasts that I never could keep my hands off. I’ve had times of being alone but never lonely because I knew she was somewhere near, sometimes not physically but truly in my head. She often said she shared that feeling. Her career often took her far away to speak of, and to show, the new ideas she had come up with in her field of cancer research. She would go no more. Her ashes were spread down the slope of the hill before me, as was her wish. But I am way ahead of myself. You must go back many years to begin to understand who I am and what made me this way.

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CHAPTER 2

Three strong young men all home on spring break sit in an inn on the edge of Colmar in the French part of Alsace —the wine producing region of France) —but all were of German descent. Each was guzzling down a mug of dark beer. Colmar had been captured and recaptured by French and German armies time and time again since 1226, when it became an imperial town under Frederick II, who surrounded it with defensive walls.

All the young men were fluent in both French and German, and they were all history students at the university in Munich. The subject of their table talk, no surprise, was the coming of yet another war. They all came from prosperous wine families, and all had heard, for all their whole lives, the debate as whether they were German or French. I can’t get my father to talk about the past . He seems content with the way things are.

Mine are the same except they are tired of being told every label must be in French. I don’t know what I am— French or German.

Well I know, said the third, firmly. I’m German. His surname was Schultz. Such conversation had gone on for decades. Ever since the French Revolution of 1789, when the area was officially administrated between two departments of Hatu-Rhin and Bas-Rhin and the existence as a separate province ended. Most people continued to speak German, but the use of French was spreading among the upper classes. The boys knew that within a few years there would be war again, and they would all be Two of them had talked with their girlfriends about the situation. They had agreed with the boys that another time of disruption would not be pleasant, and they did not want their boyfriends to go to war. In a few months, they would all graduate from university. Kurt came right out and said it: We have to make plans now.

I’m for us taking ship to the States, added Paul. And doing it right after we graduate. I’ve noticed that more and more ships are leaving for America from Strasbourg.

Should we discuss this with our parents? asked Kirt.

You can, if you must, but not me. I know what they would say, and they would try to block any plans we had to leave by any means, said Emil. But in the end, they all embarked, three young men and two women. Actually by that time, they all five had the blessing and help of their parents. One thing was most helpful : Kurt’s family had a relative in Pittsburgh, and after a few transatlantic messages, the plan was firm.

As graduate students they sailed through the rigors of immigration in New York. They found the German community on the Lower Eastside, which for many generations had been a beacon to immigrants from all over the world. At the time it was known as Kleindeutschland, or little Germany, and was home to a large German population. Soon it boasted having the third largest group of German speakers in the world. With the help of a wise old pastor of the neighborhood German church, they got in touch with Kirt’s relatives in Pittsburgh. The congregation came up with enough money to buy train thickets to for all five.

As the train chugged west, they delighted at the topography, with its high, tree-covered hills. They wondered at what it took for workers to hack down the huge trees and build all the bridges that crossed the fast-flowing streams. They thought they knew what they were getting into, but Pittsburgh was a rough-about-the-edges industrial city, and growing, a place where alcoholic drinks of all kinds were referred to as schnapps. Well, they were familiar with that.

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CHAPTER 3

As years went by, they had children, and they all moved to Brookline, which was a rural suburb of Pittsburgh. They all went to the same grade and high school and never lost sight of each other. They produced five fine, strong boys who were like fingers on a hand. If you saw one, you saw them all. They went to the same school, played the same games, went camping together, chased after the same girls— except two of the girls, Carol and Sandy, who were treated special . They laughed a lot but were also very serious about their studies. During the war they collected papers and junk and won every contest as to who could bring in the most. They trapped rabbits and were told it was to get them out of the victory gardens, where they were eating all the greens and never knew they would become warm jackets for pilots.

Their names were Bob, mostly seen as the leader; Jack, who could fix anything ; Steve, who came up with the best plans; Tom, who was a genius with math and checked everyone’s work ; and Ray, who could come up to any person and within two minutes find out all was to know about them. There