In December 1945, the baby boom was a few months pregnant and soldiers began arriving home in the euphoria of World War 11's conclusion. America's great optimism and community spirit that developed during the war was tempered with memories and fears of a return to the depression.
On December 10, 1945, fifteen families -- most living within two blocks of the intersection of Heberton Street and Wellesley Road -- formed the Highland Park Community Club in order to provide sports and recreation for their children.
Highland Park has played a role in the development of the nation since the first settler arrived in 1778.
Early nineteenth century farms and estates were divided into lots for suburban development following the civil war. Pittsburgh boomed as a center of industry, and Highland Park filled with elegant homes of prosperous merchants, business owners, and factory managers.
By the early 1890s, nearly one million dollars per year was going into home construction in the old nineteenth ward of Highland Park and part of East Liberty. The Highland Park, the Highland Park Zoo, the reservoir, streetlights and trolleys brought improvements associated with a city's industrial success.
In the early twentieth century, more homes were built between on remaining open land. People filled the neighborhood as estates were further divided and many large homes demolished for residential development.
Thus, when the Highland Park Community Club was formed in late 1945, Highland Park was a mature community of the prosperous east end. Driving around the neighborhood, one would see most of the homes and commercial buildings seen today. There were lots of families and children. With the end of the war, people stopped working Saturdays and found themselves with leisure time.
From the club's purpose, "To associate the families of the community in sponsoring and directing social and athletic activities for the boys and girls of the neighborhood," sprang a record of consistency and flexibility. Swimming and summer day camp have been held each year since 1947, while the club has evolved to tackle civic issues, housing and neighborhood development. The first meeting was held on January 9, 1946, at the red-brick home of first president Murray V. Johnston, 967 Wellesley Road.
The home of Dr. E. Ray Robb at 1206 Heberton was the club's first address. He had two teenage children, a boy and girl. Robb's family dentistry was in the highrise People's East End Building at the corner of Penn and Highland. The club immediately launched neighborhood basketball, baseball and football teams and chose club colors of green and red.
Having endured four years of not much more than jeeps and tanks coming out of Detroit, people snapped up raffle tickets for an air-conditioned new car with an automatic transmission, and the club's activities kicked off with two thousand dollars.
The founding members nurtured the club out of love for their children, and quickly backed it with organizational skill and energy, reaching out to recruit members down to Cordova Road. Families tended to join if they had small children. And in just a little over a year, membership swelled from the original fifteen families to one hundred and ninety.
The club's quick community acceptance and growth came largely from the success of its boys' midget, junior and pony league baseball teams. As Franklin B. "Herky" Allison remembers,
We had always played ball at the caddy grounds. It was great because no parents came around. Teenagers were more or less left on our own. There was no such thing as little league in those days. And when we felt like taking a break, we just sat down.
Well, we were primed for it -- I was fifteen or sixteen when the club started. One day, all these fathers show up, with pads, uniforms, all the best equipment. And they coached us. Before you know it, we're doing pushups, sit ups, and playing real baseball.
Our coaches. were great. They all knew the game, strategy, skills, and how to practice.
They took kids used to goofing around in dungarees - remember, a lot of us kids were not big enough or good enough for the school teams, so we never had the chance to play organized sports - we learned discipline and we found out what it's like to be part of a team.
In 1948, the midget team won jackets by winning the Salvation Army League. Coaches James P. Ifft Jr. led the boys to winning records in the '40s and '50s. The first uniforms were simple: a red shirt with no lettering and a cap. Baseball was a mainstay of the club for twenty-two years.
In the 1950s heyday of neighborhood teams, Branch Rickey of the Pirates sent scouts and personnel to teach and encourage young players. Coach Tom McDowell Sr. taught his sons Tom and Sam -- Sam went on to become a phenom in the major leagues, leading the American League in strikeouts -- the basics of pitching in the club's little league.
To open the 1961 season, Pirates announcing legend Bob Prince, waving from an open car, led eighty players from six teams, two ponies, and the Peabody High marching band, escorted by police and fire engines in a parade from Peabody to home plate at the Highland Park Caddy Grounds.
When Jerry Shaub led the team in the early sixties, there were fewer children in the neighborhood, so the team was expanded to include children from the blocks of East Liberty right around Peabody field, and the club ran three teams with a total of sixty children.
Russell V. Davis is remembered as an excellent football coach. Davis was short, bald, funny, and a no-nonsense coach who knew the sport, rules, and techniques. He had been a coach at Shadyside Academy, and had two sons who played on the team.
In the 1946 season, good, affordable football uniforms were hard to come by, a lingering effect of war production shortages. So the team played with only three uniforms. Players felt lucky to be learning the sport, but parents were concerned about injuries, and the team lasted just a few seasons.
Basketball, played in the basement of East Liberty Presbyterian Church and Peabody High's old cat-box gym, was a popular activity from 1946 until 1961. Dale Armstrong, a student at Shadyside Academy, was the first basketball coach. He went on to be a Dartmouth football star, was drafted into the NFL and played for the Philadelphia Eagles as a defensive end. Norm Frye, the baseball and basketball coach whose career at Peabody spanned five decades, coached the boys for several autumns in the 1950s.
Girls learned ballet, tap, and acrobatic dance at Saint Andrew's from Genevieve Jones, a dancer with a reputation in ballet. She was a tall, slim, striking young woman with dark hair pulled back in a tight bun.
Girls also went to the Fairgrieves dancing school on the corner of Penn and Shady Ave in East Liberty. Ruth Fairgrieves was an exacting teacher. She also taught ballroom dance, and wasted no time with tittering teens, matching partners by lining up girls on one side, boys on the other, and marching them to the center of the floor.
The club sponsored whatever people wanted -- roller skating, ice skating, bowling, dancing school, charm school, tennis lessons, cub scouts and brownies. Consistency and flexibility have served the club well; when an activity started to wane, it was dropped, and new activities put in. But two popular activities have stood the test of time -- swimming and summer day camp -- and been around since the club started.
"Family swim" meant separate swims for males and females in the late 1940s. That adds up to around two-thousand Friday night swimming sessions at Peabody High, now in its fiftieth vear.
Summer play school was initiated in 1947 by Mrs. Doris Ifft, a gifted teacher who grew up on the North Side and graduated from Ohio University. Sitting on benches placed around the porch, children started the day with an opening prayer, song, and flag salute, singing ditties such as:
"I say 'yoo-hoo yoo-hoo yoo-hoo' to you,
and you say 'yoo-hoo yoo-hoo' to me.
I throw up my window, pop out my head, and say 'yoo-hoo yoo-hoo yoo-hoo' to you ... '
Following morning exercises, they were divided into two age groups. One group went to art class, the other to music and games. After a milk and cookie break, the age groups switched places.
Over the years the program grew, and Mrs. Ifft managed it while hiring artists to teach and college students to assist. The program has been held at both Saint Andrew's and the farmhouse ever since. Mrs. Ifft retired from teaching in the 1950s and continued volunteer teaching. She presently teaches preschoolers to read.
Members remember that when children are involved, parents pull together and a sense of community takes hold. It was unique, then and now, for an urban neighborhood to possess such cohesiveness and run programs that pull families together.
Teens throughout history, from leading riots in Ancient Rome up to the present day, remain the most finicky special-interest group in communities. The HPCC sponsored Young People's Friday Night Dances and Square Dance at Saint Andrew's Church. These were a hit, but soon faded. Dances were again tried with a hired caller spinning records.
Teens were more likely to wander off and think up their own entertainment than to take direction from adults. As the sun set at the annual picnic in North Park and parents square-danced on the top floor of the lodge, teens went for a walk down to the swings or climbed the spiral staircase of the observation tower and looked out over the park. A stolen kiss at the top of the tower ranked higher than a victory in the flour sack race.
The longest sentence in club records is about teens -- seventy-six words with no form of punctuation to allow for inhaling:
"...four LP records dealing with the matter of instructions by parents to their children of sex problems were donated to the club and while the records are not intended for young persons it was suggested they be passed around among the Directors and after they had heard it played individually the question of whether it should be made available to other parents who are members of the club might be discussed."
The board has not yet voted whether to use those 1955 LPs.
Capitalizing on the success of the midget baseball team and what Mayor David L. Lawrence called President Johnson's "remarkable steamroller tactics," the club's first annual meeting attracted over three hundred people to East Liberty Presbyterian Church in January, 1947.
The annual family dinner at the church was a mainstay well into the 1960s. Actor and Pittsburgh celebrity Rege Cordic was master of ceremonies one year. Children enrolled in the club's classes and four Cub Scout dens enjoyed the chance to put on dance costumes and entertain the filled church hall. Hired performers such as "The Incomparable Master of Sleight of Hand -- Dick Staub!" received reviews ranging from marvelous to miserable; all have faded into obscurity.
An annual semi-formal dinner dance was held at places like the Churchhill Country Club, the Long Vue, Oakmont, and the Field Club. The Stanton Heights Golf Club was used until it closed in 1956. Over the years, couples jitterbugged and fox trotted to the music of the The Homer Oschenhirt Orchestra, D. Bartini, Harry Baker Orchestra, Benny Benack, and Johnny Fitz and his four-piece orchestra. This event lasted until the late 1960s when the genre of ballroom dancing faded.
Winter was busy in the club. In the early 1950s, Fred Parkin came up with the idea to burn Christmas trees on Twelfth Night. Over two thousand people came to the first burning. Several annual burnings attracted crowds of ten thousand to the open space, now called Pool Grove, across from Lake Carnegie in Highland Park.
It was like a fun Fourth of July in January, with hot chocolate. It grew so big that a crane was needed to build the pile of trees. One year, vandals struck a match a few days before the official burning.
A hue and cry went up for more trees. Parkin scoured the neighborhood for remaining trees and loaded them up in the family car. His son Pete got rope burns trying to hang on to the overloaded vehicle.
The mayor asked Parkin to conduct a Twelfth Night tree burning for the entire city, on the then-bulldozed area of the lower hill that was to become the Civic Arena. It was a huge success, but there was so much smoke, city council outlawed tree burning in Pittsburgh.
Fred Parkin was so extroverted in his activities, his motto might have been, "Have so much fun that they have to legislate against it."
Lake Carnegie was a busy place for ice skaters. Horses stabled at the Caddy Grounds barn pulled a plow across the ice to clear it of snow. If the ice was thick enough for horses, nobody worried about skating. From time to time, the fire department flooded the surface with a little water to make the ice smooth. Hockey games were played in the afternoon, and the lake was the place to meet in the evenings.
Some winter fun needs no planning. Before the concrete wall was installed below the farmhouse, it was a straight shot for sledders from the top of the hill above the farmhouse, all the way down to the lake. Starting at the top of Heberton Street, sledders had a great ride all the way to Stanton Avenue, where they scattered coal furnace ashes to keep them from going into traffic.
The club had a strong connection with East Liberty. Girls walked from school at Sacred Heart to the Fairgrieves studio for dancing. It was on the second floor of a building next to Bolan Candies' previous location. There is now a Giant Eagle parking lot on the site.
Students walked from Peabody to the East Liberty Presbyterian Church for the club's bowling leagues. Adults bowled at Crookston's alleys on Broad Street. Many members worked in East Liberty.
Doctors had practices there and lived in Highland Park. There were five movie theatres and a skating rink. East Liberty and downtown were Pittsburgh's main shopping and entertainment areas. Teens coming home from school in October 1960 jumped off the trolley to watch Bill Mazeroski's series-winning home run in the window of May Stern department store on the corner of Penn and Highland.
Perhaps the East Liberty renewal project in the 1960s is the biggest thing to happen in Highland Park since the club started.
In the 1960s, the Highland Park Community Club adjusted to changes in Pittsburgh and the country. Simultaneously, the number of children in the neighborhood declined sharply. Added to the club's purpose were "civic, cultural, and social activities for community improvement." The club changed with the times, and its focus on recreation evolved to include to overall quality of life.
Census tracts reveal a long history of diverse people living as neighbors along the streets behind the Highland Avenue homes of prominent residents like Henry Phipps, Edward M. Bigelow and Dr. Benjamin Peabody.
In 1910, a Russian-born, Yiddish-speaking grocer, six Syrian and Austro-German men, and nine Irish boarders lived on the same block. The "country of origin" column in the 1920 census reads like a geography book.
Halfway through the century, a rabbi, Pakistani, Syrian, Chinese, and Korean families lived as neighbors around one block of Winterton Street. There were many Italian, Irish and Jewish families.
In the club's tenth year, president Richard W. Friday noted that "although twenty percent of residents of Weberton and Winterton Streets are Jewish, they are insufficiently represented in the club" and suggested that the club should be made more inclusive.
People of all faiths mixed in the club. The neighborhood had children in numerous schools -- Sacred Heart and Central Catholic, Fulton and Peabody, Shadyside Academy, Hillel, Winchester-Thurston, and others -- and at the end of the day, "We all played release together. The club brought all the kids together. And frankly, it didn't matter who you were, what religion you were, what school you went to, or what country you were from."
In those days (1950s) the sister of jazz crooner Billy Eckstine may have been the only African-American residing in the neighborhood.
Nothing in the club's charter was racially exclusive, yet the notion of "applying," under the sponsorship of a current member, could be used to keep people out. This crumbled, however, on an African-American family's second attempt at joining in 1961.
The family's first check was returned with no explanation, save the word stamped, "REJECTED." Some members objected to this exclusion, and the decision was reversed.
The Highland Park Community Club was founded as a family organization by men at a time when a family was considered to be led by the husband. Very few women were working. Thus, a family membership meant that it was listed in the husband's name. Annual fees were paid by him. This was reflected in the charter for the club's first twenty-four years. But women played key roles in all of the club's activities.
The Highland Park Community Club's Ladies Auxiliary played a key role in fundraising, raffling a twelve-and-a-half inch Sylvania television set (television was a new luxury item for most families in 1949 and had the power to cut short a board meeting), raising $2,000 for baseball.
Women hosted elegantly catered board meetings that were often followed by "music of unique quality" on the squeeze box of John Ballard and parties that lasted past midnight.
The Auxiliary hosted bridge parties and other social events just for women. One activity that hasn't been seen at neighborhood picnics for some years is the rolling pin toss.
Exclusion from membership yielded an odd benefit for some women: since they were not members, they could be paid for their efforts. Members volunteered their time, while recording secretaries like Mrs. Betty Finch -- usually the spouse of a board member - could be hired and paid three-hundred dollars; men volunteered to coach the boys' sports teams, while dance instructors Genevieve Jones and Miss Ruth Fairgrieves were paid $450 for teaching dance. Summer play school helpers, mostly female college students, were also paid.
A rewrite of bylaws initiated in 1968 removed "male," and "heads of household'' from membership requirements. Women were admitted as full and equal members in 1970.
This inclusion resulted from necessity. Declining numbers of children had seen baseball, an activity that built community, dropped by the club. Women were running more and more activities as men began to lose interest.
Jeanne Mischler and Margo Reynolds were the first female board members. When they were asked to be President and Vice President, Margo convinced Jean that they should decline. "For two women to be running the club, that would've been the end of the men's participation. So we declined, in order to keep them involved."
In 1980, Maureen Cato became the first woman president of the club.