The stories of people's lives -- a good portion of any history -- take on a larger dimension in community affairs. The club's fifty-year record of achievement springs largely from the efforts of individuals who take on responsibility for making things happen.
The Highland Park Community Club's founders were professionals and businessmen -- family doctors, surgeons, plumbers, physicists, bakers and bankers -- interested in their families. They knew how to get things done, knew how to throw a good party, and believed in bringing the community together.
Murray Johnston, first president of the Highland Park Community Club, is remembered as a caring, unselfish man. He was interested in everybody, and would rather hear about other people than talk about himself. You could tell Johnston a fact about yourself, not see him for years, and he would remember everything you told him. He cultivated an attitude of being open to criticism and feedback that helped the community club grow by tenfold in its first year.
Johnston and his family moved to Highland Park in 1940 after finishing nine years of night classes, earning a business administration degree at the University of Pittsburgh. He came up with the idea of a community club simply to help his wife, who had her hands full with twin boys and a daughter.
Johnston became Vice President in charge of credit for Gulf Oil. When the company moved his department to Houston around 1960, he tried it out but soon took early retirement and returned to the family's home on Wellesley Road.
A busy man who was always making things happen, Johnston worked tirelessly in fundraising for Pitt's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, receiving an award and medal on a visit from the dean of GSPIA while hospitalized. He is credited with starting a Block Watch program that was used as a model for block watches throughout the country. He was chairman of fundraising for the March of Dimes and was an elder in the East Liberty
Presbyterian Church .
Between the families of William McKenna, second President of the Highland Park Community Club, and his brother, Frank McKenna, were sixteen children in club activities. William McKenna had twelve children and was President of Hanlon Gregory Galvanizing Company.
James P. Ifft Jr., third President of the Highland Park Community Club, is remembered as a wonderful man, a tremendous fellow with an open mind and a life filled with accomplishment. Before he was president of the club, he coached the pony and little league baseball teams.
Ifft was born in the Hill District and graduated from Schenley High, the University of Pittsburgh, and Pitt Law School. He was an attorney and solicitorfor Columbia Savings Bank, one of the few banks reaching out to minorities inthe '30s and '40s.
Ifft made it his lifelong legal practice to help black businesses get loans. He reached out to help black families get home mortgages. This ability to connect and help people originated from the extraordinary mix of people Ifft knew and played with as a boy.
He loved growing up on the Hill and talking about the Hill's famous personalities spread around the country in sports, entertainment, and politics. Its mix of people influenced him for the rest of his life. He was able to make life-long friends in all communities, and loved to bring people together.
Ifft was dedicated to city life as a way of learning about life. He never wanted to have anything to do with the growing suburbs, and chided people, "What are you ever going to learn about life and people out there?"
He was also an athlete, playing baseball for the Reinecker Club at Center Avenue and Craig Street in North Oakland, next to the Luna. They were serious ballplayers that played against the Homestead Grays, Pittsburgh Crawfords, and other well-organized club teams.
Harry K. Voelp, Jr., fourth President of the Highland Park Community Club, owned an advertising firm, lived on Greystone Drive before moving to a large house on Heberton Street at top of Hampton Avenue. Harry and Bertie Voelp raised five children in the neighborhood.
Fred Parkin, fifth President of the Highland Park Community Club, was an extroverted man who loved microphones, podiums, and parties. At the club's annual picnics, Parkin arranged for the bullhorn rental from the Glo Radio company. Announcing electic mixer and travel iron raffle winners at the annual family picnic at North Park was simply another chance to get behind the bullhorn.
Parkin was the organizational force behind twelfth-night burnings until city passed a law against it. He was so extroverted in his activities, his motto might have been, "Have so much fun that they have to legislate against it."
Parkin's brother Bill was also a club member, and the exact opposite of Fred. As much as Fred was extroverted, Bill was introverted. Fred and Bill were born and grew up in the house that their grandfather owned on the northwest corner of Hampton and Negley Avenues.
Their great-grandfather Charles Parkin immigrated to the United States and started Parkin Manufacturing in 1880, which continues as the family-run Parkin Chemical Company in Lawrenceville.
Fred Parkin attended Fulton School, Shadyside Academy, and Princeton University. He joined the army and served four years of combat duty as a highly-decorated captain of a tank destroyer unit in North Africa and Europe.
When he was thrown off a German tank, he received a bruise to his back and came home for one month's medical leave. While he was in the VA hospital came one of the high points of his life: the war in Europe ended.
Parkin started his post-war life with his wife and newborn son by moving to Wayne Road and going to work for his father in 1946. Over the next three decades, the two brothers successfully transformed the company from a steel and forging company into a chemical company specializing in industrial corrosion inhibitors.
As a member of the Lion's Club, and President of University Club in Oakland, Parkin believed strongly in America, community and service. As a leader of the Highland Park Community Club, Parkin ran the four dens of Cub Scout Pack 17. Whether leading boys across the Highland Park Bridge for a weekend camp at Guyasuta in Aspinwall or leading the club's social events from behind a microphone, Parkin is remembered as a person who made everything he was involved in a lot of fun.
Franklin H. Allison Jr., sixth President of the Highland Park Community Club, was a brilliant metallurgist known worldwide for his innovations in cold rolling mills. He served as president of the Carnegie Tech Alumni Association, had a sharp sense of humor and knew five-hundred limericks by heart. He listened to his favorite opera music with the doors of his house flung wide for everybody on Winterton street to hear.
Allison was born in 1902 in Oakland, went to Schenley High and received a degree in metallurgy from Carnegie Tech.
He then went to Sheffield University in England, for his PhD in Metallurgy. At that time it was an uncommon field of study; in the United States, only the Massachussetts Institute of Technology offered a metalurgy Ph.D.
Allison went to work for Crucible Steel in 1927. When the depression came along in 1929, he got married, lost his job and had a son. He got a job at United Engineering and Foundry in Vandergrift, stayed through World War II and became chief metallurgist. Rolled metal was on the frontiers of science, and Allison created heating methods and alloys that prevent cracking as an inch-thick slab of steel is processed through five stages of rolling, emerging as a thin sheet to be used for things like vehicle doors and hoods.
The depression and war strongly influenced Allison and many other Americans in his situation. As one of three children in a wealthy family, they had everything in the twenties; in the thirties, they had nothing.
By the 1940s, they were old enough to miss the draft. During the war, they were busy again, working very hard on production for the war. United Engineering, like most mills, was running full tilt producing machinery for the navy.
Emerging from the war, the Allisons were very sociable and loved to throw parties, have picnics and use any excuse for a get-together.
Dick Friday, seventh President of the Highland Park Community Club, was an active, innovative, extremely inquisitive man who lived in Highland Park for over four decades. Dick and his brother John "J.R." Friday, younger by a year, were born on Avondale Place. When when Dick was three, their mother died and their father took J.R. and Dick over to the 200 block of South Aiken Avenue where they were raised by extended family, four doors down from David L. Lawrence.
They attended Saint Paul's Cathedral School, Central Catholic and the University of Pittsburgh. Dick'and his wife Keith lived in the family's Aiken Avenue home before buying a home across from Murray Johnston on Wellesley Road. When Dick was the club's recording secretary, one board meeting was adjourned early when Keith went into labor with one of their eight children.
Dick brought his active, innovative mind to the Highland Park Community Club, always doing something special in holidays. He is credited with starting the club's holiday decorating contest and securing gift certificates at Mansmann's department store for winners.