The Mt. Washington Seven , livre ebook

Xlibris US - William R. Phillippe

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47 pages

English

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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.

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Fiction

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Publié par	Xlibris US
Date de parution	15 juin 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9798369400999
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE Mt. Washington SEVEN

William R. Phillippe

Copyright © 2023 by William R. Phillippe.
Library of Congress Control Number:

2023911305
ISBN:
Hardcover
979-8-3694-0101-9

Softcover
979-8-3694-0100-2

eBook
979-8-3694-0099-9

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: 06/13/2023

Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
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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 Mount 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,” tonight is clear. 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 created by the setting sun’s reflection on some stray clouds and on the east by a warm glow from the steel mills of great Bessemer Converters.
Mount 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 face of the hill down to the steel mills on the riverside.
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. 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 had taken 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’m way ahead of myself. You must go back many years to begin to understand who I am and what made me what I am.

Three strong young men, all home on spring break, sat in an inn on the edge of Colmar in the French part of Alsace (the wine-producing region of France), but all were of strong German descent, each guzzling down a mug of dark beer. Colmar had been captured and recaptured by French and German armies time and time again from 1226 when it became an imperial town under Frederick II, who surrounded it with defensive walls.
All 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. All came from prosperous wine families, and all had heard, for all their lifetime, the debate as to 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,” whose 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 Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin and the existence as a separate province was 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 recruited.
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 Kurt.
“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 East Side, 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 and soon boasted to have 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 Kurt’s relatives in Pittsburgh. And the congregation came up with enough money to buy train tickets to Pittsburgh for all five.
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.
As years went by, they had children, and all moved to Brookline, which was then a rural suburb of Pittsburgh, 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 all five. They went to the same school, played the same games, went camping together, and chased after the same girls—except two of the girls, Carol and Sandy, who were treated specially. 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 piolets.
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 who checked everyone’s work; and Ray, who could come up to any person and within two minutes could find out all there was to know about the other person. Nothing fancy about their names, simple, common, American. All their parents knew each other and considered it their duty to watch out for all five of the young men.
The high school they all went to was the only public high school in Mount Washington, so it gathered a multi ethnic group of students. The ones that came from the workers in the steel mill at the foot of the hill were received like all the others. Everyone knew what their fathers did. The ones from the mill had very interesting titles to their jobs in the mills, and to integrate them, the five guys and all the other students loved to ask them about the neat job names. Some of them were “teemer,” who was the leader: “puller-out,” high paying because he straddled one of the holes at the top of the boiling steel and had to pull out the “pot” to check how it was coming along; “pot-packer,” to name a few. All this made for a very interesting and happy group of students.
Once, they had been to a high school football game. It was not terribly late, but they were in a questionable section of the city. But the boys were strong and able, and Carol and Sandy could hold their own. Then it hit. Three big guys with malice in their eyes came around the corner and walked straight toward the friends. One had a large hunting knife and was pointing it at them. “Your wallets and purse,” said the knife wielder. Bob immediately got out his wallet, but before throwing it down in front of the guy with the knife, he whispered to Carol to move slightly right and scream loudly when the knife guy stooped down to get the wallet. And Carol moved and screamed. Bob moved down to retrieve the wallet and then in one swift move raised his outstretched fist hard into his adversary’s crotch. Then he came up and let loose with an upper cut, which laid him out flat, groaning over the crotch hit. Jack moved into the second one, while Ray laid into the third. By this time, Bob was angry and belted his man and at the s