"Neighbors Grow Closer Through Backyard Gardens in Roscoe"

Your Humble, Faithful Blogster has two feature articles in the Mon Valley section of today's Tribune-Review. Neither, however, is on the newspaper's website. I will blog them, until (unless) they show up on-line at the Trib. (I didn't notice any substantive changes to either from what I had submitted.) This is the second.

In two next-door neighbors’ back yards in Roscoe, a love of flowers spanning the generations blooms from earliest spring until the frosts of autumn.

Carol Kroskie and Mary Milbert have lived next to each other since 1978 – and have been neighbors for even longer, since Milbert had lived across the street for a decade before that. Their small, level lots on Garfield Avenue are cherished flower gardens mostly hidden from passersby, especially those going by in cars. Walkers and bicyclists paying attention, though, will notice the delicate wildflowers blooming before Milbert’s front porch and the roses by the fence, or the hydrangeas in front of Kroskie’s house and the irises and tiger lilies along the side, marching towards the street.

Milbert, who grew up in Roscoe, says she has been keeping flower gardens most of her life.

“I got into gardening when I was still living at home. We lived in a double house, and I took over my grandmother’s garden,” she recalls, “when she died in 1953.”

A few perennial flowers in Milbert’s garden survive from those days: “The small yellow primroses were originally from my grandmother’s garden,” she says, “and the hostas, and the snow drops.”

Kroskie grew up in Granville, and didn’t start gardening until the early 1980s when she and Milbert started a daily walking tour.

“We were really the first ones to start walking around here,” Kroskie remembers. “We walked together for about 12 years.”

“Carol and I were the walking club in those days,” Milbert says. “We walked 4 miles, shy two-tenths. Up around Elco, through Roscoe down to the mill fence in Stockdale, then back up through Stroall Acres and Roscoe into Elco again, and back home.”

Kroskie’s husband, Larry, remembers giving it a try. “It was a daily ritual with them. Every day. I tried it a couple of times, but I couldn’t keep up.”

Those walks took them near the riverside home of the late Helen Bourbous in Stockdale. She was a prolific gardener – and a generous one, too – and Milbert and Kroskie benefited from Bourbous’ largesse of plants, bulbs, rizomes, and seeds.

“We used to carry things home in bags,” Milbert remembers. “Sometimes it was hard to see because of the leaves.”

“And I used to wonder sometimes,” Kroskie chimes in, “what people would be thinking.”

Milbert used to look through her various catalogs and be amazed at Bourbous’ generosity.

“Some of her irises – the rizomes would cost eight or nine dollars a piece. And she once handed me a plastic lunch bag filled with columbine seeds – probably a couple of hundred dollars’ worth, I figured out later.”

Bourbous’ gardens are now all grass, a level lawn. But her flowers and other plants still grow in Milbert’s and Kroskie’s yards.

They have acquired plants from elsewhere, too. “I used to go knocking on people’s doors and asking if I could take cuttings from their rose bushes,” Milbert says. And tulips, hyacinths, daffodils, and poppies were recent acquisitions from the yard of an old house not long before it was torn down.

Milbert’s favorite flowers are roses, while Kroskie’s are hydrangeas and foxgloves.

“I make sure they go to seed, then I sprinkle them around,” Kroskie says. “And share with neighbors,” she adds with a smile.

A small magnolia tree rises amid the stone patio in the Kroskie’s back yard, where a bench and swing share space with the granddaughter’s toys. A white dogwood and two apple trees have their place on Milbert’s property: they provide an unusual refuge for nesting birds, for she has made them into “gourd trees.”

“I bought a gourd that at first I thought was only 99 cents. But it was actually 99¢ a pound, so it cost me twelve dollars. And I planted the seeds to get my money’s worth.”

Getting an idea from a TV show, she started to make birds’ houses out of the gourds, hanging them from branches on her trees. Of ten or so altogether, three or four of the gourds are usually occupied during the season. After having dried them out over winter, she scrubs them with steel wool to get rid of mold. Then she puts a hole in the side for the birds to go in and out, and a hole at the bottom for drainage.

“And little holes on the top,” she adds, “so the heat doesn’t build up. You don’t want to fry the eggs.”

Gardening can be hard work, and it’s often frustrating. Kroskie puts it this way: “The worst part of gardening is the diseases, mold, and bugs. And the weeding, too. But, I even enjoyed pulling the weeds when I could,” she admits, though a back injury and poorer health prevent her from doing as much now as she used to do.

A gift from Bourbous many years ago, more than flowers and shrubs, remains with her still.

“When I would go down to Helen’s, there was such a peacefulness, a serenity, in her garden,” she remembers, “and I can’t quite explain how I felt when I started gardening.” Collecting her thoughts, she continues: “People look for happiness everywhere. But I found mine gardening. Pulling weeds. Just digging in the dirt.”

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 05/22/05 09:11:17 PM
Categorized as E.L. Core @ The Tribune-Review.

"Elco Sandlot Star Still Scouting Around"

Your Humble, Faithful Blogster has two feature articles in the Mon Valley section of today's Tribune-Review. Neither, however, is on the newspaper's website. I will blog them, until (unless) they show up on-line at the Trib. (I didn't notice any substantive changes to either from what I had submitted.) This is the first.

It’s Spring. And that means baseball.

From tee-ball leagues to the majors, teams have been formed, and players have been practicing for weeks, and the games are underway. Coaches have sized up their roster, figuring out who will work best in which position. And the scouts, too, have already been sizing up the players.

Tony Segzda, of Elco, has been travelling the ins and outs of baseball for seven decades. First, he played as a boy in pick-up games, then as a star high-school pitcher who went on to play seven seasons with minor-league teams in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ farm system. Now, he’s a part-time scout for the Baltimore Orioles.

Growing up in Crescent Heights, West Pike Run Township, Segzda started playing baseball when he was five or six.

“They didn’t have Little League back then, of course. You just played with a bunch of kids,” he points out.

By the time he was a senior in high school, Segzda had become a star attraction for California’s team. “When I was a freshman,” he notes, “they didn’t have baseball because of the war. They started it again when I was a sophomore.”

His sister-in-law Linda Barli, of Dunlevy, recalls those days. “Tony and Eddie Roebuck would have pitching duels. Eddie played for Brownsville,” she explains, “and when their two teams were playing each other, people would go to the game just to see which pitcher was going to win.”

Roebuck went on to have an 11-year career in the majors, starting with the Dodgers in 1955.

The day after his high-school graduation in 1947, the Boston Braves (now in Atlanta) took Segzda to Pittsburgh to work out with them. He was somewhat concerned when they quickly asked him to come off the field.

“It was a really, really short workout. I didn’t even break a sweat,” he remembers.

But they had already decided to ask him to go with the team to Cincinnati for a week.

“I don’t know if my parents will let me go,” he recalls having to say. But a telephone call got their approval to do whatever he wanted.

After a week with the Braves in Cincinnati, and another five days working out with one of their minor-league teams, he got a contract offer. But he decided to go back home and wait on word of a Penn State scholarship he thought might be coming his way.

Shortly, he pitched a no-hit shutout in an American Legion game. The very next day, Segzda remembers, a local Pirates scout came knocking on his door, offering him a contract. His contact for the scholarship possibility was away on vacation, so he decided not to pass up the chance with the Pirates’ organization.

Except for the 1952 season, when he was in the Army, he played for several of the Pirates’ farm clubs over the next eight years: he started in Uniontown, went as far west as Waco and as far south as New Orleans, and finally ended his minor-league career in Williamsport in 1954.

“After that, they released me – though others might say ‘fired’,” he grins.

He came back home and got a job with Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel in Monessen, where he worked until early retirement in 1986. He played semi-pro ball on a couple of local teams for a couple of seasons, last playing in 1956.

“That league finally folded,” he said, “because the bottom teams couldn’t compete, and the top teams couldn’t afford the players any more.”

A chance meeting in 1987 got Segzda back into the sport professionally in a different capacity.

His brother-in-law, Roy Barli, had been a starting freshman on California High School’s team during Segzda’s senior year. Barli ran into the scouting director for the Baltimore Orioles at a Valentine’s Day dance at the Charleroi Elks. Fred Uhlman, a 1948 Charleroi graduate, had played against Segzda in their high-school days.

“Tony was a very good pitcher,” Uhlman remembers. “He had a good fastball and a good curveball. Every team in the area had some good pitching back then, but he was at the top.”

Uhlman and Segzda had later played together in the minors – sometimes on the same team, sometimes against each other. On that February night, he asked Barli what Segzda was doing those days.

“The mill is closing down,” he replied, “so he won’t be doing anything.”

Thereupon, Uhlman provided his phone number at Memorial Park in Baltimore, with the request that Segzda give him a call.

“At that time, I was recommending scouts,” Ulhman says. “And I knew that Tony would be a good one, because of his experience and his concern for the game.”

At first, Segzda thought he’d be scouting for a year or two. And his wife, Mary Alice, says, “Every year, he thinks this could be his last year.”

But he’s spending his nineteenth season travelling as far north as Erie, as far west as Harrisburg, and sometimes to the northern reaches of West Virginia and Maryland.

His next-door neighbor, Chuck Gismondi, coached baseball at California University of Pennsylvania from 1973 to 1996. Gismondi considers it a privilege to have been invited along on scouting trips with Segzda and a local scout for the Dodgers, the late Don “Ducky” LeJohn, who had played for the Los Angeles team in 1965.

“I learned more baseball sitting in the car with them than anywhere else. And Tony has an uncanny knack,” he continues, “to project what a player will be able to do five years down the road.”

Rick Krivda is a Cal U graduate whom Segzda recruited for the Oriole’s farm system in 1991. Krivda was his first recruit to make it to a major-league club, starting with the Orioles in 1995.

“Krivda was my best player ever,” Gismondi says. “Only a handful of scouts were interested in him. So, a lot of scouts were wrong about him, but Tony was right.”

What does Segzda look for in a young player? “I look for these. Can he hit? Can he hit with power? Does he run fast? Does he have a strong, accurate arm? And does he have quick feet and soft hands?”

A player with “soft” hands is good at holding onto the ball once he gloves it, rather than having it bounce out.

“We call somebody with all of those a ‘five-tool’ player,” he continues. “Now, he doesn’t have to have all of them to be really good. But if he does, he’s a terrific looking ball player.”

How has the game changed since he played?

“If a pitcher was doing good, he stayed in the whole ballgame,” Segzda remembers. “Today, they put a limit, especially on the younger ones. They’ll bring in a set-up guy in the eighth inning, and a closer in the ninth, even if the starting pitcher is doing really good.”

“And nowadays,” he continues, “the manager stands in the dugout giving signs to the catcher to give to the pitcher. I wonder if the managers these days think they’re smarter than before, or think the players aren’t as smart as they used to be.”

Segzda was inducted into the Big-Ten Fayette County Baseball Hall of Fame in 1986, the Trojan Booster Club (California, PA) Hall of Fame in 1991, and the American Legion, Department of Pennsylvania, Sports Hall of Fame in 2001.

His Big-Ten citation reads as follows: “His playing ability has gained for him a berth among the greatest sandlot players of all time.”

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 05/22/05 09:06:18 PM
Categorized as E.L. Core @ The Tribune-Review.

Three by Hopkins III

Three poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The Lantern Out of Doors

Sometimes a lantern moves along the night.
   That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
   I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright
   In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
   They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
   What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.

Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
   There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd,
Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.

(Poems 1876-89)

The Candle Indoors

Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by.
I muse at how its being puts blissful back
With yellowy moisture mild night's blear-all black,
Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye.

By that window what task what fingers ply,
I plod wondering, a-wanting, just for lack
Of answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack
There God to aggrándise, God to glorify.—

Come you indoors, come home; your fading fire
Mend first and vital candle in close heart's vault:
You there are master, do your own desire;

What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault
In a neighbour deft-handed? Are you that liar
And, cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt?

(Poems 1876-89)

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
   As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
   Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
   Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
   Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say more: the just man justices;
   Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
   Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
   To the Father through the features of men's faces.

(Poems 1876-89)

The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (fourth edition), ed. W.H. Gardner & N.H. MacKenzie, ## 40, 46, 57; pp. 71, 81, 90.

See also Three by Hopkins II: Three sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 05/22/05 08:46:06 AM
Categorized as Literary & Religious & Sunday Poetry Series.