During the St. Patrick's Day flood of 1936, James Lally of Oakland was 12 years old and scared.

The night before, he'd swallowed a hat pin and, promptly, the hunk of bread his grandma gave him so it wouldn't stick in his throat. His mother took him the next morning to Children's Hospital, where he was X-rayed just before the power died.

They knew Downtown was flooding, but not how bad. So his mother decided to take the streetcar to Horne's department store on lower Penn Avenue, where she worked as a sales clerk.

They could get no farther than Gimbels department store, up on Smithfield Street. They were stopped by police and the water.

"Oh, it was terrible," recalls Lally, who eventually, and safely, passed the pin and grew up to serve in the 1970s on Pittsburgh City Council. But he still tells this story like it happened yesterday.

"The water was rising," he says, putting himself back Downtown 70 years ago. "You could see it rising." Canoes already cruised what used to be streets.

By this time, nothing was running, so they turned and headed home to Oakland -- on foot.

It was only about 2 in the afternoon, but rainy, dark and dismal.

"I remember my mother saying, "It looks like the end of the world, Jimmy.' "