The Homestead Fizz is two ounces of gin mixed with an ounce of Italian vermouth, topped with club soda and garnished with a slice of orange.

	Post-Gazette Betty Esper, as mayor of Homestead in August 1990, supported plans of the Park Corp. to redevelop the USX Homestead Steel Works, in the background. Click photo for larger image.

The Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails found the recipe for a gin and vermouth "Homestead" cocktail -- genesis unknown -- in a 1936 bar book. So as not to entirely inebriate the women at the Frick Art Museum last Wednesday night, they watered it down and fizzed it up with a little club soda.

"If that drink were ever sold in Homestead, it would fizzle," Betty Esper said at the kitchen table on the museum's stage. "What was served was a shot and a beer."

Around the table, layered with vintage cloths, Esper joined three other Homestead women for an evening of reminiscence about life in the steel town. It was oral herstory, straight up and with a twist of humor.

Co-sponsored by LUPEC, the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area and the women of the Frick Art & Historical Center, the evening event, called "Kitchen Tables Stories," was a chance to both honor these women's lives and learn more about them. It was also a mental kick in the pants to sit down with our own mothers, grandmothers and aunts, listen to their stories and get them on tape before it's too late.

Esper recalled her family's first refrigerator -- a box in the window -- and how her mother would get up early to light the coal stove in the dining room for her 13 children. That stove "made the best chestnuts," roasted on top till they popped.

In 1951, right out of high school, Esper went to work as a messenger in the mill. She stayed for 36 years, until the mill closed in 1987.

"We built this country," she said. "The Brooklyn Bridge, the Alaska pipeline, Sputnik, the U.S.S. Enterprise, they were all made with steel rolled in Homestead."

In 1980, she won a seat on borough council and 10 years later began her second career, mayor of Homestead, a position she stills holds at the age of 72.

Marlene Todd Robinson -- better known to family and friends as Pumpkin -- also worked in the mill right out of high school, in the early 1970s. But that wasn't her first paying job. As a girl, she earned $5 for retrieving items from the cleaners for neighborhood prostitutes.

Moderator Janis Dofner, communications director for Rivers of Steel, asked the women to recall their earliest memories.

"My first childhood memory was when I realized I was black," Robinson said. Another is carrying little pieces of paper in a bag from house to house. Years later, she realized she was helping relatives book numbers, often in half-penny stakes and divined by finding in a dream book the number that matched what they'd dreamt about the night before. Sometimes, "my grandmother would hit for a nickel."

Robinson grew up to run the Homestead parking authority for 16 years, serve as president of the borough NAACP and work on many youth-oriented community projects, including the creation of Spice Writers, a weekly gathering of girls who express themselves through the written word.

Patricia Penka French, born in Homestead in 1930 to Bulgarian-immigrant parents, knew only two English words she'd learned on the street when she started kindergarten -- "shut" and "up." She'd use them in response to any question from her teacher, who to this day calls French by her kindergarten nickname: "Shut up." She grew up to become an interpreter and a guide for the U.S. State Department, fund-raiser for the Duquesne University Tamburitzans and president in the 1990s of the Pittsburgh Folk Festival.

Easter Little Baker sounds like a character in an Annie Proulx novel, but she's a real, live octogenarian who was raised on a farm in Kentucky and came to Homestead in 1944 as the bride of Dr. George Little. To get here, they drove through sooty snow in Schenley Park. She thought Pittsburgh was the dirtiest place she had ever seen.

But the Littles stayed, and when Easter got a job in a pharmacy, Esper told the group, she became the first African American to work in a store on Eighth Avenue. Eventually Baker put her University of Louisville degree to work as a special education teacher at Mon Valley School, and in recent years she has received many awards for her decades of community service.

Earlier that evening, Robin Pflasterer, registrar of the Frick Art & Historical Center's Clayton house museum, talked about an oral history interview the Frick staff had conducted with Mrs. Charles Dudley Armstrong, one of Clayton's lifelong neighbors, after Helen Clay Frick's death in 1984.

Armstrong remembered Helen as a frail and delicate child and their neighborhood of big houses, overflowing with butlers, maids, governesses and cooks, as not very neighborly. Even the parties were "formal and not much fun."

By the end of the evening, life in Homestead sounded so much richer.