Alvin Rosensweet, whose newspaper career intersected with the triumph and tumult of the 20th century, died yesterday at 99 at The Residence on Fifth.

A steady hand and sparkling writer under the fiercest of deadline pressures, Mr. Rosensweet was as often as not the reporter to whom editors turned when the weightiest of events came to bear on Pittsburgh, whether it was the assassination of a president or the struggles of the Civil Rights era.

"If there were a Post-Gazette Hall of Fame, Al Rosensweet would get in on the first ballot, by acclamation," said Peter Leo, a retired columnist and longtime friend.

Others at the paper echoed that sentiment yesterday, when word of Mr. Rosensweet's death reached the newsroom.

"Al was in his day a crack reporter who gave elegance to the term 'newspaperman.' I have known him since I was young; he was one of the last Pittsburgh Post-Gazette old-timers left. I will miss him," said John Robinson Block, the paper's editor-in-chief and publisher.

David M. Shribman, Post-Gazette executive editor, praised Mr. Rosensweet as an insightful reader and an example to the generations of reporters that followed him here.

"Nothing escaped his attention and nothing bored him. He was an example to so many of us who came to the Post-Gazette long after he left. We knew that if we kept faith with Al, we were keeping faith with the greatest traditions of journalism and of this newspaper," Mr. Shribman said.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants, the young Mr. Rosensweet's neighborhood street car passed by the bicycle shop run by Orville and Wilbur Wright. At 13, he began working as a high school sports writer for the Dayton Daily News, working alongside a young Scottish immigrant named James Reston. Mr. Rosensweet later graduated from Ohio State University where he covered sports for the Columbus Dispatch.

As a sports writer in Dayton, he interviewed Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden and Walter Hagen. He covered the famous "Iron Curtain" speech by Winston Churchill at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., in March 1946, the event that marked the start of the Cold War. He covered the trial of Chicago gangster George "Bugs" Moran.

His career was interrupted by World War II, when he served in the Army Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Base.

Resuming his career after the war, he joined the Post-Gazette in 1949, quickly rising through the ranks of the paper's deadline reporters.

When Republican presidential nominee Dwight Eisenhower was set to meet with his beleaguered running mate, Richard Nixon, after the famous "Checkers" speech, it was Mr. Rosensweet the Post-Gazette sent to cover the meeting at an airport in Wheeling, W.Va.

From the 1960 World Series victory by the Pittsburgh Pirates to the arrival here of a British pop group called The Beatles, Mr. Rosensweet's life was a virtual triptych of the people and events that shaped the 20th century.

In 1965, he waded into the volatile issue of race relations, with a penetrating series of articles about a black couple who faced roadblocks in their efforts to buy a home in upscale Mt. Lebanon. The series won him one of three Golden Quill Awards from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania. It also earned him so many threatening telephone calls that police guards were stationed outside his home in Shadyside.

When events far from Pittsburgh struck home, it was often Mr. Rosensweet to whom editors turned for the local version. His account of Pittsburgh's reaction to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is among those embossed on souvenir drinking glasses sold by the newspaper.

"They're my only evidence of immortality," he once quipped.

Not quite.

In truth, Mr. Rosensweet is immortalized on film.

Graduating from Ohio State in the depths of the Great Depression, Mr. Rosensweet drove to Los Angeles the year of his graduation in a Pierce Arrow roadster that had been repossessed from Skin Young, then a vocalist with the famed Abe Lyman Band. Jobs were virtually non-existent and Mr. Rosensweet wound up as an extra in two films at the Fox Studios: "Face in the Sky," with Spencer Tracy and Stuart Erwin, and "Cavalcade," a movie about the Titanic.

Back in Dayton, with no newspaper jobs available, he worked in the advertising departments of three department stores until 1937 when he got a job as a sports writer at the Dayton Herald. He subsequently became a news reporter and Sunday editor and joined the Post-Gazette in 1949 when the PG began a Sunday edition that lasted eight months.

He quickly drew the attention of editors for his reliability. They rewarded him with plum assignments.

Mr. Rosensweet was among the reporters who crouched for cover as Joseph Gaito, the famous Chicken Hill Bandit, traded gunfire with police. After The Beatles completed their concert, Mr. Rosensweet found himself in the back of a police decoy van sent out to divert screaming fans -- and a man raised on Big Bands was rocked and rolled.

Among his early work was a series of articles about Betty Jean Gilliam, then a 13-year-old girl who was struck and seriously injured by a runaway car in Hazelwood. The stories brought him attention in a new medium, television, when CBS featured him on a show called "Strike it Rich," a program that honored newspaper people who had performed a public service.

In 1970, it was Mr. Rosensweet who was sent to the home of Allison Kraus, a young Churchill woman who was among four students shot to death by national guardsmen during a confrontation at Kent State University. A decade later, he wrote more than 40 articles exploring the mysterious death of Wen-Chen Chen, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who was found dead on the campus of a university in Taipei. The ruling Taiwanese party was long suspected in his death.

In retirement, after 37 years with the Post-Gazette, he became one of the paper's most avid -- and keen-eyed -- readers, sending along praise, tips and the occasional gentle criticism. After retiring, he continued his contacts with old colleagues. He prided himself in every year attending the Hair of the Dog Party, a post-New Year's cocktail-and-banter gathering hosted by a local public relations agency.

Some Post-Gazette colleagues attended just to connect with Mr. Rosensweet and hear his stories.

In 1989 Mr. Rosensweet was honored by the Press Club with its President's Award for lifetime achievement.

In later years, plagued by vision problems, Mr. Rosensweet switched to a trio of radios that tethered him to the city's events. One carried a daily broadcast of the reading of the local newspaper. Another he used for radio news, the third for sports.

A son, Tom, who lives in New Jersey, said he and his brother sometimes talked with their father about moving in with them, but they lived out of town -- too far for radio contact.

"Once in a while I would bring it up and in the end he would say, 'No, I want to stay right here.' He wanted to get the Pittsburgh news," Tom Rosensweet said.

Mr. Rosensweet served on the boards of the Jewish Family and Children's Service, the Anti-Defamation League, National Conference of Christians and Jews and the Brotherhood of Temple Rodef Shalom, of which he was a member.

But his greatest joy as a volunteer after his retirement was serving with the Free Wheelers, an agency that takes wheelchair residents of nursing homes on outings.

"It was the best thing I ever did," he said.

Mr. Rosensweet was married in November 1941, to Beatrice Perlman of Fort Wayne, Ind. She died in 2002.

He is survived by two sons, James Rosensweet of Lake Havasu City, Ariz., and Thomas Rosensweet of Jersey City, N.J.; five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Services will be at 2 p.m. Friday at Rodef Shalom Temple, 4905 Fifth Ave., Shadyside, with visitation one hour prior. Interment will be at West View Cemetery of Rodef Shalom Congregation.

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