There are many of us who still miss the The Pittsburgh Press.

Even TechMan, a Post-Gazette guy all the way, remembers with fondness the days when the scrappy little morning PG competed against staid Mother Press. In those days I always thought of the afternoon Press as a workingman's paper.

Well, I have some happy news. The Pittsburgh Press lives again -- at least its archives do, on the Web.

With the approval of the Post-Gazette, Google has begun to digitize the microfilm archives of the Press and post them on the Web. The Post-Gazette's permission was required because it owns the Press archives.

But Google doesn't make this material easy to find.

To locate it, go to the Google.com home page and click on "advanced search" to the right of the box where you enter your search terms.

On the resulting page click on "Google News archive search" in the bottom left-hand corner of the page.

On the resulting page, click on "advanced archive search," again to the right of the search box.

Or you can just go to news.google.com/archivesearch/advanced_search if you're better than I am at typing long URLs. In either case, when you get there, bookmark it.

Now you are at the page where you can perform your search. Type Gilbert Love into the window that says "with all of the words." In the window to the right of "return results that come from," type Pittsburgh Press.

Voila, you should get a listing of Gilbert Love columns from the Press.

You can use Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or even Commercial Gazette as your source if you want to go back to the 1800s. (If you just want to browse, use Pittsburgh as your search word). But those archives have been there for a while, unlike the Press.

If you double-click on one of Gilbert Love's columns, you will be taken to a representation of the page. Your cursor is a hand that allows you to click and drag the page around on the screen.

Above are magnifying glass icons to enlarge or reduce the page, a box where you can type in the page number you want to view and arrows to go to the next page or the previous page.

My thanks to reader Norma Chase for alerting me to this. Although I knew digitizing the Press was planned, I didn't know it had actually started. Ms. Chase said she spent an entertaining evening reading through Press archives.

Now, into the Press.

Oh, the department store ads.

On Nov. 4, 1955, May-Stern's of East Liberty was selling a "giant 21-inch life size (people must have been pretty small back then) console TV" for $148. And you got S&H Green Stamps. Just a few pages before that, Horne's was advertising a 21-inch RCA console TV with mahogany finish for $269.95.

Frank and Seder department store was offering a Lionel train set for $29.95 with red gondola car with barrels, crane car and working caboose.

The department store ads went on and on, Rosenbaum's, Gimbels, Kaufmann's, Boggs and Buhl.

On the movie page were ads for 21 drive-in theaters and numerous Downtown theaters, including the John P. Harris, Loew's Penn, Warner, Nixon, Fulton and Stanley.

And the booze ads. This was when you could still find them in newspapers. You could choose from Dixie Belle gin, Philadelphia, Haller's Reserve, Embassy Club, Old Hickory, Bellow's Partners Choice, Kasser's 51, Walker's DeLuxe or Carstairs whiskey, to name a few. People must have been big drinkers back then. I guess at $1.15 to $1.45 a pint they could afford to be.

All this and more in one edition of The Pittsburgh Press. Newspapers were in their heyday then, both as news sources and advertising vehicles.

And we haven't even talked about news content.

There is an article by Rogers Hornsby in the Oct. 3, 1927, Press saying he thinks the Pirates are the equal of the Yankees, even with Gehrig and Ruth.

Or you can read how Y.A. Tittle tossed three TD passes to beat the Steelers on Dec. 16, 1963, ending their title hopes.

Front page news that day was the temperature of 2 below zero and the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra's son.

So whether you want to take a stroll down memory lane or are a young'n who wants to see what a big city newspaper was like in its economic glory days, The Pittsburgh Press on Google is your ticket.

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