The Next Page / How we punched it out: From Mill Hunk Herald to Northside Chronicle
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Larry Evans and Leslie Byrd Evans, then his wife, in 1981.
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My adventure in journalism actually began in my hometown Baltimore, where I "worked" as a cub reporter briefly under P.J. O'Rourke, then the esteemed editor of the underground newspaper Harry. I thought P.J. was the funniest dude alive. He thought I was an expendable idiot. So I was dispatched far and wide to duly cover endangered early '70s rock festivals in the jungles of Louisiana and -- bingo! -- the outskirts of Pittsburgh.
In Pittsburgh, I met so many people just as hyper-activist as me that I stuck around.
I was out in the far-flung fringe getting so radicalized that I went and got me a job with U.S. Steel and started the magical Mill Hunk Herald quarterly magazine in my basement office at 916 Middle St., North Side, in 1979. P.J. O'Rourke promptly blessed the trouble-making Hunk, saying I could use whatever I wanted from the National Lampoon magazine (where he got his next job), only that when I started making tons of money, he'd bleed me white with lawsuits.
In Pittsburgh's mill shutdowns era -- why this was a prime time opportunity for shiftless radicals such as me -- folks like Studs Terkel, Pete Seeger and Kurt Vonnegut began applauding the sizzling spunk of the Herald. Middle Street began reelin' and a-rockin' out many a fun fund-raiser like the Mill Hunk Ball at the Allegheny Starlight Ballroom just across that highway there where all those houses used to be, a Mill Hunk Funk Disco at the long gone Islam Grotto, a Mill Hunk Junk flea market, Mill Hunk Munch dinner (to the appropriate accordion music), a Run of the Mill 10K, a Mill Hunk Dunk Swim Party (with or without...), Mill Hunk Bunk Pajama Party (with or without... strange poetry) and the Mill Hunk Haunt Halloween Party at the Mattress Factory and so on ...
That's right, we beat it to death.
As the Mill Hunk poster boy, I also wrote some pithy, pro-labor opeds for the Post-Gazette and occasional features for In Pittsburgh newsweekly, Z, the Progressive and Pittsburgh magazines. I appeared in two Tony Buba movies in Braddock back when they actually had a functioning hospital.
First Published November 28, 2010 12:00 am
