Joseph Sabino Mistick stories, Page 9

A father’s love and advice last forever. And it seems that we all have a story — a life lesson — that began with a few words of wisdom offered by a father to his child, sometimes at a crossroads in life and often worth retelling. Last week, with Father’s...

William T. Kerr was just a Pittsburgh school kid when he founded the American Flag Day Association of Western Pennsylvania in 1888. Later, he became the national chairman of the association, a position he held for 50 years, and he was at President Truman’s side in 1949 when the law...

Some of us have not been glued to cable news for a few months now, and it has been a welcome break. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, the years leading up to and through the last presidential election were spirited but exhausting, as CNN, Fox and...

When Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor in Pittsburgh’s Strip District recently doubled its starting wage to $15 per hour plus tips, the owners quickly received over a thousand job applications for 16 positions they were unable to fill under the existing minimum wage. This rush to scoop ice cream at the...

Last Tuesday, when Bill Peduto became the first incumbent Pittsburgh mayor since 1933 to be booted from office, it was a story both as old as politics and also new again. He never warmed to the essentials of city government, and he missed by a mile the changes in the...

Since at least 2016 and up until recently, it seemed like there was breaking political news every day, all day long. Maybe you checked your newsfeed first thing every morning or kept your favorite cable news channel on in the background all day long. It became too much, even for...

The big steelmakers have been breaking hearts and promises in the Mon Valley since Andrew Carnegie fired up his first Bessemer converter at Braddock’s Edgar Thomson Works in 1875. That’s why, last week, when U.S. Steel pulled the plug on its promise to modernize the mills in the Mon Valley,...

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit,” Democratic President Harry S. Truman said. As the nation wrestles with what it means to “reach across the aisle,” Democrats can start by conceding that they have not cornered the market on good ideas....

Since the earliest days of warfare and politics, “divide and conquer” has been used by military and political leaders to achieve and hang on to power. Julius Caesar famously used it in Gaul, and Niccolo Machiavelli endorsed it in “The Art of War” as good counsel for despots. At its...

Pittsburgh buried its own Prince Phillip last week. But Phillip A. Coyne Jr. was simply called Phil or Philly by everybody around here. Phil Coyne had seen a lot, laughed a lot and put a lot of smiles on other people’s faces. And his life was a master class in...

There has not been much to laugh about in politics for a long time now, but last week Sen. Mitch McConnell broke the dire mood when he said corporations “should stay out of politics.” If you follow politics and were having your morning coffee when you heard that, you might...

Of all the low-down dirty deeds you can do to anyone, denying them a drink of water when they are thirsty is among the lowest and dirtiest. And that tells you everything you will ever need to know about the politicians running Georgia. Among recent election law changes, the Georgia...

I started to take down the pandemic table last week, but I just couldn’t finish the job. A year ago, in those first days of quarantine, I set up an 8-foot table in the middle of the garage and loaded it with things that our family and friends might need...

In 1832, as New York Sen. William Learned Marcy was defending the spoils system in politics, he used the phrase “to the victor belong the spoils.” In those days, thousands of jobs could change hands every time the political party in charge changed. Civil service eventually eliminated that, and it’s...

Now we know what “quid pro quo” looks like. After the $1.9 trillion tax cut that favored Americans in the top 20 percent income bracket during the Trump administration, the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan spends most of its money on middle-class and lower-income American families and local...

Texans like to say “Everything is bigger in Texas,” and lately it looks like mistakes are bigger there, too. Many people love Texans’ boisterous exceptionalism, but there is nothing to love about the way their leaders have been letting them down. Gov. Greg Abbott caught the whole country by surprise...

If you had any doubts that words matter, Joe Biden’s speech last week should put that to rest. Marking the deaths of over 500,000 of our fellow Americans from the coronavirus, Biden bared his heart and spoke of the tragic losses of his first wife and his daughter and later...

“We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us.” That’s what David Ball, chair of Pennsylvania’s Washington County Republican Party, said to KDKA-TV’s Jon...

Sometimes the truth must be its own reward, and it looks like the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump is headed in that direction. A block of senators has prejudged the case in spite of their oath to act as impartial jurors. Yet they cannot keep the truth from coming...

These two things happened on the same day last week. Congressional leaders paid their respects to Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who was killed by the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, and whose remains were lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. And Republican Leader Kevin...

Immediately after the Capitol attacks, Republican senators and representatives who had barely escaped with their lives blurted out the truth, putting the blame for inciting the bloodthirsty mob right at Donald Trump’s feet. They must have been scared straight. Because once the imminent threat to their lives had passed, that...

It wasn’t until Joseph “Dada” Sabino was mustering out of the Navy after World War II that he learned from a young medical officer that he had a bad mitral heart valve. The war in the Pacific had given him plenty to deal with, but this surprise would have him...

When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, federal officials launched what was then the greatest manhunt in American history. After 12 days on horseback, the Army found assassin John Wilkes Booth. Nine co-conspirators were captured, and one suspect was detained nearly two years later in Egypt. Much of what happened in 1865...

Remember who did this to us. Do not let the passage of time or the currency of other events dim your memory. Never forget what Donald Trump did last week. Never forget that he incited an attack on our republic by a traitorous mob. Remember Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted...

We can add the usual New Year’s resolutions to the list of things the pandemic has taken off the table this year. We all have made those promises with the turn of the old year into the new year, and they are usually something about breaking bad habits and starting...