Brief Bio:

 I am currently a senior at the University of Pittsburgh with a major in history. I am interested in this internship because I have an interest in the history of Pittsburgh and the surrounding area, and I believe that by looking into the circumstances of deaths in Pittsburgh's past, you can learn a lot about the type of city Pittsburgh was and how it has changed, at least in a social way.

Working Notes:

1950's

I had posted this in the infant deaths topic, but this is one of the most interesting deaths I've ever heard of. A baby sleeping in her crib on the first floor of her house was killed by rats when they chewed her face off. The rats were living in the basement at the time. 195604_16. There wasn't much else on this instance, not even an autopsy report, which I thought was strange.

Another strange baby death occured when a baby was laying in it's crib.  A rung was missing from the side of the crib, and the parents had tied a diaper there to prevent the baby from falling out. However, the baby fell out and got its neck caught on the diaper and was strangled. 195508_12

Even another baby death came when a mother was breast feeding her baby in bed, but fell asleep. She rolled over, and the baby was suffocated. 195603_195

    All of these were labeled accidental, so I assume the parents weren't charged by the law. These are just three cases I've found in two different boxes,  

    which is a lot of accidental baby deaths if these keep adding up. I wonder if there are less accidents today or in the 1950's regarding babies.

Here's an example of what not to do. A man was electrocuted while working with live wires in his basement. He was standing in three feet of water. I wonder how many less deaths there would be if people would use common sense. 195508_32     BF 1-23-08

A few deaths that struck me as unusual involved runaway objects.  A man was walking down the street when a parked car with no one inside rolled his way and pinned him against the guard rail. He later died of a crushed pelvis. 195803_66.  A group of boys were roling a big sewer pipe on railroad tracks by running on top of it. One fell off and was crushed to death as the pipe ran him over. 195710_71.  A construction worker was crushed to death by a large pipe that rolled off a truck and crushed him at the job site. 195810_84.

        With regards to the second instance; I have noticed a lot of deaths involving boys playing. I rarely see girls dying while playing. Many drown in the rivers, and some in pools. One boy

        rode sled into a moving car. (195605_36) One boy was even strangled while playing at home when he accidentally hanged himself from the bannister with the cord on his bathrobe.  

        (195604_05)  I wonder if in the 21st century, it's still the case that boys die at a much higher rate than girls while playing.            BF 1-30-08

I remember learning about this in first grade when we learned about fire prevention: smoking in bed. I remember seeing lots of these stories on the news throughout my life where someone's house would burn down due to falling asleep while smoking. That even happened to a house near where I live. In the 1950's, this happened just as much, and I read about it all the time.  195507_156, 195710_183, & 195902_92 are just three of many instances of someone falling asleep in bed while smoking and their cigarette catching their clothes on fire. One of the most basic fire prevention techniques there is is to just not smoke in bed, but people have done it for a long time and will continue to do so.    BF 2-5-08

195912_93: A man was arrested for drunkenness and was taken to jail. While in jail, he became disoriented, delerious, and hallucinogenic, and soon died. Yeah I know that's not that great. But: In 1979, a letter from the Department of Labor was written to then coroner Cyril Wecht to see if there were microscopic slides of the man's lungs. Apparantly his widow had filed for compensation from the government because he was a coal miner. The Dept. of Labor wanted to see if he had something wrong with his lungs due to coal mining. Wecht responded to the Department of Labor's letter: "very few records or materials of any kind are available for cases dating back to 1959. In fact, based upon the quality of work performed in this office prior to 1966, I frankly doubt if any microscopic slides were ever prepared. Yours Truly, Cyril H. Wecht"  He sounds like a slightly grumpy man. I guess death can't really cheer you up though. 

          BF 2-18-08

I think it's funny that the coroner uses the names of brands when people poison themselves. For example: A parent was polishing furniture with Old English and the 9 month old baby girl took the bottle and drank it. Instead of the coroner writing: death due to ingestion of furniture polish, he writes, death due to ingestion of Old English. (195808_178) Also, a man died due to "ingestion of antifreeze (Prestone)." (196012_52)  It's weird that the coroner doesn't put what brand of gun was used for a murder on the verdict page, but puts what brand of poison was used.  

         BF 2-18-08

What is with 1112 Forbes Street? Almost every day I work on the files I get an address at 1112 Forbes Street (I believe the name was changed to avenue later). After a short search, this address is currently where Duquesne Univesity is now. I know that Duquesne has expanded considerably since 1960, so this building probably was taken over by them. Normally on these files they don't say what 1112 Forbes is, but luckily on one file, there was a mention of a Pullman Hotel, which appears to be a men's hotel, where lots of old retired single men lived. That would explain the large numbers of deaths there.  BF 2-18-08 

1960's

I thought this was funny: "Age: 56 . Occupation: hooker"  After a minute of laughter I read that it was actually a man who worked for U.S. Steel at a job called a hooker. 196004_21

         That man died of a heart attack at the mill. I realized that I see more heart attacks at steel mills than deaths from machinery or something. It must have been stressful work.

         BF 2-18-08

I don't know if this was ingorance or stupidity. A man bought a bottle of rubbing alcohol from a store, and it clearly said that it was isopropyl alcohol only meant for external use. He told the man who sold it to him that his arthritis was acting up. The man went down the street to a gas station bathroom and drank the whole bottle. He died of acute gastro-enteritis while sitting on the toilet. 196105_58

BF 24 February 2008

A 19 year old guy was working on his pickup truck with his friend, working on the steering rod. The truck slipped off the jack and crushed his head. His friend said that he had handed him a wrench and the next thing he knew he had been knocked out by the front fender, but had lived. Interestingly, the victim's father was on his way to Greensburg, but halfway there, he got a funny feeling that something happened at home. When he got back he learned that his son died. 196105_36

BF 24 February 2008

BF 24 February 2008

These are kind of unusual.

A woman died of acute and chronic myocarditis with dilation of heart and scalds of body due to falling in bathtub of scalding water at home. She had a blood alcohol level of .19%. She was known as a heavy drinker. 196105_58 

A man who had been a polio victim for 9 years died from asphyxiation due to a collection of mucus in his trachea. 196110_128

A 14 year old farm hand died when he fell from the hay loft of the barn at the dairy farm he worked at. 196110_166

A four year old was killed when he was hit by a bicycle and knocked to the ground. 196110_195

A 17 year old was playing in a high school football game. He tackled the opposing player and went unconcious. He died shortly thereafter. I looked online and it seems as if the helmets and pads that players wore in 1961 were pretty similar to today's equipment. The kid was just unlucky I guess. 196110_212.

A lumberjack was killed by a felled tree. (196204_117)  

I used to work at a sewage plant, and I was amazed at some of the things that people managed to get down the toilet. At a sewage plant in Marshall Township, workers there were checking on a clarifier that wasn't working right, and a fetus floated to the surface. (196209_187) Sewage plant technology was different back then, and if someone were to dump a fetus into a sewer today (not that they would need to), it would never be found. (I won't gross you out and discuss why)   

BF 2 March 2008

In our next chapter of "The Life and Times of Dr. Wecht," let's look at his early days, 1964 to be precise. Let's look at the situation: A man was in an argument with his wife over the fact that their daughter left home the night before to try and make it on her own. The wife called the husband 'nuts' so he started to choke her and then dragged her down to the basement. He took a shovel and beat her in the head over and over. He then called his father and told him to bring a policeman over because he had just killed his wife. When the police interrogated him, he seemed very stressed out and upset about the incident, and acted almost insane. In fact, a newspaper article said that he was going to be put in a mental institution. Now for the part about Dr. Wecht. He came to the scene as an investigator for the District Attorney. He examined the woman lying on the basement floor by moving her arm up and down and probing the wounds. A deputy coroner told Wecht not to touch the body as it was the coroner's orders. Wecht shouted back,

       "I'm not probing and don't push me too far. Just because I have a hard-on for Joe Dobbs [coroner] don't make me have a hard-on for the rest of you fellows. I represent the District    

       Attorney and the fact that I'm not being paid doesn't mean I have no authority. But just you wait because in 15 or 16 months from now I'm going to clean your whole office out!"

A statement from Dobbs said that Wecht had no business touching the body or making a scene, especially standing over the murdered woman. It is obvious Wecht had an issue with the office of the coroner before he took over. As I had reported before in an entry dated February 18, Wecht crticized these people in a letter from the 1970's. After a little bit of searching on the internet, I was not able to find any reason for this animosity. Perhaps more will surface as Wecht plays a bigger role in things.

196406_164

BF 11 March 2008

Relations between blacks and whites was so tense in the early 1960's. Here are two cases where a white police officer shot a black man under questionable circumstances.

A man wanted by Pittsburgh Police was spotted and a call was put out on the radio. A patrol car came to the location of this man, where a group of men were engaged in a craps game. All the men dispersed when they saw the police and the suspect ran across the street. An officer followed and caught up with him. The suspect kicked at the officer as the officer swung his club, both missing each other. The suspect broke free of this struggle and ran down a sidestreet. As he chased the suspect, the officer shouted for him to stop, but to no avail. Therefore the officer got out his gun and, as he claimed, was about to fire a warning shot in the air. However, he tripped and the gun discharged, with the bullet hitting the suspect from the back of the neck, up into the mouth, and knocking a tooth out. At first this was considered justifiable homicide. However, eyewitnesses said that the officer stopped and fired a direct shot at the man. A number of newspaper articles documented the outrage brought on by this incident, which happened in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Manchester on the North Side. There were shouts of "Let's get the whites!" among others. It was claimed that if not for the cool headedness of the community leaders in Manchester, there would have been a full scale riot on the North Side. Luckily for the city, the officer was charged with manslaughter. Six witnesses all saw the officer deliberately stop and aim at the victim. 196306_178.

In this next case, a man was burglarizing a small market in Homewood. A police officer happened to live to the rear of the store. As he was watching television, he heard glass breaking and went to investigate, bringing his service revolver with him. The off duty officer told the burglar to stop multiple times. Then supposedly the burglar lunged at him. The officer tried to shoot him, but the gun misfired. He shot him with his next pull of the trigger. However, the officer thought that he missed because the burglar ran behind the counter towards the back of the store. The officer followed him and shot him again, this time in the back while he was laying on the ground! The jury of the coroner let the officer off with justifiable homicide, much to the chagrin of the coroner himself. If there were witnesses to this incident, the verdict could have been different. There could have even been severe outrage in the community. At least two murders by police of black men within a short period of time. There could even be more cases out there that I'm not aware of. 196401_154

BF 11 March 2008

I've found more information that may explain Cyril Wecht's bitterness to the office of Joe Dobbs. In 196410_147, there was a letter from a lawyer to the coroner that said that on nine different occasions over the previous seven months, the lawyer had tried to get an autopsy report, but the promises had never been met. In his letter, the lawyer wrote: "It is is such a lack of service which casts a bad reflection on your office."

In 196411_36, a woman was found strangled to death in the woods. A newspaper article talked about a controversy between the coroner's office and the district attorney's office, with whom Cyril Wecht worked. They said that Dobbs failed to supply information to the DA about specifics on the woman's death.

Now that we're in the 1970's, we probably won't see anymore of these disagreements. So my conclusion/assumption is that Cyril Wecht got his animosity while working at the district attorney's office because of the incompetence of the coroner's office. Perhaps this is why Wecht changed so much when he took the office; he saw what was wrong and improved it.

BF 20 March 2008

1970's

I've found that in the 1970's, they have been using Sudden Infant Death Syndrome to explain most sudden baby deaths. Before this time, the coroner only used 'unexplained infant death' or something like that. Also, I've found many letters written by Dr. Wecht to the parents of the victim describing how SIDS is an unexplainable type of death that happens all the time, therefore it is not the parents' fault. He recommended that the parents attend meetings for the Pennsylvania Guild for Infant Survival, where there is therapy for this type of death. As it turns out, Wecht was the honorary chairman for this group.

BF 3 Apr 2008

To end the 1970's might be a good thing because I was getting grossed out. Not only at the pictures (which I couldn't stop looking at), but also at the autopsy findings, where many had blood on them. Apparantly the pathologist or coroner wrote on these pages while doing the autopsy.

I also found a case where a man poured gas on himself and lit it in order to commit suicide. (197312_31) I know other interns found something similar. I wonder if these people are sort of copying the Vietnamese Buddhist monks in the early 1960's who did the same thing. I read on the internet that this was also done by some activists in the west to protest things.

BF 10 Apr 2008

I wrote this paper for my sponsor in the history department, so I'll post it here too.

During the time I spent at my internship at the University of Pittsburgh Archives Service Center, I learned many things, but most importantly I learned about the work of a historian.  Last semester when I decided to get an internship, I learned about the opportunity at the Archives Service Center working with the coroner case files. I thought this would be a very interesting topic and that I could learn a lot from this. After working there this semester, my original thoughts were correct.

As an intern working on this project, I learned a lot about the process that a historian goes through when working with primary sources. In this case, the primary sources are the coroner case files from Allegheny County. The files that the University has are from the late 1800’s to the 1970’s. These files were brought to the University Archives because the county ran out of storage room. There were about 800 boxes that held over a quarter million files. They were available for public record, but the organization of these files was not very good. There was no way of searching for a name or type of death. Kate Colligan, a researcher and my supervisor at the Archives, wrote a grant to get funding in order to preserve these files and make them more accessible to the public.

To get this done, interns were brought in for the past few semesters to preserve and document these files. This semester, the interns specifically worked with files from 1953 to 1973. The reason for this is because interns from previous semesters had already completed working with all the files before this, and 1973 was the last year that was included in this collection. What we did, was go in chronological order through every box and look at every file. We unfolded all of the files and put them in chronological order in manila folders. Then we put these manila folders into new boxes and sent them to an Archives employee who entered the names of the victims from each file into a computer, making it easy for the public to access these records. During the preservation process, all of the interns got a good look at the contents of these files. By looking at the cause of death, the nationality and race of the victim, the address of the victim, and also the circumstances behind the death in each of these files, I learned a lot about the people of Pittsburgh in the mid-20^th Century.

By looking at file after file, we all found trends in the types of deaths among different groups. For example, in the early 1950’s, women who committed suicide were most likely to hang themselves. In the early 1960’s, it became more common for women to poison themselves with barbiturates. Moving on into the 1960’s and 1970’s, I started seeing more and more instances of women putting plastic bags over their heads. Also in the category of suicides, I noticed many trends such as the types of people that commit suicide. The most likely candidates are men, specifically elderly men. Whites are far more likely to commit suicide than blacks. Guns are used in about 3/5 of suicides. These findings are interesting because when I look at other sources such as national figures on these trends, the numbers correlate, showing that these files are a good indication of what actually happened on a broad level. If a researcher wanted to research these files to find information on causes of death in the 20^th Century, this would be a wonderful place to look. Not only could you find information on suicides, but all types of deaths. The wealth of information here is endless. However, because the interns had to preserve the files, read the files, and make sure the project was finished by the end of the semester, we didn’t get to fully investigate everything that we possibly could.

Not only did we find interesting trends, there were also things such as newspapers, photographs, evidence, and letters in these files. In some cases, the coroner put a newspaper clipping in with the file if it pertained to the case. However, in very few of these I found entire newspapers put in with the files. It was fascinating to open up a real newspaper from the early 1960’s and see what was going on. Other files had evidence in them. A few interns found bullet fragments and even samples of hair. Photographs of crime scenes and even autopsies provided a glimpse into the circumstances of victims’ deaths. One of my favorite things that I found was correspondence between the coroner and outside parties. I came across letters by the coroner’s office complaining about Cyril Wecht when he was a consultant at the District Attorney’s office. Apparently, Wecht and the previous coroner didn’t get along. I found letters from the relatives of victims, asking the coroner to make accommodations for them when they came to town for an inquest. These types of things added a personal touch to these files and gave me insight into life in the mid-20^th Century.

Each week after going through all of these files, each of the interns wrote on the project’s website about our findings. We wrote about unusual and interesting deaths that we found, and also trends and other interesting findings. By doing this each week, we not only allowed others to view what we’d found, but also made an account of what we had uncovered while our memories were still fresh.

Overall, I learned a great deal about being a historian. Working with primary sources that haven’t been analyzed yet was a lot different than reading books to learn about something. By working with other interns and discussing findings together, I learned about the collaborative process of being a historian. Writing about findings is a big part of being a historian, and I also learned how to do so. It is rare for people to have access to files like these, and they are an interesting way to learn about the past. 

BF 3 Apr 2008  

BABY DEATHS

A great deal of baby deaths happen because of suffocation on bed clothing. There seems to be no correlation between this type of death and race.

There are some, as shown below, that get their head stuck in between the rungs of the crib. This also has no correlation with race.

What does have to do with race is malnuturition or poor care of the baby. Unfortunately, many more black babies die from these than white babies.

BF 2 March 2008

196105_36: 1 month old baby got head stuck in between rungs of crib

196107_3: black male 2 months malnutrition

196107_20: 22months M white Shock from 2nd and 3rd degree burns from hot water from a faucet

196107_86: 1month old black M crushed skull and laceration of brain infant hurtled from arms of babysitter when father struck her with his fists