The Us column goes back to the Hill for a butcher shop, baseball.
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When you come from a family of butchers, an oyster steak and potatoes dinner is nothing special.
“Why can’t we have hot dogs like everyone else?” Ken Deiss asked his parents in the 1950s.
Even though his father, Carl, cut meat only one night a week, he was the son of a butcher and certainly knew tenderloin from eye of round.
Carl worked as an accountant all week, then pitched in at a Dormont butcher shop.
“On Friday night, he took off the tie and put on the apron,” recalls Ken, 76, of Englewood, Fla.
So why are we raising the steaks of long ago?
Because pictures Ken sent of his grandfather’s butcher shop in the Hill District are the closest we’ve come to photographic evidence of Central Park, which was likely America’s first ballpark owned, designed and built by Black people.
In April, we published a plea from local baseball historian Mark Fatla for old family photos that showed the ballpark built by Alexander McDonald Williams, owner of the Pittsburgh Keystones Black baseball team that played there in 1921-22.
In response, Ken Deiss sent photos of his grandparents’ butcher shop, which stood at the corner of Chauncey Street and Wylie Avenue in the Hill District from 1891 until the mid-1940s. One picture shows Ken’s great-uncle in front of the shop. In the other, Ken’s cousin sits with two other boys on the shop’s front steps in 1928, three years after Central Park was razed.
The butcher shop’s back door once faced the ballpark’s wooden grandstand across Humber Way. Both are now long gone.
“It would have been hit by foul balls, and these boys would have played on the vacant lot after the park’s demise!” Mark says.
Unfortunately, Ken has no other pictures of the neighborhood his German American family shared with Black and Jewish families and other immigrants. But these two photos made me want to know more about the Deisses.
Ernest Wilhelm Deiss was 12 or 13 when he came to Pittsburgh in 1882 from Flein, Germany, according to Ken, the family historian. Karl Lutz, whose German family owned a butcher shop on Centre Avenue, was Ernest’s sponsor when he became an American citizen.
Ernest must have done well. In September 1887, he reported that someone had stolen a revolver and silver watch and chain from his coat pocket as it hung in Lang’s butcher shop, according to a clipping in the PostGazette.
He married Mary Ann Schmeltz, a farm girl from McCandless, and they opened Deiss’s butcher shop in 1891. When Ernest died in 1907, Ken’s great-uncle, John Luckhardt, became the head butcher. John may have taught the art of butchery to Carl, who was only 5 years old when his father died.
Like many families of that era, the Deisses lived above the butcher shop, and the Luckhardts lived in a house behind it. Maybe they were the ones catching foul tips from Keystones’ bats at Central Park.
The butcher shop was a family affair. Ken’s cousin, Clarence P. Walter, is the blond kid sitting on the steps in the other photo. His mother, Nelda, cooked for the family meat cutters and others on Saturdays. At one point, the shop was open Sundays to compete with Jewish butchers in the Hill.
Like his father and uncle, Carl Deiss was handy with a meat cleaver but also a baseball bat and glove. A pitcher for Schenley High School, Carl played for a couple of semi-pro teams and likely pitched against Negro Leaguers before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947.
“He mentioned Satchel Paige and Greenlee Field,” Ken says. “There’s no doubt in my mind that he would have gone to games at Central Park.”
The family butcher shop closed in the 1940s when Ken was born, and the family moved to Dormont. He believes his father, the accountant, enjoyed moonlighting as a butcher on Friday nights and not just because he brought home prime cuts of meat for family dinners.
Ken was 16 years old when his father died in 1961 at age 59. He wishes Carl were here to tell stories of the Hill District and its rich history.
“My dad would have been a real help in your search for info,” Ken wrote to Mark. “He was quite a baseball historian … He was a walking encyclopedia.”