A rightfully placed chip

Early in the fall of 1972, a young man from Chicago named Larry O’Brien got a surprising phone call from Bernie Armstrong, the program director of Pittsburgh’s WTAE radio.

“Would you be interested in making a move?” Armstrong asked O’Brien, then a radio host in Chicago. “To where?” O’Brien asked. “To Pittsburgh,” Armstrong said. “I don’t know about that,” O’Brien said.

Nobody knew much about Pittsburgh, really, other than it was a relentlessly gray place that produced a lot of steel and every once in a while had a World Series-caliber baseball team in the Pirates. O’Brien liked living in Chicago, but Armstrong convinced him to come check out the Steel City nonetheless.

During the taxi ride into town, O’Brien wasn’t seeing much of interest. Then, the cab entered a tunnel.

“We came through the Fort Pitt Tunnel, and I said, ‘Woah! What’s that!?’ ” O’Brien recalls. “I was quite taken by the natural beauty, the rolling hills, the view of Downtown from the tunnel. There’s nothing in the country like it, and I said, ‘Jesus, I could live here.’ ”

Soon, he’d have his own morning drive-time show. What he’d learn, from talking to those who’d come before him, is that Pittsburgh’s reputation as a dreary place had been earned.

Joe DeNardo, WTAE’s meteorologist, arrived in 1948 from Ohio as an undergraduate at Duquesne University, when the mills were overloaded with work during postwar expansion and the air was heavy with black soot.

There was a saying around town that “Joe said it would,” and it was too often that Joe was saying it would be dark and cloudy.

“We were constantly being put down by the rest of the country,” DeNardo recalls. “We walked around with a chip on our shoulder and rightfully so.”

By 1972, the world was growing quickly. President Richard Nixon had made his weeklong trip to China, the first step toward a business relationship with the budding superpower in two decades. Japan was already surpassing Pittsburgh mills in efficiency through new technologies, and Europe was able to offer government-subsidized steel.

But, each day in Pittsburgh, the mills were churning along just fine.

In that way, the Pittsburgh that greeted Larry O’Brien was essentially the same as the one Joe DeNardo met 24 years prior, with one notable exception: The Pittsburgh Renaissance had happened.

Mayor David Lawrence, who served from 1946 to 1959, knew that he had to clean up the city’s air and rivers for it to become a place where outsiders like O’Brien and DeNardo would want to raise their families. Lawrence viewed sports as a vital part of his renaissance, the civic cement that would keep the city together. The problem was, Art Rooney Sr.’s Steelers simply wouldn’t cooperate.

After four forgettable decades — coincidentally, the same period marked the zenith of Pittsburgh’s power in manufacturing — the Steelers appeared ready to emerge from the gray with a formidable lineup of young players who would give a skeptical nation something else to consider about the rusty old mill town.