30 Days a Black Man

In 1948 Pittsburgh's greatest journalist Ray Sprigle went undercover and then shocked the country with his powerful expose of the Jim Crow South. The history book that retells the amazing forgotten story.

Dogging Steinbeck

When Bill Steigerwald retraced the 1960 road trip John Steinbeck made for  'Travels With Charley' in 2010 he found the iconic road book was more fiction than fact. The true story of how Steigerwald changed the way 'Charley' will be read forever.

Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Ray Sprigle spent 30 days living as a black man in the segregated South. What he saw made him ashamed to be an American. What he wrote woke up the country. Read his original 1948 series.

Q&A: Peter Falk — actor by accident?

May 1, 2021 |

When I interviewed Falk on the Burbank Studios lot in 1986 it was easy to see where the lovable Columbo got his eccentricities — and his raincoat. One of my favorite interviews in LA in the ‘80s was with the beloved actor Peter Falk, who died in 2011. 1986 “Columbo” the TV show may have…

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Hope and a prayer — and a choice

February 3, 2021 |

Here’s a look back at how the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s inner-city Catholic schools used lots of love and discipline to give young black kids the education they needed and their parents wanted. In 1994 when I realized the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had not written two words about the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s three inner-city “Extra Mile Schools,”…

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Remembering fricking Tommy Lasorda — a nice guy in Blue

January 9, 2021 |
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Before two games in 1986 I hung out with the salty-tongued LA Dodgers manager in his office under Dodger Stadium. This is the X-rated version of my quality time with one of the nicest celebrities I ever met. “I get these fucking invitations to weddings,” Tommy Lasorda was saying, his bare feet propped on his…

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Downtown Pittsburgh, Sept. 11, 2001 — A city in shock

September 11, 2020 |

On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, as the country was in shock from the horrible events in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pa., my job at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was to go out into the abandoned and strangely silent city of Pittsburgh and report what I saw.  Here’s what I wrote: Empty Downtown offers…

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Western PA. to Gov. Wolf — We’re dead. Please remove your knee.

August 15, 2020 |
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For all you folks who think Gov. Wolf’s strict strangulation of Western Pa. to fight the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’  is justified and that schools should remain closed to protect the children, please wake up, look at the facts and get a grip.  Kids rarely catch Covid-19, don’t readily infect others and don’t ever die from it…

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Going to school in the Age of Covid is not going to be fun — or funny

July 19, 2020 |

OK, let’s pretend that Covid-19 is especially lethal to kids and that extraordinary steps need to be taken to open and operate our public schools safely. Let’s pretend that the state of Pennsylvania’s guidelines for reopening schools are not totally insane, laughable and unrealistic. Let’s pretend that the nannies and medical experts who came up…

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Pittsburgh’s Phantom Pandemic — as misreported by The New York Times

July 13, 2020 |
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‘Pittsburgh Seemed Like a Virus Success Story. Now Cases Are Surging’ ‘Pittsburgh, a sister city to Wuhan, China, saw only modest cases for months. In the last two weeks, cases are suddenly soaring’ The headline and content of this July 12 article about how Pittsburgh has dodged the Covid-19 bullet are a perfect example of…

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Bill's Q&A's

Q&A: Tucker Carlson, before he became King of Cable — and GOP presidential timber

Tucker Carlson of Fox News has risen to the top of the cable news heap to become the most-watched, most-hated and most influential commentator in our politically fractured and deeply divisive country. He’s so popular, now he’s being touted as a Republican presidential candidate for 2024. The Washington Post, his former colleagues at MSNBC and…
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Bill Steigerwald

Bill Steigerwald is a veteran journalist from Pittsburgh. His new nonfiction book "30 Days a Black Man" tells the amazing but forgotten story about an undercover mission by a Pittsburgh newspaperman into the Jim Crow South in 1948 that shook up the whole country. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's nationally syndicated series "In the Land of Jim Crow" exposed the iniquities and humiliations suffered by ten million black Americans in the segregated South. It shocked the white people of the North, angered the South and started the first national debate in the media about ending America's legal apartheid. Kirkus Review said "30 Days a Black Man" is "a fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure..." that Steigerwald turned "into rollicking, haunting American history." ... READ MORE