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…

Read More ...

It’s the nursing homes, stupid. That’s where 40 percent of our Covid-19 deaths are.

May 12, 2020 |
,

5.1 million people in the United States live in nursing homes or residential care facilities. The elderly residents of those facilities represent 1.6% of the U.S. population, but they account for nearly 40 percent of all deaths from COVID-19. This stunning bit of information, which you’d think every journalist and politician in the country would…

Read More ...

Six flawed arguments for not reopening America, courtesy of the Washington Post

May 12, 2020 |
, , ,

The people in charge of severely shutdown states across the USA are gradually coming to their senses and carefully reopening their local economies and societies. But public health ‘experts’ like Dr. Leana Wen don’t like it. They think it’s still too early in our mismanaged all-out war against the coronavirus to restore people’s basic rights…

Read More ...

Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania — America’s worst?

May 10, 2020 |
, , , ,

The governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, continues to make sure he holds on to his well-earned title of worst governor in state history.   He and his dictatorial health department bureaucrats completely over-reacted to the initial threat of Covid-19, issuing strict statewide shutdown orders and social-distancing decrees when they should have been concentrating their efforts…

Read More ...

Pittsburgh’s Phantom Pandemic, Part III — Nursing homes deaths are the big scandal

May 5, 2020 |

You wouldn’t know it from the media reports, but in Pennsylvania and other states like New York, the disproportionate number of nursing home deaths is the biggest scandal of the coronavirus crisis. Across the state of Pennsylvania there have been a total of 3,012 deaths attributed to Covid-19 — and 2,029 ( about 67 percent)…

Read More ...

Pittsburgh’s Phantom Pandemic, Part II

April 27, 2020 |

News Flash — Nursing home residents most at risk of dying from Covid-19   Totally predictable. Always the reality. Our old and sick people are virtually the only ones who are at risk of dying from a Covid-19 infection. Guess where they tend to live? In nursing homes. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Out of 1,550…

Read More ...

Pittsburgh’s Phantom Pandemic

April 20, 2020 |

OK, OK, though it’s getting less likely every day, I know the coronavirus could still flare up. But so far, since early March and as of April 20, there have been a total of 55 Covid-19 deaths in Allegheny County, where the city of Pittsburgh is located. In a county population of 1.3 million Steelers…

Read More ...

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…
Read More ...
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