People sometimes ask us, “How do you survive a strike that’s now gone on for more than two years?”
Our answer: “With lots of help.”
This has certainly been the case the past month. We’ve already written about the New York Times Tech Guild’s donation to our strike fund. Other efforts are more local.
In early December, we received a phone call from a former newspaper writer and editor named Cris Hoel.
“Do you need any food?” he asked.
“Certainly,” we responded.
So Hoel brought us a carload of groceries, just in time for our holiday meals. Our furry friends ate well, too, thanks to the volunteers who maintain a pet food pantry for Pittsburgh LGBTQ Charities. They figured strikers have pets, so they organized a food drive for our cats and dogs.
Longtime readers of the city’s sports pages may remember Hoel’s name. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he worked as a sports writer for both the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Pittsburgh Press.
A Chalfant native, Hoel enrolled at University of Pittsburgh after high school graduation and joined the staff of The Pitt News. He covered the school’s football and basketball teams. One day he was sitting at his desk in the student newspaper office when the phone rang. On the line was a Pittsburgh Press sports editor.
“We really like your work,” the editor said. “Would you like to work at the Press?”
“Yes,” Hoel responded.
“When can you start?”
Hoel quit school and went to work, covering Pitt sports for the city’s largest newspaper. He was 18 years old.
“I looked like I was 13,” Hoel said. “I weighed 95 pounds. I wore Bruce Springsteen and Rolling Stones T-shirts to work. I had no social skills, but I was good at the work. I could write leads on deadline like nobody’s business. That was valued back then.”
Hoel quickly found a mentor in Press sports writer Phil Musick. One day in the Press newsroom on the second floor of the old newspaper building Downtown on the Boulevard of the Allies, Musick tapped Hoel on the shoulder.
“Hey, kid, you want to go upstairs?” Musick asked.
“Sure,” Hoel said.
Hoel remembers the moment clearly: “We were walking up that internal stairwell, the one that always smelled like grease and ink from the presses, and I said to Phil, ‘Where we going?’ Phil said, “I’m the new sports editor of the PG and you’re my new hire.”
With that, they both changed jobs.
“I worked a morning shift at the Press and an afternoon shift at the PG,” Hoel said.
A few years later, Hoel returned to the Press as overnight city editor. The newspaper provided financial help so he could finish his college degree. In 1981, he left Pittsburgh to work at the Austin (Texas) Statesman but didn’t stay long. He returned to Pittsburgh to attend Pitt law school, then embarked on a career as an attorney before taking a job as president of an investment firm. He now calls himself “a spectacular failure at retirement,” meaning he still practices law and performs some political and charitable work.
Hoel has a lot of great newspaper stories and says sometimes he regrets leaving the business. He calls journalism important and necessary work. Pittsburgh, he said, needs a great newspaper.
These days, Hoel works with Val Angell of Community Angel Resource Exchange (CARE), a nonprofit organization that redistributes excess resources, to deliver food and other items to the Braddock Free Store.
“I was thinking about what was happening at the PG,” he said. “I connected the dots and thought, ‘Hey, that should have been me on strike.’ I’m driving a carload of food and clothes and candy out to Braddock and said to myself, ‘Maybe I can do something for the strikers.’”
On his first delivery, Hoel dropped off boxes of produce and meat at our strike headquarters in the United Steelworkers Building, Downtown.
“I think the cause is admirable and noble,” he said of the strike. “I look forward to the day when you go back to work.”
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The pet food drive for strikers is a natural extension of the Dr. John P. Ruffing VMD Pet Food Pantry’s efforts to provide pet food where it’s needed.
“Our pet food pantry has a goal of addressing gaps,” said organizer Sue Kerr. “We see a gap, we try to respond.”
The first corporate sponsor to step up with a donation was long-running shelter Animal Friends in Ohio Township. Others who want to donate can contact the pantry or the strikers’ Health and Welfare Committee.
Kerr said the pantry will supply pet food to strikers with dogs and cats or other animals until the strike is over. We’re all hoping that happens soon. Kerr said she could expand this effort should workers in other unions go on strike in the future. Organizers in those unions can email the pantry for assistance, Kerr said.
“There’s something universal about being a pet person,” Kerr said. “People understand how much pet owners spend on pet food. It reminds them that your family is like theirs. You have pets that need to be fed.”
The PUP is the publication of the striking workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
