Raising the Steel Curtain

[p...@rip.ax.lt]

(Wall Street Journal) - When Pittsburgh was really a steel town,
the Steelers weren't winners. When Pittsburgh was being built on
the brawn of men in blue collars, the city didn't bleed black and
gold.

And then everything changed, as the 1960s turned into the 1970s.
The steel factories went quiet, and the town started to chant "Here
we go, Steelers, here we go." Pittsburgh's blue collars gave way to
white collars—or medical scrubs, which have no collars at all. Chad
Millman and Shawn Coyne trace this metamorphosis in "The Ones Who
Hit the Hardest (Amazon: http://xrl.us/HitHardest ), a lyrical
volume that is as much a social history of Pittsburgh in the 1970s
as a chronicle of the Steelers' early glory years.

Give credit to Messrs. Millman and Coyne: They are students of the
game and of history and industry, for it isn't every sports book
that lingers on the details of how pig iron is converted into steel
or how the Bessemer process changed steelmaking. But those elements
of Pittsburgh's story are every bit as important as the team's
first Super Bowl victory, in 1975...

Continued: http://sn.im/HitHardest