Founders' Day Address Podcast

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  (37 minutes, 34MB, MPEG Layer 3, Stereo, 22.050 kHz)

Author John Hoerr delivered the seventh-annual Founders' Day Address on Sunday, Oct. 18 at McKeesport Heritage Center.

A native of McKeesport who chronicled the decline of the American steel industry in his landmark 1988 book, And the Wolf Finally Came, Hoerr will talk about his upbringing in the city and sign copies of his new novel, Monongahela Dusk.

The novel --- Hoerr's first --- is set in McKeesport against the backdrop of the struggles of steelworkers to win union recognition in the 1930s and '40s.

A 1948 graduate of McKeesport High School and a Penn State alumnus, Hoerr is a former writer and editor for Business Week and producer at WQED-TV who covered labor issues for four decades.

His other non-fiction books include 1997's We Can't Eat Prestige, which describes the 1970s effort by a group of mostly female employees to organize the staff of Harvard University; and 2005's Harry, Tom, and Father Rice, an account of the sometimes scurrilous efforts to expel suspected Communists from the union representing Westinghouse Electric employees in the 1950s.

Please direct questions or comments to wmck at lightningfm dot org or P.O. Box 847, McKeesport 15134.

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