Riding the Air Waves: The Life and Televised Times of Eleanor Schano is a chronicle of one reporter's fifty-year odyssey through the world of broadcasting and her ground breaking accomplishments earned even as she suffered agonizing personal tragedies. Literally growing up in the public eye, Schano challenged traditional female roles in an era when women were expected to sit down and be pretty, not stand up and speak out and she carved the template for reporters who bring both professionalism and compassion to the hard news they report.

Here, in Beyond the Surface, Walter C. Kidney describes the epiphany he experienced in 1948, when he suddenly became aware of the magnificence of Victorian architecture which was then so thoroughly despised. The effect must have been electric, because by the time we made our walking tours of the city in the mid 1950s, he seemed to know every building we passed, no matter how modest it might be. He took his buildings, as he took people he knew as they came. Although he lived his life as a solitary man, never marrying or taking a partner, he fully enjoyed the company of others and the sociability that might flow between them.

Evelyn Bitner Pearson tells her story, Born in 1910, she recalls the details of a now disappearing past through the experiences of her family, living in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. The experiences are those of middle class America.