In 2009, I interviewed a woman who spent her first decade of life in a suburban home that her parents bought in the 1930s. The home was located in a residential subdivision that had racially restrictive deed covenants attached to all the homes. African Americans were prohibited from buying or renting homes there.

When I interviewed the woman (who is now 78) in the fall of 2009, she told me that her family had a live-in domestic. She only knew the woman’s first name and the nickname that she and her brother called the woman. My oral history collaborator had several family photos that showed the Black woman with the family over several years in the 1940s and early 1950s. But, my collaborator didn’t recall any personal details about the woman who helped raise her.

I exhausted all of the archival records available to me at the time to try and locate the African American woman’s full name and any surviving biographical information about her. I struck out. Everywhere. I had consulted every known resource except for the 1950 U.S. Census population schedules. At the time, they were not scheduled for a public release until April 1, 2022 — today. This morning I got out of bed, let the dogs out, grabbed some coffee and made tea for my wife, and rushed into my office. I fired up my web browser and surfed over to https://1950census.archives.gov/ and typed the family’s name into the search field. A few seconds later, I had the woman’s name I had waited 13 years to learn.

She was invisible (to me) no more.

Stay tuned for more about this journey.

© 2022 D.S. Rotenstein

To use that term without explanation gives a real negative picture of the person, what he was involved in, the numbers, were illegal he was not a “gangster” — Facebook comment attached to a post linking to one of my articles about the history of numbers gambling.

It wasn’t the first such comment I had gotten about the words I had been using in my research on the social history of numbers gambling. I have been interviewing the descendants of numbers bankers and writers since 2019 and all along the way there had been gentle (and sometimes not so subtle) pushback against describing all of Pittsburgh’s gambling entrepreneurs as “gangsters” or “mobsters.”

I created the #MobsBurgh social media presence to generate visibility for my research and to connect with potential sources. But it became clear that MobsBurgh was too limiting and perhaps too negative to achieve all of my goals.

I thought a lot about an alternative and settled on The 805 Project. After all, this undertaking began when I first read about the big 805 numbers hit in 1930. A University of Pittsburgh historian’s question to an aging numbers writer and its enticing rhyming answer sent me down this rabbit hole two years ago. I embraced the story so why not borrow its source as a way to identify this project?

Goodbye MobsBurgh (mostly) and welcome to The 805 Project.

Prayer chapels. These two rural roadside buildings competed for passersby’s souls. One belongs to a church, the other was a nightclub.

The church was built in 1867 and it served farmers and coal miners. The nightclub dates to at least 1931. It served the same crowd in addition to travelers and city dwellers. New owners converted the nightclub into apartments after World War II. Some locals found that very convenient.

“I got married in the church across the street and you could do your wedding over there and honeymoon across the street,” one man told me earlier this year. The life-long resident, in his eighties, quickly added, “I did not do that, but I’ve heard different ones talk about it.”

I asked another longtime resident if the nightclub across the street, with its liquor and dancing, ever caused any friction with the church. “Oh it’s Methodist. I mean we’re Methodist. We’re Scottish. We drink. We dance. It’s not like it was, you know, Baptist,” she explained.

Most folks still alive who remember the nightclub are in their eighties and nineties. They were children with children’s memories of a place they could not go to. But, they could hear the music. One man, now 80, explained, “They wouldn’t let me over there. I mean I heard the music. I went to that church, you know, that’s the church that I went to as a kid.” His family moved away when he was about eight.

The nearest city is about six miles away. For much of the time the nightclub operated, entrepreneurs from the city and another a little farther up the highway rented the building where they hosted bands and served refreshments, liquid and solid. There was dancing and some history was made. But if you’re driving down the highway, there isn’t much there now to catch your eye and your interest. Yet, if you’re persistent enough the stories will flow and the juxtaposed buildings might just inspire you to dig just a little deeper ….

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

As the rest of the nation focuses on election returns, I’m going to spend a few minutes on some different numbers. These numbers were published in newspapers throughout the United States and racketeers co-opted them to calculate a daily lottery number. The “numbers racket” sprung from the hope that a penny, nickel, dime, or quarter bet would yield wins that equaled or exceeded a week’s pay.

Yet, factory workers, government clerks, housewives, and even schoolchildren picked three-digit numbers six days a week losing much more over the years than they ever won. Starting in the years after the Civil War, the game was called “policy.” In the 1920s, a new nationwide numbers racket spread through cities and small towns that relied on daily reports from the New York Clearing House published in newspapers.

Cumberland Evening Times, March 21, 1930.

Folks picked their numbers using birthdates, things they heard on the radio and read in comic strips, and suggestions they got from psychics or in the many “dream books” and “hot numbers” pamphlets that circulated. Lottery dates, however, remained among the most popular ways to pick a lucky three-digit number.

Typical newspaper numbers tips published in newspapers.

For example, take Monday July 14, 1930. In Pittsburgh, that seemed like a good bet and many bettors put their change on a winning combination drawn from the actual date, 714. Panic ensued as the city’s numbers bankers failed to pay the winners.

The Pittsburgh Press July 17, 1930.

Can you spot the three-digit combination used as the winning number that hot summer day in Pittsburgh?

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 15, 1930.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein