Shaping Opinion Tim O'Brien

This is a Special Edition of the Shaping Opinion Podcast called “1979: City of Champions.” In this extended episode (90 minutes), we take you to when Pittsburgh became the “City of Champions,” and how its impact went well beyond the field, or just baseball or football fans. In the end, it’s about what sports can do to bolster an entire people who are going through hard times. Guests include: Kent Tekulve, Joe Gordon, Lanny Frattare, Michael MacCambridge, John Steigerwald and Walter Iooss, Jr. This is the story of Pittsburgh, City of Champions, like you've never heard it before.



https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/Full_Episode_-_City_of_Champions_auphonic.mp3











In this episode, we start with a group of Pittsburgh steelworkers who are standing around waiting for the arrival of two Pittsburgh sports icons. They stand in the cold and drafty Jones and Laughlin steel mill along the banks of the Monongahela River. The smoke stack above their building belches out thick black smoke. The stack next to it literally belches out fire. The air around the mill is thick with the smell of burning sulfur. If you’re one of the kids at the playground on the bluff above that mill in South Oakland, you’re at eye level with the top of those stacks and you can see that fire. You can see that smoke pouring out, and the air smells like rotten eggs.  You can’t avoid it.



Down below, the guests of honor have arrived. They are both co-honorees - named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsmen of the Year. Willie Stargell of the World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates and Terry Bradshaw, of the three-time Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers. About 15 steelworkers, clad in their green and gray mill uniforms, where hard hats and safety glasses, and they crowd around Stargell and Bradshaw, who are in their own work uniforms.



Instantly, these tough and grizzled veterans of the mill become boyish football fans when the two baseball and football stars come in. Not much is getting done around the mill right now.



With them is another legend. The photographer. But not just any photographer. He’s a GOAT in his own right. Walter Iooss, Jr. is Sports Illustrated’s best ever. Ever see that photo of Joe Namath predicting a Jets Super Bowl win at pool side? That was Walter. What about the shot of Joe Montana throwing to Dwight Clark in the 1981 NFC Championship game, the one they called, “The Catch?” That was Walter, too. From Tiger Woods to Michael Jordan, to the iconic Swimsuit editions. If you can conjure up an iconic sports or swimsuit image in your mind, there’s a good chance Walter captured it for you.



And here he is, lighting the floor of a steel mill to take a shot that would soon become iconic in its own right. Willie Stargell in his World Series champion uniform. Gold shirt with black pants. Next to him, Terry Bradshaw in his Super Bowl champion uniform, that classic black shirt with boxed numbers and gold pants. Surrounding them are those steelworkers.



Walter told me there really wasn’t much to setting up the shot, but what it stood for, well, that was something else.



Welcome to 1979 and Pittsburgh, The City of Champions.



In this episode we take you through, chronologically, the year Pittsburgh became the City of Champions, along with stories, insights, and what it all came to mean.

Guests



* Lanny Frattare

* Joe Gordon

* Walter Iooss, Jr.

* John Steigerwald

* Kent Tekulve

* Michael MacCambridge



Photo Credit: Sports Illustrated and Walter Iooss, Jr.

Links



* Two Champs from the “City of Champions,” Sports Illustrated

* a href="https://www.nfl.

Julia Parsons joins Tim to talk about her role as a code-breaker during World War II. Julia was part of a a team of Navy women stationed in Washington, D.C. during World War II who worked to decipher German submarine messages that were sent in secret code using the Enigma machine. Her work relied on the now legendary Bombe machine invented by Alan Turing. This episode was originally released on July 22, 2019.



https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/339_-_WWII_-_Cracking_the_Enigma_Code.mp3











If you’ve ever seen the motion picture The Imitation Game, you would be familiar with the story of Alan Turing and his highly secretive and revolutionary work during World War II.



If you have seen that movie, it may give you a greater sense of what Julia Parsons, this episode’s guest, did in her own way to help the Allies defeat the Nazis.



Not long after the war started, German submarines were sinking more ships than the United States could replace. During 1942, German subs patrolled just off America’s Atlantic coast. Under the cover of darkness, they would torpedo ships that were silhouetted against the city lights in the background.



In the open water, German U-boats would operate in packs and sink entire convoys in coordinated attacks.



If a U-boat spotted a convoy, the German skipper would communicate with other U-boats nearby using a complex machine that sent coded messages that only other U-boats could decipher using the same machine. Then they would converge like a pack of wolves and attack allied ships. The goal was to cut off England’s supply line from the United States.



The machine that the German military used to create that secret code was called the Enigma. Enigma was so sophisticated it was thought impossible to crack.



The entire secret language the machine used changed completely every 24 hours. So, even if you were to crack the code of the machine today, you would have to start all over again tomorrow.



Both the Americans and the British were working hard on both sides of the Atlantic to crack the German military’s secret code.



In England, British Intelligence put together a team of their greatest minds and set about trying to solve the Enigma code. Alan Turing, young a mathematical genius, ran his own group as part of that effort, which would somehow find a way to crack the Enigma code.



In the process, he and his team created a new machine. Turing had realized that human beings alone could not analyze the vast amounts of data required every 24 hours to solve the Enigma problem each day. They needed a machine that was equally sophisticated at unlocking the Enigma code.



The machine Turing’s team invented was known as the Bombe, and not only would it crack the Enigma code, shortening World War II by two or three years and saving countless lives, but it would also launch the modern era of computing.



Thanks to the Bombe machine, the Allies could read German communications and gain a strategic military advantage in the field. German U-boats were neutralized. Allied ships were steered away from U-boats and kept safe.



In December 1942, Turing went to the United States to share what he knew about Enigma, along with his own solutions, with the U.S. military.



Meanwhile, the U.S. had its own code-cracking team.



Within that larger U.S. effort, Julia Parsons was on a team of Navy women who worked to decipher German U-boat messages sent by the Enigma machine.



In the Naval Communications Annex on Nebraska Avenue, thousands of WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Services) worked in three shifts to break the codes the Germans used in Europe and on the Atlantic, and by the Japanese in the Pacific.

Links

Former CNN lead news anchor Aaron Brown joins Tim to tell his story from September 11, 2001, where he brought the event to 1.4 billion viewers around the world, live as it happened. It was Aaron Brown on that day, standing on a rooftop in New York City, bringing us one of the most historic and tragic moments of our generation in real time. This episode is part of our special series, “9/11: A Generation Removed.” This episode was originally released on September 7, 2021.



https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/338_-_911_-_A_Network_Anchor_Story_at_20.mp3











If you remember September 11, 2001, you remember how you learned of the terrorist attacks of that day. If you weren’t in New York City, or at the Pentagon, or in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, chances are you remember getting the news from a friend, or a coworker, or a family member, and then you turned on the TV.



I’ll tell you what I did. I was in a meeting in a building just next to the Pittsburgh airport. We could hear and feel the roar of jet engines nonstop as they came in, one after the other to land. This was not normal. I remember telling the person I was with that it reminded me of jets landing on an aircraft carrier.



Minutes later, someone came into the room and told us that all flights were grounded, so if anyone had a plane to catch, they were out of luck. That a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and that was all they knew.



My meeting was over, so I went out to my car, and that was my first chance to get the news. I heard it on the radio. Then I went home and spent the rest of that day glued to the television, flipping channels, just like most Americans and people around the world.



While the Internet was extremely influential, television was the thing.



Most everyone in America still got most of their breaking news from one of the three broadcast networks or CNN, or the radio. Newspapers would follow the next day with in-depth reporting. News websites sort of filled in where broadcast and print couldn’t. It all worked together to give you the best picture of events as possible.



On September 11th, most watched on television. Tragic, scary, puzzling, angering, confusing, and live.



Live coverage removed the filter, it removed the buffer. Journalists were seeing events unfold with us. And so were decision-makers, from the White House to the Pentagon to air traffic controllers and first responders. If you weren’t on site, you were watching a TV monitor.



Yet still, it was the job of a few reporters to try to make sense of it all with us and for us.



Aaron Brown was the face and the voice of CNN on that day. He was the cable network’s lead anchor, newly minted, having just arrived from ABC. He was one of a handful of people, that the world relied on to try to understand what we were all seeing. To verify what we were all hearing. To know what was actually happening.

Links



* Aaron Brown Joining Walter Cronkite School, Adweek

* On the 15th Anniversary, what it was like to anchor 9/11, CNN

* The Face of 9/11, HuffPost



About 9/11: A Generation Removed

On September 11, 2021, America will mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the country that happened on September 11, 2001. In remembrance of the event, the Shaping Opinion podcast will release a series of nine distinct episodes centered on the 9/11 attacks, starting on Friday, September 3rd and culminating on the 20th Anniversary, September 11, 2021.  The series, entitled,

Author and professor Eric Heinze joins Tim to talk about freedom of speech and expression at the most fundamental level. He recently wrote a book on free speech, but it’s not exactly what you might expect. He explores free speech in a larger more fundamental context than America’s First Amendment. He talks about it in the context of universal human rights. Eric tells us about the thinking behind his new book called, “The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech is Everything.” This episode was originally released May 9, 2022.



https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/337_-_Eric_Heinze_Free_Speech.mp3











One of the benefits of having a podcast is that you get the chance to talk to a diverse set of really smart and interesting people. Sometimes those people write books, and that’s the case with our guest today.



As mentioned, the book Eric Heinze wrote is about free speech and human rights. Eric is a professor of law and humanities at Queen Mary University of London.



In his book, he asks questions like, “What are human rights?” “Are they laid out definitively in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the U.S. Bill of Rights?” Or, are they just items on a checklist, like a good standard of living, housing, dignity?



That’s how Eric frames his new book. But what caught my attention when reading the book is how deep he really goes on this topic. He doesn’t flinch when he takes the stance that when global human rights programs fail, it is often the result of people being denied one basic human right – freedom of speech.

Links



* Eric Heinze: Queen Mary University of London

* “The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech is Everything,” by Eric Heinze (Amazon)



About this Episode’s Guest Eric Heinze

After completing studies in Paris, Berlin, Boston, and Leiden, Eric Heinze worked with the International Commission of Jurists and UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights, in Geneva, and on private litigation before the United Nations Administrative Tribunal in New York. He conducts lectures and interviews internationally in English, French, German, and Dutch, and is a member of the Bars of New York and Massachusetts, and has also advised NGOs on human rights, including Liberty, Amnesty International and the Media Diversity Institute. He has recently served as Project Leader for the four nation EU (HERA) consortium Memory Laws in European and Comparative Perspective (MELA).  His prior awards and fellowships have included a Fulbright Fellowship, a French Government (Chateaubriand) Fellowship, a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) fellowship, a Nuffield Foundation Grant, an Obermann Fellowship (Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa), and several Harvard University Fellowships, including a Sheldon grant, an Andres Public Interest grant, and a C. Clyde Ferguson Human Rights Fellowship.



Heinze co-founded and currently directs Queen Mary’s Centre for Law, Democracy, and Society (CLDS).  His opinion pieces  have appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Independent, Times Higher Education, Aeon, The Raw Story, openDemocracy, Speakers’ Corner Trust, Quillette, The Conversation, Left Foot Forward, Eurozine, and other publications, and he has done television, radio and press interviews for media in Denmark, Brazil, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, the UK and the US.

Storyteller Margot Leitman joins Tim to talk about the art of storytelling, and how you can be a better storyteller.  Margot is an award-winning storyteller, best-selling author, speaker and teacher and a Moth Storytelling “GrandSlam” winner. This episode was originally released January 17, 2022.



https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/222_-_Margot_Leitman_Storyteller_auphonic.mp3











If you’re a regular podcast listener, there is a good chance you heard about a group called The Moth. It’s a nonprofit group based in New York City that’s dedicated to the art and craft of live storytelling.



The organization was founded in 1997 and now hosts storytelling events across the United States. Storytellers are from all walks of life, and each one takes the stage to tell a personal story, and each has a chance to have that story and the performance of telling it ranked.



The Moth has branched out into more than simply live events. The Moth podcast is one of the most popular podcasts in the medium.



Some Moth storytellers can become champion storytellers. Its published books on storytelling, and it hosts other events.



If you have the chance to tell your story on a Moth stage, you could become a Champion. Some of the best storytelling performers are recognized as Moth Grandslam Champions.



Our guest today is one of those champions.



Margot Leitman is an author who has written books about storytelling. She’s written for NBC, Dreamworks TV, the Hallmark Channel and others.



She is a five-time winner of The Moth StorySLAM, and was the Moth GrandSLAM winner in New York City.

Links



* Margot Leitman (website)

* The Moth Radio Hour (website)

* The Moth (official website)



About this Episode’s Guest Margot Leitman

Margot Leitman is the author of the best-selling book LongStory Short: the Only Storytelling Guide You’ll Ever Need, What’s Your Story? & Gawky: Tales of an Extra Long Awkward Phase. She has written for DreamWorks TV, the Hallmark Channel, and the Pixl Network and worked for “This American Life” as the West Coast story scout. She is the founder of the storytelling program at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre and is a five-time winner of the Moth Storyslam and a winner of the Moth Grandslam, receiving the first ever score of a perfect 10. She travels all over the world teaching people to tell their stories.

If you like baseball you’ll love this interview. If you like Pittsburgh sports, you’ll love this interview. Former Pittsburgh Pirate closer and World Series Champion Kent Tekulve joins Tim in this special extended episode. Kent talks baseball, Pittsburgh, how to teach kids about sports, and somewhat about life.



https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/Kent_Tekulve_-_The_Closer_auphonic.mp3











This is an extended conversation where I promise you that after you listen to this, you’ll feel like you made a new best friend. With that in mind, we’re going to get right to our interview.



But before we do, I think I owe it to you to give you some of the basics.



Kent Tekulve is a former Major League Baseball pitcher. He was a tall, skinny reliever and a closer in his career, which included stops in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Cincinnati. You can learn a ton if all you do is search for his name online, and you’ll get all his stats.



Kent Tekulve pitched in more than 1,000 major league games during the 1970s and 80s. He recorded an unbelievable 184 saves. He was a closer, and if you know anything about baseball, closers are the coolest dudes on the roster. They come in when the pressure’s on and they close out the game.



He’s most known as a Pittsburgh Pirate, but not just any Pirate. Kent was the pitcher on the mound to get the last out of the seventh game in the 9th inning of the 1979 World Series. This was the last time the Pirates made it to the World Series, and the last time they won a World Series. Kent was on the mound in Baltimore for that feat.



He came up in the minors with the Pirates and played in his first major league game in 1974.

If You Liked This Episode You’ll Also Like



* Going Head to Head with the NFL - Guest: Ralph Cindrich

* Larry Czonka: A Football Story - Guest: Larry Czonka



Links



* Kent Tekulve - Baseball Reference

* Kent Tekulve - Major League Baseball

* Kent Tekulve: The Bespectacled Submariner of the '79 World Series Remains a Man of the People in Pittsburgh - Sports Illustrated



About this Episode’s Guest Kent Tekulve

Kent Tekulve is best known as "Teke." He’s  was a relief pitcher in Major League Baseball for 16 years, playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Phillies and Cincinnati Reds. He was best known as a side-arm pitcher who threw the final pitch to help the Pittsburgh Pirates win the 1979 World Series.



Tekulve graduated from Marietta College in Ohio, and then signed as a free agent with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He played for them until 1985.  His most memorable seasons were 1978 and 1979 when he saved 31 games and posted ERAs of 2.33 (’78) and 2.75 (’79).



In 1979, he was key to the Pirates World Series season and in Game 7 of the World Series that year in Baltimore.



In 1985, the Pirates traded him to the Phillies. In 1989, he signed with the Cincinnati Reds, retiring from baseball at mid-season.



Tekulve led the National League in games pitched four times, appearing in 90 or more games three times.



He is one of two pitchers (also Mike Marshall) in baseball history to appear in 90 or more games more than once. They did it three times each.



Tekulve had three saves in the 1979 World Series, which tied the single-Series mark set by Pittsburgh Pirate Elroy Face...