By 1968, however, the era of church-basement bull sessions and Sunday-afternoon jazz seemed quaint and distant. The times had turned increasingly violent. Events came to a head in April of that year with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. People ran through the streets of inner city Pittsburgh smashing windows. Soon Manchester, Homewood, and the Hill District were burning.
Although angry and shaken, Strickland did not take to the streets. Perhaps this was because of his parents' influence. His father was a carpenter and his mother a domestic worker. They always stood behind Bill and his younger brother. When Strickland had wanted to go south with the Freedom Riders, when he'd wanted to tear up the family basement and remodel it as a photography studio, they said go ahead. He descended from a line of builders, not destroyers.
So now, in the basement of a row house in fraying, smoking Manchester, Bill Strickland set up a wheel and kiln and went into business, teaching kids how to throw pots. He was good at it. Children loved him, parents trusted him. He worked hard and kept his promises. The little basement where he'd set up shop was clean, bright, and inviting. Kids told their friends about the place, the mothers noticed, and the Manchester Craftsman's Guild grew. Strickland still wanted to become Mr. Ross -- in many ways, he already was Mr. Ross -- but now he started to wonder.
He took a long look at his alma mater, where, just a few years earlier, an eager kid like Strickland could find a teacher like Mr. Ross. But things had changed at Oliver. The school had turned wild and ugly. Graffiti on the walls, bars on the windows. The more money and programs that poured into the school, the uglier it seemed to grow. Compare Oliver High School with the Manchester Craftsman's Guild -- a wheel, a kiln, a young man's dream -- and which looked better?
After college, I kept up the center, but I also got interested in flying. I bought my own plane and took lessons. More I flew, the better I liked it. I decided I was going to learn to fly airliners. Took me seven years, flying every weekend, going to a school in Atlanta, but finally I got my commercial license. Braniff Airways hired me. I flew to Venezuela, Brazil, everywhere. All on the weekends. Come Monday morning, I was always back at the center in Manchester.
Man, you sit up in the cockpit of a 747 at night, 300 passengers behind you asleep in the cabin, the lights of the cities spread out 35,000 feet below, and you feel this terrible responsibility, along with this sense of confidence and power -- the feeling that if you can do this, you can do anything. Well, Braniff eventually had difficulties and laid me off, and another airline wanted to hire me. But that would've meant giving up Manchester Bidwell, leaving Pittsburgh. I thought long and hard, but finally decided that as much as I loved flying, it wasn't my destiny.
After that was when the center really started to grow. I wasn't somebody doing social work because he couldn't do anything else. I was a professional airline pilot. I was teaching kids to throw pots, helping my neighbors learn a trade because I wanted to, not because I needed to. That made all the difference in the world.
Josh Green arrived at MCG in 1989, fresh out of art school in New York, to interview for a job teaching ceramic arts. On his tour, Green saw that the center's kilns, wheels, studios, and working spaces were equal to the facilities of the art departments of most major universities. He was told that, after he finished teaching for the day, he was welcome to use the equipment for his own work. He was already half off his feet before he met Bill Strickland.
"At that interview I did a lot more listening than talking," Green recalls as he sits by the center's fountain one sunny afternoon.
The kids work here, Josh. This is not a daycare center. Your job is to expect kids to perform. But you can't just say it and you can't just teach it. You've got to show the way you think about the kids every moment you're with them. They see that fountain out in the front plaza, they eat the food in our dining room, and they know before a word is spoken how we feel about them.
"We are not a poverty center. A poverty center looks like poverty; we look like the solution. You provide those kids with good things, you expect them to do good work, and they'll do just fine."
We are not a poverty center, Josh. A poverty center looks like poverty; we look like the solution. A kid goes into that ceramics studio, he works with first-class equipment and materials. When he looks up on the shelves, he sees the work of world-class artists. You provide those kids with good things, you expect them to do good work, and don't worry, they'll do just fine. No big deal. Welcome to Manchester Bidwell, Josh.
"So I signed on, of course," says Green. He now serves as director of arts and education strategies for MCG.
He smiles, closes his eyes, and tilts back his head to take in the sun. A group of culinary students, looking crisp and professional in their white tunics, come out of the building to take a break. In the distance, in a splash of orange, the greenhouse orchids sprout. That night, the center's theater will host a concert by the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. Inside, in the ceramics studio, a half-dozen high school kids throw pots. In other rooms, welfare moms learn biochemistry and pastry presentation, knowing that their hard work will pay off in jobs. Not jobs like in the final fat years of the steel mills, but jobs that won't dry up and blow away, either. There is a little bit of elegance in learning to transcribe medical code, a little bit of grit to glazing a coffee mug. Life around the center swings.
