IT WAS A JOURNEY that was by no means supposed to be a quest. Life merely turned it into one — life, plus a single motivating sentence from probably the most influential of voices, assisted by a dose of divinity.
Someday almost 20 years in the past, Vera Clemente, widow of the legendary Roberto Clemente, entered the studio of photographer Duane Rieder earlier than the 2006 All-Star Sport, to be performed at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park. The studio had as soon as been an previous firehouse — Pittsburgh’s Engine No. 25 — located within the Lawrenceville part of town. In-built 1896, the construction had been condemned when Rieder bought it from town in 1994 for the grand sum of a greenback.
Rieder had been getting ready a pre-All-Star get together for the Clemente household and adorned his studio with placing pictures of Clemente in addition to an archive of Clemente memorabilia and ephemera he had been gathering for the earlier decade. He had met Vera after he had created a calendar of Clemente pictures to commemorate the final All-Star Sport at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium in 1994. The next yr, Rieder had assisted Vera in restoring broken pictures of the Clementes’ go to to the White Home with President Nixon following the 1971 World Collection, the second that cemented Roberto Clemente nationally as what he had been often called domestically for the earlier 16 seasons: a transcendent nice.
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The pictures have been of explicit significance to Vera, who misplaced her husband in one of many best tragedies within the historical past of American sports activities. On New 12 months’s Eve 1972, Clemente’s swiftly loaded aircraft carrying reduction provides to Nicaraguan earthquake victims crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from Puerto Rico. Monetary issue and indignity adopted: Locals started stealing priceless Clemente gadgets from the household dwelling in Puerto Rico, together with Vera and Roberto’s marriage ceremony album.
When she entered Rieder’s studio, she noticed the placing pictures of Clemente on the studio partitions, together with “Angel Wings,” the well-known shot of Clemente stretching to make a catch whereas the clouds behind him appear to kind a pair of wings behind his shoulders.
“Duane,” Rieder remembers Vera telling him, “You must make a museum of this place.”
Rieder then introduced Vera Clemente with a priceless reward he had acquired from years of “calling in favors” and kismet — a photograph album of images from the marriage she had by no means seen earlier than.
Lower than 60 days later, the Clemente Museum opened, and a life’s work would rework a constructing as soon as condemned.
“I will give Roberto and the Huge Man upstairs a number of credit score,” Rieder says, “for the issues that advanced on this constructing.”
THE CLEMENTE MUSEUM
THE CLEMENTE MUSEUM is a 12,000-square-foot homage to the person Pittsburgh has referred to as “The Nice One” for greater than a half-century. In accordance with Rieder, 10,000 guests come to the museum yearly. The nonprofit museum shouldn’t be affiliated with the Pirates or Main League Baseball, and the cash to maintain it working comes from baseball die-hards, deep-pocketed Clemente die-hards — Rieder credit Eddie Vedder, the frontman for the rock band Pearl Jam, with holding the doorways open through the pandemic. Credit score additionally, in fact, belongs to the soul, spirit and sweat of the museum’s proprietor.
The Clemente Museum is accessible by appointment solely and capabilities largely on the respect system — few of the 650 or so Clemente gadgets are protected against the general public by casing and so the museum trusts its patrons to not contact gadgets or attempt to steal them. The transformed firehouse can really feel darkish and foreboding with its heavy woods, a portal again into the nineteenth century of handlebar mustaches and horse-drawn hearth carriages. Touches of the previous firehouse stay — two holes within the first-floor ceiling, one nonetheless with its hearth pole. The opposite was eliminated to make room for the entrance door.
When it’s lit, the museum transforms right into a shrine that feels uniquely Pittsburgh — an authentic baseball city since 1882. The museum is approached by followers, celebrities and big-league gamers as a pilgrimage and sanctuary. Manny Machado, the Padres third baseman, spends the night time on the museum at the least as soon as a season. Nearly each visiting staff makes a late-night cease after video games, to pay tribute to The Nice One, and likewise to chill out within the basement of the speakeasy-style vineyard, wood-fired oven and cigar bar (named after Pirates catcher Francisco Cervelli) that’s the basement. A lot of them take turns swinging the huge 38-ounce bat the 5-foot-11, 175-pound Clemente swung. Throughout a current four-game collection with Washington, 34 members of the Nationals got here to the museum. One in every of them was Darren Baker, 25, who made his big-league debut this month. He was amused to come back throughout a 1968 picture of a 19-year-old Dusty Baker within the Marines hanging on the wall — based on legend, Dusty broke Clemente’s Marines file for pullups. Dusty, in fact, is Darren’s father and a legend in his personal proper. But for each anecdote, irony and eerie coincidence that lends the impression that the area was ordained, there may be three a long time of sweat behind it that give the tales which means, that make them actual.
With out Rieder, a 63-year-old with the spirit of a school freshman, bodily pulling {the electrical} wires and knocking out a part of the ceiling, revealing the unique Carnegie Metal beam with the No. 21 on it — signifying the 21-inch thickness of the beam — the coincidences would have remained buried, or worse, nonexistent, bulldozed by time, progress, new buildings erasing previous historical past.
“The tales come to this constructing as a result of we saved it,” Rieder says.
When the firehouse closed in 1972 — largely due to age and since the brand new vehicles have been so massive they may now not match by way of the wood doorways of a constructing constructed within the nineteenth century — Engine 25 served as a hub for EMS automobiles. By the early Nineteen Nineties, the buildings have been in disrepair and town had agreed to tear down greater than a dozen of the previous firehouses. Engine 25 was condemned when Rieder first regarded into shopping for it. It was, he says, a “haven for pigeon poop and rats.”
“This a part of city, Lawrenceville, was a large number,” he says. “Folks informed me I used to be loopy shopping for right here. The neighborhood was in such unhealthy form, you have been taking your life into your individual fingers parking on the road … and the place wanted a lot work. It had no working water. Estimates have been working me $500,000 in renovations.”
In 1994, Rieder settled on one other studio, in Polish Hill. The papers have been signed. The deal had closed. Engine No. 25 confronted one other future in opposition to the needs of offended Lawrenceville residents: It was scheduled to turn into a nightclub. There was no manner out, till Jimmy Ferlo, the highly effective metropolis councilman of the seventh District, stepped in. “I stated, ‘Jimmy, there isn’t any manner out. We have closed,” Rieder remembers. “Jimmy stated, ‘Would you like it, sure or no?'” In a scene that appears like a film, Ferlo ripped up Rieder’s closing papers on the Polish Hill spot, and the transfer to the firehouse was miraculously finished.
The firehouse was haunted by a darkish coincidence: Engine No. 25 completely closed its doorways on Dec. 31, 1972, at 9 p.m. ET; a thousand miles away and about 20 minutes later, Clemente’s aircraft had simply taken off and started its fateful descent. Undeterred, Rieder renovated the constructing, piece by piece. A welder by commerce who refers to himself as “severely dyslexic,” Rieder put his life into the constructing. Sanding the flooring. Scavenging for wooden and coal. Renovating the unique tin panels that adorn the second-floor ceiling. Discovering previous items — just like the submitting cupboard from a close-by printing press. Rescuing previous pictures, like Angel Wings, from the trash.
Rieder met Vera Clemente the next yr, and he started to archive Clemente supplies. A imaginative and prescient of a museum was taking form — however didn’t turn into one till Vera Clemente’s suggestion greater than a decade later.
“If I wasn’t a photographer and a workaholic, this could not have occurred,” Rieder says. “Who might do that? Even in case you had all the cash on the planet, might you do that? As a result of it wasn’t about cash. And I am not bragging once I say this sort of stuff. It was simply piece by piece, placing your work into your pursuits.”
When the museum formally opened in 2006, Rieder had been engaged on the constructing for a dozen years. In between, he honed one other craft, studying to make wine. First pictures. Then wine. Then baseball. “Each Italian in Pittsburgh made their very own wine,” he says. “I began making dago purple. It was only a interest at first.” Now, big-league gamers from Pete Alonso to Ryan Zimmerman to Josh Bell have barrels of wine within the cellar speakeasy as a part of Rieder’s wine membership.
Sarah Kelsey, a part-timer on the museum with a soothing voice and mild demeanor, didn’t come to the Clemente for the baseball. She is initially from Arlington, Virginia, however needing a life change seven years in the past, she arrived in Western Pennsylvania. She now speaks of the area — and the Clemente — as a spot of sentimental refuge. She met Duane Rieder for the wine, and remained for the structure, the group, what she known as the magical nature of the constructing — the cherry flooring within the basement, sloped barely to the appropriate as a result of the firehouse, inbuilt 1896, as soon as doubled as a horse secure within the days earlier than hearth vehicles and the flooring wanted to be sloped for drainage.
On the second flooring, the sunshine pierces the extensive room as if by way of stained glass, accentuating the wide-plank flooring, and the unique woodwork. The second flooring incorporates catnip for Clemente fanatics: the 1961 silver bat commemorating his first batting title, dented as a result of his youngsters used it to hit. The museum is for Kelsey a spot of peace. “It’s a lovely constructing,” she says. “The constructing feels secure. Each time I come right here, I see one thing new, and I hear one thing new. It’s a very uplifting place. Individuals are moved by it. I am pleased and humbled, and fortunate to be right here. When folks come right here, they wish to discuss their lives. They wish to donate issues — albums, cuff hyperlinks. They really feel the necessity to share.”
Thrice the museum has been saved, by luck or divinity. In 2006, Rieder’s most well-known picture — of the Steelers praying earlier than a recreation — went viral after a tv station did a narrative on Rieder earlier than the Steelers-Seahawks Tremendous Bowl. The promoting of the enduring print saved Rieder from a tax accounting error that put him in arrears. “I paid off the IRS,” he says. “Sixty thousand. In money.”
In 2009, the museum almost burned to the bottom. “It was my fault,” Rieder says. “I used to be doing the plumbing. I used to be heating up the copper pipes with a torch, and it caught on to the insulation and began burning. The ability went out, and I used to be in complete blackness. I noticed a ball of fireside. I might see it behind the drywall, so I punched holes within the drywall with my fist, discovered the piece of insulation and stamped it out. Then, I fastened the pipe and went dwelling.”
In 2020, the pandemic almost closed the shrine. However Eddie Vedder saved it. “He filmed a video for us, like a digital fundraiser,” Rieder says. “He despatched a guitar signed by the entire band. We auctioned the whole lot off and raised $100,000.
“We have been closed for nearly two full years and the payments have been piling up. He helps 100 charities, and we have been fortunate to be certainly one of them. So, thank the Lord for Eddie Vedder.”
THE LORE OF ROBERTO CLEMENTE
IN THIS TOWN, Clemente endures as maybe no different participant in another big-league metropolis. He isn’t claimed in the best way of a Ruth or Williams or Mays — revered for the reminiscences, awed by their skills. Practically 70 years after his major-league debut and 52 years after his demise, Clemente stands nearer to Henry Aaron, not simply admired, however revered. The principle bridge crossing the Allegheny River main into PNC Park is the Roberto Clemente Bridge. On the foot of the bridge is the Clemente statue. On the stadium itself, there are distractions for youths, and a bar in middle discipline for adults, and maybe the very best views in baseball, all animated by the thrill generated by rookie fireballer Paul Skenes, nevertheless it’s the Clemente photographs all through that make watching a recreation right here really feel grounded. Within the staff store on the stadium, Clemente jerseys are nonetheless prominently displayed. He stays town’s conscience.
Artwork Rodriguez, a retired dentist who works on the museum with an virtually ancestral connection to it, conducts lots of the non-public excursions. Rodriguez nonetheless owns the scorecard from his first baseball recreation: July 28, 1968, at Forbes Subject. The Cardinals have been on the town. The Pirates gained 7-1. Clemente, the son of a cane crop employee, went 3-for-4 with a triple and two runs scored. Rodriguez and his father, Archie, stopped scoring the Cardinals after the second inning. The Pirates stored their consideration till the sixth, when Clemente struck out to finish the inning. Bob Gibson did not pitch that day, however Rodriguez would always remember the aura of Gibson whereas making an attempt for an autograph: inexperienced turtleneck, gold chain. No signature. Rodriguez was seven years previous.
Rodriguez grew up in Donora, about 30 miles from Pittsburgh, birthplace of the well-known Stan Musial, and Ken Griffey Jr. It was Musial that linked the Rodriguez generations to baseball, and it was work that drew the household to Pittsburgh. His grandfather on his father’s facet, Manuel, came visiting from Oviedo, Spain, in 1917 and labored within the Western Pennsylvania zinc mills. On his mom’s facet, his grandfather, Dominic, got here to America from Ceto, Italy, in 1913 and labored within the coal mines. Their story was the immigrant-American story: the grandparents, one set from Spain, one from Italy, spoke some English and had little interest in sports activities. The following generations grew to become American by way of sports activities, the daddy with Musial, the son, Clemente.
Throughout his excursions, Rodriguez doesn’t enjoy Clemente’s prodigious statistical achievements — a .317 profession common, 3,000 hits, 4 batting titles, 12 straight Gold Glove awards — as a lot as he focuses tourgoers on the person and the worth he paid throughout his instances. Clemente confronted the discrimination of the Black gamers of his period and the anti-Latin sentiment widespread in baseball. Reporters would quote Spanish-speaking gamers phonetically, as if to imitate their poor English. Clemente resented makes an attempt to Americanize him. The museum options a number of editions of Clemente playing cards the place his identify is listed as “Bob Clemente” as an alternative of “Roberto.” For years, Clemente internalized these resentments earlier than difficult his teammates as athletes and as males.
“I actually emphasize the racism he confronted, and but he was so stoic,” Rodriguez says. “He had a manner of attending to folks. He knew he in all probability ought to converse out. He might convey that in case you have been a bigot, you could not be man, and that resonates a lot to the messages of right this moment.”
In his excursions, Rodriguez senses when guests acknowledge the parallels between the xenophobia Clemente confronted as a participant and the nation’s present divisions. Earlier than profitable over the baseball world along with his play and humanitarianism, Clemente endured the rising sentiment throughout the sport that baseball had employed too many minorities and, regardless of the greatness of him and gamers like Mays and Aaron, the sport was diminished due to integration.
“In case you’re Black or an immigrant, the message is ‘You may have ruined our nation,’ and that’s the attraction,” Rodriguez says, alluding to the rising political rhetoric over the previous a number of years and its parallels to the Clemente years. “I suppose coming from a household of Spanish and Italian immigrants, I relate to whom these feedback are directed. He did not say it. His supporters did not say it. However that’s the feeling. I am blown away by it. If somebody had informed me that racism could be as current to the diploma because it was throughout Clemente’s time, I would not have believed it. It is actually necessary for the younger folks to grasp.”
Clemente is an indelible a part of American mythology. So is baseball. So is Pittsburgh. The reverence is rooted within the uncommon one who died as he lived and thus shouldn’t be diminished by time. The Pirates gained two World Collection through the Clemente years, however the Pirates and his legend are uncomplicated as a result of the Steelers through the Nineteen Sixties weren’t the nice staff they’d turn into. Then there may be Pittsburgh, the Metal Metropolis of unpretentiousness and integrity folks wish to consider they embody — however most frequently don’t.
Duane’s spouse, Kate, undoubtedly does. She is a shy, humorous girl with mischievous eyes who says far lower than she is considering. The place folks will seek advice from her husband as “the mayor of Pittsburgh” for his indefatigable gregariousness and fixed availability, Kate Rieder is the other — and sometimes gives the governor to her husband’s limitless generosity. It is not uncommon for the Rieders to get a late-night telephone name from MLB gamers or coaches — the Nationals supervisor Davey Martinez, as an illustration — who wish to pop by the museum for cigars, a glass and absorb the aura of The Nice One. “I do not do the general public factor,” she says. “It is advantageous so long as I haven’t got to do it.” She grew up within the South Hills space, repeating, in a small sense, a part of her childhood. Her father, an previous New Englander and die-hard Crimson Sox fan from Nashua, New Hampshire, who grew to become synonymous with Pittsburgh, was recognized throughout city, the legendary KDKA-TV meteorologist Bob Kudzma. Kudzma was on the air for 34 years. However in contrast to Duane, who is of course extroverted, Kate Rieder remembers her father, who handed away in 2021 as a personal man with a public occupation. Off-camera, she says he stored to himself and his household.
She marvels at Duane’s power. “He all the time finds time to create each factor. He by no means stops. He helps folks. He is tremendous considerate. He is just like the Energizer Bunny.”
Nick Barnicle, a movie producer who shot a documentary, together with of Duane’s Clemente assortment and spent intensive time with them on the museum, stated, “Kate is the Landau to Duane’s Springsteen. The Robin to Duane’s Howard. The Varitek to Duane’s Pedro. With out Kate, it is simply not the identical.”
THE PROPELLER
BRIAN, THE UBER DRIVER taking me to the museum on a current late-summer day, drives in silence for a number of blocks earlier than glancing once more at his telephone to verify my vacation spot. “The Clemente Museum,” he says evenly. His tone is curiously monotone — one thing bothers him. By way of a number of purple lights, Brian lastly reveals the thriller of his ambivalence. “The propeller is in there,” he tells me. “It is proper there. That has by no means sat properly with me.”
To the left of the entrance entrance of the museum, at roughly 11 o’clock, sits a vertically rectangular plexiglass case defending a lone, broken gray-black propeller blade. It is among the blades from the DC-7 that plunged Clemente fatally into the Atlantic. After the crash, the newspapers confirmed the pictures from Puerto Rico, of the search and rescue. Probably the most outstanding one featured Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillén, the one teammate to enter the water as a part of the hassle, heartbroken, trudging waist-high by way of the surf.
In 2013, St. Louis got here to Pittsburgh, and Carlos Beltrán, the star Cardinals outfielder and one other within the line of nice Puerto Rican gamers, visited the museum. Quickly after, Beltran informed Rieder of a discover: The daddy of Beltran’s pal was the captain of the Coast Guard ship that pulled the aircraft wreckage from the ocean.
“I later get a name from Carlos’s pal, an architect named Angel, who was serving to Carlos design his academy,” Rieder says, staring into the case. “He says, ‘Sit down. I wish to ship you an image.’ A photograph of a propeller comes. It is laying in his buddy’s storage. He says, ‘Would you ever need this?’ And I went, ‘Holy cow. Is that the propeller from the aircraft?'”
Rieder acquired the blade on the finish of 2013, and the subsequent yr started displaying it full time within the museum. However not earlier than coping with the query of displaying the blade — whether or not its look within the museum was obligatory or gratuitous — in an emotional assembly with Vera Clemente and her three sons, Maurice, Ricky and Roberto Jr.
“There had been an public sale home in Puerto Rico promoting off components of the aircraft,” Rieder says. “And the household stated to please take these gadgets out of the public sale. So later, the household is coming to Pittsburgh to speak about Clemente Day. They are saying they’re coming over. I stated, ‘OK, head’s up: I’ve a bit I wish to discuss and also you guys can vote. In case you say it stays, it stays. In case you say it does not, it goes. So that they present up and I had it in the course of the room. I had it coated with a black piece of fabric. So I pulled off the tarp, and Vera, Maurice and Ricky all stated, ‘OK. I believe it must be right here.’ A museum ought to inform the reality, ought to inform the story. Roberto Jr. bought very emotional and ran out the door.”
Rieder had his personal purpose why he felt it essential to show the propeller: to dispel the parable that the aircraft was by no means recovered. “Roberto’s physique was by no means discovered,” he says. “That half is true, however we do a whole bunch of excursions and somebody within the tour all the time makes point out that the aircraft was by no means discovered. All Puerto Ricans know they discovered the aircraft. They stood on the shoe for 3 days watching the Coast Guard items up on deck, and that is the place it got here from.”
Vera died in 2019, and Rieder ultimately reached an settlement with Roberto Jr.: When he was on the town, the Museum would cowl the blade, and wheel it out of sight. Someday, Roberto Jr. arrived on quick discover. With no time to take away the blade to a again room, Rieder scrambled to cowl the propeller with a poster.
“The posters weren’t tall sufficient,” Rieder remembers. “He walked in and stated, “I am cool with it now. So, it took him a number of years, however he agreed that it is a part of the story. They discovered the aircraft.”
RETIRE NO. 21
ON THE COUNTER on the museum, in Pirate black-and-gold, are round stickers that learn “RETIRE 21,” a plea for Main League Baseball to do for Clemente what it did for Jackie Robinson and what the Nationwide Hockey League has finished for Wayne Gretzky: universally retire Clemente’s iconic No. 21.
The retirement push is a grassroots effort that has deep emotional resonance to its supporters — no participant is a better inspiration to the Latino gamers who now dominate the game than Clemente, the primary Latino inducted into the Corridor of Fame. Main League Baseball, nonetheless, has not pledged its help, as common retirement of a quantity is extraordinarily uncommon. When baseball lastly retired Robinson’s No. 42 through the fiftieth anniversary of his debut in 1997, it was not with out controversy. The concept didn’t come from the commissioner’s workplace, however from Nationwide League president Len Coleman.
The league workplace maintains that Clemente is already appropriately honored by baseball by way of the Roberto Clemente Award, given yearly to the participant who finest demonstrates group and humanitarian commitments. Nonetheless, retiring Clemente’s quantity is a subject that has drawn the eye of the Main League Baseball Gamers Affiliation. Government director Tony Clark tells me he helps retiring Clemente’s quantity, however he would favor the gamers take it upon themselves: As an alternative of ready to be informed by the commissioner’s workplace that the quantity is retired, Clark needs the gamers would collectively comply with now not put on No. 21. That, Clark says, could be an much more highly effective gesture.
THE PLACE TO BE
THE CLEMENTE MUSEUM is a go-to spot for the out of towners trying to rating cool factors, and for celebrities and dignitaries to pay their respects — and to go to the vineyard downstairs. Eddie Vedder has a desk. One chair has the identify “Smokey” painted on the again, as a result of that is the chair the place Smokey Robinson sat and drank. (“I make a semi-sweet Riesling for him,” Rieder says.)
Politically this yr, Pennsylvania is a battleground state, inundated with assault advertisements from each political events. Nearly each evaluation of the 2024 election expects Pennsylvania to be decisive, and so it’s that in a current late-summer week, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is on the town on a marketing campaign cease, and the Clemente Museum is on the quick record of native companies the VP intends to go to.
Harris does not seem on the day I go to, however an previous Pittsburgher does: U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. Flanked by two Secret Service brokers, the 73-year-old Vilsack and his spouse, Christie, tour the museum earlier than settling within the basement for some wine and tales. Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa from 1999 to 2007, is a Pittsburgh native, from the Squirrel Hill part.
Vilsack sips his wine because the Secret Service stands quietly at a brief distance. Periodically, the secretary will take one other piece of the lore of the constructing from Rieder, some not possible connection that have to be apocryphal, just like the repeated story that Lou Gehrig slept within the firehouse through the 1927 Yankees-Pirates World Collection. “OK, now you are pulling my leg.” The mythology is just too nice to be true.
“To begin with, who might ever discover that out, however me, as a result of I am right here, in a constructing that we saved,” Rieder says. “And now individuals are coming taking Clemente excursions, and a girl was on a tour and he or she stated her father was the chief that shut this place down. If I do not get her right here to get that story and ask her to carry him right here, we would not know this stuff. We did factor, and it wasn’t on goal. I used to be simply on the lookout for a spot for my studio.”
There’s Clemente. There’s America. There’s Pittsburgh. Throughout the desk from Vilsack is a wine barrel with the burly define of Bruno Sammartino, the legendary skilled wrestler who settled as an adolescent in Pittsburgh, within the North Oakland part. Rieder reveals him a 1967 Polaroid picture of Clemente and Sammartino. On the backside of the picture, inscribed in pen, learn the phrases, “Bruno & Roberto.” Subsequent to their names are their respective weights: 275-175. Vilsack nods in acknowledgement, relents to the facility of the shrine, of Pittsburgh, and buys 4 bottles of wine to go.
“This actually is a testomony to a person who’s been gone 50 years,” Vilsack says. “I’ve seen issues right here I by no means anticipated to see.”