New Light Lecture Series: Pittsburgh is Our Home: Barney Dreyfuss and the Origin of the Pittsburgh Pirates

in Community, Culture, Education, New Light

This event has ended

  • Start

    July 12, 2022
    7:00 pm

  • End

    July 13, 2022

Barney Dreyfuss and the Origin of the Pittsburgh Pirates

Presented by Ronald Schuler, Sports Historian

Historian Ron Schuler will talk about the background and life’s work of Barney Dreyfuss—the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, pillar of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, builder of Forbes Field, and “inventor” of the World Series—as well as his little-known struggles with Pittsburgh machine politics and his role in helping to stamp out municipal corruption.

About Ron Schuler
Ron Schuler’s first book, The Steel Bar: Pittsburgh Lawyers and the Making of America (2019), was a lively survey of the lawyers of Pittsburgh from 1794 through the 20th century, exploring Pittsburgh history as well as placing Pittsburgh and its lawyers within the context of American political and legal history.  He is now at work on a book about the political, commercial and cultural contexts of the creation of each of Pittsburgh’s major baseball parks from the Civil War to the present, tentatively entitled 7 Ballparks in Pittsburgh.  As a lawyer, Schuler was a lead member of the City of Pittsburgh’s legal team for the planning and construction of PNC Park, and was the author of the Forbes Field II Task Force Final Report (1996), the urban planning justification for PNC Park’s location. He currently serves as the managing partner of the Pittsburgh office of Spilman Thomas & Battle, has been practicing corporate, securities, merger & acquisition and technology law for 34 years, and was inducted as a fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2021.  A native Southern Californian and grandson of Mexican immigrants, Schuler is a graduate of Pomona College and Cornell Law School, and studied English Literature at University College, Oxford University. He has also previously served as a senior operating officer of a $100 million oil and gas company, and still serves as the founding chairman of Pittsburgh’s community-supported jazz radio station, WZUM-FM.

Register via email to janet@newlightcongregation.org. You may attend in-person or via Zoom.