- This program is part of WQED's Pittsburgh History Series.

- Hey, I'm Rick Sebak, and I think we're lucky to have three stories to share with you on this episode of the program we're calling Lucky To Live In Pittsburgh.

We want you to see what goes on inside a laboratory in the Strip District where they specialize in mother's milk.

And we want to take you to Washington County to a family farm where they grow and mill ancient grains.

But we're gonna start north of Pittsburgh just off Route 8, not far from Butler, where there's a stone sign at the edge of the road for an unusual local business.

after the man opened it up, Frank Raducz.

So it's called Raducz Stone Corporation.

- Sadly, Frank Raducz passed away in 2020 from a rare cancer, but his company continues.

And Ed Scheller is the foreman for the operations now.

- We are actually a stone quarry, a sandstone quarry, and it's called a dimensional stone quarry, which is quite different from an aggregate quarry.

Aggregate quarries crush stone for concrete and driveways.

A dimensional stone quarry is every stone is cut to size for a particular building product.

So our stone is more for building walls or steps or patio pavers or hearth stones, mantels, that type of stuff.

Sandstone is a much more manageable stone.

- There are stacks of manageable sandstone slabs all around.

A few boulders too.

But all of this comes from the quarry that's just on the other side of this hill.

When you get there, you realize it's kind of an open-pit mine.

So this is the vein of sandstone that we're extracting, and it's running about anywhere from 12 to 15 foot thick.

And those lines that you see in the stone, those are where we drilled with a drill -- that hydraulic drill up there -- and then we fill those holes up with this mortar that expands.

Usually takes about 24 hours for it to activate, and it actually splits 15 foot of stone and brings it out from that high wall about an inch.

- The expanding mortar in the drilled holes means that they don't have to use explosives here in the quarry.

- So what happens is: I can see a nice crack right there going down there in that rock, where they filled that one yesterday.

So it started to separate those two stones so we could grab that big rock with this excavator over here and pull that rock down and then set it up here in the field where we can come and pick it up with a high lift and carry it down to the pit.

Ed explains it quickly, but there's a lot of work and machinery involved.

And it takes time to make room for the chunks.

Sometimes a really big chunk will have to be broken apart to be in usable pieces.

- Probably about 15 ton.

Split it here and we'll save this piece for good.

This looks really good.

I know it's really big, but I can always cut a sliver off it or two.

- The big chunks of sandstone are then hauled down the hill to the processing yard where they will be cut by the huge saw into various sized pieces.

- This blade is 12 foot in diameter and actually it runs with water.

There's water jackets on the side of it.

Keep the dust down and keep the blade cool while it's cutting.

When I put rocks in here, I got to take measurements of the rock of how tall it is, how long it is, and how much good usable material's of it.

Then I enter all those measurements into the the computer on the saw, so it knows exactly where the rock is and where to cut.

The teeth are interchangeable on the blade, and they're actually carbide teeth impregnated with diamonds.

So there's little tiny chips of diamond in there that actually does the cutting.

This saw cuts every night by itself while nobody's in the building.

The building's locked down, but it'll cut slabs all night long and it actually has a telephone in it if something goes wrong with the saw.

So it'll call me right away, and now I know, "Uh oh, something happened to the saw."

If I'm in the middle of dinner or something, I gotta run out and fix it.

I can pretty much time it, so it'll run for 12 to 13 hours and finish up in that period of time.

I know how many cuts it can make typically.

- So in the morning, Ed and his men have to move the slabs that were cut overnight.

- Let's do three.

- And sometimes there are small surprises.

But the slabs can be further cut to size and designed to order.

- This machine's called a hydrosplitter, that means that it's a hydraulic splitting machine, whether we're making steps or wall stone, so the, the head of this machine moves up and down.

There's carbide teeth on that that come down and they actually chisel and bite the stone, and then it spits it out the back on a conveyor belt.

Most of our stone, he stacks on a pallet by hand.

We always sort of have a little joke about it, that you have to be able to pick 200 pounds up and be able to carry it and put it on a pallet.

Some slabs also get even more special treatment.

A lot of times people want the front of a stone to be hand-tooled.

It's called rock facing.

And he'll take a chisel and he'll go along and give, give the rock a lot more contour to it.

You know, it's up to each customer how, how they want their stone to look.

How many holes did we get drilled today?

- Employees here obviously know a lot about how to handle sandstone.

- Actually, there's only five men that work here, which is pretty unusual for a full-blown strip mine and a full-blown production facility.

I have four really good men and myself.

So we keep that down to keep costs down, lets say.

They get the job done no matter what.

- We also heard that Ed's wife, Vicki, is sometimes here.

- My wife does work here when she wants to.

My wife actually does the engraving in stone.

She does a lot, a good bit of the paperwork and also gets involved in the engraving.

She's been doing it for probably 20 years now.

- So where might you see some Raducz Stone in Western Pennsylvania?

- Well, certainly the thing that comes to mind probably the most would be the Step Waterfalls down in Pittsburgh.

And then the second thing comes to mind would be the Cemetery of Alleghenies, that was something really proud to say that that's every stone in there came from this quarry.

The entrance signs all the front borders and all the, all the divisions between the, you know, between the cemeteries is all our stone.

Well, we did the big entrance sign for Fallingwater and it was sort of a unique job because they wanted a very large natural stone for the base of it.

And then they, we took a six-inch slab.

I actually took a big giant boulder in here and I sawed a groove in it so that a six-inch slab could slide down inside of it.

So the base of the rock probably weighed 20 ton, but I notched the center of the rock out so we could slide this slab down in it and engraved in it, it says Fallingwater.

So that, that was something that was pretty neat.

Even in inside there we did another big stone that's standing on a pedestal and it actually was a, on the back of it, it was a piece of petrified wood.

- Wow!

But it come out of the quarry here.

And it was an impression of a tree.

It was a very large tree.

But then we saw the face of it and we wrote Fallingwater on there.

And it stands as you just start to go into Fallingwater.

- Impressive.

And you might say Raducz Stone is an unusual and amazing place.

- This is a blast.

It is.

Working for Frank was a blast and it was a, it was a quite a, a disappointment obviously when he passed away, but it's still fun.

This is a fun place to work.

'cause everybody, everybody here is happy.

We all get along very well.

Did it?

Yep.

And of course the whole operation here may make some folks think of an old cartoon.

Yes.

And it sort of is like a Barney Rubble, Fred Flintstone kind of thing.

I forgot his boss, but that's what they call me: Mr. Slater!

Yeah.

Mr. Slater.

alot about sandstone and therefore had a blast ourselves there at Raducz.

That's Butler County about an hour north of Pittsburgh.

And next we're gonna head about an hour southwest of the city near the town of Avella.

And there's a small family business there run by the Tudor family.

So r now you're at Weatherbury Farm, which my parents bought in 1986.

- They named this place after the farm in Thomas Hardy's novel, Far From The Madding Crowd.

- When we first came out here, it seemed like the back of beyond.

So this was "far from the madding crowd" as far as we were concerned.

And we, we, we liked the name Weatherbury Farm.

So that's, that's how it came to be.

- You know, we started out doing Bed & Breakfast, and we thought we're close to Pittsburgh, but we're so different from Pittsburgh and "far from the madding crowd," and that was... just seemed the right thing to call it.

- We did the Bed & Breakfast for 25 years from 1992 to 2017.

And basically the reason we stopped was we ran outta time.

We decided to focus more on the farming and let go of the farm vacations.

- The farming included taking care of and marketing some cattle that originally came with the property.

- From the get-go, we did cow-calf, which means we had mama cows who had calves, and we sold the calves at auction.

- We sell grass-fed beef twice a year, August and November, and grass-fed lamb.

- In 2009 we grew our first certified organic grains and we got into organic grains because when we kept more cows back, the mulch hay that we were using to bed our barn wasn't quite good enough when we decided we needed straw, and we had the bright idea, well if we're gonna grow grain for straw, why don't we grow grains we can eat?

- So now the grains have essentially become their biggest business and the three of them do it all.

Nigel and his father Dale do the farming and the processing.

- We love farming.

- Just finished off our 2021... - While Marcy Tudor takes care of the business.

- I do the accounting, and the website, and the shop, and the invoices, and the marketing, and I call myself the Office Manager if I have to put it on a form.

- So we own 102 acres and we farm three additional farms, which are right around 200 acres total.

Well, we grow a lot of ancient grains, so we have spelt, emmer and einkorn, which are your three ancient hulled wheats.

So like spelt is very popular in Europe, especially Germany.

And then we have emmer, which is "farro" in Italian.

And then einkorn is the oldest grain that a lot of people debate, whether with einkorn, if people grew it initially to make beer or bread from it, you know.

But the byproduct was civilization because in cultivating the grain they settled down into towns and became agrarian rather than hunter-gatherers.

- The ancient history may add to the flavor of the grains... - You put the grain in the hopper up here.

...but Nigel and Dale showed us some of the machines that they have to use to clean and dehull and debeard and get the grains ready for milling.

- There's a lot of work that goes in before it even sees the flour mill.

- So these mills are made in Austria and it's up in the Tyrolean Mountains, so that's their names: it's Osttiroler Getreidemuhlen which means East Tyrolean Grain Mill in German.

Grain goes in the hopper up here.

- We really enjoy the flour and the aspect of the flour that it's organic, it's healthy, - And as the grain is milling, it goes into the hopper here.

And then as we open the door, it flows out into the bin down below.

- We think it, it, it does people a lot of good.

- So we have 13 grains that we grow.

They're made into 33 different products, and each of those products come in four different package sizes, but that makes a lot of different products, you know, that we have to keep track of.

- And a lot of different products to weigh and package every month.

- So this is einkorn flakes, which if you like rolled oats, these are even better.

So all of our packages have a QR code on them, and with your cell phone you can put your camera over that and then you can see pictures of the actual grain that's in the bag, in the fields where it was grown.

- Because we have pictures from the time the crop is planted until it's harvested.

So everybody knows it comes directly from us.

- As far as we know, we're the only farm in the world that has that level of transparency as far as you can actually see the grain in the flour bag, you know, in the field.

- We don't know of anybody else who does it.

- So anytime we're out there making hay or driving by the field will just snap a couple pictures of that, and then my mom, who does the website, puts it all together.

- I like it.

I have fun doing it.

Nigel has fun taking pictures.

- Once a month we have an on-farm flour-pickup, and that's where consumers order and there's also mail orders.

- And some people drive to the farm to pick up what they've ordered and to get a few friendly moments with Marcy, Dale and Nigel.

- Thank you.

- We came for flour today.

- Marcy is an old friend.

- You've been here before, right?

- Yeah, we have.

- So you have... - We just got a bigger order this time.

- Okay.

- Just I go through the flour very quickly.

- Well that's good.

Oh, I like to talk to people.

Well, it's in the, it's in the cookbook too.

- Awesome.

I'm excited about that.

I love it.

A little bit of a haul.

I came from the city.

But I could not believe how many people were in line just to get flour and all the other products that they sell.

- Excited to make some yummy Christmas... - We're from Plum.

So we, it's a little poke, it's a little drive, but it's worth it.

- Hey, do you have a little recipe book?

- We sure do.

- Yeah, yeah, sure.

- Good.

- It's the 10th anniversary recipe book.

- Really?

- Yes.

- When we started doing the customer pickup, we had maybe 10 or 12 people.

- They're cool.

- You know, people come out, they get to meet their farmer, who's raising the food that's gonna make the flour for their bread and their cookies.

- Being stone-milled, it works a little differently than commercial flour, which is roller-milled, but tastes much better.

- I make bread, I make pizza dough.

- We're gonna experiment.

Yeah, I have a sourdough starter, so we're gonna make sourdough bread.

- I make sandwich loaves and I sell them to friends and family and I'm hoping to make a little business out of it.

- We're hearing them tell us how wonderful our flour is and how much they enjoy baking with it.

- Oh, we got the, the Pastry Flour, the 25 pounds for that and then the Appalachian Bread Flour.

- I buy einkorn here as well and make the einkorn bread.

- We do the annual Christmas Polish cookies, Polish twists or Kruschiki.

- Okay.

If you have any questions, give us a call.

- Okay.

- Happy baking!

- All right.

Yes.

- It was right in our backyard, literally, so we're very fortunate to find this place.

- I can just take it up here.

- Okay.

- Thank you so much.

- It's nice to have a local place.

I mean, you can't find rye flour hardly anywhere unless you order it online, and... - Once I found it, I've been here ever since.

- And I like it that they do this little recipe news booklet and they change it up every year.

- I mean, this is what a family owned farm should be.

- Turn around.

- All right.

Thank you.

- Watch your toes, Marcy.

- See ya.

- Bye bye.

- There was quite a long line today, longer than it usually is.

I think we, sometimes we had seven or eight cars lined up, usually it's only about three or four.

- 'Cause the stuff's really good.

I mean, we can't believe how good it is.

We can't believe how much better this stuff tastes.

- People can come buy their product, they see it's real.

- Thanks.

- Happy baking.

- Thank you.

- They feel safe, they feel comfortable.

- People are starting to really love it.

- We're the farmers.

That, that doesn't happen too much anymore.

- I think it's worth it.

It's very enjoyable, and it keeps me busy.

metimes bake cookies.

Nigel and his folks convinced me to change some of the main ingredients in my cookies and they taste better than ever.

But we're heading next to the Strip District just east of downtown, where on Penn Avenue, not far from the 31st Street Bridge, there's a nondescript little gray building where one day we met Denise O'Connor, who's the executive director there.

She's a co-founder of this nonprofit organization known as the Mid-Atlantic Mothers' Milk Bank.

- that we're kind of like a blood bank, but we're for human milk.

So we're serving primarily babies who are in the neonatal intensive care units and babies who have medical conditions.

- The other co-founder is Cyndy Verardi.

- We have four pulls... - Now, Director of Operations for the Milk Bank.

These two women got this started in 2016.

- Denise is a lactation consultant.

I am a chemist by training, and we have a huge foundation community that has backed us with funding sources that are -- have been -- exceedingly generous.

- We are getting milk from carefully screened volunteer donors who simply have more milk than their own babies need.

And then we need to do lots of things like test and bottle and pasteurize the milk to make it safe for the sick babies we serve.

And then we distribute that milk out to about 85 hospital units.

- So the bulk of the milk arrives through the back door.

It comes either by way of UPS or FedEx.

We do have some donors that will drop off.

- Megan Kennedy is just one of the donors who drops off her frozen milk regularly.

She drives around to the back of the building.

- I just drop it off in person.

It seems a little less chaotic than the mail.

- Then she just pushes the bell and someone like Amy Weber will come and take her donations.

- Megan?

- Yeah.

Hi.

- Hey, how are you?

- Good.

How are you?

- Oh, thank you so much.

- Yeah, of course.

- But when the milk comes in, it looks very much like this.

This would be a raw, what we would call a raw deposit of milk.

- All the immunological properties of human milk protects those little fragile babies that are, that are immature.

Over the past few decades, there's been an abundance of medical evidence showing that for babies who are sick, babies who are premature, babies who are medically fragile in our neonatal intensive care units, that milk isn't just about nutrition.

It's not just food.

It's not just calories, it's actually medicine.

- After it gets logged in, we bring it into the lab.

We usually pull together five donors in a pool.

So we will lay that milk out, which you can see right now, it's what they're doing.

They're laying the milk out on trays.

Those trays will go into the refrigerator and they'll defrost overnight.

- Our milk is coming from very generous volunteer donors.

As a matter of fact, we call them our heroes.

They truly are our heroes, and without them, the milk bank would not be possible.

- Give her a little hug from us.

- I am an over-producer of breast milk, so it seems, and so when I was pumping for my baby in the NICU, the lactation consultants were like, you have so much extra milk.

Would you like to, you know, donate to others?

And I, 'cause I needed somewhere to put it, I was, you know, locking up their freezer space.

So I was, you know, directed here by the lactation consultants of the NICU.

And it's been... dropping off milk ever since.

- It then will go to a big bucket where we'll pull it together.

We get it dispensed into bottles, and then it's pasteurized.

- Back in 2014, when this was just an idea, there was not a single hospital in Western Pennsylvania using donor milk.

- So after the milk is pasteurized and cooled down, we label them and all of those bottles will go into trays, and those trays will go into the quarantine freezer.

That's what this is.

One bottle from every single batch we send to Jefferson Hospital where they do a culture analysis to make sure that there's no bacteria growing in those.

- We do all of Pennsylvania, all of West Virginia, and then parts of Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware.

About 70% of the milk that we distribute stays here in Pennsylvania.

- Once that milk has been approved, we get the clean culture, we get clean drug testing, that milk is moved to dispensing freezers.

That's what these look like.

These are, this milk is already approved and ready to go to hospitals or to fill an order.

- Obviously there are lab technicians all around to help carry out this work.

- Are the labels made for tomorrow?

- And Bethany Kaspryszyn is the lab manager.

- We, every day we do get shipments of raw, frozen milk and every day we have shipments of pasteurized bottles going out.

- We have different qualities of milk.

So this is colostrum.

Colostrum is milk that a mom makes in the first four days after her baby's birth.

Pre-term milk would be milk from a mom whose baby was born 36 weeks gestation or earlier.

- It sounds simple.

It's not.

It's a very lengthy process.

We do a great job and everyone on the lab staff does a great job.

- Do you smoke or vape or anyone in your home, smoke or vape?

- We have to screen our donors.

And so we have an entire screening department of folks who are either nurses, lactation consultants, or have some type of education and training in breastfeeding.

- Yes, I do a single session.

- Okay.

Okay.

- And Melissa Watson was convinced by a visit to a NICU or neonatal intensive care unit.

- I knew that if I had the opportunity to be a breastfeeding parent, that I definitely wanted to provide some comfort to the children, some, some milk if I had a supply.

And I did.

And so I got on Google and I learned about where the nearest milk bank was, and it was right here in my backyard in Pittsburgh.

And so that's how I ended up here.

- When you walk down the hall here, you may notice the walls are brightly decorated, and on one wall there's a very special tree designed by Maria Wills.

- I've been a part of the milk bank since it opened.

I am the muralist to create the murals on the walls and the bereavement tree that we have to honor the bereaved donors that we have.

Each leaf that is on the tree is handmade personally by me, and they're each unique, just like the babies that they represent who have been lost to our bereaved donors.

So tell me a little bit about your pumping practices.

Last January, I came on board as a full-time donor-screener.

I'm the first point of contact and then I take them through the process from basically soup to nuts from first contact through their first donation.

- You know, breast milk has so much benefits in, especially for a NICU baby.

- I guess you never come into it, especially as a first time parent, knowing that you'd be able to produce the amounts of milks that you can.

- Right now, I think we have over 500 active donors.

So yes, we have quite a few and many retired donors, thousands.

- There are also folks like Tanazia Cleveland who got a prescription and comes here to get donor milk when needed - For at least three months.

I produced by myself.

And then I think I've been coming here for about a month now.

I'm thankful for it because my supply decreased and knowing that she got donor milk in the NICU.

So once we came home and I actually needed it, I'm thinking like, you know, we tried formula with her and it just, her digestive symptom didn't seem like it was taking it too well.

So I'm like, you know, we need more breast milk.

And then once again, that's how I came here.

- The wonderful success of this milk bank has allowed them to expand and include a biobank that keeps samples for breast milk research purposes.

- We're calling it the Human Milk Science Institute and Biobank, it's a very long name for just a, you know, a small room right now.

- And troubles with outdated, imported machines led them to work with a local company to develop new and better pasteurizers for human milk.

- This is an innovation from here in Pittsburgh.

This was made by a company called Data Science Automation.

Once it's prepared and ready to go, we plan to order some more units, and then we expect that other milk banks will also be interested.

And it's a Pittsburgh thing.

Yeah, it's a Pittsburgh thing.

Yeah.

It's very cool.

- Do you have anything else?

Even though we're not all Pittsburgh natives, we have all adopted -- what I would say is -- the Pittsburgh neighborhood attitude: to be mission driven and to help your neighbor, right?

Yeah.

- And they just told me how much I've donated in the past two months that I've donated milk here.

I think it was like over a thousand ounces.

So like to know that that's a pretty good amount of milk.

So I think that's, I think it's awesome.

It makes, you know me feel good.

- It made me feel like I was doing something that was lifesaving saving and worthwhile to families who needed it.

- It's a very emotionally satisfying job because you know how many people you're helping.

- Knowing the impact that we're, that we're having.

That's, that's just such a joy.

And every single person in this building, you can feel the passion that they all have.

And they're all in for the babies.

And how can you not be?

Milk Bank is doing incredible, wonderful, important work, helping families in a time of need.

We're lucky that they do the work that they do, and we're lucky that they're here.

And we like asking people about how lucky they feel to be in this part of western Pennsylvania.

- Well, Western Pennsylvania, sure!

We're extended community.

- Born and raised here.

- It's a beautiful area.

- Lucky to live in Pittsburgh?

I think so.

- I do feel lucky to live in Pittsburgh.

I think Pittsburgh is a great city to live in.

- Very lucky.

Yeah.

This is a great place.

I'm happy here, and all the people are happy here, seems like to me.

- I do feel lucky to live here.

I am a transplant, but I've lived here for almost 30 years now.

- We're very lucky.

I'd say beyond that, I think we're, we're more blessed to be in Pittsburgh.

If I say so myself.

- Well, you know, since we moved out here, we don't get to Pittsburgh very often.

We're lucky to live near Pittsburgh.

- I work pretty close to Pittsburgh, so that's as close as I need to get to Pittsburgh.

- I think we're all very lucky to work here.

- People in Pittsburgh are some of the nicest people I've ever experienced, and I've traveled many places in the world, having worked for the United Nations.

- I have done a lot of traveling.

I like going to other places and seeing them but this still, it feels like home.

This is home.

That's all I can say.

- Everybody that comes in from outta state, out of the area, nothing but compliments here.

- Yeah, Pittsburgh's a great place.

- And yes, I'm very lucky to live in Pittsburgh and I hope that I could live here for as many years to come.

- Yeah, I love living in Pittsburgh.

It's awesome.

- I hear a lot of people talking to, you know, my age and getting older and they're like, oh, we're gonna move to Florida.

I would never move to Florida.

I'd just stay right here in Pittsburgh.

It's great!

Yeah.

No need.