JoAnn was second-generation grease. Her father, José, born and raised in Corpus Christi, was twenty in 1958, washing dishes in a hospital cafeteria in Pittsburgh, when a man came in and offered twenty dollars for the grease drum in the corner. “My dad said, ‘What are you doing with that?'” JoAnn told me. “The man said he sells the grease to companies who process animal feed, and my dad said, ‘I’m going to move back to Texas, and I’m going to make myself a millionaire doing this!” José’s wife, pregnant with JoAnn at the time, was game.
— from “Hot Grease,” by John Colapinto (The New Yorker, November 18, 2013)
The Ongoing History of Pittsburgh 