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Fifty states, 28 countries, seven trips across the equator.
Bill Messinger's lifelong love of travel led him to Machu Picchu in Peru, the pyramids in Egypt and China's Great Wall.
But it was a career spent in the steel mill that made it all possible for a boy born into a North Huntingdon home with no electricity, kerosene lamp lighting and water supplied by rain-filled underground cisterns.
Messinger worked at U.S. Steel in McKeesport for more than four decades. He witnessed layoffs, strikes and an agreement between union and industry leaders to put more people to work by giving senior employees 13-week vacations every five years.
Those long vacations combined with a humble Great Depression-era upbringing and a childhood love for the globe-trotting radio broadcasts of Lowell Thomas set Messinger on a path to explore the world beyond rural southwestern Pennsylvania.
“That's what the story is all about,” Messinger said.
He started working for the steel mill part-time as a junior in high school. It was June 1944, the same month Allied forces invaded Hitler's Europe. Mill work was difficult, physically demanding labor. He worked alongside other like-minded young men, used by the mill to offset a GI-induced labor shortage.
The money was good, a big deal for a child of the Great Depression. But when Messinger's mother diverted half his pay toward the household budget, he initially scoffed. Today he credits the rule, along with his decision to avoid a mortgage by building his own house and a second home on family-owned land, with leading to the responsible financial habits that funded his jet-setting trips.
“I didn't drink, smoke or gamble,” he said. “I didn't go fishing or hunting. … My time was occupied by building, and the only hobby I really had was travel.”
After high school, Messinger began an apprenticeship in the mill's machine shop, where he'd spend the rest of his career. He also met his wife, Vivian, in 1947. They married three years later in August 1950 at Sampson's Mills Presbyterian Church, a church they still attend.
An early taste for travel followed in the form of a honeymoon in which the newlyweds trekked from Niagara Falls through Canada to Detroit and Ohio. Then the Messingers started a family.
Two boys, Wayne and Russell, came first, followed by daughter Wanda. A short trip to Yellowstone National Park with an Apache tent trailer came next before Messinger accumulated enough seniority — dating all the way to 1944 — to take his first 13-week vacation in July 1968.
The Messingers loaded into a 1963 Corvair and set out on a winding 12,000-mile road trip to Alaska and back. They traveled another 1,500 miles by Alaskan ferry.
“It was exciting,” Vivian said. “We had a van and a tent trailer behind it. The boys slept in the van and Wanda, our daughter, and I slept in the tent trailer.”
Many trips followed over the years, during both 13-week vacations and shorter times away from work. Vivian Messinger came along on most, and the pair brought or visited their children along the way whenever possible.
London, Ireland, Paris and Brussels in 1972; the Grand Canyon and the American West in 1973; New Zealand in 1976; Hawaii and Australia in 1980; South Africa and Zimbabwe in 1982; Mexico in 1984; China in 1985 — the year Messinger started collecting his U.S. Steel pension.
The destination list grew after his retirement. Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway. Lisbon, Tangier, Casablanca, Marrakesh. the Rock of Gibraltar, the Panama Canal. Vancouver, Quito, the Galapagos Islands.
Through it all, life continued.
Messinger started driving a bus for Norwin School District in 1986. He's still a bus aide 30 years later. He and Vivian became grandparents, then great-grandparents. Thirteen years ago, an English woman they met in Australia visited the Messingers with her family. Her children saw snow for the first time. Messinger has a home movie of them sledding, making a snowman and visiting his school bus.
Being almost 90, Messinger doesn't travel like he used to. But he passed on his spirit of adventure to his daughter.
She still remembers riding a mule down to the Grand Canyon's spectacular bottom and wading in the Colorado River. Now she and her husband love to travel, though they prefer to see the United States from the back of a motorcycle.
“I know he's got really good memories of everything,” Wanda Aaron, 59, said of her father. “But I know he's still got that travel bug in him, too.”
Michael Walton is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724-850-1290 or mwalton@tribweb.com.
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