How ‘orphan train’ origins informed CMU’s trailblazer — and brought diversity to Fox Chapel

(Photo illustration by Natasha Vicens)

The late Richard Cyert is best known as one of the parents of Pittsburgh’s new economy. His daughters’ curiosity brought to light his roots, which may have informed his other role: a catalyst for desegregation.

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by David S. Rotenstein, PublicSource

Richard Cyert was Carnegie Mellon University’s sixth president and one of Pittsburgh’s most transformative figures. Less known was his role in breaking Fox Chapel’s color barrier. 

His daughters grew up with the blowback from their father’s pioneering role in that community, but only recently sleuthed into his background and discovered a formative experience that may have motivated their father: The CMU leader was the child of two Jewish orphans shipped from cosmopolitan New York City to small town Minnesota.

Richard Cyert’s parents, Walter and Anne (also spelled Anna in historical documents), were moved as children to Winona, Minnesota, from New York City on “orphan trains,” which carried urban children westward to new homes in the 1800s. Walter and Anne’s story is distinctive in the annals of orphan train history.

Curious about her family’s health history and ancestry, Martha Cyert, the youngest of Richard and Margaret Cyert’s daughters and a Stanford University biologist, submitted a DNA sample to a commercial lab. Fortified by the genetic testing results, Martha’s sisters, Lynn and Lucinda, reached out to historical societies and archives for answers to lingering questions about their family’s origins. Their decade-long independent research project is adding a new chapter to the city’s history.

Richard Cyert transformed Carnegie Mellon University from a respected technical college into an internationally recognized research university. That, along with developments in the tech industry and health care, helped to propel Pittsburgh beyond steel and heavy industry into the 21^st century.

Bits and pieces of Cyert’s family history have appeared in biographies and CMU histories. But there are gaps in the story that the new information fills.

“It’s probably not the worst kind of family story to have,” said Lynn Cyert. She’s the oldest Cyert sister and is a retired optometry professor who lives in Oklahoma. She explained that her father never talked about their orphan ties, and her aunts, Constance and Charlotte, intentionally avoided the subject. It was an uncomfortable topic, tinged with pain and shame.

“I sure wish they’d handled it differently,” Lynn Cyert said of her aunts. 

Her younger sister, Lucinda Steffes, agreed. “I don’t know if he would have shared it with some of his closer friends,” she said. “Daddy was just very shut down emotionally.” Steffes is a retired banker who lives in Arizona.

Lacking firsthand family accounts, the Cyert sisters hit the Internet, phones and the mail to find answers. 

Orphan trains to the Heartland

The orphan trains were an early attempt to provide homes for increasing numbers of urban children whose parents had died or, more frequently, who could not afford to care for them. “Between 50% and 75% of all kids in an orphanage by the late 1800s had at least one living parent,” explained University of Texas Rio Grande Valley historian Megan Birk, author of the 2015 book, “Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest.”

“They begin in the 1850s with the sort of basic idea that children in New York City are suffering from their environment,” said Birk. “That the sort of poverty and the overcrowding and some of the health issues are bad for kids and that if they are surrounded by a bad environment, they will end up bad.”

Statistics are hard to come by for the number of children sent west from seaboard cities. Historians estimate that at least 200,000 children ended up on orphan trains between the 1850s and 1929 when the program ended.

Winona, Minnesota, is about 1,000 miles and worlds away from Manhattan. Located on the west bank of the upper Mississippi River, about 19,000 people lived in Winona in the first decade of the 20^th century. 

Orphan train children began arriving in Minnesota before 1870. Arrivals began increasing in the 1870s and historians estimate that between 3,500 and 4,000 children went to Minnesota via orphan trains.

“In each town in which the train stopped, a committee of prominent citizens, usually chosen through the churches, helped the agent select ‘good’ families with which to place the children,” wrote historian Janet Liebl in a 1994 book, “Ties that Bind: The Orphan Train Story in Minnesota.”

Many Winona residents were Polish immigrants like Michal and Maryanna Cyert, the couple who adopted Richard Cyert’s father. Michal and his brothers worked in the construction industry. 

In 1900, the Cyerts adopted a 3-year-old boy named Walter Brown. They renamed him Walter Michael Cyert. “Left by mother, Jewess, gave name,” reads a receipt for the child in the New York Foundling Hospital records. Walter Brown was 3 months old when his mother left him. The same receipt shows that he was baptized the day after arriving at the hospital.

Anton and Veronica Binczyk adopted Richard Cyert’s mother, Anne. Like the Cyerts, Anton Binczyk worked with wood, as a carpenter.

Anne Cyert was born in New York City’s Sloane Maternity Hospital. The Binczyks adopted her in 1900. Unlike her future husband, who had to document his life history to serve in the military, there are few early records documenting her life. 

None of the surviving Cyert family members interviewed for this story knows for sure how their grandparents met. Stories passed down in their family suggest that they met at church.

The Cyerts and Binczyks belonged to St. Stanislaus Catholic Church. The church was a religious and social hub for the city’s Polish population. Its pastor, James Pacholski, served St. Stanislaus between 1894 and 1932 and he likely played a key role in Walter and Anne’s adoptions. 

Digging into DNA and documents

“We always were told that he was probably Jewish because he was circumcised,” said Lucinda Steffes of her grandfather, Walter Cyert.

There were other, more visible clues. Walter Cyert and his future wife stood out as different in a community where fair skin, blue eyes and straight hair were dominant physical characteristics. 

“My father and his sisters were darker skinned, olive skinned,” Steffes said.

“A lot of people look at me and just assume I’m Jewish, which is weird. And I think people assumed from the way he looked that he could have been Jewish,” said Martha Cyert.

“You can imagine two little orphan kids with dark eyes and dark hair growing up in a small town in northern Minnesota,” said Lynn Cyert. “You know, it probably was pretty rough on them.”

As Walter Cyert and Anne Binczyk grew into adults and their romanced blossomed, concerns arose in the community about their New York ancestry.

“The children sent by your home to our congregation some 17 years ago are today all grown up young people and, at least some of them, are ready to marry,” wrote Pacholski in 1917 about Walter Cyert and Anne Binczyk to the Sisters of Charity in New York. “On account of their strong fraternal resemblance, the people here suspect them of some near relation that would make their marriage null and void.”

No response to the letter has been preserved. Walter Cyert and Anne Binczyk were married three years later, in 1920. Walter Cyert worked as a salesman while the family lived in Minneapolis. By the late 1940s, after working for the government in Washington, D.C., the Cyerts were living in Pennsylvania.

Walter and Anne Cyert had three children: Richard, their oldest, and two daughters, Constance and Charlotte. The couple divorced in the late 1940s, and Walter later remarried. 

Questions about family health and history compelled Martha Cyert to send a DNA sample to genetics testing company 23andMe.

“The reason I submitted it was partly because I did want to know about my heritage,” said Martha Cyert. “That definitely was one of the driving forces.” She also wanted to know about any ticking genetic timebombs that could impact her or her childrens’ health.

Though the decision was a deeply personal one, Martha Cyert approached it as a scientist. “I don’t know that I would call myself a geneticist, but I have used genetics a lot in my research, so it was very natural for me to want to have that kind of information about myself and my genome,” she said.

The results confirmed long-held suspicions. “I am 50% Ashkenazi Jew, and it’s all on my dad’s side,” said Martha Cyert. “My mom knew a little bit more about her family background, and her relatives are definitely from England.”

Birk said that the Cyert story sets the family apart from most other orphan train family histories. “I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of someone who had both of their parents transported. That’s very unique,” Birk said. “Maybe that experience kind of drew them together or was a sort of bond of sorts that they shared.”

Public accomplishments, private transactions

Anne Cyert died in Minneapolis in 1950 at age 49. Walter Cyert died in 1987 at age 90. An obituary published in the North Hills News Record described him as a retired Westinghouse industrial engineer.

Richard Cyert grew up in Minneapolis. He graduated from the University of Minnesota and served in the Navy during World War II. After earning his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University, he briefly taught at the City College of New York before coming to Pittsburgh in 1948 to teach at CMU, then known as the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He became a dean in 1962 and 10 years later, Cyert became CMU’s president. 

Richard Cyert’s many accomplishments at CMU included expanding the university’s computer science footprint and forging close ties with corporations, bringing in massive funding for research. Cyert also grew the university’s humanities, arts and social sciences programs. 

“Richard M. Cyert served as president of Carnegie Mellon University for 18 enterprising years,” wrote Ludwig F. Schaefer in a 1992 history of the university. “He was unquestionably the guiding spirit that led the university to its current distinction.”

Martha Cyert described her father as “a big part of changing the employment, you know, just the landscape of what was available in Pittsburgh.”

Richard Cyert died in 1998 and his daughters began filling in the gaps in his life history. The orphan train experience was one chapter they dug into. Another involved how their father helped to break Fox Chapel’s race barrier by working with a Black family to buy a home there. 

In 1964, two years after he became dean of CMU’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Richard Cyert was teaching in the school’s economics department. Since 1957, he and his family had been living in a home on Chapel Ridge Road. At that time, the only Black people residing inside Fox Chapel were domestic workers living in their employers’ homes and on the campus of Shadyside Academy.

Richard Cyert and his CMU colleague James Houghteling Jr. collaborated to assist Dr. Alonzo McDonald, a University of Pittsburgh oral surgery professor, and his wife, Inez, to buy a home on Chapel Ridge Road. Houghteling was the straw buyer: an intermediate who bought a home for someone and then transferred the property to the third party who was otherwise prohibited from buying it. Richard Cyert helped the McDonalds with moving into the sundown town.

“I remember my dad telling me they called the police because they just wanted to make sure the police were aware that this was going to happen in case there was any trouble,” Lynn Cyert recalled. “Well, the cops leaked it.”

That leak was the first of several episodes leading to harassment of the McDonald and Cyert children. 

Marshall McDonald was Alonzo and Inez McDonald’s son. He remembers a neighbor calling him a monkey as he walked to the bus stop. “I was very young. I didn’t understand it, really,” he said.

The Cyert family’s values clashed with their neighbors’ beyond Chapel Ridge Road. The Cyert sisters vividly recall the time their family went with the family of one of Richard Cyert’s CMU colleagues to Chapel Gate Swim Club. “​​We went to the club and we checked in and we had friends with us who were Japanese and they wouldn’t let us in,” said Steffes.

The Cyerts responded by building their own swimming pool.

Martha Cyert, the youngest, spent more time in Fox Chapel than her sisters and she was closest to Marshall McDonald. 

“I do think that the reason I remember playing with him so much was because, you know, not a lot of people in the neighborhood actually wanted to play with him,” Martha Cyert recalled. “And maybe they didn’t want to play with me either.”

Middle sister Steffes has strong memories from her childhood on Chapel Ridge Road.

“I became socially ostracized in the neighborhood,” she recalled. “And I was told by a couple of the families when I went over to play with my neighborhood friends that I was no longer welcome in their home.”

“I’m just so proud of my parents that they would stand up during those times and do something like that,” said Steffes. 

“My parents weren’t like other parents as far as their attitudes about things were concerned,” said Lynn Cyert. Those things included the Vietnam War and civil rights.

Reflecting on Richard and Margaret Cyert’s quiet activism against segregation, their daughters wonder if Jews in the family attic might have played some conscious or unconscious role in their actions. 

“I assume that’s one of the reasons my father was so dedicated” to civil rights, said Steffes.

David Rotenstein is a Pittsburgh based writer and historian and can be reached at david.rotenstein@gmail.com.

This story was fact-checked by Sarah Liez.

This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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