Mike Lange will never forget the smell.
It was actually his first time on an airplane, as a 20-year-old student at Sacramento State University, flying to Tacoma, Wash. to call a basketball game.
After landing at Sea-Tac Airport, he drove the rest of the way and began to smell sulphur from a nearby lumber mill, the same scent with which he was plenty familiar having grown up in Northern California.
“It’s a distinctive odor,” Lange said.
Fast forward to 1974. When Lange arrived in Pittsburgh, he stepped off the plane and smelled it again.
“It came from the steel plants,” Lange recalled Monday.