Following his election to the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1928, Michael A. Musmanno, 31, became its youngest member. When he rose to address his fellow legislators for the first time, the presiding officer mistook him for a trespassing visitor.
“Are you, sir, a member of this House?” he asked Musmanno.
“Mr. Speaker, I am,” he replied. “Furthermore, this is the first time and, I believe, the last time you will ever be in doubt of that.”
That anecdote, showing both his self-confidence and his sense of humor, was one of many included in Musmanno’s obituary in The Pittsburgh Press. It appeared Oct. 13, 1968, the day after his death at 71 from the effects of a stroke.
In an Oct. 14 editorial, the Post-Gazette described him as “one of the state’s most colorful and controversial public figures [who] brought to every major public issue a passionate, if at times quixotic, concern for the underdog,”
A lifelong bachelor, he appeared to be married, in equal parts, to the law and to the limelight.
As a young lawyer, he was part of the defense team that worked on ultimately unsuccessful appeals of the death sentences imposed on anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the 1920s. As a state legislator and as an author, he led the successful fight to ban the Coal & Iron Police, a private law-enforcement force accused of terrorizing workers. His efforts in that cause included writing a short story that became the basis for a 1935 Hollywood movie called “Black Fury.”
After service with the U.S. Navy during World War II, he became a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremburg Trials. Many years later, he was a prosecution witness during the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, who oversaw the deportation of Jews to death camps, was convicted for his role in carrying out the Holocaust and hanged in 1962.
He served on the state Supreme Court from 1952 until his death in 1968.
His flamboyant behavior regularly drew the attention of Pittsburgh reporters. In December 1936, for example, he issued an opinion backing the existence of Santa Claus, Jack Frost and Cupid. The Bulletin Index, a weekly journal of Pittsburgh society events and cultural commentary, described his courtroom activities as “Musmanntics.”
He drew some of his biggest Pittsburgh headlines during the winter of 1936-37 when, as criminal court president judge for Allegheny County, he led a crusade against drunken driving. During his tenure in that position, everyone convicted of that offense went to jail, usually for 30 days.
A conservative Democrat, he was staunchly anti-communist during the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s. He supported requiring loyalty oaths for public employees and backed measures to outlaw the Communist Party in Pennsylvania.
Among his dozen books was “Columbus Was First,” in which he argued against now generally accepted claims that Vikings had preceded the Italian navigator as the first Europeans to set foot in the New World. “[N]othing aroused his volatile Italian temper so much as any claim that Christopher Columbus did not discover America,” Post-Gazette reporter James Fetzer wrote on Oct. 14, 1968.
Musmanno had been picked to be Grand Marshal of Pittsburgh’s 1968 Columbus Day Parade. When the “usually punctual” justice did not show up for work on the day before the march, police were sent to his apartment in what is now Point Park University’s Lawrence Hall. Officers found him unconscious, and he was taken to Mercy Hospital where he died on Columbus Day, Oct. 12. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.