Ervin Dyer talked to a number of people who knew August Wilson as a boy and a young man in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. This is part of his story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Dyer starts with recollection of the Hill 38 years ago:

On the corners and in the clubs were a peculiar people, giving life and lyricism to an emerging black pride. They were using their art to carry messages of community and justice.

Folded into this eccentric mix was a young man, yellow-skinned and soft-spoken. He often crouched in the shadows, scribbling, always scribbling, capturing snatches of life on napkins or scraps of paper. In his white shirt or natty cap, the young man occasionally stood and recited the poetry of others. Soon, finding the strength and voice to present his own words.

The young man was August Wilson -- before he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright heralded for his 10-play cycle that would chronicle and serve as a metaphor for the 20th-century black experience in America. Much of it takes place in the Hill District.

Mr. Wilson's plays are fueled by strong, unsung characters -- garbage men, blues musicians, ex-cons, domestics and mystics. All streetwise philosophers and storytellers. In many ways, they are like Mr. Wilson, before the fame: as humble and peculiar a character as any that made its way into his opus of black struggle and triumph.

"Everybody was an oddball in the Hill," said Mr. [Amir] Rashidd, sitting in the basement of Monumental Baptist Church, Hill District, where he fondly shared a thousand memories of his old friend.

They included Sy Morocco, painter, sculptor, musician; Charlie P. Williams, poet; Maisha Baton and Rob Penny, poets and writers. Out of this groove came the Kuntu Writers Workshop and the Centre Avenue Poets, who made protest a song.

Mr. Rashidd moved to Pittsburgh in 1976, and over the years, his friendship with Mr. Wilson deepened. In their quiet moments, Mr. Rashidd would pull out his harmonica and the two would sit down and talk. In Mr. Wilson's theatrical world, bits and pieces of real-life show up in his plays: In "Seven Guitars" there's a harmonica player, Canewell, among seven friends in 1940s Pittsburgh.

Mr. Wilson, with his scraps of paper, took notes as life rolled along at Florentine's, a bar on Wylie; at Mom's Pan Fry, where an old man told stories out of the Bible as if he lived through them, and the Virginia Bar, where the proprietress who survived the Depression ruled with a grand flair. Before the night fell, Mr. Rashidd recounted that on many a day, his friend walked over to St. Joseph, a Catholic care home for indigent men.

There, on Bedford Avenue -- not far from where the house he was born in is crumbling -- Mr. Wilson would get a cheap lunch and listen to all the old timers. "He'd ask them to talk about the Hill."

After Mr. Wilson found fame, he'd occasionally come back home and the two would rendevous at Eddie's Restaurant on the Hill. Mr. Rashidd ate peach cobbler and Mr. Wilson drank black coffee and smoked. The owner, Eddie Owens, died five years ago, and the eatery, known for its home-cooked meals, closed soon after. But in its heyday, scruffy little Eddie's was a favorite hangout for Mr. Wilson.

That's where[waitress Thelma] Ms. Smalls met him. "August would come in and sit at the counter. He'd sit there all day." He'd always have the same meal: two eggs over easy, home fries and biscuits with butter and jelly or wheat toast. "He drank his coffee black and he asked that I keep it coming," said Ms. Smalls. He was nice, she recalled, but he was quiet and "people thought he had issues," because he carried all these papers around.

In the restaurant, Ms. Smalls remembered the playwright would joke around only with Mr. Owens, who occasionally put him out to make room for a paying customer. For one day, Mr. Wilson washed dishes for Eddie's. He lost his job when Mr. Owens found him in a booth scribbling, scribbling, always scribbling.