by Dan Rooney
By the time he was eighteen he was out of the house and on his own. His intelligence and winning smile caught the attention of local politicians, like state senator James J. Coyne. Before he was twenty-one, Dad became chairman of the old Ward (actually Pittsburgh’s 22nd Ward, but all the old timers insisted on calling it the 1st Ward, its Allegheny City designation). Dad had the Irish gift of gab, but he wasn’t just a smooth talker—he genuinely loved people and they loved him. He liked nothing better than helping others and he learned to work the system to get the most for his friends and constituents. At the same time, he was a young man and actively participated in sports of all kinds, but in these early years boxing was his passion.
Carnivals came to town twice a year with professional boxers, pugs who would challenge the local talent. A tough mill worker could make $3 for every round he could go with the pros. The carney boxers usually made short work of the yokels—except when they got to our neighborhood and took on the Rooney brothers. My father and his brothers beat the carneys so many times and made off with so much money, the promoters banned them from the boxing tent. In fact, Dad was such a skilled boxer that he attracted the attention of the U.S. Olympic Committee, which in 1920 invited him to represent the United States at the Antwerp Games. My grandmother, however, was against the whole idea. Dad would have liked to go, but he was so busy with ward politics and other enterprises he declined the honor. The Olympic Committee then tapped Sammy Mosberg, a good New York fighter who Dad had just beaten in a big tournament a few weeks earlier. To everyone’s surprise, Mosberg came home with the gold medal. Just to show the home crowd who was best, Dad challenged Sammy to a rematch—and whipped him again. That was Dad. I still have the silver trophy he won for beating Mosberg at the 1920 Pittsburgh Athletic Association tournament, which he prized above all others. It’s not a very flashy trophy, but to him it kind of represented Olympic gold.
Boxing, football, baseball—he loved them all. But he was more than an athlete. He was a skilled organizer and a great promoter. While still a teenager he started the Hope-Harveys, a regional semi-pro football team that played home games in Exposition Park, sometimes before crowds of more than twelve thousand people. “Hope” was the name of the fire station that provided locker rooms for the team, and “Harvey” was the doctor who tended to the players’ bruises, sprains, and broken noses. The Hope-Harveys hit hard, won more than they lost, and as the best football club in the region developed a loyal and vocal following in the Pittsburgh area.
As he grew older, Dad turned to baseball. He was good at it, real good. Soon he was making money by both playing for and managing teams like the Wheeling, West Virginia, Stogies. He even signed with the Boston Red Sox for $250 a month, but found he could make twice as much barnstorming with semi-pro teams in the Midwest. For more than fifteen seasons he traveled the baseball circuit, holding his own with such Hall-of-Famers as Honus Wagner and Joe Cronin, not to mention Smokey Joe Williams and Buck Leonard of the Negro League. Of course, Honus Wagner was past his prime—“athletically old,” Dad said—but still the best player he’d ever seen. Cronin broke into the majors with the Pittsburgh Pirates but made history as a slugger for the Boston Red Sox. He could belt the ball a mile and made a great impression on Dad. So did Williams and Leonard, two of the Negro Leagues’ greatest players. In 1925, playing in the Mid-Atlantic League, Dad batted .369 and led the league in runs, hits, and stolen bases.
He said he once tried to hold down a “real” job in a steel mill but quit at noon on the first day, wondering how anyone could work day in and day out under such harsh conditions. He had nothing but respect for the hard-working steelers who could do it, but this kind of job wasn’t for him. He was back on the baseball diamond the next day.
By 1930 Dad had made a success of everything he tried: as a baseball barnstormer, a ward leader, a sports promoter, and as a horse handicapper. He saw his first race when he was eighteen years old and quickly developed an uncanny ability to pick winners. This wasn’t luck. He studied the sport, knew the animals, the trainers, the jockeys, the owners. Dad always told me that betting on horses wasn’t just a game of chance—he wouldn’t have done it if it were—it required knowledge and skill. Some people say he was the best thoroughbred handicapper in the country. Maybe he was. All I know is that by the time he was thirty years old he had earned enough money to think about marriage and starting a family of his own.
He met my mother, Kathleen McNulty, a girl from the Point who had just moved with her family across the river to the North Side. In June 1931, after a brief courtship, they married and then honeymooned in San Diego and New York, where on a hot sunny afternoon they watched the thoroughbred Twenty Grand win the sixty-fourth running of the Belmont Stakes. Mom and Dad didn’t stay away from Pittsburgh very long. Soon they moved into a small apartment above a North Side furniture store on Western Avenue, just a block from Exposition Park.
I came along the next year, the first of five brothers: Arthur J. Jr., Timothy J., and the twins, Patrick J. and John J. The Rooney clan tends to recycle the same names over and over, generation after generation, so our family tree gets a little confusing at times.
I’ll admit Dad did get a little fixated about the “J”s. His “J” was for St. Joseph—the patron saint of workers—and all my brothers got the same middle name. Being the first born, I somehow escaped the “J” brand. My middle name is Milton, for my father’s longtime friend, Milton Jaffe. Dad may have felt a little guilty about winning Milton’s golf clubs in payment for a bet they made the first time they ever played golf together. It’s a shameful fact that in many American communities of that day anti-Semitism had become institutionalized. Pittsburgh was no different. Jewish people were barred from many golf courses, so Dad took Milton to his club, Wildwood. It turned out Milton was an awful golfer. Dad said he was doing him a favor by taking his clubs. They had a great relationship and remained close for the rest of their lives.
The little garret was soon overrun with Rooney boys tracking tar, picked up from the second-story courtyard, through the house. Mom was hard-pressed to keep the place clean and us in line. Dad often was away on business, so my mother called in her sister, Alice, to help out.
I always received special treatment—a fact my brothers were not very happy about—because I was not only the oldest boy in our family but the first grandson of the extended Rooney clan. With Irish families, firstborn sons are favored, and from the beginning I was the cock of the walk. I tried to live up to those expectations, and my mother often allowed me a longer leash than my little brothers.
This sometimes got me in trouble. My earliest memory, as vivid as if it happened yesterday, is of an outing to a restaurant on Babcock Boulevard when I was about five years old. Mom, Dad, and Alice corralled Art and me—it must have been like herding cats—but I got away and found my way to a pond in front of the restaurant. I was busy floating scrap-paper boats when somehow I lost my footing and splashed head over heels into the water. The pond was small but deep—well over my head. The thing I remember most clearly is that I didn’t panic. I sank to the bottom and pushed off with my feet, propelling myself to the surface, allowing me just enough time to gulp a breath of air before sinking back to the bottom again. This bobbing went on for some time until finally I let out a yelp every time I broke the surface. “Help!” . . . “Help!” . . . “Help!” Luckily, my cries attracted a man who at first thought I was a drowning dog. When he finally fished me out, I ran—without so much as a thank you—into the restaurant, jumped soaking wet into my mother’s arms, and told the story. They were horrified but thankful I never lost my cool and managed to keep my head above water. They made a big deal of that, and I could tell my father was proud of me. I’ve always remembered the look he gave me and that special smile of his. I also remember the next time we went to the restaurant the owner had filled in the pond with rocks.
Dad had been spending a lot of time with his new football team, the NFL “Pittsburgh Pirates,�
� which he had bought for $2,500 in the summer of 1933, about the time of my first birthday. NFL commissioner Joe Carr approached my father because the league saw Pittsburgh as a good expansion opportunity, now that Pennsylvania’s “blue laws” prohibiting Sunday play were about to be repealed. Carr and the NFL owners knew Art Rooney to be the best promoter in Western Pennsylvania. They also appreciated the fact that he was a real football man—he understood the sport and would be just the guy to cultivate a fan base in the Pittsburgh market. Dad and Carr met in New York to discuss the terms for buying the franchise. Joe said he could have the team for $2,500.
Dad raised his eyebrows and repeated, “Two thousand five hundred dollars?”
“Well, if that’s too much,” Carr said quickly, “something can be arranged.”
“No, Joe,” Dad said, laughing. “Twenty-five hundred dollars is fine.”
And that’s how my father became the proud owner of the NFL franchise then known as the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Let me say right here, there’s been a lot of talk over the years about how Dad came to buy the franchise. It’s been rumored that a big $250,000 payday at Saratoga enabled him to purchase the team. That’s nonsense. Dad’s legendary day at the racetrack occurred in the summer of 1937, a memorable opening day at Saratoga. Thunder-heads darkened the sky and a lightning strike killed several horses in a holding paddock. It was a fateful day all right—the biggest payday Dad ever had at the racetrack—but it had nothing to do with buying the team. He made the deal with the NFL three years earlier, on July 8, 1933.
As I’ve said, my father had many business interests by this time. While twenty-five hundred dollars might have been a lot of money during the Depression, there’s no question he had the financial wherewithal to close the deal without a racetrack windfall. That’s one of the reasons Joe Carr came to him in the first place. He was a good promoter and businessman, and he had money. The big payday at Saratoga might have helped keep the team afloat during the lean years of the late 1930s and 1940s, but there’s absolutely no truth to the story that he bought the Pirates with his Saratoga winnings.
My father always enjoyed telling the story of the Pirates’ first game. The blue laws were still in effect then, and several of the city’s religious leaders threatened to shut us down if we played on Sunday. So Dad went to Pittsburgh’s Irish superintendent of police, Franklin T. McQuade, and asked him if he was going to support the preachers and stop the game.
“Nonsense,” he said, “I’ll be sitting right next to you at kickoff—nobody will find me there.”
Dad loved to tell stories, and always told us to tell the truth, but to be honest, the Pirates’ first game was played on a Wednesday (the Giants beat us, 23-2), not a Sunday. The McQuade story applied to the ninth game of the season, which was the first professional football game ever played on a Sunday in Pittsburgh.
We didn’t see Dad a lot in those days. He was on the road much of the time, visiting racetracks, promoting fights, and working hard to make the football Pirates a success. Mom thought it would be good for Dad to spend some time with us boys, but she wasn’t wild about the idea of us hanging out at Dad’s office at the Fort Pitt Hotel or on practice fields with rough athletes.
Once, against her better judgment, she allowed my father to take my brother Arty and me to the football training camp at St. Francis College. Dad was supposed to watch us, but he left us on the sidelines to fend for ourselves. The players kept us company. I would laugh my head off when they grabbed our hands under our legs and flipped us over. But when one of the water boys tried this stunt with me, instead of landing on my feet, I fell flat on my face and broke my nose. That same day, Arty came home with a terrible sunburn. When my mother saw us, she was quite upset and told Dad, “You’ll never take these kids again—you’re supposed to be watching them!” But of course, she relented and the next week we were back at training camp loafing with the players.
We did have our share of close calls. One time, a big running back got tackled right on the sidelines where I was kneeling. I would have been crushed if another player hadn’t grabbed me by the collar and yanked me out of the way.
Because I was the oldest, I occasionally got to go along with Dad when the team was on the road. In 1939 the Pirates were playing a preseason game against George Halas’s Chicago Bears in Erie, Pennsylvania. The Pirates had never beaten the Bears, a real powerhouse in those days. On the night of the game my father and I were in the hotel where both teams were staying. As we walked down the hallway, we heard a loud commotion coming from the Bears’ meeting suite. George Halas was giving a fiery pep talk to his players. Dad always loved a good joke, so he pulled me aside and whispered instructions. As Dad ducked around the corner, I knocked on the door.
Coach Halas himself answered and looked down at me. “Young Rooney,” he said, “you’re in the wrong room. Your daddy’s room is down the hall.”
I didn’t bat an eye. I was on a mission and spoke right up, “Mr. Halas, I know where our room is. My old man sent me here to tell you to take it easy on our team tonight.”
Everybody in the room, including Halas, broke up laughing and the Bears’ strategy session ended right there. Pittsburgh defeated the Bears 10-9, and Halas later reported to the press that I was the reason for their loss. “Young Rooney was the best offensive weapon Pittsburgh had,” he said.
It might have been true. The Pirates were perennial losers. As competitive as my father was, he really didn’t take the football team very seriously in those early years. He only bought it so Pittsburgh would have a major league football franchise, something he thought important for any first-class city. And nobody loved Pittsburgh more than my father. Still, he never thought professional football would vault college football and major league baseball to become America’s most popular sport.
My father’s reputation as a boxing promoter continued to grow even after he got into the football business. He started by organizing charity bouts on the North Side at the St. Peter Catholic School yard. In August 1933 he gained national attention when he brought the heavyweight champion of the world, Primo Carnera, to Pittsburgh for an exhibition fight—just at the time he was negotiating with the NFL for the football team. A few years later, Dad met Braddock fight-promoter Barney McGinley, and in 1937 they formed the Rooney-McGinley Boxing Club for the promotion of world-class fight cards. The two enterprising young men worked well together and became fast friends.
Meanwhile, my mother knew our little apartment was just too small for us. Just six weeks after the twins were born, while Dad was out of town, she made an offer on a big old house on North Lincoln Avenue. Only a block away, it was located between the once grand Thaw residence and the opulent Scaife mansion. Everyone knew Harry Thaw as the guy who shot the famous architect Stanford White in a jealous rage over Evelyn Nesbitt, the “girl on the red velvet swing.” Charles Scaife was a rich industrialist who moved out of the North Side after the Allegheny City annexation. This street was once known as “millionaire’s row,” but now during the Depression in 1939 it had lost much of its luster. The house my mother had her eye on was the smallest on the block, but compared to our old second-floor apartment on Western Avenue, it seemed a palace. It had twelve rooms with high ceilings, a good-sized bathroom, and a yard in the back where we could play, a big improvement over our tarred rooftop courtyard. Mom put down $500 of her own money to close the deal on the $5,000 house. She always reminded my father that he never paid her back. Of course, she continued to run the house and everything in it, including us boys. She gave us chores, and we helped the best we could.
Dad was the disciplinarian when he was home, and he could be pretty tough. He was fair and sympathetic for big problems, but he could be difficult for smaller, everyday issues. We never cried in front of him because then he would really give it to us. “You’re a big boob,” he’d say, or “You’re a big baby.” He rarely spanked us. I remember him whacking John, who had been playing with his friend Johnny Bluecoa
t too close to the Allegheny River. It was winter and John might have drowned, dressed as he was in boots and a heavy winter coat.
Dad always worried about us playing near the water. He himself nearly drowned during the 1912 flood while rowing a boat in flooded Exposition Park. The boat overturned and his heavy coat almost pulled him under near the third-base line. He never let us forget it.
Sometimes Mom had to tell him to go easy on us. Don’t get me wrong, my father loved us, but Mother really raised us. He was always busy, managing baseball and football teams, promoting fights, and running the Ward—anywhere there was an opportunity. He had to make a living, and he did just that.
When he was home, he loved to play with us, and play meant sports: throwing footballs, hitting ground balls, and boxing. Sometimes he would lace the gloves on us and teach us how to bob and weave, jab and hook. In the winter he flooded the backyard so we boys and all the neighbor kids could play hockey. I remember he never babied us.
A bloody nose? “Shake it off.”
A hard hit ball and a sprained finger? “You’re not crying are you?”
A black eye? “What did the other fella look like?”
I have to say, when he smacked grounders to us, he never held back. It was like he was playing with Ty Cobb. He didn’t know how to play half-speed with kids, and when we bobbled a ground ball or complained that our hands hurt, he’d say, “What are you, a baby?” It got so we didn’t like to play baseball with him.
Baldy Regan and I managed our own baseball team, the “Rooneys.” We signed up my brothers and some of our neighborhood friends. We thought we were pretty good, until the day Dad came out to the field at Monument Hill to see us play. Tim popped a ball over the second baseman’s head and started running for all he was worth.