Playing Through the Whistle
Page 1
PLAYING
THROUGH THE
WHISTLE
Also by S. L. Price
Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports
Far Afield: A Sportswriting Odyssey
Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America
PLAYING
THROUGH THE
WHISTLE
Steel, Football,
and an American Town
S. L. PRICE
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2016 by S. L. Price
Endpaper map © ML Design, London
Jacket design by Daniel Rembert
Jacket photograph © Dave Dicello Photography
“Everything Must Change.” Words and Music by Benard Ighner. Copyright © 1974 Almo Music Corp. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
“Could It Be I’m Falling in Love?” Words & Music by Melvin Steals and Mervin Steals © 1973 (Renewed) Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission of Alfred Music.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.
First published by Grove Atlantic, October 2016
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
The publisher would like to thank Donald Inman and Gino Piroli for their gracious assistance in producing the map of Aliquippa.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2564-4
eISBN 978-0-8021-9009-3
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For Fran
On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
—Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”
Contents
PART ONE
Chapter 1: The Red and the Black
Chapter 2: Little Hell
Chapter 3: Free Men
Chapter 4: Bootstraps
PART TWO
Chapter 5: A War Game
Chapter 6: Father Backs Up
Chapter 7: Crossfire
Chapter 8: Mother’s Oats
PART THREE
Chapter 9: Mr. Lucky
Chapter 10: Halls of Anger
Chapter 11: The Crack
Chapter 12: Darkness on the Edge
PART FOUR
Chapter 13: You-Know-Who
Chapter 14: Up in Smoke
Chapter 15: Mauling Apollo
Chapter 16: Shiny Things
Chapter 17: Last Ones Laughing
Chapter 18: When the World Opens
Chapter 19: Iron Buttons
Chapter 20: Family Matters
Acknowledgments
The Town, The Players
Notes
Index
PART ONE
October 14, 2011
Once, years before, John Evasovich had come to the field with his mother in his pocket. It was an autumn evening much like this one, chill and damp, and only a practice session, but he is one of those men who prefer the routines, the purposeful quiet of football practice. Besides, Evasovich needed to do the woman one last service. She had seen her son play high school ball; she had seen John grinding it out young as a fullback and guard, his sharpest critic; she had seen every block and tackle he missed and always let him know. Later, after he moved back after sixteen years gone, he’d pick up his mother and her sister and her sister’s husband on game nights and they’d all ride up together. Her first time had been in 1940. John knew what she loved.
Every game—week after fall week, decade after decade, come rain or snow or biting cold—Liz Evasovich had sat in the cracking concrete stands with her lips daubed Aliquippa scarlet, peering out from the 50-yard line with seven younger women in their black “Quips” sweaters, rattling cowbells long and loud. So twelve days after she died, her only son brought a small plastic bag filled with the cremated remains to Carl A. Aschman Stadium. He felt the weight of her on his hip the whole time: driving, walking down to the field, bullshitting in head coach Mike Zmijanac’s office beforehand. . . .
When the team ran out of the locker room and the coaches began to bark, their breath forming clouds, he opened the bag in an end zone and tipped it and watched the gray dust settle into the grass. Nobody saw. Then he pinched it closed, walked out to the Indian head symbol in the center of the field, and, with tears running down his cheeks, tipped the bag again to let more of his mother go.
“You are where you belong,” he whispered. “It’s where you want to be.”
Evasovich wasn’t a young man then, and the five years since are five reasons more for any cold-hating, bandy-legged seventy-one-year-old to feel that drizzly ache, scan the low skies, and stay in for the night. But no, tonight Evasovich did what he has done nearly every fall Friday since: walk into the dining room, glance at the black-and-gray urn containing the last of Liz’s ashes, and announce, “I’m going to the game, Mom.”
Aliquippa High is unbeaten as usual, and one of its prime rivals, Beaver Area, is coming in undefeated, too. Every showdown between these two, it seems, conjures a classic; everyone’s just a bit edgier. It’s Senior Night, the last home game. Some boys will never play in “The Pit” again.
That’s what it’s called, oddly when you consider that the stadium squats, supreme and precarious, upon one of the highest ridges in town. But it’s true: the New Deal genius who decided to wedge the 7,500-seat matchbox into hillside, just below the apex, created an effect—for opposing fans and players, at least—of descending into a particularly cramped and hostile corner of hell. The visitors’ locker room is little more than a dank hole. The crumbly visiting stands feel like they could, at any time, pitch in one screaming entirety down the ravine behind. Most opponents don’t come to Aliquippa these days thinking victory. They also know that you can’t say you’ve played football in Western Pennsylvania—not really—until you’ve played The Pit.
One reason is that, in a week before a showdown like this one with Beaver, the game can feel like the only thing that matters. “I think Aliquippa will win,” outgoing mayor Anthony Battalini said two days before. “They have to win. If they lose? Christ, the town’ll cut up Mike—‘The team’s no good!’—like they lost their life. It’ll be booming Friday night, believe me. It’ll be booming.”
Another reason is that, even in one of the most talent-rich regions in America, Aliquippa remains puzzlingly special. Usually places this small—27,116
souls, at its peak—can claim one, perhaps two, names a century that tunnel out to become nationally known. But something in the air or water or blood here didn’t just produce NFL Hall of Famers like Mike Ditka and Tony Dorsett, but also basketball wizard Pete Maravich, major league baseball players like Tito Francona and Doc Medich, a U.S. Surgeon General, the National Guard’s first black female general, one of the more famous CIA operatives in American history, an NCAA president, one of the great visual effects artists in cinematic history, and Oscar-winning composer Henry Mancini.
That roll enables locals to mix twenty-seven Grammy Awards and twenty-six Academy Award nominations in with the annual rushing totals, yet numbers hardly do the place justice. Obscure Aliquippa—“the ultimate melting-pot,” as one of its sons put it—kicked off the Golden Age of American labor and crafted the arms that won two world wars. Four U.S. presidents have visited in the hope of winning its symbolic heart. Name the arena: the town has always punched well above its weight.
But Aliquippa has also been dying for thirty years now, its population in free fall, its downtown a drive-by stretch, mostly, of empty buildings and leveled lots. Legendary New York Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi made a point of visiting after he retired in 2007, and “I almost fainted,” he says. “It looks like they just said, ‘There’s a nuclear war: get out of here.’”
Yet he wanted to—had to—walk onto the field and take in the stadium, too, because the place still churns out high-level players at an astonishing rate. Every fall, still, a handful of Quips will walk into some premier Division 1-A university with full football scholarships. Since 1990, four alums from Aliquippa High, enrollment 270, have been selected in the first round of the NFL Draft: All-Pro defensive lineman Sean Gilbert, three-time Super Bowl champ Ty Law, All-Pro cornerback Darrelle Revis, and wideout Jon Baldwin.
Only one other high school in America, California’s Long Beach Poly, can match that, but its enrollment is seventeen times larger. Aliquippa High averages three dozen boys in its senior class, gets smaller by the day, but it defies logic. It refuses to buckle. The Quips have won a record thirteen Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League titles, each year painted in white on the roof of the old field house, and will win a fourteenth this year, and a fifteenth the next. This is a growing concern. Soon, they will run out of roof. . . .
Through the window he could see black hills powdered with snow, an occasional coaltipple, rows of gray shacks all alike, a riverbed scarred with minedumps and slagheaps, purple lacing of trees along the hill’s edge cut sharp against a red sun; then against the hill, bright and red as the sun, a blob of flame from a smelter. Ward shaved, cleaned his teeth, washed his face and neck as best he could, parted his hair. His jaw and cheekbones were getting a square look that he admired. “Cleancut young executive,” he said to himself. . . .
—John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel
1
The Red and the Black
They came for the money. Years later, once purchase had been gained at the steel mill, early-twentieth-century immigrants to America would speak of luxuries like liberty or freedom of worship. But the prospect sketched by industry agents who fanned out, then, through Europe’s destitute cities and farms had less to do with steeples and voting booths than the squat outline of blast furnace, powerhouse, and ore yard, high chimneys belching volcanic ash and endless fire. The pursuit of happiness? Being “happy” was never the point. Old-World peasants were near starving. The Serbs had a motto: Čovek mora da radi: A man must work. America had the work. America had money.
So they kept coming in that first decade and half, 15 million strong, most uneducated and unskilled and speaking no English, a constant flow of labor being drained from ancestral homes and hills and fields and streaming to the nearest big ports. Some were young boys, and alone. But they were mostly young men at first, cast out blindly by families like fishhooks, fleeing threat of war, natural disaster, the crumbling order of king and czar. They came from Italy, Germany, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, Lebanon, Greece; they were Slavs and Roman Catholics and Jews and Eastern Orthodox sardined together into boxcars, sometimes legally. Other times the men hopped down and dissolved into fields at border crossings, crouching silent until the officials went away. The journey was tedium, filth, spasms of fear. They kept coming.
It was, too, the first era of movement for movement’s sake, of speed as a virtue. The human rush was on: to cities, to empire, to battle, to getting wherever there was faster. Steel made speed possible. Expanding rail systems, rising skyscrapers, Henry Ford’s automobile, and the buildup of European armies created a near-bottomless hunger for the light, flexible metal, made Western Pennsylvania an industrial behemoth and magnet for all the “mill Hunkies” filing then through New York’s Ellis Island. Sent funds in 1903 by an older brother in Pittsburgh, Martin Zelenak, a twenty-year-old from the Czech-Slovak slice of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, set out for Hamburg; en route he was dragooned into the Austrian cavalry and shipped to the eastern frontier. Two years later, Corporal Zelenak arrived in New York and began walking the 370 miles West to his brother’s home. When his shoes dissolved, he stole potato sacks off porches and wrapped his feet in the burlap and walked on.
In 1905 Pittsburgh’s Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, founded in the 1850s by the self-made B. F. Jones and James Laughlin—or, as one observer quipped, an old firm “when Andrew Carnegie was still a telegraph messenger boy”—began buying up acreage twenty-six miles down the Ohio River: Crow and Hog Islands; the untouched farmland above sleepy Woodlawn; a small, adjoining manufacturing village, Aliquippa; and the remains of a once-bustling amusement park.
The original village name, applied randomly by a railroad company looking to entice customers in 1878, was lifted not from some local feature but from Queen Aliquippa, a pro-British Seneca chief who never set foot there and whom George Washington, when he met her miles away in 1753, tendered “a present of a match-coat and a bottle of rum, which latter was thought much the better present of the two.” General “Mad Anthony” Wayne—en route to his victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers—trained troops cross-river in the winter of 1794; legend has it that his soldiers rowed over so often to the Woodlawn whorehouse that Wayne had it leveled with a blast of cannon shot.
Now second in size only to Carnegie Steel, J&L had only recently come under full control of the next generation of the Jones family. Freshly incorporated, its ambitions increasingly squeezed in its South Side works, the company as pure business animal needed to expand to capitalize on the mushrooming global markets in tin, tube, and wire. But “The Family,” as the Jones management entity came to be known, didn’t only view the rolling expanse along the Ohio as a blank slate upon which to write their financial future. They had something more elevated in mind.
President B. F. Jones Jr., the only son of B. F. senior and Princeton-trained, and his more voluble cousin, vice president William Larimer Jones, considered themselves part of an enlightened subset of industrialists in that Darwinian era, touting a management bent as paternal as it was profitable. Tom Girdler, the mill’s de facto superintendent from 1914 to 1924, never had a stranger job interview: W. L. Jones and he barely talked business. Starting with the Mayflower, Jones lectured Girdler on the nation’s history of immigration, on the poorer, darker, oft-bewildered horde now pouring in, on the real estate and criminal interests that funneled them into shantytowns thick with typhoid and cholera. Aliquippa would be the corrective, Jones believed, a utopian machine designed to make citizens as well as steel.
“We can make a fresh start,” Jones told Girdler. “When the plant is fully built the men who work there will constitute, with their families, the population of a good-sized town. We want it to be the best steel town in the world. We want to make it the best possible place for a steelworker to raise a family.”
By then, the task of town-building was well under way. The first b
last furnace had been fired up—or “blown in”—on December 1, 1909, and over time Woodlawn, the original Aliquippa (later named West Aliquippa), and the highland area known as New Sheffield would all be bound by the company’s implacable will. Separated by railroad tracks, linked by a downtown viaduct—always known as “The Tunnel”—that later marked the divide between the North and South Mills, Aliquippa’s work and living quarters rose together. By the end of 1912, three more furnaces were roaring, and the tin mill; rod, wire, and nail mill; blooming mill; open hearth; Bessemer converter; and beehive coke ovens began operation on a spread that would stretch a full seven and a half miles.
Across the tracks, through the tunnel, J&L sliced the town into 12 “Plans” that kept ethnic groups separate, reinforced old-country language, customs, and suspicion of outsiders, and—not incidentally—made any attempt at labor organizing that much more difficult. Its land company threw up a two-story house—hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, base price of $2,200—a day in 1908, built a half-dozen schools and a community pool, financed and laid out the bus lines. The central commercial district, Franklin Avenue, was built atop a channeled river, the Logstown Run, and anchored by a company store called Pittsburgh Mercantile. J&L owned the water company and 674 homes. Downtown streets were paved with brick. Residential streets glowed with fresh-laid macadam.
“It has every modern utility such as natural gas, electric light, a pure and potable water supply and ample police and fire protection,” read a promotional brochure for the town in 1910. “Its opportunities for delightful home and neighborhood life are not equaled in this end of the state.” City fathers in Vandergrift or nearby Midland, other model steel towns, might take issue with the claim. But in light of the day’s industrial slums, it felt like true progress.