Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  Serbs, Croats, Poles, Slovaks, and a small scattering of blacks were sent to Plans 1, 2, 4, and 9 along the tracks, making up much of what was known as Logstown. Plan 7 held Serbs and other Slavs, Plan 11 the Italians and some Poles. Jews held down Plan 8, along Franklin Avenue; Greeks and Lebanese settled at its eastern end, by the tunnel, in the area known as the Wye. Italians dominated West Aliquippa. The higher in the surrounding hills you went, the whiter, richer, and quieter it became. Plan 6, with its three clay tennis courts, was reserved for management: “cake-eaters,” in the slang of the day. Anglos, Germans, and Nordics lived in Plan 12, spilling over the bridge into a neighborhood soon to be dubbed “Hollywood” because of its decadent parties, its wayward wives.

  The line between each Plan was invisible but known to all. Crossing entailed risk. Each enclave transplanted Old-World rivalries along with food and music, and in rich precincts police jailed anyone who seemed out of place; if you worked at J&L, the cost of arrest—$10—came out of your pay. Class rules levied a different kind of sting.

  “The fathers and mothers didn’t allow you to talk to their girls,” said steelworker Joe Perriello, a five-year-old when his family moved to Aliquippa in 1919. “If you wanted to date one of these Anglo-Saxons, you came to the door and even if you were a football player or a star or anything, they didn’t give a damn. You knocked at the door and you asked for the girl, they said, ‘Who the hell are you? Well, get out of here, you goddamn Dago, and don’t you come back.’ That’s the way it was.”

  That first generation filling the Plans didn’t argue—not when they were told where they couldn’t walk or live, not when they were told how to work. Nothing mattered more than the job early on, both the job and the idea behind it. That a man could leave his parents, wife, and life behind in Vilnius or Minsk, ride steerage in a fetid steamship, and land employment that allowed for periodic returns back home, cash in hand, felt like salvation. So what if the cake-eater at the desk couldn’t navigate the mash of consonants, and in seconds wiped out generations of family history by telling some proud Serb named Božidar Sučević, “From now on, your name is ‘Mike Suder’”? You nodded. You took it. Complaint was a vice broken back on the docks of Hamburg.

  Soon after the mill’s opening, Martin Zelenak, the corporal, landed a job in J&L’s boiler room, blacksmithing, swapping out pipes in 130-degree heat, inhaling coal dust and oil fumes. “Twelve-hour shifts in those days,” said his son, Martin Jr., a boilermaker at J&L himself for thirty years. “He’d get carbon-monoxide gas from working in the boilerhouse. When we worked in there we had a gas mask and a meter; if there was too much gas we had to get out. But my father, they didn’t have it. He’d get gassed, go out in the alley, lay down, and throw up—and go back in there and keep working. If he wouldn’t, they would fire you.”

  In moments of repose, sipping a cup of home-brewed wine or puffing a pipe, older Italians would take in the thick woods slanting above Franklin Avenue and say that Woodlawn—the name officially changed to Aliquippa in 1928—reminded them of the Seven Hills of Rome. J&L built playgrounds, gave money to the Boy Scouts, bought neighborhood baseball gear. But good intentions aside, its main order of business was still filth-ridden, dangerous, and fully in line with a business ethos that saw ravaged hearing and scorched skin—or worse—as a fair trade for a day’s pay.

  “In the Aliquippa plant of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company Eli Skylo, 22 years old, of Woodlawn, was injured in an accident at 11 o’clock Sunday and died shortly afterward,” read an item in the July 15, 1913, Pittsburgh Post. “And in the evening Jack Reynolds, 17 years old, a water boy who resided with his mother in Woodlawn, was killed. Skylo was crushed in an ore dump and the boy lost his life beneath ladle cars.”

  Within a year, the Great War had changed the dynamic. Demand for barbed wire, shell casing, spikes, rails, steel sheet, and tin food containers had the mills running at full capacity, and fighting across Europe dammed the labor flow. Three thousand J&L workers would go off to fight; in Aliquippa, jobs abounded. Schools ran year-round. The air hummed with twenty-four-hour clamor by the river; every nine minutes or so, flashes of flame bleached the night sky. That was steel’s signature, the Bessemer converter in blow, beautiful and monstrous and illustrating like nothing else the dazzling might of “industrialization.”

  In use since 1875, the Bessemer—egg-shaped, steel-plated, taller than two men—reshaped a craft once dominated by artisans into a mass production manned by unskilled labor. B. F. Jones may have been the first in Pittsburgh to experiment with the process, in 1864, but it wasn’t until a decade later, when Andrew Carnegie introduced the method at his Edgar Thomson Works, that it became industry standard. By 1916, Aliquippa had three Bessemers online. Each blow was a small ­apocalypse—50,000 pounds of molten iron ore and carbon poured into the egg, colliding with 7,000 pounds of forced oxygen. A blossom of red, then yellow, then white flame exploded out of the top.

  “It was a terrifying site, and hypnotic,” author Stewart Holbrook wrote of the scene inside a Bessemer shed in Aliquippa. “The roar was literally deafening; and little wonder, for here was a cyclone attacking a furnace in a brief but titanic struggle, a meeting in battle of carbon and oxygen, cleverly arranged by the sweating gnomes whose red faces appeared white in the Bessemer’s glow. Both carbon and oxygen would lose, each consuming the other, and men would be the winners by twenty-five tons of bright new steel.”

  All darkness above the mill, meanwhile, was obliterated by sheets of crimson and gold. “Hell with the lid lifted,” is the line Charles ­Dickens borrowed to describe Pittsburgh, but it fit Aliquippa, too. Come the next morning, a film of soot and fly ash—“J&L pepper,” “black snow”—was swept from countertops and porches all over town.

  “Goddamn you!” one old Serb screamed at a complaining daughter. “You don’t have that dirt? You don’t have no food! Shut up, get a hose, clean it off!’”

  Franklin Avenue offered dozens of bars to wash down the dust. Wages were paid in a mix of coupons, redeemable only at Pittsburgh Mercantile, and cash, snatched up by wives waiting outside the tunnel before their men could blow it playing cards or the numbers or shooting craps. “They called us ‘Little Las Vegas,’ if you please: gambling joints. Every other store was a gambling joint,” said Joe Perriello, who came of age in Aliquippa in the 1920s. “When we got paid twice a month, they’d gamble from Friday to Monday. Everybody played for money. It was a money town!”

  Debt was a constant. J&L deducted house, gas, and electric payments out of paychecks. To be fired meant eviction, and the loss of any mortgage payments made on a company home. Such power invited abuse: mill foremen demanded kickbacks—drink, cash, sex with a worker’s wife—or else. The notorious Black Hand ran extortion schemes out of Plan 11; when an Italian fruit seller refused to pay $2,000, they blew up his downtown store and the whole three-story building that held it. More and more, the Family’s Utopia had the feel of the Wild West.

  “It is said that the region is largely peopled by uneducated foreigners, who invariably carry concealed deadly weapons; that murders are common,” a state supreme court judge summarized in 1918. “And that when a quarrel ensues, the question as to who shall be the murderer and who is murdered is, largely, if not wholly, determined by the ability to draw such a weapon quickly.”

  But crime—in deed or mind—was a small chaos, and chaos was never good for the making of steel. Enamored with its own goodness, left militantly antiunion by Pittsburgh’s savage Homestead Strike of 1892, terrified that its Slavic workers, in particular, would spread the infection of anarchism or communism, J&L surveyed the mess from the head office in Pittsburgh—and cracked down. Tom Girdler, its top official in town, fancied himself “an unofficial caliph, an American Harun al-Rashid obliged by my office in a big corporation to consider a whole community as my personal responsibility.

  “There was in Aliquippa, if you please, a benevolent dictatorsh
ip. We policed it our own way and we policed it well. We began policing it because we had to—if we were to keep faith with the fine intentions of The Family.”

  As the implement deployed to shape such intention into day-to-day practice, The Family couldn’t have chosen a more dangerous man. Not because Tom Girdler was inherently cruel, but because he was plagued by a limitless certitude. Because he was the hero of every story he told, no matter that it didn’t always match fact. It takes a healthy dose of self-delusion to be solid money-born and management-bred, a fraternity man at Lehigh, yet look back from the prospect of old age and decide to call one’s autobiography Boot Straps. But then, Girdler came of age in an era where every politician needed to be born in a log cabin—and every millionaire needed to start off as a version of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick.

  That Girdler was shrewd, and worked relentlessly, was never in doubt. He grew up mowing hay on his father’s farm in 1880s Indiana, stacking endless dense sacks in the family cement plant, steeped in a narrative that marched in lockstep with the nation’s own. Girdlers had fought the British in the Revolution, captained ships in the War of 1812, manned a ship alone in San Francisco Bay when the crew deserted to chase gold. Every Girdler man enlisted in the Civil War. “So, good or bad,” Tom wrote, “every fiber of me is American.”

  His father bequeathed him a “feudal” approach to labor: those Indiana hands who produced without complaint were “good,” and if any of them fell sick the elder Girdler looked after their families, guaranteed their credit, paid the doctor. If they were “bad,” he kicked them out of town. Relations between boss and worker were man-to-man; nobody went on strike. In love with the furious clank of heavy industry, young Tom sprang out of college primed, ever conscious of his smallness, and—in a milieu populated by the tough and unlettered—vaguely ashamed of his considerable advantages.

  To compensate, Girdler chewed tobacco; he became addicted to smoking cigars, and the wearing of brown hats. Balding, bespectacled, weighing no more than 150 pounds, he was never prouder than when he could take a bigger man down. Once, during his first days as foreman in a Pittsburgh area mill, a young Polish boltmaker cursed Girdler out. He stood three inches taller, forty pounds heavier.

  “I hit him in the mouth, cutting my hand on his teeth,” Girdler recalled in his memoir. “Instead of punching back he dived at me and when we hit the floor he was on top and my elbows (my sleeves were rolled up) felt as if they were on fire. He was grappling and pulling at my cheek as if he were drawing a chicken. That’s when I began to wrestle and when I got on top I reached for his hair because this was rough-and-tumble. But he didn’t have any hair; it had been clipped. I got hold of his ears. I hammered his head on the brick floor until I was sure nobody would be disposed to call the fight a draw. I stopped when he was out.”

  A year after Girdler’s 1914 arrival in Aliquippa, J&L hired a brutal and canny ex–state trooper, Harry G. Mauk, as “Director of Plant Protection.” The title included mastery of the company’s “Coal and Iron Police”—a privately paid armed force, sanctioned by the state—de facto control of the town’s municipal police department, and anything else that Girdler deemed vital. Mauk infiltrated bars and barbershops with spies, placed puppets on the city council, monitored worker mail. When a cadre of Finnish tin workers refused to buy Liberty Bonds in the fall of 1918, the law marked them as members of the Finnish Red Guard. After a J&L foreman ordered a gang of fellow workers to attack them, the Finns were hustled to the riverbank, stripped naked, tarred and feathered, and kicked forever out of town.

  “They had local government, the county government, state, on their side,” said J&L tin worker Michael Zahorsky, who was born in 1907 and began working in the hot mill at thirteen. “There was no such thing as ‘challenging.’ You had all these things going around in your mind that you were not able to challenge for fear you may be thrown out of the job. You may be run out of the country. You were declared an anarchist just because you raised your voice.”

  Come Election Day, Aliquippa always went Republican. To ­register—never mind vote—as a Democrat meant risking the loss of job and home; J&L goons made sure of it. “There were scarcely half a dozen registered Democrats,” Girdler recalled of the town that, within eight years, would begin a seven-decade run as a Democratic stronghold. “Did that situation make it easy for me to run the Aliquippa Works? I’ll confess! It did.”

  So went William Larimer Jones’s “fresh start” for the lowly working class, a near-instant casualty of America’s forever war between freedom and control. So it went, too, in industrial metropolises like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, but a tight company town made surveillance easier and enforcement more intimate. The smaller melting pot brought its ethnic mix to a quicker, more furious boil. That alone might’ve been enough to make Aliquippa the epitome of a tough new class powered by grievance, toughened by fire, energized by a hope its fathers never knew. But they weren’t the only outsiders settling in.

  Finding escape from that tension, relief from the daily dirt and fatigue, wasn’t hard in river towns like Aliquippa. Every Plan had its house of worship, whether the God was Methodist, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Russian, Serbian or Greek Orthodox, Jewish, African Methodist, or Episcopal. Immigrants opened every kind of social club, too: the Sons of Italy, the Lebanon Society, Serbian and Croatian clubs. In the summer of 1925, Italians transplanted from the village of Patrica initiated their annual two-day San Rocco Festa: music, fireworks, a grand parading of the saint through town, boys’ and girls’ footraces, and “for men, any size,” a sack race, a bucket game, and a “slippery board contest.” First prize, $5.

  For those seeking distraction that didn’t involve salvation or good clean fun, there was McDonald Hollow, a sliver of hillside—overlooked by The Family in its initial landgrab—that quickly grew to offer every kind of vice. “On any payday that was a noisy place,” Girdler said. “Its saloons were dives. There were brothels and gambling houses, jailbirds, prostitutes, and other outcasts.”

  The bars closed down with the enactment of Prohibition in 1920, but Aliquippa barely missed a drink. Moonshiners and basement vintners moved product, initially by strapping hot-water bags to women’s legs and sending them into the streets in oversized black raincoats; when business began booming, the ’shine was delivered in five-gallon tins. The booze was stored in hidden “patents,” some with elaborate funneling systems: under floorboards, in basement holes, along row house walls. One downtown soda fountain sold shots under the counter, 30 cents for two. Those caught paid a hefty fine, and spent a night in jail mulling over where to secrete their patent next.

  The river provided fishing and swimming in the hot months and, on the backriver channel between Crow Island and West Aliquippa, ice skating in winter. After it acquired the island, J&L set aside fields for baseball and football, and distributed seed and thousands of “truck garden” plots to its employees. Because Crow Island sat in federal waters, it was exempt from Pennsylvania blue laws forbidding Sunday games and liquor. For a time, boys ferried fans back and forth across the channel in sixteen-foot rowboats. When that proved too risky, J&L had three barges lashed end to end, and Sunday outings to a game began with a stroll across the makeshift bridge.

  Baseball was king in Pittsburgh then. The Pirates, a National League power, had won the 1909 World Series and starred local boy—and former twelve-year-old coal miner—Honus Wagner at shortstop. But the game’s pastoral air, subtle details, and gunfighter showdowns between pitcher and batter harked back to an era of artisans and yeomen, its rhythm increasingly at odds with the nerve-racking pace of the machine age. Football was new. Football was obvious. Football, with its bone-snapping tackles, minimal protections, and masses toiling in syncopated fury, killed 330 American college men between 1890 and 1905. It channeled frustration, rewarded power. It fed and fed off the ethos of factory, mill, and mine. It demanded—like the production line and labor union—the su
blimation of individual want to group need. Muddy, bloody, and raw, football felt more like the life now unfolding at ground level in Western Pennsylvania: bodies punished in a fight for the slightest edge, with money, so often, dictating the terms.

  Professional football began in Pittsburgh. In 1892, the Allegheny Athletic Association publicly claimed that its supposedly amateur rival, the Pittsburgh Athletic Club, paid its top player and coach, William Kirschner. Both teams responded by seeking more inventive ways of making under-the-table payoffs, and in October the PAC offered Yale all-American William “Pudge” Heffelfinger and Knowlton “Snake” Ames $250 to play against Allegheny. The AAA countered with an offer of $500. Heffelfinger surrendered his amateur status, and stunned the PAC by showing up on game day in the opposing team’s uniform.

  “The AAA expense sheet provides the first irrefutable evidence of an out-and-out cash payment,” says the official history at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “It is appropriately referred to today as ‘pro football’s birth certificate.’”

  Gamblers had bet so heavily on AAA that day that the contest was downgraded to an exhibition. AAA followers were furious that they couldn’t collect on their bets; PAC fans publicly lamented their rival’s use of “ringers,” and privately fumed at being outfoxed. AAA manager O. D. Thompson crowed that he had just done “what the Pittsburghs tried to do. Only we were successful where they failed.”

  That mercenary tone filtered down to the prep level. The practice of hiring the city’s best players, some in their early twenties, and sending them out to play high school football soon became so common as to be embarrassing. In response, four Pittsburgh schools combined in 1906 to form the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League, complete with age eligibility rules and membership standards for all sports; once WPIAL administrators actually began to enforce player bans—even when, as one local paper put it, “leading citizens found fault”—its membership began to spread outside the city.