Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  “I beat the hell out of him,” Razzano recalled. “I tore his shirt; blood all over the God-darn place, you know. I said, ‘Now, if you want to go back to work, you’ll have to go to work now!’ So he didn’t make any attempt.”

  Police, both municipal and company, tried breaking through the masses plugging the tunnel. They drove a bus nearly into the picket line, with hidden caches of tear gas and guns; the bus was pushed back. They tried to bull out from the inside, failed, and fired tear gas to clear a path. A cadre of women, out of the tin mill, didn’t budge when set upon with fire hoses. And they were the first to challenge a suspect mail truck; workers overturned it and found it teeming with scab supplies. A fever took hold. Kids hurled rocks and tomatoes from hills at the strikebreakers lined up below. Everyone wanted to get their licks in.

  “The strike is a rank-and-file affair,” wrote SWOC staff member Meyer Bernstein. “SWOC may have called it, but it is now in the hands of anyone who can lead. It is a mob, not an organization. They have no more control than their lungs can command.

  “Remember that Jefferson once said something about a revolution every twenty years or so being a blessing? The same is true of a strike. There is real solidarity now. And certainly no fear. . . .

  “Of course there has been violence. Four or five old men who had no notion of what was going on tried to get through the picket line. They were stopped and led back, but the return was through a gauntlet. They were badly beaten and most of them were bloody. Even an organizer was just barely saved from an attack. . . . ”

  Daylight on the first full day, May 13, brought cold and pouring rain, dampening tempers, lowering the temperature. Rumors circulated that Girdler still couldn’t resist taking a hand in Aliquippa; his Republic Steel, it was said, had shipped over its “gas pipe gang” and a contingent of company forces from Youngstown. Perhaps he sensed what few suspected: J&L’s spine wasn’t what it used to be. Girdler had taken two top executives with him when he left J&L in 1929, and the retirement of chairman George Laughlin in 1936 had ended “Family” control of top management. Executives with no vaguely exalted mission, no memory of Woodlawn, were running things now.

  On the morning of May 14, Governor George Earle entered the tunnel in a car with strike leader Joe Timko, followed by four state police cars; the strikers let them through. Startled company police, waiting on the other end, greeted the governor with a phalanx of raised rifles. Recognizing him, they tried to hide the guns.

  “Never mind: I’ve seen them,” Earle said. “I don’t want any trouble here. Let the company and the union get together and settle this peacefully.”

  And so it happened, with a whimper when all expected a roar. J&L negotiators called Timko and agreed to a settlement and an NLRB election. It took hours for the crowd of 20,000 outside the tunnel to leave: some workers wanted the feeling to last; some feared a trick. They also, Bernstein wrote, “wanted blood,” the blood of strikebreakers who would eventually have to come out through the tunnel. Police didn’t dare disperse the crowd. Finally Timko—the new power in town—hired a brass band, raised up an American flag, and began a parade that took them all away.

  “J&L has been brought to its knees,” Bernstein wrote. “Think of it. The toughest Corporation in America . . . has been forced to capitulate.”

  On May 20, the union swept the election in the J&L Works in Aliquippa and Pittsburgh by more than a 2-to-1 margin, 17,028 to 7,207. Five days later, J&L officially recognized SWOC Local 1211 as the workers’ exclusive bargaining agent, and agreed to the new industry-wide standard: a forty-hour workweek and a $5-a-day minimum wage, with time and a half for overtime.

  The victory was not contagious. For Tom Girdler and the rest of Little Steel, the hard line continued, savagely: on May 30, ten strikers were killed by police outside a Republic plant in Chicago, and the SWOC effort to unionize thirty other mills in eight states crumbled after five more violent months. Little Hell, though, took on a new texture. Some workers would call it dignity, some would call it freedom, and some would take a long time to believe that it had ever happened at all.

  “Let us forget the tension of the past few weeks and cheerfully apply ourselves to our duties,” read the coyly bland surrender statement issued by new J&L chairman H. E. Lewis, “as there is much for all of us to do with our order books better filled than for some time past.”

  4

  Bootstraps

  Still, the town seemed no better than most. It was like any factory city in Michigan, any textile hub in Massachusetts, any mining village on the Great Lakes, any of the dozens of mill feeders of Pennsylvania pinned along the shores of the Allegheny River, the Monongahela, the Ohio. After the buzz of the strike faded, once the reporters and organizers moved on, Aliquippa was known for nothing but steel, fire, and a brimstone sky. The mill’s order books might have been “better filled”—though, due to a recession in 1938, probably not by much—but as it was, J&L was running a $6 million deficit.

  Steelworkers like Achille Letteri felt lucky to land a single shift a week. When his wife and ten-year-old son, Joe, arrived from Italy in 1938 they found life “very, very hard,” Joe Letteri said. “Very little food to eat. What my mother had to do, you wouldn’t believe: She had to scrape. We made our own bread. We lived on soup and bread most of the time. My mother tried to sneak me stuff on the side because I was little.”

  The Letteris were typical. Achille had left everything behind—his wife, Agate; their hometown of Sulmona in the Abruzzi region of Italy—when he and his three brothers came to America after World War I. Every few years, after saving enough, he would travel steerage back to Sulmona for a few weeks, impregnate Agate, and return to America. Their two oldest sons sailed for Aliquippa first, then in 1938 Little Joe boarded the SS Conte di Savoia, third-class for the seven-day trip, got seasick, passed the Statue of Liberty, and shuffled through Ellis Island. He and his mom boarded a train in New York. When they stepped off at the West Aliquippa station, Achille Letteri was waiting.

  “That’s when I met him,” Joe said. “I didn’t know my father till I come to America.”

  They lived those first years in a company row house in West Aliquippa, the thirty-four-block enclave planted squat within the open hearth’s shadow, atop the amusement park remains. The family picked tomatoes out of its plot on Crow Island, and come Sundays wandered over to the football field to watch the semipro Indians. The other six days, the men played the numbers, drank, cheered the high school teams that never won championships. The talk out of Europe was about Mussolini, Hitler, Neville Chamberlain; everyone here worried about family back home.

  At night Joe would fall asleep to a piano’s tinkling, the fingerings of a flute through the thin walls of the home next door. Already, fifteen-year-old Henry Mancini was known as a prodigy, playing for Aliquippa High and the Sons of Italy band. Sometimes Henry’s gruff dad, Quinto, would invite the Letteris over for a glass, a chat about the old country, a listen to his gifted son.

  “He used to play piano and we’d go over there and watch him,” Joe said. “We didn’t know what was going on.”

  Meaning that the Letteris, like everyone else in Aliquippa, had no sense that beneath the surface of things a subtle alchemy was at work. Through some combination of proximity, geography, friction, hardship, talent, conflict, drive—not to mention a loathing for ­steelwork—the town had stumbled on a knack for producing excellence. Its first examples, in fact, had just shipped out: Pete “Pecky” Suder out of Plan 7, and Press Maravich of Plan 2, teammates on Aliquppa High’s 1933–34 basketball team, were off playing minor league baseball and college basketball, respectively.

  No one, of course, would have predicted that Suder, a utility infielder buried in the Yankees system, would play thirteen years in the majors and with the ’49 Philadelphia A’s help set a record for double plays—218—that still stands. Or that Maravich would become a force as a college basketbal
l coach in the ’60s, winning conference titles and producing one of the game’s most dazzling figures in his son. Who had that kind of foresight? American team sports weren’t easily plumbed by immigrant parents—and besides, they had larger concerns. The coming of war in Europe changed Aliquippa, said Jesse Steinfeld, whose widowed mother ran a notions shop in West Aliquippa, “from a total disaster to a busy little town.”

  By the end of 1939, with the U.S. building ships for Great Britain, J&L’s production had doubled and Achille Letteri had more work than he could handle. Soon his two oldest sons would land jobs at the Aliquippa Works, too, and start counting the days until they could move out, unaware that they were fleeing something rare. Mancini’s music—encompassing everything from “Moon River” to the Pink Panther theme—would win him twenty Grammies and four Academy Awards. And though little brother Joe Letteri never made it past seventh grade, his own oldest son, Joe Jr., would go on to win four Oscars for visual effects in blockbuster movies like Avatar and Lord of the Rings.

  “That’s eight Oscars coming out of that one row house in West Aliquippa,” said former Aliquippa postmaster, and Beaver County historian, Gino Piroli.

  Half a mile up Beaver Ave., meanwhile, Silvio “Tony” Ciccone, the youngest son of a mill-working immigrant from Pacentro, Italy, had just turned seven; he’d later move to suburban Detroit, become the only one in his family to graduate college, and father the pop star Madonna. A few blocks over from the Letteris and Mancinis, Jesse Steinfeld was getting restless. Every day brought another anti-Semitic slur. The older Henry always looked out for him, and in the early ’40s the two would pay their nickels and together ride the bus from West Aliquippa up to the high school. “He was very smart,” Steinfeld said. “A great guy to have as a friend.”

  Mancini left town in 1942, and Steinfeld, after graduating Aliquippa High at sixteen, was gone a year later. He, too, rose to the top of his field, becoming the eleventh surgeon general of the United States in 1969, and one of the most effective; Steinfeld was an early voice warning about the effects of violent TV on children, and proved far more outspoken than any of his predecessors against cigarette smoking. His superiors in the Nixon administration pressured him to back off, but Steinfeld had no choice: His antipathy ran all the way back to Aliquippa.

  “My mother hated it,” he said.

  Steinfeld’s father had chain-smoked from the moment he woke, and between his exhalations and the putrescence billowing from the nearby stacks, there was little good air for the boy to breathe. Indeed, the most cursory scan of wartime Aliquippa’s newspaper—rife with stories about gambling raids, wildcat strikes, men suffering horrific burns at the mill, a man killing his father with an ax, the occasional ­shooting—reveals an era far more complex than the sepia-toned, “Greatest Generation” caricature so beloved by nostalgists.

  Too often, the idea of small-town America then gets reduced to a quaint admirable mush. But even the now-adored 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life portrayed two sides: the light, wholesome Bedford Falls and the noirish Pottersville, staffed by bartenders serving “hard drinks for men who want to get drunk fast.” Aliquippa had both. It was a cheek-by-jowl, working-class universe—family-centered, intensely clannish, busy, and warm: You knew your neighbors. Kids could roam. Time was marked by the steam whistles mounted on the mill’s massive boilerhouse stacks, blowing the noon and midnight shift changes, signaling the arrival of the new year, the end of war.

  “I grew up in Plan 11: it was wonderful,” said Gilda Letteri, Joe Sr.’s wife. “I went to the Jones School, and ended up teaching there. I grew up on Third Avenue because our relatives all lived there. There were sections where all the Italians lived, all the Polish, all the Slovaks. We had a mix of all these different people who became all our friends. . . .”

  But it could also be grimly Hobbesian. Work in the mill took arms and hands, polluted bodies fast and slow; three men a year died in the Aliquippa Works, and the town’s above-average indices of infant mortality, respiratory death, and heart disease would hold for generations. You could smell J&L in the tap water and rising off the skin, its coke and chemicals defying the strongest soap. Few complained. The airing of grievances, large or small, received little sympathy from officialdom or the culture at large. The job, the cops, and the times were all tough, and the combination fostered a hard—even brutal—sensibility.

  In 1937 fourteen-year-old Steve Zernich, a future beloved surgeon from Aliquippa, began work at his parents’ tavern downtown, one of the first to get a liquor license. Massive rats occasionally swarmed the basement; ferrets were brought in, but the rats killed the ferrets. When business was slow, “our sport consisted of turning off the lights, then quietly going down the basement stairs,” Zernich later wrote.

  “We waited until we heard the rats racing across the shelves. Then we snapped on the lights and stabbed the rats,” he went on. “I caught one, pinning his leg to a board. At first, he spun around the ice pick like a propeller. He then started to chew off his leg until I finished him with my other ice pick. . . .”

  Many who lived in Aliquippa then can’t help but list only its virtues. But steel-town nostalgia is never just about drugstore egg creams and Sunday night dances at the Sons of Italy hall. It’s about the challenges that made its inhabitants tough—or broke them whole. Survival carried its own reward.

  “A wonderful experience—in retrospect,” Steinfeld said. “But I don’t look back on it fondly at all. Unfortunately, there was nothing fond about it. We were not in the winning circle, so to speak. Not football players, basketball players—or any kind of players. It was just a question of keeping going.”

  On February 21, 1941, the newly named football coach at Aliquippa High School, irked by a dawning sense that fans and boosters and one particularly anxious drum-beater from the Aliquippa Gazette nicknamed “The Armchair Athlete” expected a savior, allowed himself a flash of temper. “Rockne is dead. Let’s forget this Superman buildup,” Carl Aschman snapped. “I’ve got a tough enough job on my hands now without any buildup.”

  He was thirty-seven years old, of Austrian descent, and had never before said anything so colorful for public consumption—or even admitted to being aware of Notre Dame’s legendary Knute Rockne or any comic-book hero—and never would again. But such was the anxiety surrounding the program then. Coach Nate Lippe had won only eleven football games in the previous three seasons, and had resigned amid dimming prospects. “The varsity grid cupboard is bare,” wrote Richard Amper in the Gazette. “The entire squad is gone. A few straggling reserves are around but do not amount to much.”

  Landing Aschman had been a major coup. As Lippe faded, “King Carl” had shined: building previously unheralded and tiny Brownsville into a WPIAL power, going undefeated his last three years, winning the 1940 AA championship. And Aschman had seemed happy at Brownsville, saying just two months before that he had “hit the jackpot” as the top coach in the Monongahela Valley. Yet like Lippe, like many high school coaches, he was in charge of all Brownsville’s major teams, and when the Aliquippa school board dangled a county-high salary of $3,500 ($59,000 today) to coach only football—with a much bigger talent pool—Aschman jumped.

  He was hardly met with a parade. Germany had overrun France the summer before, and the nation’s first peacetime draft was registering, examining, and inducting Beaver County’s young white men; the week Aschman agreed to terms, German planes were bombing London. Everyone had an eye on the old country. Women had learned to keep mourning wear—black dress and beads—handy for those killed back home and for Aliquippa friends who’d lost family elsewhere. Children’s voices, singing patriotic songs like “Over There,” wafted every other day out school windows.

  Still, that last peaceful fall, Aschman made an impressive debut. His was a traditional, down-the-throat offense, and the team local papers dubbed the “Steelers” opened the season grinding out thirteen first downs and crus
hing Freedom 39–0. Aliquippa allowed only two touchdowns in winning its first five games, seemed poised for a title run, shoehorned nearly 8,000 into Aliquippa Stadium when Ambridge came calling . . . and Moe Rubenstein walked out with a 21–0 win. It was Aschman’s first loss in four years; Bridger fans couldn’t have been more delighted. Welcome to the neighborhood, King Carl.

  Aliquippa finished the season 8–1. Late in 1941 a young couple with two boys, drawn by the boom in war work, moved up from Carnegie. The twenty-three-year-old breadwinner, Ukrainian with a bit of Pole mixed in, had been born Mike Dyzcko, but he didn’t wait for some boss to change his name; ever bullheaded, he did it himself—his way. One brother had changed his name to “Disco,” another to “Discoe.” Mike liked the spikiness of “Ditka” better. He worked as a “burner” for the Aliquippa & Southern Railroad, which serviced the mill, repairing cars with an acetylene torch. Nightly he’d come home with his clothes full of holes, arms and hands scorched raw by the spitting fire.

  War eats steel. The ’38 recession evaporated fast; J&L logged a $10.3 million profit in ’40, and after Pearl Harbor the workforce, production, and money only grew. In spring of 1941 Aliquippa schools led the county in enrollment, with the high school at 1,279 pupils; the following year alone, 407 students dropped out to seek war work. The ever-increasing, ever-shifting demand in the ensuing months and years kept J&L engineers scrambling. Hot and cold rolled steel, tin plate, wire rope were needed for all manner of machine parts, ship plate, tank armor, sprockets, gun barrel tubes, gun mounts, food containers, bombs, bullet jackets, blood plasma cans, and submarine construction. J&L’s furnaces ran literally full-blast, twenty-four hours a day, breaking nearly a thousand production records in 1941, and five hundred more in ’42.