by S. L. Price
Over the next four years some 6,000 of Aliquippa’s young, most of them white men, but soon enough blacks and some women, went off to fight. The inducted got a union hall party, a Bible, a parade, waves, backslaps, and tears. It became customary for a crowd to accompany the departing soldier out of his Plan, the place he grew up, the mile or so to Aliquippa’s train depot. “The men would congregate and we would all walk down to the train station while the young men would get on the trains, to go to war,” said Gilda Letteri. “Friends, the families: We all got together and walked down. Following them.”
Aschman’s second season began even better than his first. Aliquippa outscored its first three opponents, 93-6, edged Ambridge, and rolled unbeaten into its first-ever WPIAL title game, against four-time champ New Castle. With no fields available in Pittsburgh, the WPIAL decided to hold the game in, yes, Ambridge; no one knows if Rubenstein played a part in the decision. The stadium filled with 11,000 people on Thanksgiving Day, most from right across the river, but New Castle won 25–0, the Quips’ offense unable to muster a first down until the final two minutes.
“Power by Jesse Gunn, Negro fullback, and snake-hip sprinting by swift-cutting Robert (General) E. Lee, Negro left halfback, featured their final scholastic work in New Castle’s deserved triumph,” read the Pittsburgh Press account. “Time and again the Quip backs, especially Mike Devonar and Nick Odivak, tried their utmost to get somewhere, but with no avail. New Castle was just too tough, rugged and alert.”
By then service flags were hanging in windows, a blue star signifying a family member in the military, gold signifying the dead. Mothers and wives paled at the sight of the Western Union man. Blackout drills were held every few days, older men in Civil Defense hard hats and armbands toting flashlights, inspecting houses for the merest leaked light. Benefit dances raised money for the Red Cross, and scrap drives for steel, rubber, and rags allowed everyone to feel a part of the war effort. But with only radio, newsreels, and sometimes-months-late letters bringing home just snippets of news, the faraway fighting felt almost unreal. Only once did Aliquippa get a first-hand taste of carnage.
At 5:10 p.m. on December 22, 1942, a bus carrying war workers just off their shift at J&L was heading south on Constitution Boulevard at a spot opposite the coke ovens. The steep cliff above, softened and split by freezing rain, loosed a forty-foot-wide avalanche of stone and dirt, some two hundred tons, onto the bus below. Twenty-two of those inside, most heading back to Pittsburgh, died instantly. “There was no warning,” said Joseph Manko, a metallurgist, who crawled out a rear window. “Just the crash. Not so loud either. After that just silence and darkness.”
Bystanders arrived to a scene of mangled bodies and crushed heads. Men clearing the debris came home speechless and faint. Four more of the injured would die, their names soon lost among the era’s millions.
Life and the war and the mill went on. Women poured into jobs vacated by men gone away; new lifts and conveyors allowed the most diminutive to swing unfinished shells and bombs into position. Afterward, there were movies to take in at Abie Rosenthal’s theater next to Steinfeld’s home, springtime baseball games played in the community league. Some nights, fifteen-year-old Joe Letteri, struggling still with his English, would hit West Aliquippa’s Saxer Field to take in a ball game. Tonino “Toats” DiNardo pitched for the Panthers Athletic Club when he wasn’t anchoring the Aliquippa High staff.
“I watched him play all the time,” Joe said. “Nice guy. Real quiet. Never bothered anybody.”
Nate Lippe didn’t leave town with Aschman’s arrival. He continued coaching Aliquippa High basketball and baseball, and in the spring of ’43 DiNardo beat Ambridge twice and led the Lippemen to the WPIAL semifinals before losing—despite tossing a three-hitter—2-0. That would be his last high school game. In December of ’43, before his senior season, the eighteen-year-old DiNardo began basic training at Camp Wolters, Texas. He was sent overseas and, like 128 other Aliquippa men in World War II, died there.
“He never made it back,” said teammate George Suder. “What a great kid, too. Oh, my God: people get killed or they die and then they were all ‘good guys,’ but this guy really was a helluva man. He was going to be the pitcher on the team. Right-hander, and he had everything.”
In January 1944, J&L—which had already scooped up fifty-two more Aliquippa High boys, age sixteen and up, for war work—put out the call for more. The job required a six-hour workday, five days a week, and bent the schedule around the school day. For most, it was voluntary duty. For Joe Letteri, sixteen now and flailing in seventh grade, there wasn’t any choice. Both his older brothers had left in ’42, one to serve as a gunner on a supply ship in India, the other in the antitank corps in Europe. Joe’s dad sent him down to the mill to do grunt work weekends and holidays, at 68 cents an hour. When the school year ended in June, he dropped out and began a forty-year stint at J&L.
“My father had just got through the Depression and we had a tough time until my two brothers went to the service and I was the only one left,” Letteri said. “I went to work to help out. We didn’t have nothing.”
He took home $21.76 for his first pay, for four days of work, and handed his father the envelope. Achille Letteri handed Joe back a dollar. From then on, every two weeks, the routine was the same. “I didn’t even open it,” Joe said. “He’d give me whatever he felt like giving me. I didn’t take my first pay until 1946, when I went into the service. I stuck the pay in my pocket and left.”
World War II was as much a war of production as a battle of wills, and Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy” now hit full stride. In March 1943, Aliquippa’s blooming mill rolled a world-record 171,440 tons of ingots (individual molds filled with molten metal weighing from hundreds of pounds to hundreds of tons); a single crew rolled an unprecedented 512 during one eight-hour turn. J&L’s three main works fabricated beams and channels for ships and submarines, the walls and decks of the LSTs—landing ship tanks—for the assault on Europe. But only the Aliquippa Works could produce the Navy-designed “Steel Box”—a lightweight, 5-by-7-by-5-foot watertight container of impressive versatility. First used as portable piers in that year’s invasion of Sicily—allowing troop landings where none had been possible—Steel Boxes could also be used as troop causeway, ferry for supplies and men, containers for precious water.
Steel mills don’t get the Medal of Honor, but in 1943 the Aliquippa Works was awarded its equivalent: the Army-Navy “E” for excellence, “for distinguished service on the first line of defense.” A pennant was raised over the grounds, and every worker received a silver “E” lapel pin. “This war is not merely the Army’s war and the Navy’s war,” said Lieutenant Colonel John S. Swauger in a January speech to 5,000 workers. “It is being fought right here in Aliquippa, with milling machinery and engine lathes, calipers and micrometers, open hearths, blast furnaces and rolling mills.”
Beyond the tunnel, the streets and air hummed with comings and goings. Early in 1944, Wes and Myrtle Dorsett arrived from Pittsboro, North Carolina, and moved into Aliquippa’s Mount Vernon pocket, in a house just wide of the borough line. The local draft board reclassified Pete Suder—three years a mainstay with the Philadelphia Athletics, wintertime hand in the blooming mill, father of two—“1-A”: available for unrestricted military service. High school halls and rosters were decimated by the steady departure of eighteen-year-olds, the last cluster leaving Lippe particularly shaken.
At the end of January, Lippe had walked another group of soon-to-be-soldiers to the Aliquippa train station. His basketball team had gotten off to a 4-0 start, with a game looming against Moe Rubenstein across the bridge. When Lippe tried to say some comforting words, the boys cut him off. “Don’t worry about us,” they said before boarding. “Just beat Ambridge.”
The night of the game, Lippe gathered his Quips in the locker room and gave a teary-eyed speech relating the trackside scene, the young soldiers
’ words, his fierce emotions, the need to win. Then his team walked out onto Rubenstein’s court and played passionately and well—and lost another heartbreaker, 56-54.
Take your left hand, palm up, cupped as if holding sand. Hold it against your gut and look down. This is your relief map of downtown Aliquippa in the spring of 1944. Riding along the ball of your thumb is Franklin Avenue, rounding past St. Titus Church. Veer off to the right, and rise to the top of your little finger, and you come to the highest point in town: the seventeen-year-old high school, jammed with students, and its seven-year-old football stadium. Stay left on Franklin and follow the lifeline for less than a mile, past the stately library built by company largesse, the five-story company store, the three dozen bars, overflowing. Aliquippa, population pushing 30,000-plus, was like any other place in America then. Everybody was waiting for the endgame.
The war in Europe had turned for good, it seemed, but the final push promised horrific losses. No blue-star family could escape the dread; a son’s or father’s or husband’s fate hinged on timing, location, or the mocking lottery of pure dumb luck. In June of 1944, Mike Ditka of the A&S Railroad turned twenty-six: eligible even with a wife and two sons—four-year-old Michael and three-year-old Ashton—to be drafted. He went into the Marines, spent the rest of the war mostly at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, sent home $100 a month.
“He didn’t get in the war,” said his wife, Charlotte. “He got a vacation from me and his kids.”
Without Toats DiNardo, Aliquippa High’s baseball team tried to make do. Pete Suder’s brother George, the youngest of thirteen, was a lank and feisty shortstop invited more than once to work out with the Pirates at Forbes Field; by summer he would be cursing out a badgering Honus Wagner (Wagner laughed) and meeting with Dodgers owner Branch Rickey in Brooklyn. Coming off two also-ran finishes in the WPIAL playoffs, “Juke” (everybody had a nickname) smelled a chance for the school’s first-ever title in anything. He went to Nate Lippe and offered to move to the mound.
“You ever pitch before?” Lippe said.
“Never in my life,” George said.
“What makes you think you can?”
“I’ve seen the rest of your pitchers.”
Suder carried Aliquippa that ’44 season, yet the coach made all the difference. Even with Moe Rubenstein retired from coaching baseball, Ambridge remained the most vexing puzzle—and here, at last, Lippe had the answer. In the season’s second game, the Bridgers crushed Aliquippa, 8-0, the go-ahead run coming from left fielder—and Aliquippa High dropout—Alfred Sullivan. Suder started the next game, one-hitting Beaver Falls, and didn’t give up the ball the rest of the season, winning seven of the Quips’ final eight games. However, in his best performance, he struck out 16 yet lost, 2-1—to first-place Ambridge, of course.
In most other years, that would’ve ended Aliquippa’s shot at a sectional title, much less bragging rights. But Lippe cannily filed a protest—the umpire wrongly awarded an Ambridge player first base after he’d been hit with a pitch on a swinging third strike—and got the result tossed. Ambridge coach Jack Burns confidently agreed to replay the game. But two weeks later, Lippe struck again, tipping off WPIAL officials to an open secret: Sullivan had never left Aliquippa; the home address he gave in Ambridge was a vacant lot. Caught, Ambridge High declared Sullivan ineligible, and forfeited two wins—including the 8-0 romp over Aliquippa—to concede the season. It may not have come on the field, but few of Lippe’s victories tasted more delicious.
Not that the town noticed much: Sports hadn’t yet assumed an outsized place in American life, and weren’t about to gain much purchase with a war on. Suder’s parents didn’t see Juke play once that season. The team had nothing close to state-of-the-art gear; players wore jerseys emblazoned not with “Aliquippa,” but “Celtic” or “Red”—hand-me-downs from the local Celtic Reds social club. Aliquippa entered the WPIAL playoffs 6-1, but even the most intense players knew that their preoccupation was a secondary thing, just one playful piece in a world dominated by the mill and the union, the bars and churches, the endless parsing of overseas news.
Juke had two brothers off in Europe—Pete, the oldest, building pontoon bridges in the engineering corps, and Ted, two years younger, serving in one of George S. Patton’s tank destroyer units. Buddies like Nick “Ninnie” Vuich, first baseman on the ’42 Aliquippa team, and DiNardo were somewhere fighting, too. “I’d wait for a letter from them,” Suder said. “I was writing to two or three of my friends in the service that got killed. I remember one, getting a letter back and it was stamped on there, ‘DECEASED.’ That’s the way I found out that he was gone.”
Suder threw a three-hitter with eight strikeouts to beat Leetsdale, then gave up just two hits to shut down Mt. Lebanon in the semifinals. In the two weeks before stepping onto the mound in the championship game at Forbes Field, against Charleroi, he took his Navy physical and passed. The game was set for June 5; a reporter for Aliquippa’s Evening Times promised Suder front-page coverage if the Quips won.
There was no team bus. Gas and tire rationing were in full swing, so players cadged rides into Pittsburgh in individual cars. Usually they dressed at home, but this was the championship, a major league park: They brought their uniforms and changed in the Pirates clubhouse like big leaguers. Aliquippa second baseman Jack Cable had lost his cleats en route, sparking a mini-crisis, but Pirates All-Star infielder Frankie Gustine happened to be knocking around Forbes that day. He lent the kid a pair.
The Pirates’ thirty-five-year-old home field was, by then, a beloved if creaky venue, its cavernous dimensions accentuated by the expanses of empty seats. The public address system wasn’t used for high school title games; the hand-operated scoreboard sat untouched. “The only insignificant phase of the proceedings was the fact that the fray was played in comparative secrecy,” wrote Evening Times scribe Nick Wallace. “Barely 200 fans had mammoth Forbes Field to themselves.”
The turnout, Wallace added, “points up, as never before, the complete lackadaisicalness of local sports followers.” It’s like Joe Letteri said: We didn’t know what was going on. No one figured this for the beginning, the moment when the town’s talent began to show like some gleaming pocket of ore.
It didn’t matter. Suder took the mound cocky; pro scouts had come to watch him. “First guy up was probably the second baseman, he must’ve been five-foot-two, and I said, ‘Hell, I’ll blow this fastball by him. . . .’” Suder recalled. “I throw that ball in there: vooom! He hits a line drive single. Next guy come up, he wasn’t no bigger. Same thing—another line drive single. I said, ‘Oh God, here we go. . . .’”
Aliquippa won, 9-1. Suder ended up having the game of his life: hit two doubles, went the seven-inning distance on the mound, struck out three, and limited Charleroi to five hits. For the final out, he easily fielded a slow roller and trotted to first, where his buddy Rudy Neish was waiting. Suder could’ve stepped on the bag himself, but why not share the wealth? He flipped the ball to Neish and the Red and Black, the Quips, the Steelers were WPIAL champs at last. There were a couple handshakes, maybe a hug, but no dogpile on the field. That wasn’t done.
Instead, the team stayed in Pittsburgh to celebrate and take in a show at the palatial, blazingly lit Stanley Theater. Schmaltzy showman Ted “Is Everybody Happy?” Lewis and his orchestra performed one of his most famous bits, a soft-shoe rendition—with a black man imitating, in perfect synchronization behind him, his every step—of “Me and My Shadow.” Nobody found it offensive: The top-hatted duet brought down the house.
When the boys straggled home to Aliquippa that night, there was no crowd waiting. Next morning the championship was an afterthought: News from Normandy was all over the radio, and the above-the-flag headline of that afternoon’s Evening Times screamed, “CONTINENT INVADED.” The only mention of the win was buried within a wrap-up story on the city: “Next to the invasion, the most discussed subject in town
today is Aliquippa High’s WPIAL baseball titlists. ‘At last we broke the ice,’ seems to be the general consensus of opinion.’”
Two days later, Aliquippa’s catcher, Joe Branchetti, left for the Navy. Suder spent his summer waiting for orders, working some at J&L. The town’s latest losses trickled and then rushed in over the harried months: The first local D-Day casualty, John Kaurich, a former Quips football player, died on June 7. Late in July came news that Ninnie Vuich, the first baseman, died of wounds suffered in a glider crash in France. Toats DiNardo was still alive then, with the 94th Infantry Division, readying to plunge across France in a tank with Patton’s Third Army. By year’s end he’d die, too, blown apart by a shell inside his tank at the Battle of the Bulge.
Still, even as families braced for the worst kind of telegram, everybody knew what D-Day meant. It was the last corner turned: The war would be won, maybe even soon. Meanwhile, people were suddenly eating well, flush with money. War work had swelled the population by 6,000; one prediction had Aliquippa hitting 50,000 if enough housing could be built. In July of ’44, J&L announced it would spend $7.5 million to build 106 by-product coke ovens and increase capacity by 50 percent.
For decades, most townfolk had been told where to work and live and what to think by forces more powerful than they; now Aliquippa bristled with a pent-up, jazzy vim. The American Century was about to hit its stride. Teens began believing that, unlike their fathers and uncles, they just might control their fate. The dank streets seemed almost lovely. “Oh, my God: what a beautiful place,” Suder said. “It was great. Honest, we used to go down on Franklin Avenue just a few blocks from where we lived, walked up and down and ordered a bag of peanuts maybe, stop for some ice cream or something. Every night we would walk up and down the avenue. Every store was booming. It was a boom town.”