Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  “A boy drove my aunt down to my father’s, shows him the picture. I come home from school and my dad: ‘Hey, how was band practice tonight?’ and my dad was upset and then it was, ‘Send him down to the mill! Go to work.’ But Dominic told my dad, ‘I’m the oldest of the family. He’s going to go to school, and if you don’t like it he’ll come live with me.’ And my father backed up.”

  Jimmy Frank’s father wanted him working, too, especially winters, when he’d run the truck out twenty miles to Clinton, Pennsylvania, pick up a load of coal, drive back, and deliver it to homes all over town. “My dad wasn’t too much on us playing ball,” Frank said. “But of course when we started winning and got some notoriety, then he would tell people he taught me everything. But to keep him happy? If we had basketball practice on a Saturday morning, I would get up five o’clock in the morning, go to the coal mine, get a load, come back and deliver some, go to practice—then after practice continue delivering the coal.”

  The spring of 1949 showed just how important sports had become. Led by Frank, a cocaptain with his high-scoring teammate, Mickey Zernich, Aliquippa’s basketball team went 29-0, easily claimed the WPIAL title, and traveled to Philadelphia to face York for the town’s first state championship. Nate Lippe just missed out: After two decades of coaching—and three losing trips to the WPIAL finals—he had resigned the year before over a salary dispute, handing basketball, his first love, over to assistant Sam Milanovich.

  Unlike the all-but-ignored ’44 baseball champions, for this title shot the town turned out. The Beaver County Times sent four reporters, an editor, and a photographer to Philly’s venerable Convention Hall, and estimated that more than 2,000 residents traveled east by private cars, chartered buses, and a fifteen-coach special train for the game. A plane was chartered to fly in sixty high rollers, including mill executives, politicians, and bank officers.

  Two fans—“Timber” Mayconich and “Scratch” Chalfa—blew long horns to lead cheers, and everybody sang:

  Let me tell you, friends of mine:

  Aliquip-pa’s team is fine!

  They’re the best in Section Three,

  And will go down in his-tory!

  The only notable absence, considering that he would attend every big Aliquippa High game for the next fifty years, was Joe Letteri. He’d done his time in the Army, after turning eighteen in 1946, but when he came back home the old rules still applied. Achille was king in his house, Joe’s pay went into his pocket, and the job trumped all else. “My father wouldn’t let me go,” Joe said. “Because if I missed the train or bus, I might miss a day’s work. They were that tough in those days.”

  Jimmy Frank scored five of the first seven points in the 63-51 win, and came home a hero. The players were feted in a Sunday parade featuring fire trucks rolling along Franklin Avenue; 30,000 people packed sidewalks on either side. The next day of school was canceled. The only thing Frank could compare it to was May 8, 1945—V-E Day, when Germany surrendered and he, only fourteen years old, had driven his dad’s people-laden truck through streets filled with honking cars, screaming adults, an uncontainable joy.

  “We didn’t expect that kind of turnout,” Frank said. “Sitting on top of the fire truck going down Franklin Avenue and the streets lined with people, waving and hollering and all? Heady experience for an eighteen-year-old.”

  It didn’t make sense that winning a basketball game could feel like the end of the bloodiest war in history, but what was a young man to do? Jimmy Frank waved back.

  Such fervor, though, has a way of curdling into expectation, impatience, and soon Aliquippa’s nearly led to a big mistake. Carl Aschman was blunt, honest, a daily churchgoer, could boast of a championship from his previous stop, would work into darkness to teach a kid the proper technique—had all the qualities, in fact, that you could want in a head football coach. Except one: he had forgotten how to win. Since being crushed in Aliquippa’s first shot at a WPIAL title in ’42, the forty-seven-year-old Aschman had kept his teams hovering at just above .500—and, worse, had beaten Ambridge only once. When the 1950 season began shaping up as another mediocre stew, the knives came out.

  “They were going to fire him,” said town historian Gino Piroli.

  No wonder. That year’s loss to Moe Rubenstein’s final Ambridge team might’ve been the most embarrassing yet in the schools’ rivalry: Not only did Aliquippa surrender the winning touchdown with just twelve seconds left, but on the previous play a substitution error had left Aschman’s defense a man short. Some members of the school board tried convincing players to sign a petition backing the coach’s dismissal, hoping to replace him with an outsider or an assistant coach. But Aschman had built up plenty of goodwill—running out nightly to fight blazes as a volunteer fireman, cultivating the town booster group known as the “Curbstone Coaches”—and, most important, had never lost the faith of his players.

  “They called us into a room in study hall to can Aschman,” said Lou Mott, a center on that team. “We all voted to keep him.”

  Relieved or exultant, the coach didn’t show it. His son, Carl Jr., recalls his father being worried about his job, but, he said, “he never discussed things like that, too much, with the kids.” Aschman was of a piece with his generation of men, the hard cases who had survived wars, a deadly influenza epidemic, a child’s journey into the unknown. Born in a small town outside Istanbul in 1903, son of an Austrian glassblower, he grew up in nearby Charleroi after his father went to work in the factory there. Carl thought he wanted to be a forest ranger, but proved a tough football center, and played well enough at Washington & Jefferson College to earn a spot in the then-prestigious East-West Shrine Game in San Francisco.

  He liked to remind his players of that, clapping his hands and, just before squatting into position to demonstrate some nuance, growling happily, “You should’ve seen your coach when he played!”

  But heart trouble also ran like a curse in his family, killing his mother and sister young and, years later, his daughter at the age of thirty-one. “Paper heart,” the Aschmans joked, but never in public. If anything, Carl carried on as if his were made of steel.

  “Some people thought he was nuts, constantly on edge, ranting, raving,” said Don Yannessa, who graduated Aliquippa High in 1957. “When I played for him he was an absolute screaming maniac, lunatic. He wasn’t physical, but talk about verbal abuse—he could make you feel like a piece of crap and never use a foul word. He’d cut you: ‘You don’t want to play this game. You don’t have any guts—that’s your problem!’ And you’d just tore a knee cartilage and were still playing and couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. He made you feel horrible because you didn’t perform well in that practice or that last game. He knew how to push buttons.”

  But if there was plenty of grumbling about his record, no one complained about Aschman’s style. His way—full of arbitrary, wide-ranging authority and dictatorial abuse—was the way for coaches then. Press Maravich, the hotshot basketball star for Aliquippa High in the 1930s, returned home to coach his alma mater and teach physical education in 1954, and his strict rules—backed up in class with public smacks delivered by a three-inch-wide paddle—included something called the “Crewcut Club”: if you didn’t have one, you didn’t play.

  Frank Marocco was a senior when Maravich took over the team. His hair was already short; dad Eleutero refused to pay for another trim. “Come here, you!” Maravich snarled when he saw Marocco and another player’s unshorn heads. Frank protested that his dad wouldn’t budge. Press kicked them out of the gym. “So we didn’t play basketball,” Marocco said. “I hated him for that.”

  No parent complained. Rough, top-down, sometimes incomprehensible discipline had saved the world, hadn’t it? Press had been a Navy bomber pilot in World War II, and the American military, starring outsized egotists like Douglas MacArthur and soldier-slapping George Patton, had conquered Hitler and Tojo, and
was now fighting communism in Korea. Its place in American life had never been more celebrated. Soon General Dwight Eisenhower, a former running back and linebacker at West Point who once tackled Jim Thorpe, would move into the White House.

  Aschman sensed that connection earlier than most, and wasn’t shy about linking his sport—and methods—with a model based upon following orders. “Today’s football is a war game and there’s no getting around it,” Aschman said during a football banquet speech in January 1945. “All that the game is, is a mere forecast of the bigger one yet to come against the enemy.

  “America’s deadliest disease at the present time is fatigue. People simply tire out too fast and refuse to do anything about it. Yet because of America’s love for sports, our boys over there are pressing ahead, ahead and ahead.”

  Indeed, football could make that analogous leap far more nimbly than basketball or baseball: mud was mud, whether you were a dogface slogging through the Bastogne or a tackle grinding down after down against New Castle. “Show me a line,” Aschman would say, “and I’ll show you a football team.” His ideal offensive line would be filled with “ugly men”—there was no higher compliment—two-hundred-pound human plows who keyed the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust attack that so resonated in a town sustained by three daily shifts of filthy toil.

  “When I was a kid you had to be tough,” said Marocco, a freshman at Aliquippa in 1951. “Get your ass kicked, you got back up again. You never cried. You didn’t complain about being hurt; you went home hurt and cried down in the cellar. That was one of the things: never let people know you’re hurt.”

  He takes a finger, smushes his nose against his left cheek. “I broke my nose in the Ellwood City game, 1954,” Marocco said. “We didn’t have face masks. Go to block a punt, the ball hit me in the nose, and I blocked it and went in the end zone. I come out bleeding, and my nose is over here and I know because I can see it. And [teammate] Pete Fuderich says, ‘Shit, you broke your damn nose! Hey, Coach!’”

  Aschman approached. “What happened to you?” he asked.

  “I blocked the punt with my nose,” Marocco replied.

  Aschman reached out, centered the nose between his thumbs, and squeezed. Marocco nearly passed out. Aschman told someone to slap gauze on the break, and sent him back in. “So I went back in the game,” Marocco said. “That’s the way Aschman was.”

  Not always. Away from the field, he liked the quiet of fishing, an occasional tune; in the weeks before Christmas Aschman was known to trail behind the school’s Bach Choir as it made its rounds caroling through the halls, loudly singing along. And he never brought home a loss or a win. When his only son stopped playing football after one fall of junior high ball, Aschman didn’t make a fuss. “He didn’t push me. He knew I couldn’t play,” Carl Jr. said.

  Jimmy Frank worked for Aschman for four years as the football team’s manager. “I didn’t think he was the greatest guy,” he said. “But my brother loved him.”

  Four years younger, Willie Frank was born in Aliquippa, too. For his first job, he worked as a towel boy/lifeguard at the colored pool in Plan 11. “I gave my dad my paycheck, twenty-some dollars and fifty cents—and he gave me the fifty cents,” Willie said. “He was trying to teach me a lesson: You go down to the company store down on the main drag, buy your two pair of shoes—one for Sunday and one for the school year? Dad gets ready to get paid and sees three X’s. That means the company store got it all. Man, was I upset about that.”

  In August 1951, Willie Frank headed to his second preseason camp with the Quips. The team trained at nearby Raccoon Creek State Park, on the remnants of a Civilian Conservation Corps campground, and that two weeks alone on “Camp Site 9” was a test: wood cabins, no fans, bunks with a couple overhead lights, outhouses featuring a wooden plank with five holes. Guys took shits side by side, talking football. A shower was an inverted hose with a sprinkler head.

  “Like Stalag 17,” said John Evasovich. “We would get there and walk down the field and pick out the bricks and rocks and throw them aside. You may have had two or three blades of grass for a while; the rest was mud. Sleep in the cabins—had mattresses that were all of two inches thick; outhouses and a shower. You had nowhere to hang your clothes, no change of clothes, and we would have sweatshirts from the years before for practicing. And they might have six different names on them, scratched out: ‘Jones,’ ‘Yannessa,’ ‘Pesky,’ then your name: ‘Evaso­vich.’ That was your sweatshirt for the year.

  “They’d give you a couple pair of woolen socks that fell down two minutes after you put ’em on. Pair of shoes, canvas pants, and a helmet that weighed three thousand pounds. You practiced twice a day, chalk talk at night. Water was taboo. We’d get it once—line up, and we had this big galvanized thing with a stainless-steel ladle that we would all drink out of. You didn’t wipe it off. You didn’t bless it. That was your water for the day. Clothes you could barely put on by the third day, they stunk so badly. I think we got a change of clothes the second week—got ’em washed that weekend, put ’em on again. And we wore those goddamned clothes all year.”

  New players got to join Aschman’s “Ghost Battalion”—a sexy name for the squad whose job was to get trampled, day in and day out, by the starters. “Aschman served breakfast, a big bucket of Mother’s Oats,” Marocco said. “He’d throw it in a dish and a couple pieces of toast, that was your breakfast. Then a sandwich and bowl of soup for lunch. In evenings the Quarterback Club would come out and cook us spaghetti. If you was at the football camp and really hated it? You didn’t have the guts to say I’m going home, because the other guys would kick your butt.”

  Willie Frank had the guts. He did like Aschman better than his older brother, but unlike Jimmy he was less inclined to “accept those things” when he felt slighted by some white person in authority. Willie had gone to camp in 1951 intending to beat out fellow sophomore George Sarris and win the starting quarterback job, and felt good about his chances when Aschman suddenly switched him to halfback. Frank didn’t protest. He kept working, felt he was being the ultimate good soldier until, in a meeting, Aschman stunned him by snarling something about “that prima donna Frank over there . . .”

  That did it. Frank called his big brother, Robert, and said, “Come and get me. I’m finished.” An assistant coach found out, and told ­Aschman he was about to lose one of his star players. In his later, more secure years, the coach would ignore kids who walked away from his program, no matter how talented. Not then. Aschman pulled Willie aside to explain himself. “I had to find somebody that could take it,” he said. “I figured you could take it.”

  That, too, was an Aschman trait. He seemed attuned to some archaic form of fairness, and if he couldn’t roar at students the way he could at players, anyone who came to his ninth-grade history class with notions of being a star there was quickly disabused. “He was a good teacher,” said Carl Jr. “He kicked me out once or twice for not having my work done.”

  A generation later, the shifting of black players away from quarterback to other, more “black” positions came to be seen as one of football’s less subtle forms of racism. But Willie Frank, who doesn’t hesitate to critique Aschman for playing favorites when it came time to push his kids for college scholarships, thinks need—not race—was the impulse behind his switch to halfback and Aschman’s insult. “Black players under Carl Aschman, I think they all got a fair shake,” Frank said. The coach was hardly progressive. But he did play at Washington & Jefferson just two years after Charlie West quarterbacked the Presidents in the Rose Bowl, and his results-first attitude in Aliquippa helped bend white sensibilities in a new direction.

  “I played my whole life, went to a Catholic grade school, we didn’t have one black kid in school,” said Ditka. “Went to Aliquippa High, played football, basketball, baseball, and all the (black) guys—Bob Rembert, Johnny Moore—were good athletes, better athletes than I ever thought I’d be, a
nd we never had a problem. A lot of that was because Coach Aschman would say, ‘I don’t care what color your skin is: Everybody bleeds red.’ I can still remember him saying that early on, and I thought, He’s right.”

  So Frank took it, and stayed, and in 1952 ended up anchoring Aliquippa’s first great football team. Sarris had a whip arm and in tight end Ernie Pitts a huge, fast-moving target; for the first time in his life, Aschman would see the virtue of putting the ball in the air. But Willie Frank, quick and deceptively strong, led the team in scoring out of a traditional T formation; Zmijanac, who was in fourth grade then, says Frank was as good as any running back he’s ever seen. Some, including Willie himself, say he was better than Tony Dorsett.

  “They’re comparable,” Evasovich said. “Willie in his day was bigger than Dorsett and stronger, probably not as elusive and not as fast. But given the style of pro football then, if Willie played he would’ve been a star as a pro.”

  The Quips rolled Erie Tech 40-0 in their first game and never looked back; after seven games they’d outscored their opponents 292-19. Against Ellwood City Frank went off tackle and took a helmet to the thigh; the piercing pain left him sprawled on the field. Next thing he knew ­Aschman was looming over him. “Son, you can run!” Aschman rasped. “Get up!” Aschman then called the same play. Frank shambled some thirty yards for the touchdown, and then limped to the sideline. “I said, ‘That’s it,’” Willie recalled. “I didn’t get in the rest of the game.”