Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  “Did you ever see a lion jump through a hoop of flames?” Press Maravich said to a New Orleans newspaper in 1986. “That’s how Mike was.”

  And basketball wasn’t even his sport. When Ditka showed up at Raccoon Creek State Park for camp his senior year, you could see the difference. The season before, he’d been just another player on the ’55 championship team. But now he’d grown two inches, put on twenty pounds. Aschman took one look at Mike’s nearly 6-foot-2, 185-pound frame and switched him to fullback. Between the previous year’s passing drills and all his running in the fall of 1956, the foundation for Ditka—the man who would revolutionize the position of tight end from a blocker to a dynamic, game-changing pass receiver—was being laid. “I didn’t think he was very good until his senior year,” said Evasovich, a junior in ’56. “Then I thought: Who the hell is this guy?”

  But already Ditka was known as the guy who, when a teammate had his leg broken on a clean hit against Beaver Falls, walked into the opposing team’s huddle and threatened to kill them all. Aschman loved that, of course, because such passion couldn’t be faked. Some tried. Gone from the ’55 team were four of the “ugly men” Aschman so dearly prized, and in the second game of the ’56 season Aliquippa traveled to McKeesport and got hammered, 25-6. Ditka began tearing the locker room apart afterward, screaming, berating himself, smashing lockers, throwing anything he could lay his hands on. The rest of the team began doing the same.

  Aschman consoled Ditka. The others, he ripped. One boy tried sobbing, “I didn’t do a good job! I didn’t play hard enough!”

  “Don’t worry,” Aschman snapped. “You won’t be in there next week.” The message was clear: Ditka does this. The rest of you don’t even try. You’re not him.

  The Indians won their next three, but the season was a struggle. Ditka played even better on defense—inside linebacker—burrowing in on every tackle, never quitting. “Oh, my God,” Yannessa said. “Mike was a pain in the ass to play with.” Down 20-19 to Sharon with little time left and Sharon punting, Ditka was sure that a complicated, rarely used set, where the defensive linemen would somehow crunch the offensive linemen’s shoulder pads and neutralize them, would result in a blocked punt, a recovery, a win.

  “It was the goofiest thing,” Yannessa said. “It only worked in practice and only if the other guy was passive. So Ditka was the linebacker behind us and he’s telling us, ‘You pull him! And you pull him! And I’ll go through there! I’ll block that punt!’ Well, we don’t block the punt, and with forty-eight seconds left we get the football and we don’t manage anything and we lose. Now he’s on the field, bitching at everybody, bitching at me; he wants to take it into the locker room and I’ll never forget, I finally told him: ‘Mike, fuck you. You think you’re the only guy that hurts when we lose?’” And Ditka glowered, and growled, and finally stalked away.

  He wasn’t all intensity, though. Ditka was named “Most Popular” in the class of ’57—along with his future wife, Margie ­Dougherty—and was alternately president, vice president, and treasurer of his homeroom, and a member of the astronomy, conservation, fishing, and hunting clubs. As a student he got Bs in English and social studies and Ds in French and math. Two weeks later, on the night before the Duquesne game, Evasovich drove Mike up to Plan 12 to see Dougherty. Ditka tried showboating with a flip off the back porch and ended up tumbling forty feet down a grassy ravine. The next day, sore before the 28-12 loss even began, he still made 80 percent of the team’s tackles.

  “Might’ve been the best game I’ve ever seen a high school kid play,” Evasovich said.

  But it couldn’t save the season. The Quips lost four games in 1956, including an embarrassing, 53-13 finale against Mike Lucci–led Ambridge, with Ditka swarming, taunting, tackling every available Bridgers jersey—only to walk away from his final high school game furious and convinced that the Quips had given in. Scouts were watching. Aschman played favorites, and if he liked a player he would make the calls, cultivate the coaches, pull any string to get colleges interested. If he didn’t like a kid? Well, he just didn’t. “I was okay, but I had fifty offers—­because of him,” Ditka said. “Because if Coach ­Aschman recommended you, everybody would give you an offer. Clemson, Miami, Minnesota, Michigan State, Penn State, Pitt, Notre Dame, everywhere—because of him, not me. Pretty crazy stuff: that’s how much he was respected.”

  The recognition did nothing to diminish Ditka’s fire; what’s remarkable was just how little such outward signs of success would register. His dad might’ve looked at sports as a way out, but for Ditka “it was personal,” he said. He simply had to be better than everyone else, always, and when his high school football career ended Ditka moved on to basketball. During one game his senior season, with Press Maravich gone on to college coaching, Mike missed a layup, punched the wall in a rage, and broke his wrist. In the summer, when one might have expected him to ease up, to protect his body and psyche for college football, Ditka poured himself into American Legion baseball.

  “I was there the day he chased Ash over the center-field fence,” said Mike Zmijanac, on a local ball team for the first time then at the age of thirteen. “He scared the hell out of me. He was so big and tough, I was such a skinny little kid. We were playing Beaver Falls late in the year. I was the last guy, probably batting twelfth—last out of the game, couple runners on. If I make an out, we lose; if I get a hit, we win. He told me: ‘If you don’t get a hit, I’m killing you. I’m ripping your ass.’ I’m a right-handed hitter, hit a little looper over the first baseman’s head. I was never so glad of anything in my life.”

  Ditka’s parents loved Penn State, if for no other reason than the beaky charm of head coach Rip Engle’s top recruiter, Joe Paterno. Mike had committed to the Nittany Lions for the fall of ’57 and, up to just a few weeks before the semester began, intended to enroll there. Though Mike was only an average science student, Aschman had latched onto the idea that he should dedicate his college studies to a future spent jamming those meathook hands into people’s mouths. “He wanted me to be a dentist,” Ditka said.

  The idea has been a source of delight ever since. “Mike Ditka as a fucking dentist?” Yannessa said. “You got a better chance of seeing Jesus pulling teeth. Start bitching about the fact he’s hurting you and he’ll punch your lights out.”

  Yet dentistry was the hook that the Zernich brothers—Pitt boosters all, including Mickey, the star of the ’49 basketball team—used to pry Ditka loose from Paterno. Mike wasn’t thinking about playing pro football yet; the idea still was to use sports to pay for college. On August 18, thinking he’d be going to Happy Valley, Ditka joined Aschman and the rest of the Quips at Raccoon Creek State Park for training camp, looking to get in shape for freshman year of college ball. Paterno showed up and stayed three days in the cabins with the rest of the coaches, ostensibly to advise Aschman on some new offensive wrinkle. But everyone knew: He was keeping tabs on his prize.

  “And guess what? At the last minute, the Zerniches told him, ‘We’ll guarantee you we’ll get you into dental school if you go to Pitt,’” said Yannessa, the future Aliquippa coaching legend who was then a senior tackle. Paterno was livid. It would be twenty-eight years before he set foot in town again. “Let me tell you something about Joe,” Yannessa said. “I’ve been to Joe’s house; that’s how close I was with him. He’s an Italian, Sicilian-Calabrese mix from Brooklyn, New York. He held a vendetta against Ditka and Aliquippa ever since.”

  But for the town, losing a pipeline to Penn State was a small price to pay. Eventually Ditka’s success at Pitt and beyond, along with that often-unbearable, somehow comic, always unflagging intensity, would slowly become the prime example of the Aliquippa way: Yes, you work hard, and yes, you win. But you also have to be a bit larger than life. You have to succeed in a way that the whole county, state, nation will be forced to notice.

  “Everybody in my family worked in the mill; that’s what we kn
ew,” Yannessa said. “It wasn’t until I was a junior and Mike was a senior that some people said, ‘If you get your grades in order, you can get a scholarship playing football’—and then so many of our guys did get scholarships. That’s the first time the light came on: maybe I can escape.”

  In 1953, Gino Piroli—future Aliquippa postmaster, future Aliquippa historian, forever devoted partisan of Aliquippa High sports—moved to Hopewell. That’s what you did in Aliquippa then, given the chance. Piroli had been married four years, had worked as a pipefitter at J&L for eight, and now he was making enough to leave the row house life, the ever-more-cramped neighborhoods in West Aliquippa or Logstown or Plan 11. It wasn’t like his dad’s time anymore—come through Ellis Island, live so close to the mill that you could feel its daily heave like a beast breathing until the day they cart you away in a box. Housing developments were springing up all over the former farmland surrounding the borough, out in townships like Center, Independence, Raccoon, and, of course, Hopewell: a man could carve out some space there, some quiet at last. Hadn’t they had enough excitement?

  After all, in 1944, at eighteen Piroli had gone to Pittsburgh and chose induction into the Navy with his buddy, Juke Suder. He served on a Fletcher-class destroyer, the USS Irwin, at the bloodbath of Okinawa in the spring of 1945, with Japanese kamikazes plummeting like hellfire out of the sky; Gino’s ship was right there on July 29, 1945, when one Zero tore into the fire control deck of the USS Cassin Young and killed twenty-two men. Only three of the nine Fletchers at Okinawa survived untouched. His was one. Sometime that year, nineteen years old, he was sorting through a batch of letters. “I guess you heard what happened to us . . . ,” his sister began. His father, Oreste, a railroad worker at J&L for three decades, had been crossing the street to work when he was hit by a car and killed.

  When Gino returned, his mill job was waiting. “On the employment card when I got hired again, they had name, address, age, and had a thing that said, ‘Nationality,’” Piroli said. “And they put ‘Italian.’ I said, ‘Hot damn, I’ve been in the war for two years and I’m still not an American?’”

  Moving to Hopewell was the most tangible reward for the promise people had fought for: a better life. In Hopewell you could get away from the street noise, the bars, the casual ethnic tension; you could count a day’s cars on Brodhead Road on one hand, raise kids in peace. At least nine other veterans moved onto Gino’s street in the new development, Crestmont Village, with its three-bedroom bungalows, $13,000 apiece—living room, kitchen, maybe a basement. Many of their children would graduate high school the same year. All the men drove to the mill now, coming in from Hopewell or Center or even from as far away as Moon Township. Vince Calipari, of Coraopolis, the father of future Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari, commuted into Aliquippa as a young man to work in the blast furnace, sweating off five pounds every eight-hour turn. He lasted a year. Driving later on Route 51 with his son, Vince would point to the blazing fire skimming along the horizon. “You see that red line?” he’d say. “I used to work right beside that thing. If I’d stayed, I would’ve died.”

  For those who did stay, the compensation carved out by the union—an average wage of $24 a day, pensions, an hourly minimum of $1.96—enabled steelworkers to put some distance between work and home, take a step up the social ladder. And Aliquippa was just a small sample: starting in 1950, eighteen of the nation’s twenty-five biggest cities began a thirty-year slide in net population; U.S. suburbs, meanwhile, grew by 60 million people. “Nobody blames them,” Zmijanac said. “It was just natural. . . . You do what’s best for you and your family.”

  Still, Hopewell was just a place to lay your head then. Downtown Aliquippa was home. The men went there to work, to pick up school supplies or groceries when the whistle blew, to drink. The whole family went back for big days like January’s Orthodox Christmas or the San Rocco Festival in August—a weekend of parades, the Sons of Italy and Musical Political Italian Club bands, the bishop of the Pittsburgh diocese waving—to honor the patron saint of Patrica, home village to so many Italian clans. They went on weekends to visit Mom and Pop, who just refused to move, and Sunday nights the unattached—or not—would drive in for the weekly dance in West Aliquippa, up on the second floor of the Sons of Italy hall. Cost a quarter admission: somebody spun records, and the hardwood floors squeaked from all that shoe leather and sweat.

  In later years you went to Villa’s Lounge, the nightclub on the upper end of Franklin Avenue, to see Diana Ross and the Supremes, Dionne Warwick, Ike and Tina Turner when they were all obscure and hungry, or to watch Dr. Steve Zernich, fresh from the operating table at Aliquippa Hospital, carousing with his latest dazzling woman. Closing time, they’d often end up—entertainers and all—at the good doctor’s house, where the party only picked up steam.

  “Those were the wild days,” said Joe Letteri. “After that you settle down.”

  Joe married up. He’ll be the first to tell you, when he landed Gilda Cappella, a schoolteacher at Jones Elementary in 1955, his life took the turn that made everything good happen. Except for the war, he’d work the same operation for thirty-nine and a half years: J&L carpenter shop, building scaffolds and platforms and doing the latest odd repair. “Only five, six years of schooling, but I had a pretty good job,” Joe said. “My two brothers were both bosses, foremen; I wasn’t that lucky. They come up through the ranks.”

  But he was lucky too. After marrying at twenty-seven, Joe moved out of his father’s home in West Aliquippa, built a 24-by-24-foot home on a concrete slab behind his father-in-law’s house in Plan 11. The money he’d been paying his parents for a decade? His mother had saved it all, and presented it back to him when he married. Joe and Gilda and the kids wouldn’t make their big move out of town for another eight years, but the eight-room house they’d later build in Center was on the horizon. Aliquippa gave them that. “It wasn’t a perfect Eden,” Gilda said. “But you could make a living.”

  And there, in the simplest terms, was the small-bore miracle at work in the country then. Few stopped to wonder at the historical anomaly that allowed for it; indeed, in the future many would mistake the era for a national birthright meant to last forever. After the war, the U.S. had emerged as the world’s preeminent power, virtually unchallenged as an industrial colossus. With Britain exhausted, Europe and Japan flattened, and China and South America still in their economic infancies, America accounted for 64 percent of the planet’s steel production.

  Management concessions through the 1950s could be seen as repayment for past sins or an overdue sharing of the wealth, but they were actually the result of a market misread, the idea that any wage and benefit increase would be passed along to industries—particularly automotive and construction—that were dependent on steel. That devastated countries like Japan could ever rebuild enough to seriously challenge American primacy seemed beyond imagining, yet the evidence kept mounting. By 1950, the U.S. was producing 46.6 percent of the world’s steel; a decade later it accounted for 25 percent. Averse to innovation and engulfed in a “malaise,” as former J&L vice president Harold Geneen once described it, that they would never quite shake, by the mid-fifties steel management had grown fat, happy, and slow.

  In retrospect, of course, the trend lines all but begged for agility. Endless union demands meant ever-higher employee payouts. Large-scale investment was needed to replace facilities ravaged by wartime production; the introduction of the far more efficient basic oxygen furnace overseas had rendered America’s classic open hearth and Bessemer converters obsolete. The price of steel, meanwhile, wasn’t keeping up with costs. “The handwriting was on the wall,” Geneen wrote. “Many could not see it at the time, and those who could see into the future seemed powerless to do anything about it.”

  The bosses, later, would bear much of the cultural blame for the resultant crash, if only because steelworkers would bear the most horrible scars. But with their relationship poi
soned by decades of mistrust, violence, and zero-sum posturing, it’s near impossible to imagine either camp having been capable of recalibrating for the long term. Labor-management partnerships in the face of job losses and shrinking market share were decades away; for the moment the two sides were determined to slice whole pieces off the other, get “concessions,” and “win.” And labor was winning a lot.

  Indeed, the pendulum swing had been so laudable, the improvements for the worker—from the winning of what Piroli calls “dignity” to safer conditions and sane hours to the lifting of an entire multitude into middle-class pay and values—so patently “productive” for the culture, that no one could mark the exact moment when it tripped into excess. J&L workers never committed anything so extreme as the kidnapping of Georg Isasky, but late in the ’50s they began—like all of American labor—edging into a mind-set that would, later, have many declaring that they too had gone too far.

  “To the other extreme,” said Paul Radatovich, a commander with the Pennsylvania State Police who grew up, the son of a steelworker, in nearby New Brighton and studied political science at Pitt. “You could argue that the steel industry actually started to die right after the Second World War because we were the only major power not domestically devastated. Our dollar was artificially inflated; labor in Europe was cheap. So we go over there and companies that were really domestic at that time—U.S. Steel, Gulf Oil—became diversified, international; they were investing in Japan and Germany.

  “So if we’re building these automated plants in the early fifties in Japan and Germany, how is J&L—where the furnaces are built in 1901, 1903, 1905—able to compete with an automated plant in Germany or Japan that’s also paying one-third the labor cost because their workers don’t have thirteen weeks vacation, and don’t get time and a half to work overtime? All these things the union fought for, at some point actually became the knife that slit their own throat.”