Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  Abuses in a plant the size of the Aliquippa Works had gone on since it opened; stories are still told of men, in the ’30s and ’40s, who came to work drunk and somehow remained employed. But what began as union rules to protect workers from employer abuse, from arbitrary firing because the boss wanted to hire his brother-in-law or a willing wife’s husband, over the next few decades would ossify into rules for the sake of rules, a labor force interested less in producing competitive, quality steel than in preserving hard-won gains. “The biggest concern for unions in those days,” Piroli said of the 1970s, “was protecting people who didn’t want to work.”

  But the first glimmers at the Aliquippa Works could be seen long before. John Evasovich came back one summer in the late ’50s to work the wire mill, “and I wanted to do more work and wasn’t allowed to do it because that was not in my job description,” he said. “I was a laborer in the wire mill and when they would make this one kind of wire they would have scraps, and my entire job was to sweep up the scraps and dispose of them. When that was done, I volunteered to do other things and was not permitted. That amazed me.”

  It was inevitable that the union hall would become a power center: control a man’s job, and you all but control the man. Union connections could make all the difference; Yannessa had uncles in the local, so a summer job at the mill during high school and when he came home from playing football at New Mexico State was always a lock. Even those benefiting, like carpenter Melvin Kosanovich, who worked more than two decades as a general griever for Local 1211, found it disturbing. “The union had very much power, a lot of power at times, too much power, because most of the things we done we had a lot of power,” he recalled. “We had a lot of hiring.”

  J&L was producing more steel annually than at any other time in its history, and in 1959 set new records for sales and income; its second-quarter revenues, $316,384,000, put the steelmaker on pace for a billion-dollar year. But the way Kosanovich tells it, union officials were now given nearly the same due as Mauk’s policemen in the ’20s. “Whatever we wanted they gave us, because they were making money,” he said of J&L management. “Things got slacked and they couldn’t afford to pay those things, but, yes, we had too much power. At times I think the company had too much power, but I think union had more power.”

  “You know what?” said Yannessa, whose father worked as a crane operator at J&L for forty years and whose many uncles all worked there. “Everybody says, ‘You got that steel-mill mentality. People that work in the mill are tough.’ Yeah, they were tough guys, a lot of ’em, but a lot of ’em were lazy, laid-back, didn’t do a good job on the job. They ended up union employees and a lot of it led to the demise of the steel industry in America.”

  At 11:25 p.m., July 14, 1959, a large parade of members of Local 1211—with 12,000 members the largest local in the state, and third biggest in the nation—marched behind a cluster of picket signs and American flags down Franklin Avenue toward the Wye, the tunnel, the mill. All had been drilled weeks before in their strike duties, and then again at 7:30 this night; near J&L the marchers efficiently broke ranks, spreading wide to cover the five entrances of the Aliquippa Works. Some 2,000 men and women from the midnight shift stopped on their way out to take in the scene, but by 12:45 a.m. only two gate pickets were left. “This Plant Is On Strike,” read the sign. “Aliquippa Local 1211.”

  It would be the longest American steel strike yet: 116 days of banked furnaces, 500,000 idle steelworkers, and 250,000 more in secondary industries. Industry losses totaled $248 million a week; in Beaver County alone workers lost $45 million in wages. Some, like Joe Letteri, had a working wife and barely felt the pain. “I didn’t have a problem with it,” he said. “I just laid around and didn’t do nothing. Go on a picket line once in a while, and that was it.” But the walkout savaged most workers’ savings. Aliquippa’s local was flush enough to give out weekly turkeys and sponsor a thumb-nosing, community-wide party on Labor Day; a food bank supplied struggling families with flour, rice, dry milk, and powdered eggs.

  Concerned with the long strike’s threat to both the economy and defense, in early October President Eisenhower unleashed Taft-Hartley by asking for a board of inquiry; informed that there was no chance of a settlement, he ordered the steelworkers back to work. Arguing that Taft-Hartley was unconstitutional, the union went to court and lost at every level, capped by a November 7 decision by the Supreme Court that upheld a district court injunction forcing workers to return to their jobs for an eighty-day “cooling-off period.” The 8-1 ruling effectively put the strikers on the wrong side of the law and became a landmark of antiunionism; it had been more than two decades since labor had felt so bullied. Management wasn’t happy, either: steelmakers were outraged that Ike had taken so long to act.

  Workers filtered back to J&L slowly, unsure whether they’d be back on strike when the eighty days expired. But the prospect of fresh paychecks with Christmas coming was a relief, and besides, Aschman had fielded another distractingly superb team. Aliquippa won its first ten games, beat a still-maturing Joe Namath of Beaver Falls and Ambridge handily, and came within two points of winning another WPIAL championship when Charleroi edged the Quips in the final, 13-12. It felt good to get back to the routine.

  And when a deal got done on January 9, 1960, it seemed the union had walked away with another win. One of the union men back from signing the pact with J&L was on the front page of the Beaver Valley Times, grinning. “Best we’ve ever gotten,” he said, and if it wasn’t quite that, the contract was still pretty good: a raise of 39 cents an hour spread over the next thirty months, automatic cost-of-living increases for the first time, increased pension and health benefits.

  But that was just money; it would take time for the less obvious losses to reveal themselves. As the Wagner Act had been cemented by the ’37 strike, so Taft-Hartley was now actualized by Eisenhower’s action and the Supreme Court’s decision. Worse, with their mills quieted for four months, America’s steel firms had turned to Japanese and Korean sources to fill any shortfall in their orders. With no drop-off in ­quality—and U.S. steelworkers averaging $3.10 an hour and the Japanese about 50 cents—the benefits of offshore manufacturing had been made tantalizingly plain. In 1959, for the first time since the turn of the century, U.S. steel imports exceeded exports. No one knew it yet. But the underbelly had been exposed.

  7

  Crossfire

  Mike Zmijanac graduated from Aliquippa High in 1960. Five decades later, when asked to explain the bubbling cocktail of factors—ambition, genetics, pain, work ethic, and a constant pressure to excel amid a landscape of failure—that makes Aliquippa unique, his first stab is an offhanded: “If you aren’t from here, you can’t understand.” But if we’re being precise, the man who ended up being the greatest football coach in Aliquippa history—surpassing Aschman, his freshman history teacher; Yannessa, his smoother, far more popular mentor; and Marocco, Aschman’s decorated but bitter heir—has less claim on the place than most. Zmijanac never played football, wasn’t born in the state—much less the town—and moved from Aliquippa to Hopewell in 1969. Today he lives even farther away, in Mt. Lebanon, where he can plant tomatoes and plot his next trip to the racetrack in peace.

  Distance, in fact, is central to the Zmijanac pose. With sheepdog bangs hooding his eyes, a sardonic grin flashing like a shield, his default mode falls in the same dismissive-to-flip range assumed by many bruised romantics—i.e., English teachers—who spend their adult lives corralling all manner of teenage bullshit. He shrugs often—his generation’s version of “whatever”—and whether the subject is another game won or player lost, it’s easy to wonder how much he truly cares. Yet in time served alone, few have devoted more to Aliquippa kids.

  The convert may exceed those born to the faith, but it takes a while for Zmijanac to make his zeal plain. “The single greatest thing that ever happened to me,” he said finally, “was growing up in this town.” />
  He was sixteen when he graduated—a skinny, quick-on-the-draw wiseass, most comfortable with adults, left too often to his own devices. That had always been the way. Zmijanac’s father, Stan, had been a master sergeant with the Marines in World War II, fought on Okinawa and Iwo Jima; his mother, Bette Swan, was the daughter of a Welshman who came to America at fourteen to dig West Virginia coal and drifted up to Aliquippa for millwork. Yes, Aliquippa is in Mike’s blood: His parents met at Aliquippa High and graduated in the class of ’41. He was born on the Marine base at Parris Island, South Carolina. When Stan deployed, Bette took the baby home to wait out the war on the family farm, bustling as it was with her parents and four ex-footballing brothers. By the time she brought five-year-old Mike and his little sister back for good in ’49, moving onto Wade St. in Plan 12, the marriage was over. Bette began long hours waitressing, downtown at Della’s Lounge.

  That was August. Within a few days, Bette sent Mike out the door. “School’s down there,” she said, gesturing in the direction of Laughlin Elementary. “Go tell them we moved in.” Maybe that prompted Zmijanac’s first shrug. He wasn’t six yet. First day, Mike walked himself to school.

  Summers, he would head back to his grandfather’s farm, fifty acres up near where the interstate and Center Township would be one day. The land was the clan’s second job. All the Swan men worked shifts, full- or part-time, at J&L—seamless tube, hot mill—and divvied up the endless chores at home. “He bought that farm as insurance against the Depression and the mill going down, and they raised everything on their own: chickens, a couple of cows,” Mike said. “Sold potatoes. People would come with washtubs and go down to the bottomland, down by the creek, and they could get a washtub full of potatoes for fifty cents, fill up a colander full of eggs for a dime.

  “They taught me how to work. For breakfast my grandmother called me: ‘Butch, go down to the henhouse, get a dozen eggs, get a pail, milk the cow, go out in the field, get me a box of tomatoes. . . .’ Pick some berries, this and that. She made everything from scratch; the only thing bought in the store was salt and pepper. Breakfast would be three, four pork chops. They raised pigs, bacon: that was the big meal of the day. When you went out to work you got a cold-cut sandwich delivered to the fields at lunchtime. Then a big dinner.”

  Sports opened up the town for him. His uncle Jimmy took nine-year-old Mike to the ’52 WPIAL championship in Pittsburgh, where Willie Frank and that epic 28-yard touchdown run became Mike’s template for what an Aliquippa running back should be. He has been at every Aliquippa title game since. But basketball was his love, not least because it was all the rage among Slavs; between Press Maravich’s drive and Mike Ditka’s fire, a half-Serb like Zmijanac had plenty of role models. But he didn’t play for Aliquippa High; he wasn’t good enough. So this became personal. Zmijanac made playground hoops, with its unstated codes and obscure triumphs, his proving ground. It was still basketball, but his way—held, like everything else, at a remove.

  So on warm days there were endless pickup games down at Morrell Park: dozens lined up on the fence rails waiting for “Next,” the cocky lift you got from taking on all comers—including the ringers back from Duke or LSU or Iowa and expecting to rule—and holding the court for hours. But Mike would find as much joy dribbling in the snow, a solitary figure endlessly shooting, knuckles purpled and the soggy, backspun ball splitting his fingertips like a razor. Get him in a gym, and he had his routine: a thousand shots, tote up numbers after each hundred; hit fewer than nine hundred and you start all over again. Therapy, he calls it now. “I don’t miss playing organized, because those are better memories. That was great shit,” Zmijanac said. “It kept me from being lonely. It solved a myriad of teenage problems. I would go play.”

  He made himself a name, too. “Mike was one of the best sandlot shooters I ever saw,” said Robert Pipkin, an Aliquippa all-state selection who went on to play for the University of Idaho. “I don’t know about a whole-court game, but, oh, he had a shot that was unbelievable. I’ll give him his props for that.”

  Mostly, though, Zmijanac served time as the shyer, less accomplished sidekick to George Suder—son of Pecky, nephew of Juke—a handsome cock of the walk who earned himself, in 1961, a full-ride scholarship to play basketball at the University of Maryland. Together George and Mike were Batman and Robin, with Suder always at the center of the action, in a bar or on the court, reeling in women like honey draws flies. Zmijanac would be off to the side, of course, grinning. “Look at you,” he’d say. “Ain’t you fucking somethin’?”

  Once, during a 3-on-3 tournament at Laughlin Elementary, Zmijanac got tangled up with Pipkin, and the two started yapping. “I remember punching him right in the mouth,” Pipkin said. “He was bitching about something and I just hit him.” Zmijanac didn’t fall, and he didn’t hit back. “No,” laughed Pipkin, “I would’ve beat the crap out of him.

  “That guy just rubbed me the wrong way. It was something about his arrogance. He was a crybaby. If you touched him, he cried. If he shot? ‘You fouled me!’ There was something about his spirit that I just didn’t like.”

  Still, in the two of them—Mike whip-smart and roiling, George charming and self-destructive—you could see the Aliquippa elements at work, could see the charisma and brains and drive and self-destruction feeding off each other. George would die too soon, after all. And it’s Mike who revels still in the civic self-image summed up to him when he was just a boy by Sam Milanovich, coach of the ’49 hoop team: We don’t stab you in the back here. We tell you to turn the fuck around so we can bury it in your chest.

  “My current wife, been together twenty-some years, has said to me—and she grew up in the suburbs: ‘There’s something different about you guys from Aliquippa,’” Zmijanac said. “‘All the ones I know are pretty bright, pretty charming, but you have these rough edges that I can’t explain.’ And there is an edginess to us. We have this ‘veneer of education.’ But we’ll ‘motherfuck’ you in a minute.”

  Never mind that such hair-trigger machismo has caused more than its share of pain, and that Zmijanac knows this. He still finds it admirable. The town’s decline has been so publicly detailed, its criminals and knaves are so much a part of an increasingly small social fabric, that any hypocrisy or spin gets called out fast. Why bother trying to cover up the feckless dad, the mother in jail? Why not be straight up? His weekly game plans make the attitude flesh: No trickery, no flash, just an unrelenting ground attack. Opponents know what we run, he says. We’re Aliquippa. Try and stop us.

  His critics, of course, use any loss as an excuse to carp about Zmijanac’s supposed “lack of imagination,” his reliance on the town’s endless supply of fresh legs, its pure hunger, to overcome a musty playbook and mostly outclassed opponents. And if his pride makes for blind spots, they aren’t limited to football. Zmijanac is described, by blacks and whites alike, as a fair, challenging, color-blind presence in classrooms and locker rooms, but his loathing of self-promotion or the slightest hint of a hidden agenda—his full-body embrace, that is, of the Aliquippa stance—left him blind to the cancer corroding the town even in its best days. Racial tension was percolating as Zmijanac grew and graduated. That it had to surface just two years later, in 1962, when Robert Pipkin made it a football issue for the first time, offends him still.

  “That piece of shit!” Zmijanac yelled when he heard the name. “Bobby Pipkin. He’s such a phony piece of shit. This was horrible, and fuck Bobby Pipkin, he was such a coward; he quit the football team. You know what? It’s fuckin’ . . . He is Al Sharpton, and I call him that to his face. He’s fuckin’ Al Sharpton: he’s made his life out of being black. . . .

  “There was always tension. But see, this is one of the reasons I have no respect: Bobby Pipkin was one of those guys who egged it on for no reason. This town was completely unbiased. It was artificial bullshit. The football team was three-quarters black, the basketball team was all black. But ther
e weren’t any black cheerleaders? Oh, fuck you. I’m blaming guys like that for exacerbating the whole situation. It was unnecessary. It was all artificial.”

  All artificial? No. But Zmijanac isn’t alone in believing it so. Many whites who grew up in Aliquippa during the 1940s and ’50s like to recall it as a haven where races and ethnicities bonded by labor wars endured the mill’s hardships together. Older blacks, too, remember whites and blacks living side by side—and peaceably—in the two areas, Plan 11 and Logstown, given to color-blind housing. They speak fondly of the years before the African-American family unit, especially, went to smash. But when she hears white people voicing the notion of Franklin Avenue, then, as some kind of idealized Main Street, Carolyn Browder, class of ’64, has to laugh. “Yeah,” she said. “For them.”

  Browder grew up, too, in the wake of World War II—when racism on the job was blatant and there seemed little to do but take it. “It was terrible,” George Stokes, hired in 1949, once said of his early years working on the A&S Railroad at the Aliquippa Works. First day, a foreman told him that he’d never advance past the job of track repairman, and “I had to accept that because I wanted the job,” Stokes said. “I accepted it, but I knew I had a high school education. I wanted something else, too: I could do my math, took the test like everybody else. I passed all the tests they gave us down there. I said I want more, and I got more—but not from that guy. Not from him.” Because train crews were white then. Blacks worked the tracks.

  “And why did that occur?” said Stokes, who stayed at J&L for thirty-three years. “It’s proven that our society is very racist. The whole mill was like that: they had certain bathrooms that blacks wasn’t allowed in. They had big parties that blacks wasn’t allowed. That was 1949. . . . The tin mill had no blacks, the carpenter shop, none of the trade units had any blacks. Electricians, none of the crafts. We got the labor jobs. Like he told me: You’ll be a laborer when you leave.”