Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  King Carl took his grandson, Harald, in hand. He brought the seven-year-old up to training camp in 1964, made him unofficial team mascot, and put senior Bob Liggett in charge of the boy. The public pools in town were segregated, but at Raccoon Creek State Park the football players swam together; no one seemed to mind. Still, it was a sight: a huge black kid, 6-foot-5, 250 pounds, splashing in the pool with a little white boy, hoisting him up on his shoulders. The only sour moment occurred during a scrimmage, when Harald was flopped on the sidelines and a play came his way, players tumbling out of bounds. Bodies flew; someone’s shoe smacked the kid in the eye. It began to swell.

  Aschman snatched up the crying boy, hurried him down to his car, and, dust kicking up behind, rushed off to find the nearest doctor. And for that short flurry, the years fell away; the old man almost moved like the player he once was. Everything happened so quickly, in fact, that it took a while before anyone realized that this was the first time in memory, stretching back to his arrival in town twenty-three years before, that King Carl had left camp for any reason at all.

  When Robert Pipkin graduated in the spring of 1963, off to junior college and then a stellar basketball career at Idaho, his “walkout” had seemingly changed nothing. The tryouts for the following year’s cheerleading squad—seven varsity and six jayvee—produced the same grinning white faces, the same white-sounding names: Hodovanich, Sherba, Como, Ceccarelli, Glucki, Kelliher. Black girls did try out, including one talented gymnast, Carolyn Williams. But as so often seemed the case involving election to the school’s honor societies and political offices, the bar for blacks seemed higher. Or the white women in charge just kept moving it.

  “We girls who kept trying out for cheerleading, we were talking about it: ‘Why? I made the finals, and then I got a D on my report card? My grades were good!’ and stuff like that,” said Carolyn Browder, née Williams. “It was conspiracy.”

  No one in charge ever admitted as much, but the issue didn’t go away. In early 1964, backed by the First Class Citizens Council—a black organization dedicated to equality in housing issues and the hiring of blacks downtown—Aliquippa High students, including some whites, began a month-long boycott of the cafeteria to protest the lack of black majorettes, cheerleaders, and food-service workers in the cafeteria. They brought in their own lunches, dubbing themselves “The Brown-Bag Brigade.”

  Compared with the fire-hose-and-attack-dog footage of Bull Connor’s Birmingham, Alabama, seen on nationwide television the previous year, such slights at a Northern high school seemed decidedly minor. But for young Aliquippa blacks, the school’s cheerleading squad was the richest symbol: glittery proof of the cancerous views lurking below. “Negroes,” it seemed, were good enough to tend J&L fires and run a football—but God forbid the borough feature any darkness on its public face, or allow blacks any voice in public life.

  “It was not until 1966 that the black population began to gain sufficient political strength to make any inroads into the political structures” of Aliquippa, the state’s Human Relations Commission stated in a 1971 report. “And at present blacks are only marginally represented in the community system of power relations such as the borough council, boards and commissions.”

  Blacks at the Aliquippa Works, meanwhile, remained stuck in unskilled or semiskilled jobs. Composing 8 percent of the workforce there in 1970, blacks had minuscule representation in white-collar and craft jobs: Four of the 982 officials and managers, four of the 154 technicians, eight of the 812 office employees, and eight of the 2,310 skilled workers were black. Departments like carpentry and bricklaying remained off-limits, and those seeking promotion into management or clerical work, or a spot in apprenticeship programs, met with discouragement and hostility from white workers.

  Life outside the tunnel offered little different. Aliquippa’s local hiring practices, the report stated, “reflect a rejection of blacks in substantial proportions in the community businesses such as automobile dealers, retail trades, food, wholesale trades and real estate. Black women are primarily working as maids, waitresses, laundresses and in the hospitals. Professional blacks have limited positions in teaching, social work and nursing.”

  That lack of public and private clout was galling, but the lack of cheerleaders struck an even more basic nerve. It seemed just another way of saying that black skin, black people, would always be considered substandard, ugly even, when compared with white. “We have been referred to and treated like objects much too long, and the time has come that we are not going to take it anymore,” said an unidentified black resident quoted in the commission’s report. “For us to be constantly referred to ‘them,’ ‘those,’ ‘they’—as objects rather than human beings: this is one of the reasons for the problems that we are having in Aliquippa. . . . To us blacks we are black, and to the whites the matter is that you don’t consider us human beings.”

  So while the Brown-Bag Brigade started with far smaller slights, down to even the cafeteria’s serving of fish on Fridays, its ’64 boycott became a pivotal wedge. Whites—and older blacks—had no choice but to confront a lifetime of norms.

  “It caused the entire community to start looking at other things that didn’t make sense,” said Barron Harvey, the future business school dean, a junior that year. “The white students had buses. We didn’t. We had to walk the mile and a half, two miles through the snow down one hill, up another hill. As a function of that, buses started—even though they were coming real, real early.”

  Harvey’s father, Henry, a bookkeeper in Ambridge, was president of one of Aliquippa’s most venerable black institutions, the Quippian Club. He attended one of his son’s protest meetings, and Barron was sure that his dad would echo his contemporaries. “All the rest of the older generation’s saying, ‘You’re making fools of yourselves, you’re making things worse than what they’re going to be, you shouldn’t be doing that. . . .’” Barron said.

  Instead, when the meeting concluded, Henry said, “You’re right. You can count on our support. I’m going back to my group and see what we can help with—and we’re going to look at other things as well.” Barron didn’t see his dad again until the next night, at dinner. They didn’t say a word about the meeting, but Barron couldn’t help but stare a bit. He had never been more proud of the man.

  Slowly, then, change started to come. All of it—the Brown-Bag Brigade, the glaring lack of black cheerleaders, the coverage in the press—began to be an embarrassment. “We had one meeting at the 500 Club, with the NAACP and the First Class Citizens and some of the school board and the superintendent and the principal and they asked [the cheerleading sponsor] why don’t she ever pick black cheerleaders?” said Carolyn Browder. “And she said, ‘Because they didn’t have any rhythm.’ Everybody in there cracked up laughing and she walked out and resigned as the cheerleading sponsor. And I had loved her dearly. Martha Mooney: she was my neighbor.”

  Browder was a senior in the spring of 1964. Late in April, without mentioning race or acknowledging a change in policy, the new cheerleading squads were announced for the following school year. No blacks made varsity, but they were in the pipeline at last: Judy Toliver, Rachelle Wingate, and Josephine Dudley were named to the junior varsity squad, and rising ninth-grader Cassandra Blue made the junior high team. Browder remembers seeing the names posted on a bulletin board. She was proud of the breakthrough, but it hurt.

  “Too late for me,” she said.

  Browder stayed in Aliquippa. She didn’t have much choice. “I was raped at eighteen,” she said. “Graduation party, and I drank for the first time and he took advantage of the situation. And I felt like, Here goes another bad thing in my life . . . but this child didn’t ask to be born. I wasn’t going to give her up for adoption. My mom and dad told me, ‘We’ll raise her; you go on to California and go to college.’ I said, ‘No, I’m going to get a job and take care of her.’ She ended up with cerebral palsy.”

 
; Browder married in 1969, and raised three daughters and a son. Her second, Carletta Browder, went to Aliquippa High and made the varsity cheerleading team. In her senior year, 1987–88, she was named captain.

  Was Aschman too hard? Perhaps. But for the boys he coached, in the town he worked, the choice life laid out was as stark as could be. Richard Mann felt the chill on his neck, every day: father never around, mother unable to work, food and clothes supplied by what used to be called “public assistance.” Raised by his grandparents in Plan 11, and later on Fourth Avenue, Mann watched his grandfather ready himself, year in and year out, for his shift on the by-product coke ovens with all the other black men, watched him come home filthy and spent, marked the pink burn scars on his legs and hands from a molten spill that had killed a man. At some point, too, the old man had lost a finger down at the mill. Little finger . . . wee-wee on it, son! But Grandpa didn’t complain.

  During a training-camp scrimmage in Donora before the ’64 season, Mann felt his right shoulder crunch and pop—and knew almost instantly that he was done. Dislocation, muscle tear, the whole horrid deal: He could barely walk, the pain was so bad, and even then he was bent double and shuffling. A doctor in the hospital there wanted to operate immediately, but his grandfather drove up and got Richie discharged and hustled him home before they could do even more damage. This was his senior year. He needed an Aliquippa doctor, one who understood the stakes involved.

  “If I didn’t play the rest of the year, I wouldn’t get a scholarship,” Mann said. “And I just knew if I didn’t get a scholarship, that was it for me. Nobody was going to give me money to go to school.”

  Enter Dr. Mickey Zernich, one of those crucial background ­figures—lubricants, really—that keep towns and high school powers running. A member of Aliquippa’s ’49 state-title basketball team and prime steward of its recruiting pipeline to Pitt, the Quips’ jocular team doctor was an orthopedic surgeon with an unorthodox bent. He once took a box of M&M’s candies as payment for surgery. He lived all his adult life next door to his brothers—and fellow doctors—Steve and Wally, and their sister, Nadine, in a compound in Center Township. Zernich had the run of Aliquippa Hospital. And Hippocratic Oath be damned, he knew that Mann—a quick and sticky-handed, 6-foot-3 talent—was right: He needed an Aliquippa doctor.

  So Zernich made sure word got around to the hospital staff: Loosen the rules a bit here. Mann spent the season’s opening week enduring hours of therapy, but some buddies also snuck in a pair of sneakers; the nurses looked the other way when Mann slipped outside to run in a field behind the building. At the end of the week, Dr. Mickey walked in with a ball of tape in his hand.

  “How’s it feel?” he said.

  “All right,” Mann said.

  Zernich tossed the ball of tape high, and Mann reached up and grabbed it. Zernich asked if it hurt. Mann said no. He was lying.

  Mann asked if he’d damage the shoulder any more by playing the rest of the season.

  “No,” Zernich said, lying a bit too. “You can take the operation after. You can probably learn to live with the pain.”

  Mann came back in the second game of the year, a 16-0 win over Farrell. Zernich had rigged a thin chain, with one end attached to a wrap on Mann’s rib cage and the other under his right arm, for Mann to wear beneath his uniform so that he couldn’t fully extend the arm. A week later, against Sharon, he went up in the back of the end zone, covered by two defenders, caught a pass from quarterback John Tazel, and came crashing down hard on his side—but held on to the ball. Aliquippa won, 7-0. The next week, Mann, moved now from flanker to tight end, fell on a fumble in the end zone with two teammates for the first touchdown in a victory over Ellwood City. The next week against New Castle, he recovered another.

  Midway through the season, Mann felt good enough to dispose of the rig under his jersey. “Eventually I just learned to deal with the pain,” he said, “and eventually I forgot about it.”

  It became one of the strangest seasons in Aliquippa history. The team was stacked with talent, but couldn’t have been more unpredictable. Defense—and a line keyed by massive tackles Bob Liggett and Joe ­Catroppa—made the Quips unstoppable in Class AA league play, but the offense had no rhythm. On October 23 Aliquippa stuffed ­Butler—with future NFL quarterback Terry Hanratty leading its 40-point-per-game attack—41-21 before a home crowd of 9,000; Mann, at right cornerback, intercepted Hanratty twice and ground up 102 yards on runbacks.

  Two weeks later, Aliquippa played Hopewell High for the first time. The two schools sat just 3.2 miles apart, if you took the windy route up Sohn Road through Plan 6, but it may as well have been 100. The new school, opened in 1940, was dismissed throughout the county as Aliquippa’s smaller, softer stepbrother, populated mostly by the children of white couples who’d fled town in search of breathing room. Hopewell’s mail still had an Aliquippa zip code, even though residents lived outside the borough limits, and the Class A high school didn’t even have a football field; the Vikings borrowed Aliquippa’s stadium for their “home” games on Saturday nights.

  But on November 7, in the opener of a series played for a new trinket called the Steel Bowl Trophy, the impossible happened. It was a damp Saturday evening—technically a Hopewell home game—but 8,000 fans still poured into Aliquippa Stadium expecting the true home team, and its legendary coach, to romp. “We had nothing to lose,” said George Medich, Hopewell’s junior quarterback that night. “Everybody expected us to get our brains beat in. But we had a bunch of tough kids on that team. I think we surprised ’em.”

  Indeed, Hopewell’s offense did nothing different than it had all year, yet Aliquippa somehow allowed halfback Chuck Blaney—whose dad, Larry, insultingly enough, taught biology at Aliquippa High—to canter all over them for 167 yards. In the second quarter fullback Clyde Fuller bulled in from the 1-yard line to provide the game’s only score. “I thought we held him out of there, man,” Mann said fifty years later, “but they called it a touchdown.”

  Medich, who would go on to earn a football scholarship to Pitt, attempted only three passes all night, muffed an extra-point kick, and hurt his ankle; his enduring memory is of the cleat marks the speedy Blaney left on his back when he ran over him from behind. None of it mattered. “Doc” Medich, as he’d later be known, would go on to win 19 games for the New York Yankees in 1974, while studying to be an orthopedic surgeon. He notched 124 major league wins overall, twice went into the stands during games to save heart attack victims—and ended up going into practice for a time with Mickey Zernich. Eventually, an addiction to painkillers would cost him his medical license.

  But before all that, good and bad, Medich had one pure moment by which to measure every big event in his life: the night he, a Hopewell kid, helped take down the toughest guy around. “It was a big deal,” Medich said. “Everybody was really surprised that we won. Everybody. Even the guys on our team were surprised that we won. Because we thought that they were tougher than that, really.”

  Who didn’t? “In the annals of Beaver County football—and indeed the WPIAL—there has been no greater upset,” the Beaver County Times announced the following Monday. It had been twenty-five years, Aschman declared, since he’d been so stunned by a loss. “Aliquippa fans, who had watched their team humble six league opponents as the top contender for the WPIAL Class AA crown, sat silent, waiting for the next miracle,” the Times went on. “Their expressions would not have changed if the earth had opened up and swallowed Quip Stadium. Some, no doubt, would have welcomed it.”

  In other words, the loss couldn’t have been more humiliating for school and town—and yet, oddly, it didn’t matter at all. Aliquippa’s two losses had both been nonconference affairs, uncounted in the WPIAL standings, and the following week the team zigged again, crossing the river to crush Ambridge 20-0. Mann intercepted a pass and ran it 23 yards for the final Quip touchdown. Fans tore down the goalposts. Though three other AA t
eams had posted undefeated seasons, the playoff-less WPIAL still relied on a long-controversial “Gardner Points” tiebreaker system to rate schedule difficulty and dominance. Aliquippa, with a league-high 146 points, was tapped to play Monongahela for the championship in Pitt Stadium.

  Critics howled. But in what ended up being the supreme distillation of the Aschman style—smothering defense, punishing ground game, an utter disdain for flash—the Quips suffocated Mon City in the blustery cold, 7-0. The Mon offense racked up a measly 20 yards total in the game, completing just three passes to their own receivers and throwing three interceptions. One of them belonged to the “redoubtable” Mann, as the Times called him, the capstone of his high school career. No mention was made of the fact that he’d caught it wincing.

  For the impartial spectator among the 9,109 present, everything about the frigid November day was ugly. On the sideline, the sixty-one-year-old Aschman—bags under his eyes, skin crosshatched with wrinkles—wore a hood to protect himself from the cutting wind. There was but one heart-stopping moment: near the end of the second half, on third and 14 on Monongahela’s 22-yard line, Tazel hit Mann on a slant; the Mon defenders converged, Mann fumbled, and the ball squirted toward the Mon end zone. After a mad scramble Aliquippa halfback Ed Hauser fell on it at the 1-yard line. Tazel then ran the ball in for the only score. The second half was all trench warfare: young men trading small chunks of territory, accomplishing little.

  The minute the clock ticked to 0:00, though, all tension and cold seemed to vanish. The Aliquippa players screamed and hoisted coaches on their shoulders; the massive Catroppa picked up Frank Marocco as if lifting a child. Aliquippa fans rushed the field. A goalpost came down. When Aschman was asked what it meant to win the town’s third title, his fourth overall, he gave a perfectly clichéd answer about each one being “equally satisfying.” But once he’d tunneled through the crowd of reporters and parents to the players gathered in the tumultuous locker room, his stoicism dissolved; Aschman saw his players, arms locked, posing for photographers, and rushed in, embracing every one he could. The room hushed. For a moment Aschman’s head was hidden, face crushed and shaking against a shoulder pad.