Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  On the first working day in January 1968, the Beaver County Redevelopment Authority opened an office in town to help the 180 families soon to be displaced by a new housing project, built with federal funds, on twenty-seven acres in Plan 7. Superior Avenue would be widened and upgraded; The Hollow would be razed. Now a new, faceless, white-collar force, flush with cash, would direct where people would live: a $2.6 million low-income complex, with 120 garden apartment units and 82 row-type town houses, to be called “Valley Terrace.” Urban renewal had come to Aliquippa.

  Within a month, home appraisals began and the number of affected families rose to. Hearings, relocation, construction would all take years, but the neat racial boxes that J&L had constructed fifty years earlier slowly began to splinter. Melvin Steals, an aspiring songwriter just graduated from Cheyney State, came back to Aliquippa that summer to teach English in the junior high. He married in December of ’68 and began shopping for a home, and “we couldn’t buy a house anywhere,” he said. “Except on Plan 11 or Plan 11 extension.”

  “At that time if you were black you couldn’t buy a house where you wanted to buy: You were ‘redlined,’” Salt Smith said. “The banks would only let you buy a house in, say, Plan 11—not Plan 12!”

  As an open practice, redlining dated back to the early 1930s, when the Federal Housing Administration’s lending arm ordered maps to determine the level of security for loans in 239 U.S. cities. The richest communities were designated “Type A” and outlined in blue. The poorest, high-risk and usually black, were labeled “Type D” and outlined in red. Private banks assumed the standards, which included instructions to avoid areas with “inharmonious racial groups,” if only to guarantee FHA underwriting on their loans. Until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed it, redlining blocked the upward mobility of blacks cold. It cut them off from vital capital, ensnared them in declining neighborhoods no matter their worthiness or wealth.

  But by the time the Fair Housing Act took effect, Aliquippa’s blacks were already on the move. The purchasing of “Holla” properties by federal and state authorities had had an unintended effect. As a low-income project, Valley Terrace could be projected as a place where blacks would gravitate. But the lump-sum payments—in effect, the “loans” redlining had long kept out of reach—empowered those living paycheck-to-paycheck to buy anywhere in town, including Plan 12. It also empowered those waiting for an excuse to join the exodus out of town.

  Money talked, and in the exchange one color-tinged term, “redlining,” was replaced by another: “white flight.” “Because now all the blacks got this money,” said Salt Smith. “When the blacks got this money—say, twenty-five thousand dollars—the whites who were still living up there, that gave them a chance to fly. And now that the blacks had cash money, they didn’t have to worry about the banks approving.”

  But the churn in housing was a slow, document-heavy process, experienced in quiet offices one family at a time. Aliquippa’s junior and senior highs, on the other hand, were populated by hormone-charged teenagers and marked by what Melvin Steals would soon condemn in the Beaver County Times as “a corrosive and inequitable learning environment,” caused by “the existence of a double-standard—one set of rules for white students and a harsher one for blacks—that is responsible for the past, present and future unrest among the black students who are daily made painfully aware of the fact that they are being discriminated against.”

  School hallways had become far more volatile since Robert Pipkin’s walkout over cheerleaders seven years before. By the spring of ’69, as Steals’ first year of teaching neared its end, racially charged scuffles had become the norm. Blacks kids had tagged one white as the leader of a racist cadre. A white girl approached the twenty-three-year-old Steals, said she liked a black boy, and asked his advice. “It was the 1960s, and I said, ‘Go for it,’” Steals recounted. “She came into the cafeteria one day holding this black boy’s hand and the kids got all upset about it. I was changing the guard.”

  He also arranged for a talented young black deejay, “Brother Matt” Ledbetter, to pay a visit to the school. Something about the record-spinner’s presence stirred resentment and empowerment, and a small frenzy of fighting broke out across the springtime grass. “Brother Matt’s appearance became a racial incident,” Steals said. “A riot broke out in the courtyard in the junior high and the police had to come. Outside in the courtyard . . . it was like a swarm of bees.”

  When Henry Mancini whipped up his breezy jazz tune “Mr. Lucky” in 1959—“I know I’m on a lifetime lucky streak/A lucky rainbow lights the sky”—there was never any indication that he was thinking of Juke Suder. But if anyone in his hometown deserved the title “Mr. Lucky,” it was Georgie’s uncle, Pecky’s brother, the guy who pitched Aliquippa to its first WPIAL title the afternoon before D-Day.

  Juke survived the war that teammates Ninnie Vuich and Toats ­DiNardo and 131 other Aliquippans didn’t. He enlisted in the Navy just a few months after that championship game at Forbes Field, but while best friend Gino Piroli found himself in the terrifying soup outside Okinawa, Suder spent just twelve days of a two-year hitch on the water. “I wasn’t involved in anything,” he said. “The war ended before I went overseas. I was in on that big celebration in San Francisco.” His two brothers did see action, especially Ted. They survived, too.

  After five years of minor league ball, Juke returned to Aliquippa for good in 1950 and married an Italian girl, Josephine Spaziani; they would stay together sixty-one years. “What a wonderful woman,” Suder said. “I thank God every night for every year that I spent with her.”

  He always had a job. When he was playing pro ball, he’d work winters on J&L’s line and wire or electrical gangs, or in the shipping yard or seamless tube mill. When he quit baseball for good, he hooked on at the welded tube plant, and stayed thirty-four years. Josephine landed a job managing Linmar Homes, up where the Ditkas lived. About halfway through, Juke left the union and became a salaryman—lower management, lining up truck and rail shipments. That shot to hell his chance at the thirteen weeks off, but he couldn’t say no. J&L had offered up the ultimate prize: “steady daylight”—no 4-to-midnight or midnight-to-8 a.m. shifts. Everybody wanted steady daylight. You could see your kids. Wives were happier. A worker could have a normal life.

  Mr. Lucky was also Mr. Sunshine: it’s no wonder that Honus Wagner laughed along when Juke Suder cussed him out. Always upbeat, almost sweet, he is one of the few residents lacking the Aliquippa tendency to see more darkness than light. He and Josephine raised two boys and unlike, say, Joe Casp, who made damn certain his son Bill worked the worst mill jobs when he came home from Princeton—so he’d hate it—Suder figured J&L could be counted on to reveal its nature without his help.

  “I wanted them to work in the mill,” he said. “It paid half their education. My first son was in the labor gang. and that was some rotten jobs, man. He was in the soaking pits, underneath the furnaces digging out the old bricks, wearing wooden shoes. He had enough bad jobs that he knew he didn’t want to settle there.” Suder makes it all sound easy, somehow. And it worked out. Both his boys went to college: one’s the vice president of an insurance company, the other’s a dentist. “They’re both doing very, very well,” he said.

  That’s why it’s not surprising, really, to hear Suder say that he didn’t notice any racial tension growing up in Aliquippa. He never needed a lock on his door in Plan 7, and in ’44 he played with a black center on the basketball team without any sense of strain. If blacks were discriminated against in the mill, he said, it must’ve been before his time. Then again, Suder is also one of the few who found the mill enjoyable. When it finally closed, he said, “I felt like I lost a friend or something. A lot of people, they hated the place. But I didn’t mind it, really.”

  Such a disposition is perfect for a bartender. So it’s no shock, either, that as the ’60s careened to a close, Juke found a spot pouring dr
inks at Savin’s—the shot-and-a-beer joint up in Linmar on Penn Avenue, straight down from Woodlawn Cemetery. Ditka’s dad, Big Mike, would show up most nights, after his shift with the A&S Railroad. “You sat in a bar with Mike, everybody really liked him, but ain’t nobody was going to say anything to irritate him,” Gino Piroli said. “Mike was tough.”

  It was a mill crowd, mostly, and white; guys like Piroli and Joe Letteri would stop in on their way out to Hopewell and Center. There was plenty to laugh or complain or wonder about: boys with long hair, LBJ and Richard Nixon, those black runners holding up their fists at the Mexico City Olympics, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Vietnam. People argued sometimes, but nothing too serious. Juke Suder wiped down the bar, topped off glasses. Business was good, and the nights moved along.

  10

  Halls of Anger

  On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon, who’d won the presidency seventeen months earlier in part because of a promise to end the war in Vietnam, announced his decision to expand the conflict by ordering a bombing of enemy bases in neighboring Cambodia. He did so in a nationwide speech marked by a vision so bleak, so overarchingly apocalyptic, that it reads today like a cultural cry for help. And in a way, it was.

  “My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” Nixon said. “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without. . . .”

  Such imagery, of course, was startling enough, but the self-analysis was even more unsettling—and resonated long after the war’s details had been forgotten. “If,” Nixon went on, “when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world. . . .”

  This was, of course, one man’s alarmist justification for the stark reversal of a pledge, just ten days before, to withdraw 150,000 troops from Vietnam; and Nixon’s core persona was marbled with darkness and paranoia. But he was also a brilliant politician with a career long sustained by shrewd readings of the national mood. One June 1970 poll had 59 percent of Americans supporting the Cambodia decision—end-of-days rhetoric and all—even with the virulent negative reaction it sparked in Congress and on campuses. Nixon wasn’t alone.

  It’s impossible to pinpoint when, exactly, the white American center began doubting its core faith in political and social institutions, in the idea of the United States as an ever-renewable engine of progress; the transformative era known as “the Sixties,” that eleven-year period between Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and Nixon’s resignation in 1974, spawned so many wrenching events that each one has been cited as the moment when cynicism took hold as a mainstream attitude.

  Yet the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X and King, the prevaricating Vietnam maneuvers of Lyndon Johnson, the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick and Senator Ted Kennedy’s subsequent silence, were but touchstones amid a broader landscape of urban unrest, a rising divorce rate, the “communication gap” between young and old—and outnumbered occasional mood-lifters like the 1969 landing of the first man on the moon. By the spring of ’70 the old social compact—family ties, automatic respect for elders, the idea of “my country right or wrong”—lay in tatters. Few dared invoke the usual visions of America as a “city upon a hill” or the “last, best hope of earth.” To many, both nation and notion felt unmoored.

  Four days after Nixon’s speech, National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University during a campus demonstration. That was White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman’s touchstone; thus began, he later wrote, the administration’s slide into Watergate, presidential resignation, national disgrace. Four days later, in response to—and protest of—the Cambodian invasion, more than 4 million students walked out in the largest college strike in U.S. history. Some 100,000 protesters descended on Washington, D.C. Students and police clashed at twenty-six universities. Armed insurrection seemed possible; the military was called in to protect the White House.

  White House counsel Chuck Colson recalled seeing troops from the 82nd Airborne sprawled in the basement of the Executive Office Building then and thinking, “This can’t be the United States of America. . . . This is a nation at war with itself.” On May 8, construction workers in New York City attacked student protesters. Just before dawn on May 9, Nixon—accompanied by his butler, Manolo—appeared unannounced among protesters camped at the Lincoln Memorial, looking, indeed, like a giant helplessly out of his element. Students gathered around to hear him ramble about the war, the plight of blacks, the wiping out of American Indians. Some were from Syracuse University; the president remarked that they had a good football team.

  “Look at the situation,” Democratic congressman Thomas “Tip” O’Neill said then. “No nation can destroy us militarily, but what can destroy us from within is happening now.”

  While wrenching, the centering of Vietnam protests on college campuses at least made for a bit of clarity. The media could point to a defining hub—complete with built-in, dramatic visuals—for an often amorphous “movement.” Antiwar strategists could expect receptive audiences of teachers and students. And opponents could dismiss protesters as elitists who didn’t speak for what establishment types called the “silent majority”: the mass of Americans who liked the war and their nation just as it was.

  But racial inequality was a far different issue, one lacking instantly recognizable targets like a president or soon-to-be-drafted eighteen-year-olds. America’s “race problem” offered little in the way of battlefield “wins” and “losses,” and presented nothing resembling an “exit strategy.” There was no “silent majority” at a distance from the tumult. The war was here. They were the tumult. And their children were the first to feel the pain.

  By the time bullets began flying at Kent State, Aliquippa, sitting just eighty-five miles southeast, was already a fortnight into its own violent crisis. It began with a growing sense of inequity in the schools; discipline for misbehavior and small-scale racial spats was increasingly falling hardest on blacks. Of the 174 Aliquippa junior and senior high students suspended during the 1969–70 school year, 162 were black; the five students expelled permanently were all black. Long-simmering tempers between the races began to snap.

  “I remember you getting around a group of ’em, the whites, and they would say anything to you,” said Chuckie Walker, a junior at Aliquippa High that year. “Teachers always played favoritism with ’em, in my time—always. Literally, they’d talk down to you.”

  On April 21, 1970, English teacher Melvin Steals took his junior high classes on a field trip into Pittsburgh. First stop was the Highland Park Zoo, and second was the Gateway Theater to see a new movie called Halls of Anger—an unflinching account of the travails of five dozen white suburban students bused into an inner-city Los Angeles high school populated by 3,000 blacks. It was a logical step: in his two years teaching, Steals had been a vocal critic of Aliquippa race ­relations—and “anathema,” as he puts it, to many of his white colleagues and bosses. “We used to have meetings in Jones School and I’d dress like H. Rap Brown and we’d really exhort the crowd,” Steals said. “There was a lot of tension.

  “I would come into the men-teachers’ lounge and they would get up en masse and walk out. And if I sat down in the crowded lunchroom at the table where the teachers sat with my tray, the others would get their trays and get up and walk away.”

  The film, starring soon-to-be-stars Jeff Bridges, Edward Asner, and Rob Reiner, depicts a high school with the reverse makeup of Aliquippa’s, but the same explosive divide: fights, repeated mouthings of “nigger” and “honky,”
all-black and all-white lunch tables, a word-of-mouth assigning of “white-only” or “black-only” designations to water fountains. At Aliquippa High, meanwhile, another student boycott of the cafeteria over the lack of black cheerleaders was in full swing, complete with a new Brown-Bag Brigade.

  In a letter to the Beaver County Times two weeks later, Steals denied that his trip to the theater had anything to do with the subsequent unrest. In fact, he wrote, the school principal and his fellow teachers—“impressed by the good results” of the “properly motivated” group he had first taken to Halls of Anger, “and perhaps fearful of the growing unrest within their classes”—the next week led a field trip of five hundred Aliquippa junior high kids to watch the same film at the State Theater in downtown Aliquippa.

  “Obviously,” Steals wrote, “the students attending this showing were not properly motivated.”

  In the days following that second field trip to Halls of Anger, black students reportedly designated water fountains at the junior high school “white-” and “black-only,” and refused to sit in assigned seats unless they were next to a “soul brother.”

  “We went to the show, and it was like a white movie, how they disrespecting blacks, calling them ‘niggers’ and whatever,” said Sharon Casterlow, a junior high student then who would go on to marry fellow student Chuckie Walker and raise Dwan Walker, Aliquippa’s first black mayor. “So when we went to school the next day, you were mad as hell.

  “Somebody white looked at you and said something? You were pissed about that movie; it was in your mind. You going to disrespect me? So you automatically jumped off.”

  Soon word spread: Blacks intended to make Friday, May 1, a “Halls of Anger” day in the junior and senior high schools by starting a riot. Some white kids told their parents and tried to beg out of going to school. Other whites met at the Eat’n Park restaurant the night before to make a plan to stow baseball bats under the steps outside Room 29 in the high school. By the time Friday’s first bell rang, nerves had been rubbed so raw that the fear became self-fulfilling. “The white parents began to take their kids out of the school,” said Steals, “and finally there was nothing left but black kids—who rioted.”