Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  An unnamed teacher later described a scene “of utter chaos at the junior high, a disintegration of law and order and no respect for authority.” Windows were broken. “It happened in this hallway,” said Zmijanac, a junior high teacher then, speaking one morning in what is now the Aliquippa High football office. “I remember the girl, Vera Motten, threw a big rock through that window over there. I taught in that hallway down there, and it was horrid. As bad as you can picture.”

  Quickly, the mayhem spread a half-mile down the hill, to the high school. Down on the ground floor there, in Room 29, the sound of rumbles and crashes from the floor above seeped through the ceiling. A white sophomore, Bill Casp, was sitting through homeroom period when a black student named Fred Peake, a rising track star and football player, suddenly said, “We got to get out of here.” Peake led the mixed class of some twenty-five blacks and whites into an empty home economics classroom nearby. They locked the door from the inside, and could hear the rampaging on the floor above. Everyone hidden in the home ec room emerged unharmed.

  “Why’d you do that?” Casp asked later.

  “Because you’re my friend,” Peake replied. “I didn’t want anybody to get hurt.”

  “That’s the way we were,” Peake said. “The class of ’72 was close-knit, did a lot of things together. There were times when you were not going to let stuff happen—white or black, green or yellow.”

  Administrators sent students home early that day. A group of forty high school “youths”—and reportedly some adults—then ransacked a local A&P supermarket, overturning displays and causing thousands of dollars in damage. The arrival of a police car scattered the crowd; when it gave chase up Monaca Road, a brick crashed through the windshield. As the officers tried to step out, they were hit with a hail of rocks from a crowd estimated at two hundred.

  Schools opened as usual the following week, but on Tuesday, May 5, the conflict reignited in the high school cafeteria, where the moment the bell rang to end the second lunch period, two black girls and a white girl began fighting. “It started as a sit-down situation in the cafeteria,” Chuckie Walker said. “A fight started and then everybody jumped up and chairs started throwing.” Within seconds the melee expanded to more than 270 students. Lunch trays went flying. Girls were seen backed against the walls, screaming.

  “Then it went from the lunchroom up into the classrooms, out into the parking lot, up toward the junior high,” Walker said. “Kids were coming out, and I remember one of the little kids coming down holding his head, saying a guy hit him in the head with a stick.”

  Rocks flew. A knife flashed. Police arrived: five white high school students were found to be carrying chemical Mace, hoses, a physician’s scalpel, and a blackjack. Some whites reported seeing blacks with knives, but police found no weapons on black students. When the Beaver County Times asked the cause of the rioting, school board president William Zinkham said it had been building for two decades, and “the kids finally exploded.”

  Pressed for specifics, Zinkham could come up with only one. “Some people want to know why the school can put five black students on a basketball court and nine of eleven on a football team but don’t have a black girl on the cheerleading squad,” he said. In fact, he was wrong: that year’s varsity cheerleading squad did feature one. But her uniqueness made nearly the same point. “It’s harder for a black girl to become a cheerleader,” Zinkham continued, “than it is for her to be named to the National Honor Society.”

  The crisis went deeper, of course, than cheerleaders or a movie. A sense that the town’s white leadership didn’t seriously account for black concerns, didn’t truly listen, had been building for generations. Blacks accounted for 42 percent of Aliquippa’s school population, yet students were now on their third boycott in eight years regarding cheerleader ­representation—with one girl to show for it. When they went home to Plan 11 and its declining housing stock, they heard parents complain about redlining and the lack of mobility at J&L, saw them diverted at every turn from that upward path to the middle class—and saw no reason to think that anything would change. And the nation outside hardly looked better: hundreds of U.S. cities had been buckled by race riots since 1965.

  Classes across the city, in all Aliquippa schools, were canceled for the rest of the week, then again for a day the following week. Sheriff’s deputies were brought in to patrol the halls, and seven junior high students were arrested after thirty whites attacked a group of blacks. That same May morning, a group of fifty black students gathered at the high school, demanding to talk to the superintendent, and then rushed to Room 225, interrupted a class, and injured some of the white students.

  All the closings, reopenings, “cooling-off periods,” and rumors of closings ravaged the school calendar. In all, nearly the entire month—fourteen school days—of instruction was lost. For the rest of the spring, and into the summer of 1970, administrators suspended classes intermittently—but refused to shut the doors for good. Attendance plummeted. “They tried to keep the school going,” said Zmijanac, who was teaching eighth- and ninth-grade English then. “I have a grade-book here somewhere that shows the exact date where the kids stopped coming to school.

  “And out there, outside that door? National Guard stood out there, with guns, for six weeks. And every day the kids who wanted to come to school? There were some. One black girl would come every day and sit in my classroom. Just one girl. I wish I could remember her name. . . . And we used to talk. She’d say, ‘My father says I have to have enough courage to come here. He drops me off and picks me up.’ I used to give her books to read, that kind of thing.”

  But such quiet acts gained little notice. King’s message of passive resistance had lost its cachet among many younger blacks; the militant message of Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton’s Black Panther Party advocated empowerment and armed revolt, loud and extreme. For centuries blacks had endured slavery, lynchings, third-class citizenry, discrimination in housing, jobs, and schools—often quietly, often nobly. But this was a time of violence, at home and abroad, televised nightly into American living rooms. Grievances, large and small, would not pass unanswered. Everybody, it seemed, was dead set now on making a statement—or else.

  “It was tough,” said Carl Legge, a ninth-grader at the junior high in 1970. “I grew up with a lot of black people and they were all my friends all my life, then all of a sudden they turned cold on me. I questioned a guy one time, down the mill, later on in life: I say, ‘Hey, we grew up together and you wouldn’t even talk to me when we went to junior high and high school.’ He says, ‘There was a lot of pressure on us. If we were seen conversing with white, it’d have repercussions.’”

  Battle lines were drawn. Positions were hardening fast.

  “White student threw an apple and struck a black student. Black student demanded white student be identified and expelled,” read one passage of the state report detailing the school clashes. “Fifty-one white students held; when questioned, eight said they would be willing to get killed fighting blacks. The black student Ad Hoc Committee expressed a similar sentiment about white students.”

  Amid the upheaval, a ghost continued to make his rounds. Since he had retired in 1965, weathered, frail Carl Aschman was seen at the school, St. Titus Church, the firehouse, the football field—but rarely heard. It was as if, stripped of his vocation, he had lost that part of himself he’d indulged only as a coach; the man didn’t have a harsh word for anyone anymore. He kept busy substituting as a teacher in the area, showing up in Aliquippa one week, Ambridge the next. Don Yannessa would give his old coach a ride sometimes, pick him up at home and take him over the river.

  “He was a bigger-than-life figure, the way I thought about him: constantly on edge, screaming, ranting, raving,” said Yannessa, who was teaching and coaching at Ambridge then. “It wasn’t till I got older and came back from college that I got to know him really good. I would pick him up in Plan
6 and drive him to work. I got to know him in a different perspective. He was gentle and . . . a nice guy.”

  Doctor’s orders had something to do with it. Word circulated that Aschman had been told to stay away from Aliquippa games because the emotion would tax his heart. But he also knew that his presence would put pressure on the school’s succession of struggling coaches, that fans would always ask what he thought of the new guy. He would show occasionally at Aliquippa’s training camp, but cut short any talk about football. If a sportswriter got him to say, about some opponent, “They wouldn’t have run that against us. . . .” it was considered a coup.

  The other factor, of course, is that Aliquippa football had sunk to a heartbreaking low. The Quips won just six games in the five seasons after Aschman finished coaching and then, during two-a-day workouts at Edinboro State College in August of 1969, junior Aliquippa tackle Ron Vincich collapsed and died. “It was one of those days when it was just too hot; he overheated, hyperventilated, and we couldn’t cool him down,” Peake said. “We couldn’t rescue him. He was a really big kid. That hurt us real bad.”

  The combination of racial problems and coaching ineptitude, meanwhile, shot the roster full of holes. Hopewell, Beaver Falls, Ambridge: Everybody beat up on Aliquippa during the fall of 1969, and the team went 0-10. Worse, almost no one seemed to care.

  So come Friday nights, Aschman wouldn’t go to Aliquippa Stadium. He’d ride instead to Ambridge, cheer his old archrival, watch his protégé, Frank Marocco, make a go of it as head coach. The football was better and, besides, he needed the distraction. One night in 1968, ­Aschman’s thirty-one-year-old daughter, Susan, a home economics teacher and cheerleading advisor at the junior high, went to sleep and didn’t wake up. No one ever knew why, but the family curse, that “paper heart,” was always the prime suspect. Aschman’s wife, Sarah, was devastated. It hit Carl even worse.

  “It was very hard on my father, especially,” said Carl Aschman Jr. “He just never really got over her dying.”

  Small consolation came in the knowledge that Susan passed away in bed, and never had to have her probable heart condition tested in the school turmoil of two years later. Indeed, when Aschman himself died of a heart attack at sixty-eight, on Thanksgiving Day 1971, it was easy to view him as a figure from a more fortunate, unquestioning era. The King had gotten out just in time, it seemed, untouched by the furies now roiling town and country.

  But his family didn’t go unscathed. In May 1970, Aschman’s grandson, Harald, a seventh-grader at the junior high, was attacked by black students in a stairwell. Why? “He was the first one down the steps,” said his father, Carl Jr.

  “I happened to be white,” Harald said. “I was by myself going to my locker and there was about eight or nine blacks down there. I only knew one of them; they weren’t in any of my classes. I didn’t provoke ’em or do anything. They threw me down the steps and started pounding on me.”

  And that was that. Carl Jr. pulled his son out the Aliquippa school system and sent him to St. Titus—where the waiting list had suddenly grown very long—for eighth grade, and then on to Quigley Catholic High in Baden. Harald played some football there, across the river. Soon the only thing in Aliquippa carrying on the Aschman name was the aging stadium up on the hill, and the boys inside who’d been left behind.

  Aschman wasn’t the only one. Ghosts were beginning to haunt heavy then. That’s what happens when life gets harder: reminders of better days, of the way this town or family used to look and feel, mock even the most hard-boiled soul. And Tony Dorsett was hardly that. A mama’s boy from the start, forever scared of his father’s hard hand or his older brothers’ jeers, young Tony assumed an eyes-wide cast so pronounced that his dad nicknamed him “Hawk.” It stuck. But the best football player the place ever produced always felt more prey than predator, wary of what he might see next.

  That quality made Dorsett. The skinny kid learned to juke, dodge, and corner so well—made near every rush, in fact, look like a hare fleeing a pack of wolves—that he went on to win the Heisman Trophy, a collegiate national championship, a Super Bowl title, and a place in pro football’s Hall of Fame. To become great in a brutal sport can be a transformative act; for long stretches Dorsett could even convince himself that his career was about records or supremacy or fame, and not about a conquest of fear.

  But ask him about his first years, and Dorsett will show you the truth. When he’d dress out for Pee Wee games, Tony would beg the coach not to put him in, then drag his pants in the dirt on the way home so the family wouldn’t suspect. Once his brother Keith saw eleven-year-old Tony shrinking along the sideline, and screamed at him to get his hesitating ass out for kickoff. The ball, of course, came straight to him. “I took off like a rabbit,” Dorsett said. “I was running up and down that field, went zigzagging because I was scared to death. I went about seventy-five yards for a touchdown the first time I touched the ball.”

  Then there was his maiden game against Aliquippa. He was in ninth grade, playing for Hopewell Junior High—high school ran tenth thru twelfth—and all week brothers Keith, Ernie, and Tyrone had been riding him at meals, at bedtime, between shots at the pool hall: You’d better win. . . . “Make sure you’re at the game,” fifteen-year-old Anthony—as he was known then—would answer, but he was hardly sure of himself. The older Dorsetts had starred for Hopewell, and everyone always said they were bigger and faster than Anthony was. And, besides, he was a wreck. Just a month before, he had watched their oldest brother die.

  Melvin Dorsett never played for Hopewell. He dropped out of school, liked to drink wine, worked the mill some, had a heart condition: “My brother was a rough dude, man,” Dorsett said. In August of 1969 Melvin was twenty-seven years old, and out of time. “That one morning, my brother—I think it was Keith—came running in, ‘Mom, something’s wrong with Melvin!’ So they called the ambulance. I thought I saw him die in the house. They said he died at the hospital, but I saw him.”

  That it all happened so quickly—youth to death, promise to waste—was a shock; but then, the family always did move fast. Their daddy, Wes Dorsett, known to his family as “The Big Apple,” had fine wheels himself and used to race beside his boys with a switch, goading and lashing at their legs. Ernie was known as “Speed Disease.” Late in his career, a thirty-four-year-old Tony reportedly ran a 4.38 40-yard dash, and it’s a measure of his younger self that many NFL peers believed it. But Melvin was the family legend. He’d run lightpole-to-lightpole races up on The Hill, everybody laying down bets. Challengers came in from all over Beaver County.

  “He used to take their money,” said Quips assistant Sherman McBride. “He was the fastest Dorsett. Tony didn’t have nothing on Melvin.”

  “Talk about speed?” Tony said. “My brothers all had speed, but he was the one I’d watch at the park Fourth of July, everybody playing softball, and it was amazing the stuff he’d do. He ran from left field to right field and caught a fly ball—the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen in my damn life. It was almost like he could play the outfield by himself.”

  After Melvin died in the family house, Dorsett found it impossible to sleep there. Moving in with his older sister helped, but he kept the light on all night. And now summer had turned to fall and it was time to play the Quips, their roster loaded with buddies like Fred Peake. In truth, Dorsett had far more friends on that team than on his own, so bragging rights were a worry, and his brothers were pushing him, so that was a worry—and he didn’t know how he’d do, so that was a worry, too. But then the game started. Dorsett unleashed a breathtaking run, then looked up to the corner high in the stands where his family always sat. He saw his brothers. And then he saw dead Melvin.

  “People always say they see visions,” Tony said. “And what I saw was an image of my brother. I know people might think I’m crazy, but I made a great play, and I looked up to see my family and I saw him. I saw a vision, clear as could be. .
. . He had a smile on his face.”

  Hopewell Junior High beat Aliquippa that day in 1969, and Hopewell Senior High beat their counterparts that season, too. No one was surprised. The tables had completely turned since Hopewell’s shock win in 1964; the Vikings were the power, Aliquippa the pawn. That, more than anything, accounts for the persistence of a counterfactual query: What if Tony Dorsett had played for Aliquippa?

  Hopewell folks dismiss the entertainment of this notion, of course, and it’s true that no previous Dorsetts ever went to Aliquippa High. But talent-poaching is a constant of high school sports, and with Dorsett, it would’ve been easy. The boundary between Aliquippa and Hopewell runs through the middle—right through one home’s kitchen, in fact—of the Mount Vernon housing project in Plan 11 where the Dorsetts lived, and hopping it for one school or the other is a time-honored tradition. McBride, for example, grew up in the ’70s with his mother on the Aliquippa side and a dad wanting him to go to Hopewell; in eighth grade, Sherm moved in with his father in a house over the line. Sherman lasted just a few days at the school: a neighbor told on him.

  He wasn’t alone. Hopewell in Dorsett’s day was known as “Whitey­land” to Aliquippa blacks, and its high school enrolled only a token handful. In the 1960s, Mount Vernon had been one of the first places to feel the effect of school busing as a way to ease desegregation; each day, black kids trooping out of their homes for the two-mile walk to Aliquippa High would look up to see a bus taking half their neighbors off to Hopewell. Tony grew up living the life of an Aliquippa black in Plan 11: his father worked the open hearth at J&L. His older brothers were part of a local gang called the Bugaloos, drinking beer, hustling. Tony ran some with the Baby-Baby Bugaloos, when they tried to stir trouble in Aliquippa.