Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  And when it came to playing Midget League football—at the pivotal, high-school-deciding age of thirteen to fourteen—Dorsett wasn’t even allowed to play in Hopewell due to hazy rules about age and weight limits. He and his best friend, Mike Kimbrough, played instead for the Aliquippa Little Steelers. In any other era, he was there for the taking.

  But in the spring of 1970, just as the Aliquippa schools were becoming bedlam, Dorsett was a ninth-grader walking the calm, safe, football-happy halls of Hopewell Junior High. Even so, his mother, Myrtle, was taking no chances: she kept Tony home a few days when Aliquippa’s rioting hit its peak. If Dorsett had once been a candidate to play for the Quips, that day had passed. In “1970, ’71, ’72, you didn’t want to go to Aliquippa,” Zmijanac said. “It was a terrible place to go to school.”

  Indeed, any Aliquippa football player with talent was looking to get out, too. “I almost attempted to do the same thing,” said Peake, Tony’s teammate on the Little Steelers. “It was a struggle playing for Aliquippa, even though it was my home. The chance to win a ball game every once in a while was zero to none.”

  So it is that many in Aliquippa today chalk Dorsett up as a hidden casualty of the era: the one that got away. Two years later Don Yannessa—all charm and gab and grins—would come back and begin the program’s revival. Dorsett was finishing up his marvelous Hopewell career for coach Butch Ross then and, forty years later, the memory still stings. Yannessa has no doubt what would have happened if he had been in charge.

  “I never would’ve let him play for Hopewell,” he said. “I’d have got his ass. I never lost anybody to Hopewell; I used to get ’em from Hopewell. I used to take their players. When I got the job in Aliquippa I never lost a player to Hopewell again.”

  Juke Suder was pouring drinks the night Aliquippa came undone. It was only a matter of time. The town had been edgy since blacks and whites began battling in the schools, and no subject stirs or reveals parents more than the fate of their kids. When children become the opening front in a war, escalation is near inevitable: now the future—no matter that the mill is booming and employing more than 10,000—seems at risk. So it was that, after years of seeing burning cities and fire-hosed black protesters on TV, after all the small-scale skirmishes and boycotts of their own, the two strains, national and local, finally merged. Aliquippa came to a moment of frightful clarity.

  Just past 9 p.m. on May 21, 1970, Suder was behind the bar at Savin’s in Linmar. Mike Ditka’s dad, Big Mike, was sitting on a stool, as always, when the street outside Savin’s and the nearby Linwood Tavern filled with restive members of a West Aliquippa softball league. Within minutes, they were battling a group of blacks from Plan 11 who, according to the next day’s Beaver County Times, “had invaded the area and started a fight.” Aliquippa’s mayor, James Mansueti, immediately charged the blacks with planning the riot. “How else,” he asked, “could such a large group arrive at Savin’s at the same time?”

  No one in the black community ever explained why so many had gathered then in the predominantly white area, and locals assumed the worst. “They were going to clean out the white people,” said Charlotte Ditka, Big Mike’s wife.

  The Linwood Tavern was owned by West Aliquippa’s Joe Battaglini.* “They were going to burn his bar down and one of the bartenders called down West and said, ‘Hey, guys, there’s a big riot starting up here,’” said Anthony Battalini, Joe’s brother, who served as Aliquippa mayor from 2003 to 2011. “That particular night, Battalini’s Lounge softball team played the Panther Athletic Club, and they went up there and cleaned that place all up. They went up there with ball bats and everything—and from that, the blacks actually were so scared they shot all the streetlights out up in Plan 11 because they were afraid the whites were going to go up there and burn them out.”

  Police arrived and the blacks scattered, but not before a red Pontiac convertible sped through the area while a man inside fired a rifle at the police chief’s car. Sniper fire, some random and some directed at police, was heard overnight and into dawn, but it wasn’t long before the whites went on the offensive and did some “invading” themselves. Soon after, reports came in of bullets striking the low-income apartments at Linmar Terrace and windows being broken in the Plan 11 homes of blacks. Some blacks were evacuated for their own safety.

  A swelling group of Linmar residents—armed with “clubs, chains, steel and iron tools and a machete”—became what the newspaper called “an angry charging mob of chanting whites,” and were stopped from burning down a Linmar Terrace apartment building only when “police formed a human barricade and after taking much jeering and taunting by the group, managed to halt its progress and calm them down to a talking stage.”

  “‘We’re not going to let them [black people] cause trouble and run all over Linmar,” one man shouted to the applause of the angry crowd. “We’ve put up with it long enough.’”

  That night, four white Linmar residents were treated for ­injuries—two of them stab wounds—and seven people were admitted to Aliquippa Hospital. The following day the schools again closed, police arrested fifty people, and a citywide curfew of 7 p.m. was imposed. Cars were stoned. Sniper fire was reported. Blacks and whites were found cruising the streets with a total of 450 rounds of ammunition, clubs, bats, knives, revolvers, and “a home-made ball and chain attached to a billy-club type wooden handle.”

  The subtle and blatant lines of segregation, drawn up by J&L and cemented by decades of custom, were enforced now with bared teeth. Aliquippa—like Watts after thirty-four died in rioting there in 1965, like the 125 U.S. cities that exploded after King’s assassination in 1968—became an armed camp. “The only time you were allowed up in the school [area], where the white people lived, was during school,” said Sherman McBride. “We weren’t allowed, and if you ran into a certain type you were getting jumped on. Vice versa for whites: if they were downtown, they were getting jumped on by black guys. And in the school, from what my brothers say, there wasn’t a day you didn’t have guys carrying switchblades.”

  Neighborhoods, split by the color line, organized vigilante patrols. “Both white and black citizens armed themselves in significant numbers,” said the state report on the unrest. “In certain white communities, so-called ‘walkie-talkie’ groups organized, solicited funds and purchased electronic communications equipment.”

  In Plan 6, “King Carl” Aschman took his grandson Harald to a meeting on the old abandoned tennis courts, built in the elite area’s 1920s heyday. “All these neighbors were getting real radical about patrolling the streets and saying, ‘We should have guards at the two big roads,’” Harald said. “But even being the football coach and well known, he didn’t say much of anything.”

  Vigilante whites in West Aliquippa, meanwhile, set up roadblocks on the bridge later named for Henry Mancini—the only way in and out of the area. Buses carrying workers to work the North Mill were stopped and searched, with the lunches of blacks checked for weaponry; there was a constant fear in West, the place where the original town was founded, of a black invasion. “Because our houses were so close together, we were worried about them throwing cocktail firebombs over and burning the houses out,” Battalini said. “There was an old Jewish synagogue right there at the bridge, and a .50-caliber machine gun on top of that roof, protecting West Aliquippa. And we had a Catholic priest who went out and bought a Jeep and all the walkie-talkies for us to protect that town.”

  Blacks were no less trigger-happy. Larry Stokes, twenty-three years old and Richard Mann’s best friend and teammate on the ’64 champs, was arrested at an Aliquippa gas station with three others—but the concealed-weapons charge hardly did the moment justice. Stokes remembers “hand grenades and shotguns” in the car’s trunk. Police informed the Beaver County Times then that the car held “one 12-gauge shotgun, a .30-30 Winchester rifle, a .32-caliber revolver, one bayonet and two bandoliers of live shells.” Stokes, meanwhi
le, carried in his mind a mash of Black Panther and Nation of Islam rhetoric advocating violence against “blue-eyed devils.”

  “I was preparing myself to kill somebody,” Stokes said. “That’s what they told us to do. But I was so afraid.”

  Stunningly, during that tense summer no one ended up getting killed—not by racial shoot-out, anyway. George Medich, intent on becoming a doctor while he played pro baseball, had just graduated Pitt. He spent his time before the June amateur draft working as an orderly at Aliquippa Hospital, operating on high alert. “They always wanted me hanging around the ER . . . just in case something happened—whatever that means,” Medich said.

  In later years, residents found themselves downplaying the danger and playing up the Keystone Kops feel of those days: “sentries” with rifles dropping, asleep, out of trees. Or the goofy fear then in outlying townships like Hopewell, Moon, and Center. “Everybody was a nervous wreck that they were going to come up into Center and, ‘Oh, what’s going to happen next?’” said developer Mark Betters.

  His brother Joe got so frantic that he fired a bullet through the floor of the family’s home. “When these riots started, the guns were put out—loaded guns on tables in the living room,” Mark said. “There was fear. We had a loaded gun in the living room and we always remember him fooling around or something and he shot a bullet right through the floor into the basement.”

  “Pistol,” said another brother, developer C. J. “Chuck” Betters. “Joey was a fucking nutcase.”

  But the schools remained ground zero. On June 11, a hundred black students reportedly “invaded” Aliquippa High, breaking eighty windows and trashing the desks and chairs in two classrooms; seven windows were broken at the junior high, and seven students were treated for injuries at Aliquippa Hospital. Three unnamed white youths were arrested and charged with aggravated assault. When they weren’t immediately released to their parents—like the several black youths arrested in earlier unrest—hundreds of furious whites descended upon the front of the Franklin Avenue police station and refused to leave.

  Over the next three hours the crowd grew in size and outrage, like a spill of gasoline waiting for a spark. A smaller group of blacks gathered on Sheffield Avenue, the street running parallel to Franklin behind the station. After a gunshot was heard from up the hill, the “black turf” of Superior Avenue, Aliquippa police returned a volley of fire. The panicked white crowd surged into “Police Alley,” the lane running perpendicular, and were beaten back. Sixty helmeted, billy-club-wielding members of the Beaver County Tactical Unit, a riot-police squad of officers from neighboring municipalities, then swept up Franklin Avenue, dispersing the mob with pepper and tear gas. In response to a shower of rocks from the hill, police fired another volley of buckshot into the dark.

  To many, the melee downtown was Aliquippa’s nadir, “the worst time,” said Juke Suder. “The blacks are blocking up one side of the street and the whites were on the other side, and they were hollering back and forth, this and that, and some redneck from the white side yells, ‘Let’s go get ’em!’

  “And they took off up the alley. . . . and both [groups] went up that Plan 7 hill. And the next thing you know tear gas is flying everywhere, man. Somebody was going to get killed: you knew that. It was burning your eyes like crazy.”

  By the end of the night, twenty-eight people had been arrested. One Plan 7 house was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail; no one inside suffered injuries. The following day, some five dozen police personnel ringed the campus of the junior and senior highs; only 29 of some 2,300 students showed and classes were canceled. Many families pulled their kids for the rest of the school year, never to return, and in the ensuing quiet tempers eased. Committees met, and administrators vowed increased dialogue and oversight so that blacks would become more integrated into school activities.

  Still, the damage could hardly be undone. In physical terms, the havoc ravaged Franklin Avenue’s status as a shopping destination; the opening, just three months later, of the hundred-storefront Beaver Valley Mall in Center helped guarantee the eventual shuttering of nearly three hundred downtown storefronts. Meanwhile, for more than fifty years black and white, rich and poor—not to mention Slavic, Lebanese, Italian, and Greek—students had arrived at the junior and senior high schools from segregated elementary institutions. Many became close friends. But now the cultural concept of a “melting pot”—in practice, at ground level—lost its allure.

  “It calmed down,” Steals said. “They eventually got control of the school, but from that point on white parents of means took their kids out of the public schools. Soon, every day there were about four hundred fifty, five hundred kids who were bused to private schools.”

  Because the new exodus folded into the decades-old migration of residents moving out to the spacious enclaves of Center, Hopewell, and beyond, it took time to realize that they weren’t the same. The old was based on hope, and animated by the sense that Aliquippa was still home. The new one was based on fear, animated by the feeling that home was gone for good.

  Yet if this was the time that Aliquippa’s identity, its sense of itself as community, began, like some middle-aged body, to lose muscle mass, the bones remained strong. Fatherless homes, like the one Richard Mann grew up in, hadn’t become common yet. Adults still hadn’t cocooned themselves off from neighbors, so elders still felt a responsibility to discipline, advise, or cajole kids who were not their own. When Mann came home in the summer of 1970 from Arizona State—education degree in hand and heartbroken, his pro football dream destroyed by knee surgery—he didn’t want to be anywhere near the game. He spent three months at his sister’s house, steeped in self-pity, figuring he’d get some cushy work at a Pittsburgh YMCA.

  But then George Stokes, the man Mann had watched every day growing up on Elizabeth Street heading off to work at J&L, took him aside. Maybe it was because his own son, Larry, had been arrested in the rioting of the previous spring. Or that George, an active member of Aliquippa’s black leadership, could sense the slackness setting in, could tell that this wave of white flight would be taking with it, yes, some bald-faced racists, but also—bit by bit—the town’s stabilizing voices. What would take their place? Here was a young black man with a degree. He needed every hand available.

  “You need to go up to the school and help,” George told the young and bitter Richard Mann. “You know football. You ought to go up and coach those kids.”

  Mann had had no intention of teaching math at Aliquippa Junior High, much less coaching. Just being on a football field—smelling the cut grass and that sour stink of used pads and tape and socks, or seeing a ball fly—twisted his gut like a knife blade. He missed the game too much. “I didn’t want to be around it,” Mann said. “I didn’t want to do it.”

  But then he remembered how George Stokes, railroad worker, had bristled at the mill’s daily reminder of all the higher-paying jobs he would never have because of his skin, but who showed up and worked hard anyway, every day, because that’s what a man with a family does. And Mann just couldn’t say no to Mr. Stokes.

  When students returned on Tuesday, September 1, 1970, enrollment was already down two hundred students from the previous spring. Mann was starting his career teaching math at the junior high when he heard some startling news. It was starting again: White students planned to attack blacks. “It was ‘Kill Nigger Day,’” Mann said. “My first day on the job. And they tried to start right in front of my building and I told ’em, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ I’m a young guy, had a big old Afro. If stuff got worse, I don’t know what I’d done. But they moved on.”

  That was progress: The violence fizzled where, three months earlier, it would have flared. At the high school, too, junior Fred Peake noticed that his cousin Wanda had been elevated to varsity cheerleading. “Eventually they ended up getting there,” he said. “In my time, there were a couple blacks who were cheerleaders.” But such sm
all steps barely registered: If the football team was any measure, town morale remained abysmal. Only twenty-nine boys showed up to play Aliquippa High football for new coach Dave Strini in August, and by late October the number was down to nineteen.

  “He goes 2-7-1, and loses all of his white kids,” Yannessa said. “All the white kids quit and there’s nineteen kids playing; they’re black. What a mess that was.”

  Parents, especially, couldn’t shake a nagging dread. Every trend line seemed to be heading south. The just-reported 1970 census results showed that, even as Hopewell’s population had risen to 14,056, Aliquippa’s had dropped 15.5 percent, to 22,277. Drug use in the area was now among the highest in Western Pennsylvania. Even the vicarious pride taken in the town’s famous successes—Ditka in the NFL, Mancini in Hollywood, Jesse Steinfeld in Washington, DC—experienced a chilling turn. On September 25, Ernie Pitts, in 1952 key to Aliquippa’s first football championship and perhaps its greatest all-around athlete ever, a record-setting receiver for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and a four-time Canadian Football League champion, and the father of six, was shot and killed outside his suburban Denver home by his wife.

  “We were real close,” said Willie Frank, Pitts’s Aliquippa teammate. “He was out having a few, came home late, and knocked on the door. She thought it was an intruder and she shot him through the door.”

  Pitts’s death—he was just thirty-five—was another first for Aliquippa. The too-early demise of America’s best and brightest leaders, politicians, and movie stars would be one of the era’s recurring themes. Now, in a year already soured by harsh division, the era’s random cruelty had finally hit home.