by S. L. Price
Taken together, such hits couldn’t help but have an effect. Don Yannessa had spent four years teaching and coaching at Ambridge, and during free periods he’d listen to the clipped voices on the police scanners—like a fan taking in radio play-by-play—describing the gunshots and unrest across the river. But he still wasn’t prepared for what he found when he returned to his old high school to take over as head football coach in the summer of 1972.
“It was heartbreaking,” he said. “When I came back to Aliquippa I didn’t recognize it. It was totally different. I had never seen a community change so dramatically in a negative sense as I did in those four years I was gone. It was all racism, and it was white flight—all those bad things. It was ugly.”
* Battaglini spells his surname differently than the rest of the family.
11
The Crack
Yet the town still possessed a certain beauty. Even as newspapers and TV stations now focused on the easiest story—public, emotional violence—to show and tell, even as Aliquippa in the 1970s became labeled a small-scale racial battleground, the old order and its undergirding rules did not vanish. Franklin Avenue still filled after each shift change. Mothers still demanded that homework be done. The ambition that drove families across oceans and up from the dying plantation South still burned.
In the summer of 1972, Mervin Steals was working the blast furnace at J&L. He didn’t want to be there. But unlike his twin brother, Melvin, Mervin didn’t stay long enough at Cheyney State to earn a degree, didn’t have credentials to teach at the junior high. So he fell into the vocational safety net woven by the nation’s manufacturing base, dipped into jobs at the Fesco plastic works in McKees Rocks and at American Bridge in Ambridge, then made a stab at selling insurance before finally heading through the tunnel for a six-year stint in the mill that killed his father.
That’s how the family saw it. The twins were five years old when Thomas Steals died of cancer at forty-nine, and his three decades at J&L, especially those years spent steeped in the galvanizing fumes of the welded tube department, always figured in family lore as the reason. When Mervin first punched in, twenty years later, a supervisor took him aside to say that Tom Steals had been a wonderful man. Mervin worked seamless tube, then in the stockhouse, finally as a lorryman feeding the furnace. He thought about training to become an industrial engineer and passed an in-house test. But some other worker was chosen for the program. He wonders, still, if that wasn’t because of the man’s lighter skin.
Then again, everyone knew Mervin Steals wasn’t looking for a lifetime at J&L. During breaks he’d go outside and stare at the river, munching a sandwich and trying to organize the music in his head. Eddie Holman, of “Hey There Lonely Girl” fame, had taught him much about songwriting at Cheyney State, but it was their one postgrad summer spent in Philadelphia—Tammi Terrell’s friendship, the months spent working the low rungs of the city’s soul circuit with master producers like Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell—that gave him and Melvin enough fuel to think that they, too, could write a monster hit.
Nothing shook that belief, not even when things started to crack in Aliquippa and his brother stood at the center of the racial strife and the family home on Green Street provided little refuge. In the spring of 1970, word got around that Melvin was involved in the shipment to town of a cache of guns. White friends passed along word of death threats; a group of black radicals declared that they were coming, armed, to protect him. Neither showed. But the twins spent those hot months convinced that law enforcement had placed a tap on their mom’s phone.
Still, on off days, Mervin would noodle for sixteen hours at the secondhand piano on the first floor, sometimes alone; sometimes Melvin came home from teaching and they’d go a few hours more. Mervin’s boss was a man’s man named Al Harvan, a bluff white guy from West Aliquippa, and Mervin loved him. Harvan treated him fair, with affection even, and it didn’t hurt that he had grown up friends with Henry Mancini. And Mervin was less political than Melvin; as a student he didn’t grasp what the radicals at Cheyney were after. “A lot of my friends used to fly around the country creating all these problems—black militants,” Mervin said. “I took one to the side and I said, ‘Why’re you doing this?’”
To Mervin, dwelling on skin color was a near-pointless exercise. Part of that’s temperament: “You’ve got to learn to laugh,” he likes to say. But the twins were also under contract then with Atlantic Records, and in his midweek trips to studios in Philly or Chicago Mervin learned that sharks come in all shades. He wrote a song called “Soul Power,” for Archie Bell & the Drells, that was retitled “Green Power”—and never, he thought, was a change more fitting. Money was like music: it didn’t matter what race you were so long as you could bring it.
So he absorbed the Holland-Dozier-Holland Motown songbook, Burt Bacharach’s arrangements, Carole King’s Tapestry album. Mancini tunes were all over movies and TV; the Aliquippa High band broke out “Mr. Lucky” at football games. Local lore had “Moon River” named for the crescent-shaped bend in the Ohio seen from West Aliquippa: During breaks at J&L, Mervin would stand staring at the filthy Ohio, hear its haunting strains in his head. And one summer day in 1972, it all came pouring back out.
He had the hook first—“Could it be I’m falling in love”—and Melvin sat down and, inspired by the courtship of his wife, Adrena, filled in the rest of the words. The song took about fifteen minutes to complete. “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love” went on to be recorded in December by the Spinners, and by the spring of ’73 was the top-selling rhythm and blues record—and No. 4 song overall—in America. It has since racked up more than 4 million plays, appeared on the soundtrack of three motion pictures, and been covered by nearly a dozen recording artists. But its triumph goes beyond numbers.
The house on Green Street, after all, sat smack between the whites up in Linmar and the blacks in Plan 11, in a town poisoned by distrust and, often, raw hatred, at a time more suited to produce a plea like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Yet there and then, a schoolteacher and a steelworker managed to conjure a lighthearted classic, a four-minute, thirteen-second rebuke to the world in which it was made.
I don’t need all those things, that used to bring me joy
You made me such a happy boy
And honey, you’ll always be the only one for me
Meeting you was my destiny-ee . . .
Melvin has been married to Adrena ever since. And for his brother, the song laid a sheen upon the mill, the era, and his hometown that will never fade.
“My mother always told me how she set me up to go to college,” Mervin said. “Melvin, he went to school and was a teacher, and my reward since I didn’t graduate was J&L. But you know what? I liked it down there. J&L was the backbone of America.”
Even as he became known as a football prodigy, Tony Dorsett never lost his wariness. At Hopewell High he had a short temper, was quick to fight, even stood at the center of what he calls “a small riot” his sophomore year and got suspended from team sports for “a short time.” But challenging his father was never the rite of passage it was for his brothers. At home Tony always had his ears perked, his internal radar alert to the subtlest shifts in the family air. Now you see him, now you don’t: Tony the running back and Tony the miscreant were one and the same. “I could always see it coming down and I could always somehow disappear,” he said. The whippings Wes Dorsett laid on his brothers were not for him. By the time his dad came looking for him, Tony was already gone.
Dorsett played his first Hopewell season as a 130-pound defensive back, more than enough time for coach Butch Ross to realize he needed his speed on offense. Dorsett moved to running back as a junior, scored forty-two touchdowns the next two seasons, and became the hottest recruit in college ball. His senior year, the Quips’ only consolation was “holding” Tony to 103 yards rushing in a 26-12 loss. “I put a defense on
him, a 44-stack monster, and had a good athlete mirror Dorsett,” Yannessa said. “We blitzed right and left every snap. He carried the ball thirty-one times, the highest amount of carries he ever had, because they were so stupid, their coaching staff. If they’d have thrown the ball they could’ve beat us by fifty. But they just ran Dorsett, ran Dorsett—and we were there.”
By then Dorsett had learned to enjoy the daily transition from black Mount Vernon to tranquil Hopewell and back again. Ross, the son of an Aliquippa steelworker himself, had a rep for relating to black players and, besides, Tony was no militant. He’d date white girls, if discreetly: come the end of the night, the girls would crouch on the floor of the car when Dorsett rode them back into Whiteyland, and then he and Mikey Kimbrough would haul ass out of there before any neighbors could see.
The world is full of treasure unearthed by unseemly traits like selfishness and greed. Cowardice, too. His mother, Myrtle, once said that Tony was different from all the other Dorsetts—“scared easier and cried easier”—and it may have saved his life. Acclaim and achievement—not to mention a furious training regimen at Pitt—armored up his confidence, but the fear never fully dissolved. From then on, Dorsett was running from failure, shame, even death, and lucky to have come late in the family line. Surrounded by cautionary tales, he was the only one sensitive enough to be able to read them.
The mill? Wes Dorsett told all his boys: “Come in this place, you don’t know if you’re coming out. And if you do you might be missing an arm or eye or leg. Do something for yourself.” But his brothers, at one time or another, all ended up working at J&L. Only Tony listened. He never forgot the time, at sixteen, when he went to drop off keys at the mill and couldn’t recognize his dad for the filth on his face. When summertime came and his buddies started trolling for jobs there, Tony refused. Football helped; Mickey Zernich paid him to come out to the family compound and mow grass and tend the pool. But it wouldn’t have mattered.
“I wanted that money. They made good money down there,” Dorsett said. “But I said, I’m never, never going to work there. Because of what my dad said: There’s better things for me in life.”
Dorsett was no saint. While a freshman at Pitt in ’73, he had his first child out of wedlock—on the same day that he rushed for 103 yards in his first college game—and was hardly apologetic. But something kept him tethered to college when he got homesick and wanted to quit, beyond his mom’s urgings and the soothing presence of assistant coach Jackie Sherrill. After starring for Hopewell in the mid-1960s, Dorsett’s older brother, Tyrone, had gone off to junior college for one year before quitting—and his life spiraled down from there. His decline felt different than Melvin’s, his waste of speed more wrenching than Ernie’s, if only because Tony saw it all firsthand. Tyrone, he still says, was “The Original ‘TD,’” his childhood hero.
“He was the brother that I always wanted to be like,” Tony said. “Ernie and Melvin, I didn’t get to know; I was so much a whippersnapper, a young cat. But I got to see Tyrone play. He was called ‘the Sophomore Sensation,’ because sophomores weren’t playing a whole lot.
“Man, he was spectacular. He was a nice-looking guy, had some of the prettiest girlfriends that I’ve ever seen. The way I learned how to drive, he was back up on The Hill, playing cards—bid whist and spades and all that. I had these girls we were dating and had to take them back; he grabbed the keys and threw ’em to me. I was like, Yeah! I jumped in that car, and I hadn’t driven a day in my life. I took off driving. . . .”
He took off for good. At Pitt Dorsett couldn’t have run harder, becoming the first college running back to amass 6,000 career yards, but his reach for the brass ring gave off a scent of desperation. Folks back home had smirked when he allowed a Pitt media official to change his name from Anthony to “Tony,” but found it truly insulting when, returning from his Heisman ceremony in 1976, he altered the pronunciation of his name from DOR-sitt to Dor-SETT. Down at the mill, word got around that Wes wasn’t pleased.
Indeed, such tinkering for the sake of—what? celebrity?—smacked of a man who didn’t know himself, much less his roots; or, if you paid closer attention, of a man terrified that those roots would wrap around his feet and never let go. Dorsett went on to star for the Dallas Cowboys, but always seemed slightly at odds with success. He publicly complained about the Cowboys’ legendary coach, Tom Landry, and how tough it was to be a black star in Dallas, and was never fully embraced by “America’s Team” and its fans. He squandered money, liked to party in an era when partying often meant marijuana and cocaine, and if Dorsett insisted that he never did recreational drugs it’s not like he was tucked in by 9 p.m.
Yet Tony never, like many of his contemporaries, allowed himself to go fully off the rails. He finished his twelve-year pro career with 12,739 rushing yards, remains one of the greatest running backs in NFL history—and he did it all for one reason. That didn’t become clear until his Heisman night, December 1976, when Manhattan’s Downtown Athletic Club gave him college football’s highest honor. Because suddenly there was his daddy’s face, all clean now, the way Tony always wanted to see it.
“My older brothers, seemed like they were closer to him because they’d got out of school and they used to drink with my dad,” Dorsett said. “I wasn’t doing that. Everything I did, that was for my dad to be proud of me. I’ll never forget: when I won that Heisman Trophy, the smile that was on his face? Man: He looked like the proudest man in the world. I felt so good about it, that whole experience, him having to be there, being able to go to New York. Oh, man.”
Yannessa was right: Aliquippa was different. By the time he came back home in the spring of 1972, the racial divide wasn’t a matter of muttered slurs or phantom red lines drawn by faceless bankers. Outsiders now reduced Aliquippa to the broadest of images, and the town made it easy: When the meager crowds showed up for home football games on Saturday afternoon, whites sat on the home side and blacks sat across the field, in the seats reserved for visitors. The head coach gave his weekly chalk talks to two separate booster clubs, one night to the whites at the Ukrainian Club and the next to the blacks at the Quippian Club. When it came time for the annual team banquet, the Quippian would hold its at the end of November for black families and the Ukrainian would hold its a few weeks later, in December, for whites.
And the players were no different. When the thirty-one-year-old Yannessa walked into the Aliquippa High gym for the introductory meeting with his team, some five dozen boys were waiting. The whites sat in the stands to his left and the blacks to his right. He started pointing at faces. He asked each one his name, made him stand and move to the other side. Then Yannessa delivered the same pitch the previous four coaches tried: You have to learn to trust each other. We can win here. We can get nighttime football back. We can do magnificent things.
“They’d heard this bullshit before,” Yannessa said.
The blacks eyed him, nodding, but he knew they didn’t trust him: Aschman’s boy, old-line Aliquippa white guy. And when, in the ensuing weeks, he made every effort to win over the most gifted black player, Larry “Bulldog” Jones, a natural leader who never complained and had a way of seeing through phoniness, the white players weren’t shy with the main question: Is he going to be close to the niggers?
“I had to put a stop to that shit,” Yannessa said. “That’s how crazy it was, every day. It was a powder keg all the time, just waiting for somebody to light the fuse.”
He almost didn’t make it. During the team’s training camp at Edinboro State, Yannessa thought he had Bulldog Jones in his pocket. The kid was key in every sense—a linebacker and fullback, member of the French Club, great student. But on August 24, 1972, during a scrimmage, the seventeen-year-old took a hit to the head short of the goal line, suffered a blood clot, collapsed in the locker room, and fell into a coma. The team trainer packed him in ice and sent him to a local doctor. He died a day later. “Football was his
heart,” said Jones’s father, Johnnie Price, at the time.
Players wept openly. “The grief knew no color barrier,” said the Beaver County Times. “Tears swelled the eyes of black and white players alike.”
The Quips went 2-8 that year, winning two games less than the season before. But Yannessa’s charm was irresistible. His instant recall of plays and games, massive smile, and ever-quotable natterings were catnip to teenage boys, gloomy alums, and sportwriters alike. Two years later, when a reporter asked his strategy for beating defending WPIAL champ New Castle—which hadn’t lost in two years and hadn’t lost to Aliquippa in a decade—Yannessa quipped, “You win the coin toss, catch the opening kickoff, and then run into the field house and lock the door.”
But he had been telling his team all week that they could win, that all of Western Pennsylvania had them wrong—and then Aliquippa came out gambling and beat mighty New Castle, 17-8. On the game’s first play, Yannessa lost his center to a broken ankle; twice on fourth down, he went for it instead of punting, and picked up a big gain or a touchdown. “This is the biggest thrill of my life,” Yannessa crowed afterward. “Not just for me and this team, but for the town of Aliquippa.”
That con man’s flair made football fun and fans feel special; in time Yannessa would, indeed, return Aliquippa football to Friday nights, come up with the idea of shooting off fireworks before, during, and after games, inaugurate the pregame spectacle of an headdressed Indian riding onto the field and impaling it with a flaming spear. But his first year was the foundation. Word got around that Yannessa didn’t play favorites. He visited black players at their homes, ignored the rats and roaches, cultivated their parents. During one visit some mother’s pissed-off boyfriend was said to be coming soon with a gun. Yannessa made a point of staying until the danger passed.