by S. L. Price
Before all that, though, Larry Jones died—and black players especially noted how the ever-glib Yannessa took it. Even forty years later, it’s the one subject that can render him speechless.
“We came home, and that threw a black cloud over everything we were doing,” Yannessa began, but soon his voice grew thick, and quavered. He tried to clear his throat. “There was nothing good that came out of that, but . . . but the one thing about it was, those black parents and the black community, ahhh, they supported us . . . in that situation . . . and I developed some really strong relationships with people like Charlie Lay. People like that.”
He stopped, tried again. “And, uh . . .” But then Yannessa went dead silent. Ten seconds passed. You could hear his wife, Elaine, moving cutlery in the kitchen. He tried one last time. “I can’t breathe,” he said.
But if the town’s darkening mood, that “black cloud,” seemed to be spreading, it was hardly universal. Through the tunnel, out on the mill floor, you could be forgiven for believing that life hadn’t changed much. In 1968, James Ling’s Dallas-based airline/electronics/sporting goods conglomerate, the LTV Corporation, bought 63 percent of J&L, but the acquisition terms and a tenacious J&L management enabled the company to operate for years after as a quasi-independent entity. Industry leaders and experts already knew that the Japanese had grown far nimbler than their U.S. counterparts in the embrace of cost-slashing new technologies like electric arc furnaces; by the end of the 1970s, a Central Intelligence Agency study would declare Japanese design and operation “the best in the world . . . the envy of the world’s steelmakers.”
But at first, anyway, the wave that economists and executives would later consider tidal crashed lightly on the Aliquippa Works. Constant expansion over the previous decade—new blast furnaces and continuous casting operations, a second basic oxygen furnace facility, the filling in of the channel between the mill and Crow Island—signaled only eternal permanence and growth. Jobs were plentiful. Detroit was still making cars out of steel. The unions, fresh off a 1973 agreement that traded a no-strike pledge for ironclad 3 percent annual raises and cost-of-living raises, were only getting cockier.
“Stuff started to happen that just didn’t make sense,” said Mark Betters, sitting with older brother C. J. “Chuck” Betters. “I would hear my friends, even into the seventies, telling me how they would go to work on the night shift down there”—and here both men shout—“and sleep!”
“For eight hours,” Mark continued. “And somebody’d come over and wake ’em up and they’d leave and get paid for a whole day. It was the gravy train. And basically the union people, down at that Franklin Avenue union hall there, would protect that. And then [the workers] would vote ’em back in.”
Meanwhile, J&L management, in contrast to the hard-liners at U.S. Steel and elsewhere, had regained a reputation for relatively enlightened leadership. In 1971, they even allowed a gimlet-eyed reporter, John Hoerr—who would later write the definitive autopsy of the U.S. steel industry—to roam for a full week through the works. He walked away impressed. “The Aliquippa plant seemed impregnable,” Hoerr later wrote. “Some ten thousand people worked there. Retirees were still so attached to the company that every day one could see half a dozen or more sitting on a bench outside the plant, old fellows with arthritic hands and wrinkled faces for whom the mill was the center of life.
“It should not have been, of course, because the union had tried to give workers the wherewithal to do other things—travel, set up a small business, move to Florida as so many steelworkers did. But this older generation, men who had started their working lives in the 1920s or before, couldn’t pull themselves away. . . .”
Hoerr just missed, by a year, Giuseppe Battaglini, who had survived, alone and sixteen years old, the sea journey from Italy in 1927 and quarantine on Ellis Island, who spent forty-plus years face-to-face with 3,000-degree molten steel in the open hearth—“working the hot-tops,” as his son puts it—weighing 140 pounds going into his shift and 135 coming out, every day. Giuseppe retired in 1970 at fifty-nine, but never really left. “That place was his life,” said Anthony Battalini. “For six months after he’d get up every morning and go to that mill. I’d tell him: ‘Dad, the mill’s going to be there. You don’t have to check to make sure it’s running.’
“I never knew he was sick. He developed a lump over here on his neck, and was taken to the doctor who diagnosed it as cancer. Six months later, he was gone. It spread, went in everywhere down.”
Hoerr would later tell of an ever-widening gulf between supervisors and workers in the early ’70s, due to everything from the drug culture to a new generation’s seeming disdain for hard labor to the hiring of business school grads with no hands-on knowledge of steelwork. But in Aliquippa, this was masked by plans for another capital expansion, valued at $200 million, and steel’s relative health in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis; the resulting dip in auto production was offset by a spike in domestic oil drilling and the ensuing demand for pipe and tubing. Like the Soviet nuclear arsenal, cheap foreign steel was recognized as an existential threat. But the changing face of the workforce pushed more immediate buttons.
“Let’s face it, men, it’s no longer a man’s world,” read a 1973 editorial explaining the name change of J&L’s in-house bulletin from Men & Steel to JALTeam Almanac. “It was called to our attention that the name of J&L’s employee magazine . . . didn’t take into account the fact that we also have many women working for J&L and that more are on the way.” Macho glibness made it easy to credit or blame “women’s lib,” but the truth was more mundane—and far-reaching. Inflation was making it harder for families to stay afloat on one income. At J&L the names of many positions were officially changed: craneman to crane operator, foreman to supervisor. Old Tom Girdler would hardly have known the place.
But the work remained brutal. Aileen Gilbert was twenty-two years old, with four children out of wedlock, when she went into the open hearth to work the coke oven manned, for forty years, by her father. It was 1974. She needed the money. Her dad had died three years before, “and they called me to work in the department my father had worked in—on the same battery that he worked on,” she said. “Which really blew my mind.”
Gilbert worked, essentially, atop fire. A battery, standing twenty feet high and fifty feet front to back, contained fifty or more ovens that baked as much as thirty-five tons of coal at 2,000 degrees for seventeen hours; on top were charging holes into which was dumped the coal for cooking. She wore flameproof clothing and gloves, a helmet with a face shield, a pair of wooden shoes. Waited with a long pole with a hook on one end, near the charging holes, for the larry car’s approach. She used the poled hook to pull loose the steel charging hole lids, then slide them aside.
“These lids, God, they weighed about fifty pounds,” Gilbert said. “Then I’d move out the way. The larry car would come and drop coal down into the holes and after it dropped coal down into the holes, it moved on to the next three. Then I had to go back out there and push those lids back on—because the fire’s shooting up out of the hole after he puts the coal in—take this stuff, pour it around to seal the lid back on, because now it’s got to bake. And then I’ve got to go to the next three ovens.”
She lasted two and a half years. The job paid more than $10,000 a year, decent money—maybe—for a single, childless person then, but Gilbert carried burns on her arms, soot on her face and neck, and bone-deep exhaustion every time she walked out of the tunnel. “I couldn’t take it,” she said. “I quit. Or they might’ve fired me, actually, because I couldn’t take it.”
In 1976, Gilbert picked up her brood and left—first to nearby Moon, then to Hartford, Connecticut—taking a series of jobs, including one involving the clearing of rats out of low-income housing, which all seemed like vacations compared with the steel mill. She had no intention of going back. Gilbert had felt ostracized by Aliquippa. Even juggling three
jobs there, she had had to apply for welfare, and she had the kids and no husband and everybody knew everybody else’s business and felt superior enough to judge it. “People talked about me really, really, really bad,” Gilbert said. Really, what did her hometown have left to offer?
Eventually, though, she would return.
Don Yannessa could sell. Everybody could see that, even amid the 2-8 wreckage of his first season in ’72. The football stadium was renamed for Carl Aschman the September afternoon that Aliquippa played Sharon High, and they almost won that one. Butler—always motivated, always tough—barely squeezed out a 1-point win, and the players began to believe. But the players weren’t enough. If Aliquippa was ever again to play night football—with its bigger, revenue-generating crowds—Yannessa needed the town to buy in, to stop turning games into rumbles, to assure opposing players and fans that their buses and cars wouldn’t get stoned. To get the town to buy in, he needed the black community to buy in. And to get the black community, he needed an ally.
Charlie Lay was a thirty-nine-year-old Korean War veteran who worked in the 14-inch mill at J&L, but made his name as a constant hand in Little Quips football, Little League baseball, and any other kind of ball, it seemed, played by his two sons, two daughters, and every other Aliquippa kid. Yannessa began cultivating Lay as soon as he took over. On Sundays he’d go with his assistants to the Quippian Club and drink for hours, waiting for the moment to break out the classic fund-raising weapons—flattery and shame. “You should hear what the whites are saying,” Yannessa would tell Lay. “They’re saying, ‘We do everything. The blacks: What do they do? They just take. They don’t give nothing back.’ That’s how they see it, Charlie: ‘All you guys do is take.’”
So when some parents spoke of wanting to give the players a spaghetti dinner at season’s end, Lay volunteered the Quippian Club. Before anyone could argue, the plan was set.
“It was tremendous,” one white parent, Jean Rossi, later recalled. “The blacks were so proud they were doing something for the team, that the whites were there in their neighborhood.
“Parents from both sides were there. The men were at the bar together bending their elbows. It didn’t matter whether the next guy was black or white. I think we’ve grown from there.”
It didn’t happen overnight. Lay spent months and years setting up mixed meetings of boosters, players, and parents in white homes and bars, black homes and bars, buying drinks, laughing at bad jokes and good stories told for the umpteenth time. There was no shortcut. “We used to have so many meetings among white and black people . . . at my home, others’ houses . . . meet at the black club, have drinks and talk, meet at the white club, have drinks and talk,” Yannessa said. “People in Aliquippa, you’d better be able to stand at a bar and drink a shot and a beer. If you can’t do that nobody’s going to trust you.”
The two men’s aims were different. “Don, you’ve got to get more white kids on the team. An all-black team isn’t good for the community,” Lay once told Yannessa at his home.
“Charlie,” Yannessa replied. “I’m going to play my eleven best.”
But both men knew that football success and racial unity were mutually dependent; Aliquippa couldn’t have one without the other. Once he got past that first year, and the wins started to slowly pile up, Yannessa allowed himself to get cocky. “That racial shit” was unacceptable, he’d tell both groups of players, and if he heard “nigger” or “honky” or anything like it from any player, they would be gone. “I’ll win with you and I’ll win without you,” he’d say, flashing that Pepsodent grin. But the players knew that he meant it. Yannessa would be staring at them hard when he spoke and his eyes, like pieces of coal, wouldn’t be smiling at all.
And if Yannessa would later receive most of the credit for the way football helped stitch the town back together, it’s only because few high school programs ever had a better front man—and because Charlie Lay died before the stitch-up was complete. The stricken steelworker conducted Quarterback Club meetings as long as his strength held, even out of his hospital bed, before pancreatic cancer killed him in December of 1980. The coach knew better than anyone what had been lost.
“Just a wonderful human being,” Yannessa said. “He was the catalyst.”
Still, it took four seasons of groundwork before Lay and Yannessa could unify whites and blacks into one mixed Aliquippa Quarterback Club. The permanent move back to night games remained elusive: In ’74, three Butler students were injured, one with a fractured skull, in a postgame melee with Aliquippa fans; in 1975 a rolling fight behind the home stands resulted in six arrests, flying rocks and bottles, a police officer having to be treated at a hospital, and spasms of vandalism in the surrounding neighborhood. In February ’76, the Beaver County Times offhandedly referred to Aliquippa “people rioting before and after football and basketball games for several years now.” The school’s reputation in the region had sunk so low that a writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that same month, erroneously, that someone had been killed in the skirmish following an Aliquippa football game, explaining, “I thought I remembered something about it happening.”
The Post-Gazette published a retraction, but few outsiders would’ve been stunned if such a murder occurred. The high school seemed afflicted by problems beyond the skills of a mere administrator to handle. “I’ve got to have the most difficult job any man would wish to have,” said Aliquippa High principal Jerry Montini, a member of the school’s 1949 state championship basketball team, in February 1976. “It’s hard trying to maintain my sanity, if I may say so. I go home at nights and for a couple of hours I find myself just sitting in a chair or on the floor just wondering what’s going to happen the next day.”
In October of 1976, Aliquippa High forfeited all its football and basketball games for the 1973 and ’75 seasons for playing ineligible athletes. Yannessa had never been shy about importing good players into his district, but the use of one ineligible athlete in 1973 and three more in 1975 earned him two years of probation by state and WPIAL officials. In the community, that hardly hurt his standing; the team had been steadily improving—going 5-3-1 in both 1973 and ’74, 6-3 in ’75, and 8-2 in ’76. Mere residency infractions were hardly enough to overshadow winning.
“Yeah, Don Juan would recruit kids,” said Melvin Steals of Yannessa’s wooing of talent near and far. And yeah: “They called him ‘Don Juan.’ And they called him ‘God.’”
But even God couldn’t control everything. One warm Friday, February 25, 1977, the shaky peace that had existed between whites and blacks shattered again. The Beaver County Times had one version—after a white student sold a black student a bag of “bad marijuana,” the latter tried to get his money back—and those on the ground had another. “I was there,” said Dan “Peep” Short, Aliquippa’s High’s current defensive coordinator, then a sophomore. “Two black guys tried to buy from a white guy. They took the weed, the boy who got his weed taken went back into the school and told his friends that these two black guys took his weed; they came out and there was a standoff.
“Four whites . . . and three or four black guys were getting ready to fight, and all of a sudden this black guy comes running out the door and he punched a white guy in the fucking face. He came running off the steps—I can see it clear as day—and sucker punches the guy. All hell breaks loose. I get pinned down by somebody who’s beating the living shit out of me. He got me pinned—and that’s the guy who ended up getting stabbed.”
The white pupil on top of Short, Mark Petrie, rolled off after being knifed in the abdomen—“somebody,” Short said, “trying to help me”—and Short and the rest scattered for the paths leading down the hill from the school. The conflict metastasized: current Aliquippa schools superintendent Dave Wytiaz, a junior at the time, was taking a standardized test in the cafeteria when a black pupil named Robert Williams rushed in, yelling, “This whitey knifed me!”
&nb
sp; “The next thing you know, tables were being thrown,” Wytiaz said. “I’d never seen anything like it: it went from stone silence to tables flying. Boom! Everyone started yelling and jumping up, with the panic that happens.”
Petrie survived. Five students were arrested; sixty-five more were suspended. School was canceled the following Monday, but even when it reopened the next day few bothered to show. At the first hint of trouble—real or imagined—some teachers locked their doors and hid. Some didn’t. “Frank Antonini was an assistant football coach at the time and our gym teacher—and Frank had no fear,” Wytiaz said. “Another kid got on campus, puts a gun in the air in front of the high school, and Frank, having no fear, went right at the kid—grabbed the gun. Today that kid would’ve probably shot the teacher.”
As always, the school served as the most sensitive gauge of the town’s mood. The ensuing weeks and months made the ’60s notions of a “Great Society,” of racial progress, and of a “war on poverty” seem laughable. “Every day we’d come to work and every day here’s somebody beating the shit out of somebody, a white kid and black kid, white girls getting beat up,” Yannessa said. “One day I look out my classroom window and here comes about seventy-five, eighty, a hundred white guys down this way, they got baseball bats, chains, all kinds of makeshift weapons. And coming from the stadium area to meet ’em, here’s the black contingent.
“And you know what? It changed everything. I was going to work and I had a calendar; I’d scratch every day off and I’d say, ‘I didn’t sign up for this. I’ve got to get out of here. This is never going to work. It’s never going to stop.’”
Battle lines kept getting drawn and redrawn. The teachers went on strike but the coaches kept coaching, crossed the picket line in a union town, and felt plenty of hostility. School renovations split the 1977–78 school day and gave everyone too much time to burn. Football players had little choice but to take sides, the black ones siding with their friends from Plan 11 or Logstown—or from the projects of Valley Terrace, where, just two years after opening, shoddy construction and living conditions led to its being all but declared a slum and placed under federal control—and the whites with theirs from Sheffield or Plan 12.