Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  “We had some selfish sons of bitches on that team,” Short said. “It was all about ‘me-me-me.’”

  Like most black players, Short had risen through Aliquippa’s Pee Wee football program, winning alongside white teammates like Dan Metropoulos, Bobby Babich, and Art Piroli, all of them, he said, “closer than close.” Metropoulos, especially, was like a brother. They had won and lost and bled together, laughing at racial differences while the outside world couldn’t even mention the issue without burning up. The all-white offensive line and the all-black running back corps called themselves “The Black Backs and the White-Line Fever”—and as twelve-year-olds they had traveled together to Fort Myers, Florida, for a Midget Bowl game, went to Disney World as a pack, and never split along color lines. Now that unity splintered.

  “There was a divide in the football team—again—after the boy got stabbed,” Short said. “Even though we were playing together and practicing together, the chemistry and the unity wasn’t what it should’ve been.” And, he said, “that shit didn’t heal itself all of a sudden.”

  After the Quips suffered a gutting 20-19 loss to Blackhawk to finish the ’77 season 5-5, Yannessa all but surrendered. He’d lost his players. The program was facing total collapse. He began talking and ended up making the speech of his life, perhaps the most important speech in Aliquippa since Cornelia Bryce Pinchot’s forty-three years before. “This is not my team,” Yannessa told them. “You’ve got to turn this thing around. You got scumbag black kids out there and scumbag white kids out there causing trouble—and they don’t give a shit. They’ll destroy everything here. They don’t care. They have nothing to lose. You guys have got to care. Because you do have something to lose.

  “You got to take ownership. We’re the coaches, we’re the adults, and there’s teachers and administrators but goddammit they don’t own this. You own it. When I played here, I was proud of who I was and where I was from and I wanted to have a future and this was a catalyst to my future. Same thing for you. This is your team.”

  Still, into the spring of ’78—a full year after the stabbing—each side eyed the other warily. Notions like “teammate” and “winning” seemed quaint. The school year ended, and no one could say if Yannessa’s words would have any effect at all. “A lot of us [blacks], most, chose to be on the side with the blacks,” Short said. “And they [whites] chose to be on the side of the whites.”

  He recalls looking around at his childhood buddies in the locker room, at training camp the following August, in the hallways. He recalls looking at Metropoulos, his “brother.” Am I going to fight Danny? Can I? Are we all really going to fight each other?

  With memory of the early-seventies riots still fresh, healing that rift would normally have figured as Aliquippa’s primary mission. But Yannessa wasn’t the only one waving a white flag. The understanding that race, rather than being an issue “solved” by marches or legislation or endless attempts at “dialogue,” was a bone-deep stain that might take generations to remove had all but settled in. No one expected a quick fix. Besides, the county was in a state of panic.

  Locks that had never been used were being oiled and thrown. Aliquippa’s streets emptied at night, dogs went unwalked, and every strange face—and even those that weren’t—was suspect. “All you knew,” said Sherman McBride, “is that there was a killer.”

  Starting in October 1977—with the death of a seventeen-year-old boy named John Feeny and the disappearance of his girlfriend, Ranee Gregor, sixteen, on a lovers’ lane in nearby Findlay—and continuing deep into the spring, a series of what would amount to eighteen murders—most accompanied by rape; committed by shotgun, knife, or blunt object; and occurring in Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio—dotted the map around Aliquippa. There seemed to be no motive, no pattern, and for seven months no suspect. At least one psychic was called in to search for a missing body. The hunting-obsessed region starting stocking up, and didn’t stop.

  “I had a gun shop, and I ran out of guns,” said Beaver County sheriff George David, then an Aliquippa police officer. “Rifles, shotguns, pistols: Everybody was going frantic. They wanted guns.”

  Yet Aliquippa remained spared, and why didn’t become clear until 10:20 p.m. on June 6, 1978. Four days after a Columbia, South Carolina, man was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, a tip from the wife of thirty-six-year-old Eddie Surratt, of Montini Street in Plan 11, led six state policemen to the victim’s station wagon, parked near the Aliquippa Works. Surratt, who had served combat tours in Vietnam with the Army and Marines, kicked open the passenger-side door, got out with his hands raised—and bolted into the mill complex. Then he leapt down a sixty-foot embankment and disappeared.

  Three weeks later, the sleeping Surratt was arrested in the home of a family he was holding hostage near St. Augustine, Florida. But as sensational as that news was, as astonishing as the speculation that Surratt had eluded police in Aliquippa by either swimming the gamy currents of the Ohio or scrambling up the drainage tunnel beneath Franklin Avenue (“Uncle Sam trained him,” Salt Smith said, “to be a survivor”), was the numbing idea that this was one of their own.

  Eddie Surratt returned from Vietnam in 1970 with shiny medals and a new wife, Offia. Many claimed that the war had changed him, and stories he told of clearing Vietcong bunkers, being hit by shrapnel, being overrun in a foxhole by Vietcong, or seeing his buddy’s arm blown off perhaps spoke to how and why. But there were also signs of normalcy: The couple had a son, and in the year before his arrest Surratt repeatedly visited with a school official to monitor the boy’s progress. Ocie Patrick, an old teammate of Ditka’s, would play cards with Surratt, and sometimes when Ocie would go to work his shift at the blast furnace, Eddie would come by and visit with Ocie’s wife, Betty, at their home on Orchard Street.

  The Patricks’ young twin sons, Timmie and Terry, weren’t old enough to go off to school then. “He was good friends with the family,” Timmie said.

  Just two days before the chase down at the mill, then–Ambridge head coach Frank Marocco, who’d known Surratt nearly his entire life, had chatted with him while working at his father-in-law’s fruit stand in town. “A very liked gentleman, very respectful,” Marocco said. “He’d come in and take the garbage out. I knew him because of his military background; we were very close there. We were all figuring, Who can this guy be? When it was Eddie Surratt, I couldn’t believe it.”

  But for Ocie Patrick, the mystery sat closer to the bone: not just what did happen with Eddie Surratt, but what didn’t. For decades he’d tell Betty, “He could’ve cut you up and put you in a refrigerator!”

  And all of them, Timmie and Terry and the rest of the Patrick boys, would laugh then. What else could you do? The rest of the country had its share of spree killings after World War II, their names tattooed into the consciousness—Starkweather, Green River, Zodiac, Manson, Son of Sam. Maybe they had always happened. Maybe TV made such horrors available in a way they never had been before. But each one seemed like another piece of evidence that the culture had spun off its moorings.

  Aliquippa had always been a place high on cause-and-effect: at the mill, in the streets, on the football field. You worked, you got paid. You hit somebody, you got hit back. With Eddie Surratt, though, its people came face-to-face with the inexplicable, the senseless, the random—and it had risen from their midst. That was a shift. After his rampage, little could come as a shock.

  “Sometimes people just take a turn and you never know what happens,” Timmie Patrick said. “Just like you can have someone come to your house and you didn’t know they were a serial killer.”

  12

  Darkness on the Edge

  Now it was Peep’s turn. The weekend before the ’78 season opener, Short, McBride, Bob Babich, Dan Metropoulos, and three others, a mix of juniors and seniors, black and white, met in someone’s basement and listened as Peep Short, never quiet, stood up and got even loude
r. “This has got to stop somewhere,” he said, and he meant: Here, now. The next day, after the team entered the gym and, for the first time in years, divided itself into white and black factions, the seven players walked together to the center of the floor. “You’re either with us,” they announced, “or you’re out.”

  “No one left that gym,” McBride said. “Everybody came together as one.”

  And as the season unrolled—one win after another (except for that big loss to Butler) over Canon McMillan, then Montour and Moon and New Castle and, yes, Hopewell and Seneca Valley and Ambridge, too—some could feel a change in the Aliquippa atmosphere. The crowd at football games began to mix. Black and white players were seen double-dating, sometimes interracially; “Danny Metro” and other white players were seen at parties in Plan 11, and Short and Co. were seen at white parties up near Brodhead Road. Suddenly, Yannessa said, “everything became a lot easier for us as football coaches.”

  It may have been too soon, when the American president hit town, to say that some corner had been turned. But it had. On September 23, 1978, Jimmy Carter, the soft-spoken Southerner whose election nearly two years earlier had been taken as a corrective to the lies of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the cynical drift of Vietnam and Watergate, had not yet become a symbol of weakness. He came to speak at an Aliquippa High scrubbed, principal Jerry Montini said, to “its super-sparkling best”: grass remown, halls polished, none of the tension that, the year Carter won, had Montini wondering if he was losing his mind. People thronged Franklin Avenue to watch the president pass, and nine hundred locals filled the auditorium for a fifty-minute question-and-answer session. Carter’s first comments, after the usual thanks, were about the town’s famous names.

  “Anybody who cares about sports knows about Beaver County,” Carter said. “As you know, Joe Namath was a great friend of my mother’s when she was in Alabama, and still is. Pete Maravich played for our team in Atlanta, great athlete who began here; Tony Dorsett, another great athlete, as you know; Doc Medich and many others. I won’t try to mention all of them that came from here. But there must be something special about the climate or the training, because you have set a standard for the rest of the country in athletics.”

  No one was impolitic enough to mention that not one of those men had actually played for the high school in which he stood; and, besides, Carter followed up by saying that “Moon River”—written by Aliquippa’s own Henry Mancini—was one of his favorite waltzes: “Rosalynn and I like to dance to it.”

  The event had little in common with JFK’s drive-by speech sixteen years earlier: people were far less awed by the White House now, and the first question from an Aliquippa woman named Evelyn Rosmini concerned the loss of “old-fashioned things—respect, management, and cooperation. We no longer have small-town lifestyles. Everything is deteriorating. . . .” Locals knew that Rosmini was speaking less of abstractions than of Aliquippa itself—sending up a distress flare from the nation’s gut—but she was right to be polite: anything more specific might’ve split the room in two.

  Then came a question from another woman—this one black, Etta Colbert of Logstown—wondering why redevelopment was making her neighborhood disappear; why, in fact, this concept of “urban development” that was supposed to save poor people had left her world in “critical, deplorable condition”? And Carter said he loved small towns and didn’t have the answer, but that his Housing and Urban Development secretary would phone her soon (and, indeed, Colbert received a call at 5 p.m. that same day).

  The remaining questions went big—prayer in schools, national health care, unemployment, energy, Middle East peace, the future of a domestic steel industry besieged by foreign imports. But the moment nobody forgot was when a fifteen-year-old girl from South Heights, Ambridge High sophomore Wendy Babiak, whose mother had died the previous Wednesday of cancer, asked Carter if she could give him a big hug and, before he could answer, ran to the stage and skipped up and got what she asked for and told the president, “I love you.”

  “This was not on the program,” Carter said, grinning, hugging back. “I would ask all of you not to tell my wife about this until I can get home and explain it.”

  The crowd laughed, of course, and that was the bit that made the news: Tense, torn Aliquippa had gone warm and cuddly. It didn’t hurt that Aliquippa High had crushed Moon, 40-0, the same day (it would go undefeated until the last game of the season). That Yannessa’s team, their team, was humming again. That football was the thing again, with black cheerleaders—not just one token girl, but now three fully a part of the squad; any players or parents agitating against it came off as distractions from the new, winning way, and who wanted that?

  The season ended, and Yannessa knew that this was the time: He insisted that the end-of-year banquets, the white one hosted by the Ukrainian Club and the black one hosted by the Quippian Club, be merged. The two clubs agreed, and Yannessa pulled every string to make the night first-class, luring every recruit-hungry coaching name in to speak. With each ensuing year, the arrival of such famous football men—Joe Paterno, Dick MacPherson, Lou Saban—would only certify that this way, Yannessa’s way, was the right one. Someone still might mention “black” this or “white” that, but the other parents would shake their heads and say, “Shut that down!” or “We don’t need that here” or just change the subject.

  Early on, though, the players were key. The players, Yannessa knew, would be the ones who made the unity last. That’s why that loss against Blackhawk on the last day of the ’78 season, a Friday night home game no less, mattered more than a lot of the Aliquippa wins that would soon be piling up like change on a dresser.

  It was one of those grind-it-out defensive battles, down to the last second, Blackhawk holding a 7-0 lead, winner goes to the playoffs.

  Peep Short was a senior tight end on the team, playing in his last game. “I dropped the ball,” he said, staring into space, watching it happen all over again. “Last play of the game, I caught the ball and had one guy to beat and if I made that cut, I know I’m gone. Mike Sutton from Blackhawk hit me and the ball went about twenty yards in the air. And I couldn’t get to the ball because he was on top of me and all I did was lay on the ground and watch that ball, and all I could think was, Damn. There goes my season.”

  But what happened after mattered even more.

  “When we lost that game, in front of a packed house in Aliquippa, against an all-white team, Blackhawk, everybody would’ve expected: There’s going to be trouble now. There’s going to be a fight, our kids going after their kids because these white kids beat us,” Yannessa said. “That didn’t happen. Instead, our guys ran over and shook their hands, congratulated the coaches, ran off the field and into the field house—and cried like babies.”

  Together.

  For the youngest players in the room, such an outbreak of raw emotion was unsettling. As bad as they felt over losing, they couldn’t join in the sniffles and sobs or slammed locker doors, couldn’t dress with tear-streaks on their cheeks. They had barely played. They weren’t dirty. But for one sophomore this was particularly hard, because he was a softie; tears were his refuge. And his life had been one long struggle to tamp that softness down, because tough guys didn’t cry, but now the toughest guys he knew were weeping and no one was laughing or calling them “pussies.” Who wouldn’t be confused?

  In truth, none of it—football, the town, life, fatherhood—was ever going to be easy for Jeff Baldwin to figure. Thick, strong, and with a mammoth capacity for work, he was the latest in the series of Aliquippans with big-time talent—another product brewed up, as Jimmy Carter put it, by “the water.” Soon he’d be drawing Division 1-A scholarship offers from all over the nation, be squired around Pitt’s campus by defensive legend Hugh Green. But Baldwin had weaknesses. Maybe if he’d come up in a different decade—like Jimmy Frank or Ditka or Richie Mann—before drug use had become casual, before the
black family began to implode, before Big Steel collapsed and the church and unions lost their clout, they wouldn’t have figured so prominently. Weakness was nothing new. Maybe, like the lost or hot-tempered or unskilled souls who had preceded him for generations, he would have found his impulses channeled by the mill or stunted by societal norms. Maybe he would’ve earned a college degree, or come home to find a stabilizing spot at J&L. Maybe.

  But as it was, Jeff Baldwin came up at a time when the old pillars were crumbling, and he wasn’t strong enough to withstand the ensuing shock waves. Indeed, he was fated like few others to live out the dual nature of Aliquippa just beginning to emerge—its pride and pain, its talent and trouble—and to personify the year-by-year narrowing of its options until football and prison could seem, at times, the only two left. For him, even then, the narrowing had begun: Jeff Baldwin, the sixteen-year-old boy hurrying into his clothes in the Quips locker room that night, was already the father of a one-year-old boy named Jamie Mandel Brown.

  Baldwin wasn’t living under the same roof as his son then; he was still living as a son himself, on Washington Street in the Plan 11 house of his parents, Henry and Delois Baldwin. Henry Baldwin had come up during World War II from Richland, Georgia, and worked in the J&L wire mill for thirty-five years. Delois arrived from Georgia a decade later, baby daughter in hand, fleeing a teenage marriage in Florida. The rest of her life, she told anyone who’d listen, “Don’t get married too early.”

  But Delois got together with Henry and bore him two kids, Norman and Jeff, moving to the Washington Street house in 1969, thinking all along that she had wedded him, too, until the truth came out. “He was already married and I didn’t know it, so it’s just like we didn’t,” Delois said. “So that’s not counting. No, it’s not counting. Henry lied to me. Yeah, he lied, so I never was married to him.”