Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  By 1978, Delois was working at the mill, too, in the monotony of the seamless tube department. “I’d sit there and take account of the pipe that they was cutting,” she said. “I worked on the ‘cutoff’: the crane would go where the pipes are and pick ’em up and bring ’em over and sit ’em on the table? And those guys would cut ’em—and I would count the pipe, keep track of how many they’d cut. And at the end of the shift, I would take it in the office. That was my job for a whole year. It just made me so lazy.”

  Norman, the oldest, was the sports star then. When it came to pickup games in Aliquippa, he never wanted Jeff around; in elementary school Jeff was big and clumsy and, worst of all, scared. The sharks smelled his fear. “They used to always beat me up and jump me: I never fought back,” Jeff said. “They’d take my toys and stuff. That’s why I’ve got a hard-stone face. You can punch me as hard as you want and won’t nothing happen to it. They’d get me to play football and hit me. They’d use me for the dummy.”

  Finally, at eight or nine, he’d had enough. Two kids called the “Bucky Boys” jumped him, spit on him, and Jeff went blind and started swinging and beat them both. There were a lot more fights to come; he lost plenty—but he never backed down again.

  Always exceeding top-end weight limits, Jeff didn’t play organized football until ninth grade. But the game gave him confidence like nothing else. By his sophomore year he was playing both ways, offensive guard and defensive end, a two-hundred-pound hunk making up for inexperience with raw strength and good hands. First to practice and last to leave, he ran five sets of stadium steps afterward, rain or snow or shine, alone. Toil and talent brought him along. The town’s inbred competition did the rest.

  “Growing up Aliquippa, you play with older people and I guess you get the rough, true story of it,” Jeff said. “Because older people don’t cut you no break; they play hard and learn you the hard way.”

  Henry tried instilling larger lessons. He brought the boy grocery shopping, so Jeff would see him budget and shop; he tried to teach the need to take care of bills and family. At the same time, the house on Washington Street was renowned for the violent sounds of Henry and Delois fighting. The sight of a police car out front wasn’t unusual. Finally, twenty-six days after the season-ending loss to Blackhawk, on the morning of November 29, 1978, the phone rang at A-Ambulance Service, Delois on the other end. Someone had been hurt, she said. When crew members arrived, they found a body on the floor.

  “My daddy was in an accident; he got killed,” Jeff later said. “It was a . . . domestic accident.” Asked what that means, he said, “I really don’t want to discuss that.”

  The Baldwin family can be remarkably open when speaking about stumbles involving sex, gunplay or the criminal justice system, but not about this. When asked about her husband more than three decades later, Delois said, “Who? No, Henry, he died. He’s dead. When did he pass? I don’t know.” Asked if the two were together when he died, she said, “In a way we was and in a way we weren’t. I don’t know. I don’t think about all that back stuff, like the years and the date and stuff like that. I have to go look. I don’t know what it was.”

  Pressed, Delois said, “He died accidentally.” By gunshot? “Yeah,” she said. In the house on Washington Street, here, in the home she still lived in thirty-four years later? Delois nodded, then, and laughed, nervously perhaps. “No, I don’t know what happened to him. I really don’t.” So she just came home and there Henry was, lying on the floor? “And there he was. . . .” she said.

  The November 29, 1978, edition of the Beaver County Times ran a story that stated: “An Aliquippa woman is being held in connection with the murder early this morning of her husband. . . . Delois Baldwin, 44, was taken into custody by Aliquippa police shortly after the shooting occurred. She was charged with the murder of her 58-year-old husband, Henry, during a quarrel.”

  No court record seemingly exists to say that Delois Baldwin served a day in jail for that crime, and her arrest, any kind of “charge,” or her ever being cleared don’t show up in a criminal records search. A death certificate dated December 4, 1978, in fact, states the cause of Henry Baldwin’s death as “homicide,” and notes, “Victim shot by wife.” Yet, six months later—and in apparent contravention of Pennsylvania’s Slayer’s Act, which prevents a decedent’s killer from receiving benefits from his or her passing—Delois was made administrator of Henry’s meager estate.

  The only traces of what happened that night remain, then, in the family’s touchiness, and in the article printed that morning in the Times. The accompanying photo shows three Aliquippa policemen staring at a pistol and some bullet casings spread out upon what appears to be a white handkerchief. The story goes on to say that Henry’s corpse, pronounced dead at the scene, was lying on its left side in the kitchen when police arrived. A police officer named Herman Cain “then noticed” a .38-caliber revolver lying on a nearby table. The gun contained one live shell. The four others inside had been, according to police, “spent.”

  Mike Zmijanac was in the locker room, too, after the ’78 loss to Blackhawk, one of the few there with nothing to cry about. He’d just finished his first season as Aliquippa’s defensive coordinator, and it had been a sterling run to the end. His unit had limited opponents to an absurd 3.6 points a game in the season’s second half, had held Blackhawk to sixty-six total yards and just two first downs this night—an achievement all the more remarkable considering that, on paper anyway, he had no real business being there.

  No, on paper Zmijanac wasn’t a football guy, wasn’t an organized-team guy, wasn’t—despite his vague renown in pickup games—­technically even a basketball guy. Yet he had a talent for cursing and that sarcastic tone that snaps male teenage minds to attention; he had a way of seeming to call bullshit on authority even when, as a demanding English teacher, he was authority. And, Lord, Zmijanac was cocky. Never played a down, but he had the gall to believe that the game wasn’t all that hard to figure.

  “Football and basketball are the same thing: It’s the same exact game,” he said. “When teaching a linebacker how to get into his drops, it’s teaching a basketball player how to take away the baseline—exactly the same footwork. And when I would need someone to square up and shoot the ball? It’s the same thing: Square up and block the guy. Absolutely the same game. So it was easy for me. It took me a year or two to figure out the terminology. But . . . same game.”

  Still, someone had to open the door. After his first season, in ’72, Yannessa had a few staff openings and asked Zmijanac what he thought. What he thought? Zmijanac had been pressed into service as a junior high football coach for a few games when the ’70 riots made everything an emergency, and he had been junior high basketball coach for two seasons before losing interest. So when Yannessa beckoned, in the summer of ’73, Zmijanac’s first response was bewilderment.

  “Have you lost your fuckin’ mind?” he said.

  “Come on,” Yannessa replied. “I’ll teach you.”

  “You ain’t got enough patience to teach me about football,” Zmijanac said.

  “Come on. Be the assistant junior high football coach. I’ll pay you five hundred dollars. . . .”

  “We probably drank more than five hundred bucks’ worth of alcohol this weekend, but . . . okay. Why didn’t you hire me last year?”

  “I didn’t need you last year,” Yannessa said.

  He needed him now. “Mike was a good teacher,” Yannessa said. “When you’re a good teacher, I don’t give a shit if you played football: If you know it, you can teach it. Plus, he was no-nonsense. Mike isn’t exactly a tough guy. He acts like he is but he’s not. But he won’t take any crap from those kids. And Mike will tell you: He’s learned a lot from me.”

  So for five seasons, Zmijanac served as an assistant at the junior high and, then, in 1975, he joined Red McNie’s basketball staff as an assistant, too. Yannessa loved his sharp scouting
reports on opponents, and even sharper observations on his own team. Before long, Yannessa was sending a varsity assistant out to scout and keeping Zmijanac close. He made himself just as valuable to McNie, made himself a name in the process, but there was a problem. By the fall of 1977, Zmijanac had grown sick of nearly all of it.

  First, there was the job itself: low pay, long hours, thousands of critics and no sign of advancement. Two days after the ’77 season ended, he told Yannessa, “If I’m not going to move up to varsity, I’ve got to give this up. It’s junior high football: fuck it.” Then came a break; four assistants got furloughed, another moved up to athletic director. Yannessa shuffled the deck, and during a meeting asked his assistants, some former D-1 players, who wanted to take over as defensive coordinator. No one spoke.

  Zmijanac looked around, raised a finger. “I’ll do it,” he said. He even got a raise.

  Still, there was also the matter of the players. Zmijanac had become convinced that kids had changed in some basic way, that authority had snapped at home, and that the aftereffects were seeping into sports. Aliquippa’s reputation, meanwhile, had been stained by fan fights and postgame crime, by ineligible players and probation, year after year. Yannessa’s iron-fisted charm held that largely in check during football season, but players like Short and McBride played basketball, too. And McNie didn’t wield the same control.

  On December 29, 1978, nearly eight weeks after that peaceable Blackhawk loss, a brawl broke out between Aliquippa and Midland at the end of the Quips’ loss at a Christmas basketball tournament at the Community College of Beaver County. Benches cleared, Short was seen chasing a Midland player into the stands, and at least two dozen fans waded into the fray: The Beaver County Times reported a full five minutes of “punching . . . kicking and stomping” by all involved. McNie had worked two years to improve players’ behavior. “I thought we had the whole problem licked,” he said after. “You work so hard and it just doesn’t get through. The whole thing is just so totally unbelievable. . . .”

  Zmijanac didn’t share McNie’s dismay: he was outraged. He had gone out on the court, tried to pull some players apart and finally gave up. He threw an arm over the shoulder of one senior, Eddie Palombo, and stalked off to the locker room muttering, “I’m done here.”

  “On the floor, everyone rolling everywhere, people coming out of the stands, fights: fucking horrid,” Zmijanac said. “That night we got back here, in the gym, I told Red to stay and all the kids left. I finished the year: Red’s a friend of mine. But I said, ‘I can’t do it.’”

  He applied for two basketball head coaching jobs at other schools, and barely got a sniff. For the first time since he was very small, hoops was no longer a central part of his life. Zmijanac, suddenly, was a football man.

  June 3, 1981. Jeff Baldwin, eighteen years old and a day away from graduation, eighteen years old and heading to Pitt on a football scholarship, eighteen years old with the dawning certainty that people found him special, stood angrily in his dress shoes and suit coat and V-necked shirt and watched a hand with a gun rise and stop. It was pointing at his stomach now.

  The two boys weren’t five yards apart. The strange thing was, this was a teammate from football, a sixteen-year-old scrub who knew even less than he. And what began as a minor spat had now escalated into madness.

  The roots of it, like so much of what happened in town, went deeper than most knew. In 1974, John Evasovich, one of Aliquippa football’s steady hands in the late ’50s, had come back home after sixteen years away at college and a career in Virginia. Over and over he was warned, Things’ve gotten bad there: Don’t send your girls to Aliquippa High. That was the word all over Western Pennsylvania, passed hand to hand and then hammered in place by newspapers and TV.

  “I was in a black neighborhood in Sewickley going to school; some people were descendants of freemen, not slaves,” said Reverend Chris Leighton, who moved in 1979 to All Saints Episcopal on Franklin Avenue. “They were our friends—we were the first white people to live in the house—and they were extremely alarmed when they heard I was going to Aliquippa. One woman with tears running down her cheeks said, ‘They’ll kill you over there because you’re white.’”

  Evasovich had heard such things. His wife was nervous. He first tried sending his daughters, Jonha and Mia, to Quigley Catholic; they couldn’t have hated it more. The girls’ mom was in the hospital recovering from an operation when her daughters came to visit. “Good news, Ma,” they said. “We made varsity cheerleading. Bad news—to you: It’s at Aliquippa.”

  Jonha, the oldest, was a junior, and didn’t know any better. In Virginia things had been different: Kids were starting to mix; she thought nothing of going to black dances and parties. Game weeks, she and Mia would drive up to Plan 11 to do the customary decorating of the starters’ homes—bedsheets painted with “Good Luck!” and a player’s name. “We can’t believe you little white girls are coming up here to decorate,” the mothers said the first few times. “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Should we be?” Jonha said.

  From nearly the first day, Jeff Baldwin had looked after her. They were buddies; he made it clear that anyone who bothered Jonha would answer to him. And until the day before graduation, no one—black or white, male or female—ever did. Sometimes she would be the cheerleader to take Jeff’s arm and accompany him out to midfield for his pregame dunt-dunt-dunt, and she couldn’t believe how much her protector would be transformed.

  “I don’t think I hit the ground with my feet,” Jonha said. “I remember grabbing his arm and Jeff just, like, dragging me because he was so focused. Honestly, he would scare the living shit out of you on the football field, because he had such a fire behind his eyes. But the second he got to the sideline it was, ‘Let’s go, team, come on, you can do it.’ He was super-nice to everybody in high school, a big softie. But on the field he was mean.”

  That Wednesday morning, the seniors emerged from graduation practice to find a line of parked cars vandalized. And Jonha’s car—her dad’s, a brand-new sedan—was the worst: smashed-out rear window, mirrors snapped, a headlight shattered. Word of who was responsible, a scrub, got around, and at football workouts that day Jeff confronted the kid and turned him in. Indeed, Jeff felt so righteous about it, and so much happened—a graduation party, a girl to charm—in the hours after, that it was easy to think that everybody had moved on.

  But then Jeff had been leaving the girl’s place on Return Street, heading home with the school year nearly over and the late night thick with promise and a hint of rain, and the scrub found him and there was a confrontation, mutual curses. And now that hand with the .32-­caliber pistol was rising and he could see it clench, hear the trigger pulled: click, click, click, click. Nothing happened. Then it rose to chest level and. . . . Click. This time there was a flash. Baldwin felt something hit his neck. He fell back.

  “It’s crazy,” Jonha said. “But that’s what those guys do there: They just aim to kill.”

  Later, maybe a decade later, Jeff Baldwin ran into the guy. He didn’t want to fight. But Jeff had to know: How many bullets were in the clip that night? He’d figured with all that clicking, there had to be just one. “All five,” the scrub said. “They was duds.” That’s the first time Jeff knew how lucky he was—could’ve been gut-shot, or dead. As it was, the one live round nicked a channel along his neck. The doctor at Aliquippa Hospital needed twenty stitches to close the wound.

  “You know what actually saved me?” Baldwin said. “My sister bought me a stainless-steel silver necklace for Christmas and I told her I would never take it off. I had that on and it ricocheted off the stainless-steel necklace. Half a millimeter more, it would’ve hit my jugular vein.”

  He had been in the newspaper just that morning, listed with the dozen other Aliquippa football players who’d received scholarship offers to small colleges, junior colleges, but also Ohio State, Kansas State, and Mic
higan State. The class of ’81 had gone 12-1 in its final season, lost in the ’80 WPIAL final to Thomas Jefferson, and was, in all, one of the most talented lineups the town had seen. And Baldwin was one of the best—first-team all-state, 230 pounds and 6-foot-3 now. He made it to graduation the following night, too, in dress shoes and suit coat, a thick bandage pasted to his neck.

  The scrub got hauled off to juvenile court, and Pitt head coach Jackie Sherrill made sure to hustle Jeff out of town for the summer, had him working a horse farm in Canonsburg. Jeff loved Sherrill, his drive and loyalty. He’d gained ten pounds for the man by the time he got to camp, and Sherrill switched him to defensive tackle and Jeff played second-string freshman year. But when Sherrill left for Texas A&M that winter, he took Pitt’s faith in Jeff with him.

  The new coach, Foge Fazio, wanted to move Baldwin to the offensive line. He refused, slogged through his sophomore season as a backup, and, when it looked like his junior season would be more of the same, told Yannessa he needed to transfer. “Don,” Fazio explained. “If he would just go over to the offensive side of the ball, he would start.”

  “The problem with Jeff Baldwin was that, defensively, it’s a reaction game,” Yannessa said, pointing to his eyes. “And by the time the information went from here to his feet, it was too late: it was past him. On offense, you always know where you’re going; you don’t have to react. If he’d have made that transition, he would’ve played.” Yannessa shrugged. “He didn’t.”

  Soon Baldwin’s confidence was in tatters. He started two games in his three-year Panther career before dropping out. “I just lost the desire,” Jeff said.

  His son, Jamie Brown, was a kindergartner in Aliquippa then. He lived with his mother, but recalls seeing Jeff play at Pitt, recalls his dad giving him a football each Christmas, recalls intermittent attempts to pass on wisdom. Jeff wasn’t around much to coach him, day in and day out, but he pushed six-year-old Jamie to play Little Quips football. The boy quit midway through his first season. “He put so much in me,” Jamie said. “Told me to be the best at whatever I do. Stand up for what you believe in.”