Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  Yet as far as drug markets go, crack had an impact—in sheer speed and force of penetration and all the resulting social costs—like few others. Like the later confluence of Viagra and aging baby boomers, crack was that rare case of chemistry and demography converging at the perfect time. In isolated, single-employer towns like those dotting the Beaver Valley, each mill closure had left behind 20-plus-percent unemployment, broken marriages, a spike in suicides—desperate wounds ripe for infection. Those who could leave did. Those who didn’t were left with few options.

  “It snowballed,” said future city councilman Donald Walker. “If people weren’t killing themselves because they lost their jobs, they were turning to drugs and alcohol. At one time in Aliquippa, there was fourteen bars, probably more. Not to mention the privates: my uncle Perry sold alcohol out of his house, a dollar a cup. I witnessed that. That was the times. That’s what you did.”

  “That’s when everybody gave up,” said Jamie Brown, eight years old when LTV went down in ’85. “It seemed like everybody gave up for life. A lot of people were involved in drugging, trying to escape reality.”

  Ty Law was thirteen in 1987, the year his mother, Diane, became a crack addict. He lived by then with her dad, his grandfather, Ray Law, a millworker who’d put in thirty years and retired and had adopted and raised Ty as his own. Diane came and went at the house on Wykes Street in Plan 11 extension, the declining pocket west of Monaca Road. The boy absorbed Ray’s lessons on the value of hard, often-thankless work, day in and out; he took in the havoc and stink of his mom’s dependency, the clash of old and new. New was winning. And once the epiphany hit, once young Ty figured out why his mom was acting so erratically, he was never the same. He began seeing crackheads everywhere.

  In the longest of views, such carnage was generations in the making. “I do think that history leaves its mark on a region,” said Reverend Chris Leighton, who left Aliquippa in 1985 after seven years of ministering downtown. “There was a lot of oppression in Aliquippa, especially in the early days. I know about it; I have an ancestor who led the Western Federation of Miners. The U.S. government shot and killed unarmed people in those days. It’s horrific—and that pain never goes away from the land. People may forget about it, and they come and go. But there is this residual effect.”

  In the short term, though, the result may be as simple as the very human impulse to fill a vacuum. It’s as if, without the built-in need to keep a regular schedule or one’s wits in a world of metal and flame, without the social framework of the timecard and the hope of steady daylight, the town had lost the one force big enough to countervail drugs’ seductive call. Little by little, decade by decade, narcotics of varying strengths had worked their way from the fringes—plaything of the rich, tradecraft of the criminal, millstone of the poor—to the national mainstream. Now in its demise, labor itself, dirty and dangerous and boring, stood revealed as the last defense. When the work crumbled, all hell rushed in.

  “When that mill went down it took everything down with it,” Ty Law said. “And when the drugs came in, either you were going to be a user—and more people did that—or seller. And if you did try it—which, in a town like that you probably ain’t thinking too much of it, because I know heroin went through Aliquippa before because my dad was on that back in the seventies and early eighties—the crack-cocaine thing was a totally different ball game.

  “That hit everybody. Everybody wanted to try it, and they got hooked. And the dealers who knew what it was about? They were getting paid. So they became the new role models—unlike my grandfather and the old-timers who did it the right way: saved up and got a nice car through hard work, went and got it financed, had decent credit. But the new regime came in and it’s drug dealers, and now it ain’t about getting a Buick. It’s a Mercedes. It’s BMW. So now for kids it’s a different perspective: that’s real money.”

  The institutions of legitimacy, meanwhile, only continued to crater. In 1985, LTV’s tax assessment was slashed in half—from $19 million to $9.5 million—and the shrinking tax base left the borough, like many steel orphans in Western Pennsylvania, unable to pay its bills; the 1988 budget carried a deficit at $350,000. On December 23, 1987, Aliquippa became the second Pennsylvania town to be “declared distressed” under Governor Bob Casey’s new Financially Distressed Municipalities Act—Act 47—which, while placing a town’s fiscal affairs under state oversight, also allowed it to receive tax money from nonresidents. Going into Act 47, said council president Mary Alviani then, is “the best Christmas present I could have received.” Weeks later, the state granted the borough a no-interest loan of $460,000. Aliquippa, in essence, had gone on welfare.

  One of the first signs that things were tipping radically in a new direction—especially in housing projects like Griffith Heights and ­Linmar—came in February of 1988, when a group of armed men was arrested early one morning after surrounding a Valley Terrace apartment building. All drove rental cars, three possessed semiautomatic weapons, five were carrying guns with obliterated serial numbers, and five gave Detroit as their home address: Outside interests were making their play. A year later, an estimated 80 percent of crime in the borough was drug-related. Aliquippa was fast becoming the drug capital of Beaver County.

  Jamie Brown, the oldest son of former Quips and Pitt star Jeff Baldwin, was on the cusp of adolescence then. “You could see everything from Third Avenue, Plan 11, could see the drug dealers with their cars and jewelry,” he said. “All the shiny things. My mother was on welfare, Dad wasn’t ever there: all the stuff a kid wanted, I could see I could get it on the street.” He remembers the first step he took.

  “About ’89,” he said. “Crack cocaine had just hit the area. Somebody I knew had it and was hustling it, a little bit older. He got involved and he let me help him. It started on from there. I saw shiny things.”

  14

  Up in Smoke

  It wasn’t the shine that snagged Jamie Brown’s father. It was the murk, that new, anarchic haze. Not right away—Jeff Baldwin gave himself a chance or two: After leaving Pitt, he took a year off and then washed up at nearby California University of Pennsylvania in the summer of ’85, playing noseguard, Division II ball, looking for one last shot at the NFL. But he missed four weeks that season after breaking an ankle, took his cast off too soon, played hard—and was never the same. The Philadelphia Eagles came to work him out, and the Steelers seemed interested. Nothing panned out. He ended up back home at the house on Washington Street.

  The next path was the one blazed by scores of ex-footballers who fell short of the league, who saw policing as the next best thing, on paper anyway; there was the badge and uniform, after all, and instant respect and a chance to feel that same adrenaline high from the hit, the chase, the thrill of bringing some hyped-up badass down. Peep Short did it, from Pitt to the semipro Pittsburgh Maulers to the police academy to corrections officer in the county jail—and now he was rising fast at the county sheriff’s, loud and proud. Baldwin enrolled in the academy at the Community College of Beaver County in 1986.

  “Matter of fact, we started out, got hired part-time as Aliquippa police together,” said future Aliquippa police chief Andre Davis. “We were friends, and were in the academy together. He didn’t last maybe two years, if that. He had an addiction problem.”

  Baldwin wasn’t much of a cop. During that stint he admitted to misdemeanor convictions for theft and unauthorized use of a vehicle—neither of which resulted in immediate dismissal. Eventually, Baldwin “informed me that he had a drug dependency problem,” William Alston, the police chief then, testified in court fifteen years later, and was told to either resign or be fired. Baldwin denied that on the stand, saying he quit because police training interfered with his wedding, and has never publicly admitted to drug use. But his reputation plummeted. Those who knew him at his best saw disturbing signs.

  One night in 1986 or ’87, Don Yannessa recalled, he was wok
en up by a banging on the front door of his house in Center. It was a Friday night, into Saturday, 3 a.m. He reached for a gun, crept downstairs, and squinted through the peephole at a figure outside in the dark. “Coach!” a voice yelled. “It’s Jeff Baldwin!”

  “Jeff?” Yannessa said.

  “Yeah. I got to talk to you.”

  Yannessa walked into the nearby bathroom, placed the firearm on the sink and closed the door. He turned off the house alarm. When he opened the door, Baldwin said that his brother was in a Philadelphia hospital, bad accident, probably wasn’t going to make it. Delois was going crazy, he said, and he needed to get there. He needed $50 for gas.

  The coach walked back upstairs. Elaine was standing in the hallway in her housecoat, and watched her husband go into the bedroom and rustle through his wallet. It had been years now, but still: his player. “Coach,” Baldwin promised, “I’ll get it back to you on Monday.”

  When he got back upstairs, the bedroom was dark. Yannessa was feeling pretty good about himself; he liked being the one they could depend on. He hurried out of his clothes, slid back under the covers, figuring his wife asleep.

  “Don,” Elaine said in the darkness. “Why don’t you just put a MAC (automated teller) machine on the side of the house, so when they pull down the driveway they can get their money and not wake us up?”

  That gave him pause. “Then I found out,” Yannessa said. “­Everybody—the principal, other teachers, other coaches—was saying he was making the rounds: one, two, three o’clock in the morning, giving everybody the same bullshit. And then we all [figured] Okay, he’s on crack. There was times when I was coaching in Aliquippa and involved in a bar and restaurant when he would come into this bar and he would ask. And I’d say, ‘No, Jeff. Don’t ever come to me for money again. You get somebody else to give you that money, shove that shit up your nose, whatever you do with it.’”

  By then the drug trade was leaking into the town’s lifeblood, wiping out thickly drawn lines between legitimate and illegitimate businesses and behaviors. Police found themselves arresting not just young bucks, but ex-steelworkers, some in their sixties and seventies. Peep Short and Sherman McBride were best friends, had been part of the core that made Aliquippa’s football team the model for racial coexistence in the late ’70s. They remained close, and after college was done—Short at Pitt, McBride at Ohio University—returned home. They saw each other plenty. Holidays, weddings, dinners: Short treated Sherm’s mom like his second mother; he ate plenty at the McBride home in Mount Vernon.

  Sherman’s oldest brother, Grover “Bobo” McBride Jr., grew up playing football against Tony Dorsett; after graduation from Aliquippa, he joined his father in J&L’s 14-inch mill. A decade later, along with thousands of others in the early ’80s, “he got laid off,” said Sherm McBride. “And got into the ‘pharmaceutical’ business.”

  It didn’t take long for word to reach Short, now an officer in the Beaver County Sheriff’s Office: Bobo was distributing. Short knew Grover well. “I ate over there and he ate over my house,” Short said. “We were close. I told him. It wasn’t like I was warning him off, but I said, ‘Look, man, you’re in the fuckin’ way.’ I told Grover, I tell just about anybody: I’m not giving you any kind of information that I’m coming to bust you, or the detectives or the state police is coming to bust you. All I’m telling you: ‘You’re in the fuckin’ way.’ Which is code or a language for: Stop doing what you’re doing, bro—because if I know, everybody else knows.

  “Some guys listened, some didn’t. And those that were in the way that didn’t listen, I arrested.”

  In July 1988, Short took a ride to see Sherm’s mother, Janice.

  “Mom, it’s never personal with me,” Short told her. “I’ve warned him several times, but his name just keeps ringing.”

  “Peep,” she said. “You have a job to do. No hard feelings.”

  Two weeks later, Short arrested Grover Jr. in the Bethel Baptist Church parking lot, charging him with possession “with intent to deliver” multiple packages of rock and powder cocaine. Grover Sr. paid $2,000—10 percent of the $20,000 bail—in cash to get his son out. One month later, Short again busted Bobo, this time at 1 p.m. on Todd Road, and found in his possession “44 packets of white powder substance, to wit—cocaine and 2 packets of rock form cocaine.” Grover Sr. paid that bail in cash, too.

  Grover McBride Jr., then thirty-one, pleaded no contest to two criminal charges of “possession with intent to deliver,” and in August 1989 was sentenced to fifteen to thirty-six months in state prison. “His first offense,” Sherm said. “The first time he’d ever been in jail.”

  You don’t talk about Berwick. Absurd, isn’t it? Sean Gilbert has nothing to apologize for. All-American at Pitt, third overall pick in the NFL Draft, all-rookie, Pro Bowl, eleven seasons with the Rams, Redskins, Carolina Panthers, and Oakland, 146 pro games. He never played in a Super Bowl, so the painful losses piled up, year after year. But even after more than two decades, it’s that 13-0 defeat to Berwick in the ’88 Pennsylvania state title game, the last game of his Aliquippa career, that hurts the most.

  It doesn’t help that Gilbert, afterward, starred as a senior on the Quips’ basketball team that won a state title. USA Today had ranked Florida’s Pine Forest football team No. 1 in the country to Aliquippa’s No. 2; a loss by Pine Forest and an Aliquippa win over Berwick, Yannessa had told everyone, would mean the national championship. Not to mention the first statewide football title: Until then, competition for Pennsylvania prep footballers ended at the regional level. No Quips team had ever played for higher stakes. Yannessa spoke dreamily about national championship rings. Even the Berwick coach, sandbagging or not, said that Aliquippa was good enough to win the Division III college national title.

  “Don’t ever mention that one to him,” Diana said of her brother. “If you say that to him? They all freeze up, like, Who? Berwick? Don’t even say that name.”

  Oddly, most folks do leave Gilbert alone about this. He lives in North Carolina and remains a distant presence when he returns home. Maybe it’s the fact that a state title in his day had nowhere near the prestige of winning one WPIAL crown, let alone two. Or maybe it’s because he became the first postmill superstar, the best to rise out of town since Dorsett, the best to come out of the school since Ditka, that Gilbert is given the rarest of passes. Because anyone connected with Aliquippa football? If you lose, you never live it down.

  “You can’t walk out here with no bullshit team,” said Peep Short. “You can’t walk out here with all these former players and people who’ve been around fifty, sixty years watching you. You don’t pass that smell test? They’ll let you know. In every coffee shop and newspaper stand and every corner, they’ll let you know: Them boys is playing like shit. What’s going on up there? I’ve had old players call me after the first game: ‘What’s wrong with you, Coach Short? We didn’t punch nobody. . . . That guy got beat and you didn’t yell at him or nothing. . . .’”

  To his dying day, Short will still be seeing that ball fluttering out of his grasp, twenty feet in the air, that sure touchdown on the final play, the win against Blackhawk in ’78—gone. But just to be sure, someone at the wake will be whispering a reminder in his ear. “Nobody has to tell me,” Short said, voice rising. “I know it. I know where I messed up.” But then the voice goes soft. “They remind me of it, sometimes,” he said.

  Even in Yannessa’s lean years, there had been a standard. In projects like Linmar Terrace, the idea that football players were small gods took hold. Little Mike Warfield, raised alone by a single mother, would sit on the stoop and stare after the team’s kicker on fall Fridays, equipment bag over the shoulder, on the way to get his dunt-dunt-dunt. But Warfield’s timing couldn’t have been worse: he grew up to be the starting quarterback of the ’86 team, the one squad after Yannessa started piling up titles to come up empty—no WPIAL championship, and a season-e
nding loss to Ambridge besides.

  “Oh, we’re like dogs,” Warfield said.

  The next year, ’87, Timmie Patrick, a senior starting fullback, was sitting in a corner of the locker room just before the home opener against Center. His dad, Ocie, with all those burns on his hands from thirty years in the blast furnace, had regaled his six sons forever about the game he played just weeks after getting his appendix removed. Timmie’s older brother, Daryl, had played out the ’83 season with a broken wrist, caught passes in a cast. Now, every time the door swung open, Timmie heard the band playing, the crowd buzzing. He can’t remember which came first: the goose bumps or the tears. He was crying as he ran onto the field.

  His first carry, a cluster of bodies fell on his left ankle, and Timmie Patrick heard it pop. He limped off the field and as the trainer, Art Piroli, was taping him, Patrick kept urging him, “Art, hurry up. . . .”

  “Why?” Piroli said. Timmie didn’t even look up at the stands. He knew.

  “My dad’s coming down here.”

  After a few seconds, Ocie’s voice rolled in from behind the bench. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I hurt my ankle,” Timmie said.

  “Get your ass out there!”

  Timmie played the entire game. He played every game that season, limping, and never let a doctor check it out. “I’m sure I had a fractured ankle,” Patrick said. “That’s just what you do.”