Wilt, 1962

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  What fans saw in the Chamberlain-Russell wars in 1961–62 was less than the full truth. The men shared a friendship; while in town to play the Warriors in November, Russell ate Thanksgiving dinner in the home of Chamberlain’s parents in west Philly. The two players dined together in Boston, too, sometimes with Attles or Sam Jones. McGuire warned the Dipper that Russell was trying to soften him up before games. The Dipper didn’t believe it. Their personalities defined their style of play and how they treated opponents: Russell confrontational and defiant, the Dipper anything but, relying more on finesse with his fall-away shot. That Chamberlain never fouled out of a game in his fourteen NBA seasons can be explained in part by his preference to avoid confrontation. When the Celtics’ black players had talked about boycotting the exhibition game in Lexington, Kentucky, Russell had led the discussion. That was not Chamberlain’s way. About the broader issue of civil rights, the Dipper said only, “The best way to help integration is to live a good, clean life.” This comment—straight-faced, banal, flat—typified the Dipper’s public position on the issue at the time. His private life, of course, was a different matter.

  Traveling to Boston guaranteed the Dipper would face jeers and derision. At the Boston Garden in January, the public address announcer facetiously told the crowd that Chamberlain had broken the arena record for most shots taken in a quarter. The crowd erupted in laughter. McGuire, in a red-faced fury, raced over to the p.a. announcer’s table. “Is this the way you build up basketball?” he asked, shouting. “Why does everyone want to ridicule him?” McGuire would say, “I’d like to see Russell play Wilt all alone. People think that’s what happens. When he got his sixty-two [points] Sunday, Wilt was playing against Russell, Tom Heinsohn, Tom Sanders, and Bob Cousy, sometimes in a collapsing zone. It isn’t Wilt versus Russell but Wilt versus the world.”

  End of the third quarter: Chamberlain with sixty-nine points, including nine during the final two minutes of the quarter, the Warriors holding a nineteen-point lead, Pollack typing furiously on his Olivetti, Campbell wondering aloud how high the Dipper’s scoring total might go. The record, yes, but how high? Sitting with his ten-year-old son on folding chairs near the court, the Associated Press photographer Paul Vathis wasn’t taking any chances. He told his son, “Wilt’s going to get eighty. You stay right here. I’ll be back.” Vathis went outside to his car and pulled his MamiyaFlex 2¼-inch camera from his trunk. The previous spring, he captured JFK and Ike walking alone even as press secretary Pierre Salinger announced to waiting photographers, “Okay, boys, that’s it. Lids on.” Now, he reentered the Hershey Sports Arena, a mere spectator no more, and planted himself beneath the Warriors basket. Something special was about to happen. He took the lid off.

  CHAPTER 11

  Ryman of Chocolate Town

  FROM THE MOMENT OF HIS FIRST AWARENESS, Kerry Ryman understood that his world was shaped by chocolate. It dominated his senses: every second of his life he could see, taste, touch, and, most of all, smell it.

  Ryman was a typical Hershey kid. Born in Hershey Hospital, he attended the Hershey public schools, his father worked at the Hershey chocolate factory, and his family lived in a rented row house on Chocolate Avenue. It was difficult for young Ryman to make it more than two or three sentences without mentioning Hershey since nearly everything in his town—every aspect of his existence—was infused, in fact, in spirit, or in scent, with that name. Ryman’s mother once had been a cheerleader at Hershey High and as a young girl often saw Mr. Hershey from afar, smoking his cigars on the porch of his lovely mansion, Highpoint, as she and her girlfriends picked violets on the hillside below. The old man always waved to them. Lucille Poorman Ryman liked to tell people that she had chocolate in her veins, and when Milton Hershey died in 1945, she had been moved to write a poem entitled “Our Founder”:

  His ambition, generosity and success,

  Brought to the unfortunate happiness….

  He was equally kind to the great and small,

  And commanded respect and love from all,

  The good deeds of this Philanthropist are seen today,

  And the memories of Mr. Hershey shall not fade away.

  Ninety miles northwest of Philadelphia, Hershey sat in the lush Lebanon Valley, surrounded on three sides by an amphitheater of mountains. It was a neat and orderly town of nearly 6,000, the Amish and the Dutch craftsmen close at hand, where the sound of the crickets on summer nights was drowned out by the screams of kids at the amusement park riding The Comet roller coaster.

  Was it a town surrounding a chocolate factory or vice versa? To read The Hershey News, published twice a month in 1962, it was difficult to tell since much of its news—nearly always good news—was about the Hershey Chocolate Corporation: a proposed split of the corporation stock, or its women’s bowling team, the Chocolettes, bound for the state tournament in Erie. Certainly, it was a Republican town whose partisan leanings were evident in 1953 when President Dwight Eisenhower came from his farm in Gettysburg to celebrate his sixty-third birthday. Ike’s motorcade swept down Chocolate Avenue where five-year-old Kerry Ryman (with a broken leg) was set up by his mother in a chaise longue and received a wave from the passing president. That night Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, drove a horse-drawn buggy into the Hershey arena and 7,000 locals chanted, “We Like Ike, We Love Mamie!” and lit candles in the darkness and sang “Happy Birthday” to the president.

  An eighth-grader like Kerry Ryman could learn a lot in Hershey in 1962 just by listening. At school, in current events, he could learn about the heroic astronaut, Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn, or the evil Mr. Khrushchev and his nuclear missiles. In the neighborhood, he could learn the latest buzz from the chocolate factory from workers in printing or in molding or in longitude (where chocolate paste was machine-blended into a smooth liquid). At home, he could learn from his parents about just how lucky he was. “You’re growing up like a rich kid,” they told him, “thanks to Mister Hershey.” Seventeen years after his death, Mr. Hershey still made possible the Ryman family home—rented to a factory worker’s family for $16 per month. He also made possible Kerry Ryman’s daily after-school entertainment at the Community Club. An Italian Renaissance structure, elegant and U-shaped, the club featured a swimming pool, basketball courts, trampolines, slate pool and billiards tables, a library, a social room, and an ornate 1,900-seat theater with stylized balconies and a Pompeian lobby of marble grandeur. Kerry Ryman’s full-year club membership cost his parents three dollars.

  Because of Milton Hershey, Kerry Ryman didn’t have to travel to see the world. The world came to him. Broadway shows. First-run movies, The Magnificent Seven and Lawrence of Arabia, watched in opulence and splendor on Friday nights, “Movie Night,” at the Hershey Theater, and for only a dime. Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars: Paul Anka, Chubby Checker, the Shirelles. Ryman’s own local favorites, the Hershey Bears of the American Hockey League. The Philadelphia Eagles in training camp each summer. Ryman had even carried the helmets of Eagles Chuck Bednarik and Pete Retzlaaf from the dressing room at the Hershey Sports Arena across the street to the practice field at Hershey Stadium. He had seen the great (if sometimes wobbling) Sonny Jurgensen entering the Oyster Bar on Cocoa Avenue. When the Eagles left town, the Warriors arrived for their own preseason camp: Dipper Chamberlain, Pitchin’ Paul Arizin, and Tommy Gola. Ryman watched Chamberlain play pool in the Community Club, awed at how he made shots by reaching his long arms to the far edge of the table and how he moved the scoring buttons along the wire near the ceiling with a simple reach and the flick of his fingers. (Ryman could only reach the wire with his pool cue.) The Dipper treated Ryman and his buddies like friends, nearly. He bought them ice cream cones and once, in a playful basketball game between the Warriors and local schoolboys, he’d lifted little Larry Wagner, a boy known as the Flea, and set him inside the basket, his legs dangling from the rim.

  Ryman never had to leave Hershey to see or do any of this. Everyone and everything came to him. To a fourteen
-year-old boy who loved basketball, it was all he could hope for: clean water, clean streets, clean parks, clean living … and the Dipper.

  All thanks to Mr. Hershey.

  Milton Snavely Hershey, a small man with a gray mustache, middle-aged paunch and, invariably, a cigar in hand, was a benevolent dictator, the wizard of his own chocolate Oz. It was his town, named for him, paid for by him, and populated by many of his workers. He christened the main boulevards Chocolate and Cocoa Avenues, and its side streets for brands of cocoa beans: Java, Granada, Areba, Caracas. He served as an early fire chief and mayor in town. In 1927, he said, “I am trying to build here a place where people can be happy and contented while they work, and live in pleasant surroundings.” Of course, he had his own sensibilities, framed by his mother’s strict Mennonite beliefs, and in return for his great civic gifts, he wanted his townspeople to act accordingly. Once, Hershey noticed a visiting salesman in the local department store, his arm draped around a young woman working the candy counter. This violated Hershey’s own code of decorum. At once he found, and fired, the supervisor. As his driver, Roy Tice, chauffeured him through his town, M.S. Hershey jotted notes about which lawns and houses were not properly maintained; that was the least residents could do, he reasoned, given that he had made those homes available and affordable. He was known to hire private detectives to find out the source of the local liquor flow during Prohibition and even to learn who was dropping trash at his lovely Hershey Park. Long after Prohibition, a former chocolate factory worker named Ernie Accorsi opened a beer distributorship in a small shed in his backyard on Areba. Milton Hershey pulled up, Tice behind the wheel. Hershey had known Accorsi from the factory and liked him. He told Accorsi that day he would buy beer from him but with one caveat: “If this turns out to be a hangout for rummies, I’ll run you out of business.” Of course, when Milton Hershey became a regular customer, it did wonders for Accorsi’s beer business.

  After several early business misadventures, Milton Hershey had made his first big money in caramel. In 1898 he married Kitty Sweeney, daughter of an Irish immigrant ironworker, and when he sold his caramel business for $1 million two years later, he and Kitty intended to retire to a life of leisure and travel. He quickly bored of that. Hershey’s father, Henry, was a nomadic dreamer, and his mother, Fanny, a humorless Mennonite with a Calvinist’s love of labor. He took the best qualities of each—plus Henry Ford’s genius for mass production—and built an empire. Better than anyone, Milton Hershey knew that if there was anything America loved as much as automobiles it was chocolate. On March 2, 1903—fifty-nine years to the day before Wilt Chamberlain’s big night in town—the first spade dug into the valley’s fertile soil at the spot where Hershey’s chocolate factory would be built; his mother and father were there to see the symbolic moment. The Hershey milk chocolate bar was followed in 1907 by Hershey’s Kisses and a year later by the Hershey Almond bar. The profits were staggering, and an American icon was born, although the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers nearby complained of “da chockle shtink.”

  In 1909 he and Kitty, with no children of their own, created a school in Hershey that was designed for white, orphaned boys, in keeping with the homogeneous tenor of their town (and with the language in the original mid-nineteenth-century deed for the Girard School in Philadelphia, which served as their model). “I have no heirs,” Milton Hershey would say to Fortune magazine in 1934, “so I decided to make the orphan boys of the United States my heirs.” He quietly endowed the school, where orphaned boys would learn thrift and how to work a farm, with his common corporation stock and other assets, totaling more than $60 million. Upon graduation, every boy received a handshake from Hershey and $100. When Kitty died in 1915 of a neurological disease at the age of forty-two, M.S. Hershey poured himself back into his business, back into his town, never to remarry.

  M.S. Hershey had wizardlike powers in his town and that was never more apparent than during the 1930s: In a remarkable sleight of hand, he made the Great Depression disappear. He went on his own building boom and so kept his people employed. He built the $3 million Community Club (Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace dedicated its ornate theater in September 1933); he built the $1.5 million Hotel Hershey with its grandiose fountains and botanical gardens; he built an office building on Chocolate Avenue; he built the new Milton Hershey Industrial School for his white orphan boys; he built a football stadium seating 16,000 and the Hershey Sports Arena with its state-of-the-art concrete roof. Milton Hershey liked sports. He was seen at the stadium watching car races and once at a hockey game at the old Ice Palace where afterwards fans unknowingly jostled him as they headed for the exits.

  In the 1930s, when he was in his seventies, Hershey still toyed with new chocolate concoctions. Out at the old homestead, where he had been born in 1857, he fiddled with recipes in the kitchen. He never knew the name of the teenaged boy working at the homestead—it was Brent Hancock—so each time he spotted him Hershey said, in his squeaky yet cheery voice, “Hi, boy!” Once, M.S. Hershey stepped from the kitchen at the homestead, wearing his apron and carrying a pail. He’d mixed onions and carrots into his chocolate. He wanted the boy to have a taste. Hancock did. It was dreadful, though he couldn’t quite say that to Mr. Hershey. So Hancock nodded and, with the oniony paste still thick in his mouth, smiled bravely and said only, “Yes.” When Mr. Hershey walked away, Hancock rushed into a bathroom. He needed water to wash away the taste.

  Early 1930s: Joseph Nardi, an Old World man, approached the bank teller in Hershey. Like so many of the Italians in town, Nardi worked at the factory, in molding, where over the decades he had earned more respect than money. He spoke broken English—you could hear the Tuscan village of Pitigliano in his voice—and so, just to be sure everything went right, his son-in-law had written specific directions in English for him to give to the bank. Nardi, a meticulous saver, wanted to withdraw $5,000 to buy a house. He handed over the handwritten note. The man behind the counter gave him the money. Nardi counted it. He told the teller a mistake had been made, that he’d been given $6,000, too much. “Listen, you dumb Wop,” the teller replied angrily, “I didn’t make a mistake!” Nardi put the money in his pocket and went to work. There he waited for Mr. Hershey on his rounds. “I’ve got a problem,” he said. Milton Hershey listened patiently as Nardi recounted his story and then found Nardi’s boss and said, “I’m taking Joe Nardi with me for a while.” Tice took them to the bank, Mr. Hershey sitting in the backseat, holding the straps. Nardi was nervous. Confrontation made him uncomfortable. “Point out the man to me,” Hershey said. Nardi pointed across the room. Hershey approached the man. He told him Joe Nardi’s version of the story and said, firmly, “Did this happen?” The teller blanched and said, “No, he’s lying.” Milton Hershey knew Joe Nardi as a loyal worker. Joe Nardi didn’t lie. Hershey eyed the teller suspiciously. “You’re fired,” he told the teller. Back in the car, Joe Nardi, still trembling, asked about the extra thousand dollars. “Keep it, Joe,” Mr. Hershey said. As he returned to molding, Joseph Nardi told himself that Milton Hershey took care of his people.

  The Rymans set up home at 50 West Chocolate Avenue in a duplex. Half a house, they called it. On winter mornings, Reuel Ryman (a graduate of the Hershey school for orphans, class of 1944) bundled up and walked a few blocks to the factory. For nearly fifteen years Reuel Ryman had been walking these same steps, just like so many other Hershey men. He kept working at the factory, in printing, making labels for the Hershey bar and Mister Goodbar, not because he enjoyed it but because it provided benefits, insurance for his family, and the opportunity to rent the duplex. He worked in the factory from 6:30 A.M. until 2:00 P.M. and then returned home to sleep a few hours. After dinner, he showered and drove to the 210 Club, a smoky bar in Harrisburg, where he performed at the Hammond organ until 2:00 A.M. as a member of the Charlie Morrison Trio. (His music was his joy; he performed once at a governor’s conference at the Starlight Ballroom in Hershey. President Eisenhower walked by the
stage and said cheerfully, “Hey, fellas, it sounds really good!” Then the dour vice president, Richard Nixon, walked past the musicians, head down, and said not a word.) Each night, Reuel Ryman returned home to sleep a few more hours, then bundled up in the darkness and retraced his steps to the factory. The Ryman’s duplex only had one bathroom and sometimes, rather than wait for one of his younger siblings to vacate it, Kerry walked over to the Community Club to use the facilities. The local firehouse was in back, and when its fire bell sounded in the darkness, neighborhood volunteers were seen running, pulling on their shirts and pants as they went. In the row of six houses, five were duplexes, only one a single. Neighbors knew each other, and their homes swelled with children’s laughter. Without fences, yards and lives converged. Through the wooden boards in their cellar, Kerry Ryman sometimes heard Mrs. Norman Smith, who lived in the adjoining half, calling to his mother: “Yoo-hoo, Loo-seal? Can I borrow a stick of butter?” Lucille Ryman passed the butter through the hole alongside the cellar steps. It was closely knit living, everyone family.

  Ryman and his buddies usually could be found playing sandlot football in the meadow near the factory or basketball games on the macadam in Kenny Snyder’s back alley on Areba. (Snyder was Ryman’s town hero, a Hershey High sports star who, upon graduation, went on to excel in football at Gettysburg College.) Sometimes boredom set in, and the boys wandered to the abattoir. Passing time at the slaughterhouse, they watched workers shock squealing pigs or lift them with a chain only to slit their throats and cut off their heads. The workers stored the heads out back in fifty-five-gallon drums.