Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  And soon all the bad war news, all the faraway killing and dying, would stop. The best days were coming. You could feel it.

  PART TWO

  October 14, 2011

  . . . . So there’s an ESPN crew here tonight, a few local scribes, a writer from a national magazine, and a stream of a few thousand people ignoring the day’s lashing rain. The reward is Aliquippa’s biggest home game of the season, a glimpse of sun, a suddenly blueing sky. It’s getting past 6:30 p.m., pregame drills just finishing, when defensive coordinator Dan “Peep” Short—massive, alert, poetically profane, and wielding a menacing five-foot staff of polished oak—pops out the field house door and into the home end zone.

  Standing there is Tommie Campbell, the latest Quip to make good. In 2005, Campbell was the area’s Athlete of the Year, winner of the state title in the 100-meter dash, a can’t-miss speedster with a full scholarship to play football at the University of Pittsburgh. Then he slept his way out of Pitt, blew a second chance at a smaller college, and ended up swabbing toilets as a night-shift janitor at Pittsburgh Airport before, essentially, waking in the nick of time. Now, just turned twenty-four, Campbell is a Tennessee Titans rookie with a four-year, $2.09 million contract, come back home to bask some.

  Everyone knew Campbell would be here. Short, though, seems oddly startled. Campbell played for him, even wore the number 29 in honor of his coach’s own uniform number at Pitt. Yet, at the sight of him, the coach cuts the volume on a persona usually set on full blast. It’s a remarkable reduction of self: You could spend a year in Aliquippa and never once hear Peep Short described as shy. Then again, in a town where nearly every person can claim a bond of blood or circumstance with the next, no relationship may be more complicated than Campbell and Short’s.

  “How you feelin’, Tommie?” he says.

  Campbell keeps his eyes fixed on the field. He doesn’t smile. The voice, when it comes, is full of ice. “Like a million bucks,” he says.

  Quips are trotting off the field now. They brush past the two men, their socks and gloves colored, for one night, fight-against-breast-cancer pink. Mess with the team’s traditional black, red, and white? It seems sacrilegious, at least in the awkward silence that has now gone on three beats too long. “Why’re you wearing pink?” Campbell says finally.

  “Times change, Tommie.”

  Campbell stares at the emptying field as if it’s on fire. “Man,” he says, “Aliquippa ain’t changed for fifty years. . . .”

  “No,” Short says. “It’s changed.”

  Campbell takes another shot, a sharp, quick jab. “Same defense,” he says.

  “Why change the defense?” Short says. “We keep winning championships.”

  Short turns, follows the last straggler inside. Benches, battered steel lockers: Fifty-eight large young men jostle about, brewing up that fine sporting stench of polyester, sweat, and nerves frayed to hair-trigger sensitivity. Players pass around a Sharpie to scrawl memorials on the white tape choking their wrists.” RIP Mom”; “RIP DLR”; “RIP Gram”; “T.D.W,” “BDB,” “WOO.” Some players are jabbering, some stare at the floor; one senior is crying. Now a coach grunts. The players stand as one and, ignoring the central door leading straight out to the field, file out a side entrance for the presentation.

  “The only time we go out that door,” says assistant coach Timmie Patrick, nodding at the portal below the handmade wooden sign WE RULE OUR HOUSE, “is to kick someone’s ass.”

  Aliquippa is a young team this season, its most talented cohort the tenth-graders who’ve been studied and pushed by the town since they began playing Little Quips ball at five years old. Game nights, it has long been school tradition that the starters’ names be called by the public address announcer, punctuated by the school band’s drumbeat—three hits—and cymbal crash, as the player runs on-field with a cheerleader on his arm. As much as its old-time offense, this is the nearly all-black, rap-animated squad’s firmest connection to Aliquippa football’s square, white roots. No one calls it corny. In fact, this moment—those three drumbeats, especially—remains the siren call for any youngster toting a ball on Aliquippa ground.

  “We called it ‘dunt-dunt-dunt,’” says Mike Warfield, a former Quips quarterback. “It’s unspoken, but everybody wanted to get called out with the cheerleader.” Lately, the expression has expanded beyond football. Drug dealers, cops, anybody who’s been raised in town knows it as shorthand for recognition, respect, Aliquippa’s be-all and end-all. “I get my dunt-dunt-dunt whenever I drive into the city,” says incoming mayor Dwan Walker. “Swear to God, goose bumps on my arm. I ride down Franklin Avenue, I see the City Building, I feel like I’m getting my dunt-dunt-dunt.”

  There’s no cheerleader on the arm tonight. Each senior runs out alone onto the field, crashing through a paper banner at midfield, where, on the other side, parents or sisters or brothers wait to bid him goodbye. “It’s nice,” says assistant head coach Sherm McBride, standing at the 5-yard line. He had his own such moment back in 1980, and for a second, watching them pass one by one, he seems unusually touched by the sight. Yes, someone agrees, it is kind of beautiful.

  “No,” McBride says. “Just seven seniors. THAT’s nice.” In other words: forget tonight, fool. Tonight’s nearly past. Seven seniors means we’re stocked deep for next season.

  The PA announcer directs the crowd’s attention to one corner, where Campbell, in a blue checked shirt and preppy shoes, stands now with Jon Baldwin, a rookie with the Kansas City Chiefs. “Two former Quips,” the voice booms, “making their mark in the NFL!” Baldwin wears all black—jeans slung below his ass, T-shirt, baseball hat tilted at a rakish angle. He, too, is known for the path just missed: A derailed football career set his dad adrift for years on Aliquippa’s mean streets; his half brother is serving twenty to forty years in prison for the 2001 murder of an Aliquippa police officer. The two pros grin and wave. Their mothers rise amid cheering, eyes wet, feeling something like victory.

  When the team files back into the field house for its final pregame prep, a senior, Davion Hall, sits on a bench, drops his head in his hands, and doesn’t move. One by one, his teammates pass, placing a hand on his head, his back. McBride leans into his ear, whispers, “This is your last game. Play hard. Go hard like you do. . . .”

  Just before game time, head coach Mike Zmijanac—sixty-nine years old, 6-foot-1 when he doesn’t stoop, walrus-mustached, with a mop of white hair and a habit of christening his players with lifelong nicknames like Sauce, Mouth, City, Dreads, The Big Russian, and Pimp—calls for the team to gather in. Players circle and drop to a knee; Coach Z draws himself up, towering now like a lighthouse in a sea of black. The walls thrum with the band’s relentless drumming. The expanding bustle of the crowd, louder by the second, sounds like high tide coming in.

  “The reason all these people are here today is not because of you,” Zmijanac says, voice deep and oddly self-echoing, as if rising from the bottom of a well. “It’s because of all the people who came before you—and all the people you owe for what you wear on your shirt. I keep reminding you: You want to make your own legend, you want them to come back because of you and what you did? It’s strictly up to you and us to do it: make our own legend. Play hard, take care of the ball, pay attention to what you’re doing and play the game the right way—the Aliquippa way. That’s why it says that on your shirt. Play hard. Get after their ass. . . .”

  “Come on, baby!” McBride shouts. “It’s on! It’s on, it’s on, it’s on!”

  Zmijanac lowers his head. “Our Father . . . ,” he begins, and dozens of voices chime in, “. . . who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .” and the prayer rushes as always to its mumbling end, followed by players shouting, “Quips on three: one, two, three . . . QUIPS!”

  Now they pour out the main door, each throwing up a hand to slap the sign. A man dressed as an Indian rides a horse named War Eagle to the c
enter of the field and flings a flaming spear into the turf. War Eagle delays kickoff by dropping a shit on the grass, but no one in the stands seems to notice. Old, young, white, black, monied or desperate, criminal thinking about a score, ex-steelworker with aching knees, ex-teacher wondering which students will survive: it doesn’t matter. In the final seconds before kickoff, they’re all charged with that same old thrill. John Evasovich wanders up the sideline, eyes wide.

  “You’d think, coming to games here since 1948, I wouldn’t get excited—­particularly having played,” he says, throwing up his hands. “But I do. . . .”

  The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

  —George Santayana

  5

  A War Game

  Jackie showed him how. Jimmy Frank had heard of the man, of course; by the time June rolled around, Jackie Robinson’s day-to-day shredding of baseball’s color barrier had become part of the national conversation. And that was the general idea when Jimmy’s oldest brother took him to his first-ever major league game at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field: to live the phenomenon, see the social pioneer. Witnessing the first display of Robinson’s unmatched daring was a bonus.

  It was June 24, 1947. Jimmy Frank was sixteen then, old enough to know what the ballplayer faced. By then he’d learned to sit in the balcony of Aliquippa’s theaters, separated from the whites in the prime seats below. He’d already been driving his dad’s truck for years, delivering coal and ice, cleaning trash out of the shops on Franklin Avenue—the Kroger, the Giant Eagle—hauling bushel baskets of ashes out of the basement of the tony Woodlawn Hotel down near the train station. In winter, they’d sprinkle ash on icy streets and sidewalks for traction. He would eat at the Station Lunch. It was the only restaurant downtown where blacks were allowed.

  “You accepted those things,” Frank said. “We couldn’t stay at the Woodlawn Hotel: we could clean it up and clean the ashes and all, but we couldn’t stay there. But we didn’t protest, we didn’t try no counter-sitting. We just accepted those things.”

  By 1940, some 3,200 blacks lived in Aliquippa, making up just under 12 percent of the population, their place in the social order like it was in the nation at large: they were third-class citizens, behind the WASP and northern European bosses, the immigrants whose white skin and shortened surnames made assimilation just a matter of time. Still, pejoratives like “Hunky,” “Yid,” and “Mick” flew as commonly as “Spade” or “Spic” or worse, sometimes among friends. Indeed, among Aliquippa whites, it has become an article of faith that the town’s hardships discriminated against no one.

  “I never grew up prejudiced,” said Mike Ditka, who entered high school in 1953. “I knew black people were different than white people, but what the hell was the difference? Their dad worked right next to mine in the mill. It wasn’t like we had anything they didn’t have. So I could never understand that.”

  “Everybody was equal,” said Aliquippa High football coach Mike Zmijanac, who graduated from the school in 1960. “All of us—Polish and Serbians, Lebanese and blacks—we grew up together because we all made the same money. All the parents worked in the mill, and they all worked together. There were really no prejudices. I learned to swear in Lebanese and Italian and Greek.”

  But if he himself was unaffected by bigotry, Ditka wasn’t deaf or blind. The area was “very prejudiced,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Whether you were a Polack or a Hunky or a Jew or a Dago or a Wop or a cake-eater or colored—we didn’t use the other slang word for blacks—it was prejudiced.” But then Ditka, by his own admission, led a fairly proscribed existence. One of his high school classmates, Gust Avrakotos, who would later gain renown as a CIA operative guiding Congressman Charlie Wilson in his “war” to aid the Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union, kept much later hours.

  “Each of the Plans had a gang, and they fought like cats and dogs,” Avrakotos once said. “Each Plan fought among itself, but when the niggers came we all banded together. You had to be very fucking practical.”

  In other words, skin trumped ethnicity, push come to shove, and to be black in Aliquippa was to know that you were on your own. Until the mid-1950s, black workers at J&L almost invariably went through the tunnel and took a left toward the North Mill’s dirty and sulfurous jobs in the blast furnace and 14-inch bar mill; whites turned right, toward the South Mill’s cleaner shifts in places like the seamless tube mill. Restrooms were segregated. White leaders were known to look after whites first, in both the offices of management and at Steelworkers Local 1211, shunting blacks away from clerical or union work to lower-paying, unskilled positions like maintenance and service.

  “I knew there was no future,” said Eugene “Salt” Smith of his initiation into a ten-year stint at J&L in 1957. “When I got hired, they hired four people—two blacks and two whites. The two blacks were high school graduates, the two whites were nongraduates. One of the blacks was a football star, Richard Blackson; they sent he and I to the labor gang, and sent the two white guys to the special department. They started making, like, thirty-five, forty cents an hour more than us. Right away I said, ‘Something’s not right.’”

  Options were limited. Jimmy Frank—future college president—had just finished his sophomore year and wasn’t thinking about college. If a black kid wasn’t obviously studious then, the guidance counselors at Aliquippa High directed him toward the trades; Jimmy Frank was taking the “electrical course.” He loved basketball and baseball, but big-time sports in the mid-1940s was white-only. His path was heading straight to, as Frank put it, “the hottest place in the world”—a J&L blast furnace.

  But then there he sat—with his big brother, Robert, who had followed their dad into the mill—taking in an afternoon ball game on a June Tuesday. They were hardly alone in the right-field stands; 35,329 others had crammed into Forbes Field, too. Robinson was playing first base, as he would all that season, and it was something to see in ­person—the way Jackie had of walking that line between aggression and control, the lone spot of black in an expanse of green grass, brown dirt, and white faces, without apology.

  “He was the crack,” Jimmy Frank said. “That gave us impetus, that gave us inspiration, that gave us hope. Jackie Robinson gave us hope that it could happen.”

  But hope’s an abstraction. For a sixteen-year-old kid, nothing provided a more immediate, visceral thrill than Robinson’s guts. Pittsburgh pitcher Fritz Ostermueller, a forty-year-old lefty, had fired a rising fastball at Robinson’s arm five weeks earlier, a warning shot that drew rallying curses and threats from the Dodgers dugout. Now the score was tied, 2-2, in the fifth inning, with Ostermueller on the mound and Robinson dancing off third base. With the count 2-1, Robinson bolted; Ostermueller flinched and there Jackie went, sliding safe under the mitt of a Pittsburgh catcher named—perfectly—Dixie Howell, with what would prove the winning run. Looking back, no play better summed up Jackie Robinson, Ballplayer, than stealing home. He did it nineteen times in his career. Jimmy Frank was there to see the first.

  “The image is very vivid today. I’ll never forget,” Frank said, sixty-five years later. “He’s my hero.”

  Yet, in truth, what Jimmy Frank and Aliquippa had to learn from Jackie or Branch Rickey or major league baseball was more symbolic than practical. Because even with the racial and ethnic lines and tensions, when it came to the high school and its sports teams the town remained markedly color-blind.

  Come summer, you’d see some divisions bubble as high school athletes drifted back into their various social hubs—the Serbian and Ukrainian Clubs, the Sons of Italy, the Celtic Reds for whites, the Quippian Club for blacks—to play for neighborhood and clan. But even there, teams raided each other for talent, looking to field the best lineup regardless of race. Jimmy Frank was tutored in the fine points of baseball by a white Italian, the manager of the MPI (Musical Political Italian) Club team, who didn’t even ask him to play. He just wanted to
make Jimmy better.

  Each fall about a dozen black boys and girls enrolled at Aliquippa High, and when it came time for square dancing in Miss Elizabeth Carver’s gym class, blacks were not allowed to dance with whites. For many, that was the first time they’d feel what some dubbed “a racial”: blatant prejudice. “She would pick five white boys and five white girls and they would form a circle—and when she gets to the blacks, she would pick five black boys and five black girls,” said Salt Smith. “Say there was two black males standing and one white female? You didn’t dance.” But if you could play—and help Aliquippa beat other towns—neither your color nor the Plan you lived in mattered. You played together.

  Within a year after seeing Jackie steal home, Jimmy Frank had developed into a superb infielder himself. He was the only black that summer on Aliquippa’s American Legion team, and when it hit the road for a game in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, “we went to this restaurant and they wouldn’t feed us because of me,” Frank said. “Everybody got up and left.” A teammate was a teammate: against outsiders Aliquippa backed its own.

  By then, too, sports had regained the heft it had lost in the war years. Peace meant a refunneling of the tribal urge, and the United Steelworkers was consolidating its newfound clout; wars had been won, home and abroad, by the workingman. The town wasn’t J&L’s alone anymore. Now it belonged to the workingman’s sons, too, and investing in the high school football, basketball, and baseball teams was the easiest way to show that ownership, cheer that change. The shift in sensibility was one that some Ellis Island alums couldn’t grasp. Sports? A game? Who cares? A job: that’s what matters.

  Frank Marocco would be the only boy in his family of fourteen to graduate high school; in the early ’50s his father, Eleutero, kept pushing him to follow his ten older brothers and drop out and go to the mill or carve tombstones in the family’s Logstown memorial shop. But the oldest son, Dominic, a boilermaker, sensed a way for Frank to break out, get an education. For two years, Frank hid the fact that he was playing football. “My father thought I played in the band,” Marocco said. “He found out because my junior year, they had my picture in the paper. And my aunt sees me, says, ‘Frank’s picture!’ and calls my dad. My dad says, ‘He don’t play football, he plays in the band.’