by S. L. Price
Aliquippa High was indeed the undisputed heavyweight champ of Beaver County. It had the area’s largest population, its biggest employer, its most accomplished high school, and now the best football program. Students from next-door Hopewell High had grabbed a chunk of goalpost in the after-game melee at Pitt Stadium: The following Monday, they showed up at Aliquippa’s pep rally and presented it as tribute. With three titles in hand, Aschman was now truly the WPIAL’s “King Carl.” The town was flush enough to reward him with a new 1955 Plymouth—painted, of course, Quips red and black.
“Even with the victory celebration, trouble was at a minimum,” the Beaver Valley Times reported that late November afternoon. “Aliquippa police reported very few disturbances over the weekend.” The place had reached a moment of civic equipoise, a rare balance of ambition, security, and achievement. Some might have called it peace.
6
Father Backs Up
Consider the phrase “Workers’ Paradise.” For most it’s a contradiction that, throughout communism’s decidedly earthy run, was impossible to take seriously. Yet perhaps the final irony of Karl Marx’s vision, the ideal that spawned the Paris Commune, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, endless Red Scares, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the Vietnam War, is that for a time nowhere came closer to realizing it than profit-driven company towns like Aliquippa.
Most there, of course, would have paled at the notion. Yes, postwar Aliquippa was hard-core Democratic, thick with New Deal true believers. But for four years the town had pumped out the weaponry and sent off its youth to die for the American Way; as late as snowy January 1949, sacrifices like Johnny Reft were still coming home in sealed coffins. To suggest any link with the Cold War foe whose iron curtain had clanged down over their relatives’ lives, who then claimed 37,000 more American war dead in Korea, was to invite a punch in the face.
Yet this was the era when locals began describing J&L fondly, and downtown as “lovely”; the idea of smoky, clamorous Aliquippa as a blue-collar standard was taking hold. In 1953 the domestic steel industry, with J&L its fourth-largest producer, employed 650,000; J&L was spending $676 million in a decade-long drive to expand capacity by 35 percent. By the end of the ’50s, the Aliquippa Works employed some 15,000 employees—13,550 of them hourly, unskilled to semiskilled workers whose entry qualifications were little more than a clean police record and the ability to endure monotonous, hazardous work.
Aliquippa’s population stabilized at just over 26,000 after World War II. After the close of Ellis Island as the prime immigrant gateway in 1954, the best place to find a cross-sample of the nation’s newest citizens was on a shop floor; locally run, union-backed “Americanization” programs, mandated in more than thirty states, only sped the melting pot’s boil. Saturdays at Aliquippa High, five instructors taught immigrant children and adults English and “the customs and ideals of a new land,” and prepared them for the naturalization exam. Runoff from the war—the broken and displaced—flowed for years.
“Between 1946 and 1950 there was a dramatic influx of Europeans,” wrote Aliquippa schools superintendent Lytle Wilson of his system’s population. “Americanization classes were filled to capacity. Young boys and girls from Europe came at the rate of four and five a month. They came from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Syria, Rumania, and Portugal. Three came from concentration camps. Evening classes were comprised of adults over forty years of age. From 1949 to 1950 the classes prepared for citizenship two hundred immigrants between the ages of nine and sixty-two. Twenty of these had come from German concentration camps; many had a fine educational background, and were lawyers, teachers, engineers, architects. They represented Russia, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Greece, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Ukrania.”
But this was a headier, more cynical mix than the one that had built the town two generations before, and decidedly less docile. Indeed, the war only completed what labor’s New Deal victories had begun. Gone was J&L’s iron grip over the town’s politics, police, and planning, as well as any sense of noblesse oblige. In its despotic prime, the company had built streets and infrastructure, a quaintly gorgeous library, a slew of ball fields and recreational facilities. Then, in 1940, chairman of the board H. Edgar Lewis announced in the Aliquippa Gazette, “The days when J&L would build swimming pools, homes and public buildings and present them—complete and wrapped in an attractive package—to the people of Aliquippa are over.”
Meant as an on-high pronouncement, Lewis’s statement was actually an acknowledgment of a new reality. The combination of progressive politics, the Supreme Court, and national emergency had forced American industrialists to accept a partnership—often hostile, and increasingly unequal—with labor. War’s end unleashed grievances bottled up by years of no-strike pledges, and a wave of industrial walkouts nationwide. In January 1946 some 750,000 steelworkers struck for an 18½-cent-per-hour wage hike. Three weeks later, management caved.
In June of the following year, a Republican Congress tried rebalancing the scales. Enacted—over President Harry Truman’s veto—as a corrective to the Wagner Act’s wholly pro-union provisions, the Labor-Management Relations Act sponsored by Ohio Senator Robert Taft and New Jersey Representative Fred Hartley outlawed union practices such as secondary strikes and the “closed shop” requiring union membership for employment, and banned communist leanings in union leadership. Most dramatically, Taft-Hartley empowered the president to step in, with the legal might of strikebreaking injunction, if an impending or ongoing strike was deemed a threat to national interest or safety.
Union heads declared Taft-Hartley a “slave-labor law,” and spent much of the next decade fruitlessly pushing for its reform or repeal. But their rhetoric was continually undermined by an age of prosperity: Between the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, steady U.S. military spending, and a booming U.S. auto industry, the demand for steel I-beams, welded tubes for water lines, seamless tube for oil and gas pipe, wires for bedsprings and field fencing, tin cans, pails and nails, fenders, tailpipes, and other car parts seemed limitless. For steelworkers the end of every three-year contract brought another nationwide strike, and victory. Their six-week action in 1949 won funded pensions and health care. A fifty-three-day walkout in 1952, marked by Truman’s illegal seizure of the steel industry, landed significant wage and benefit hikes and recognition of the union shop. Thirty-four days out in 1956 earned the rank-and-file 45 cents more per hour and guaranteed 80 percent pay a year during layoffs.
J&L, meanwhile, had come a long way since the kidnapping of Georg Isasky. Its new chairman, Admiral Ben Moreell, had made his name as commander of the “Seabees,” the Navy combat construction battalion legendary for its harried production of airstrips, docks, and roads in the Pacific Theater, before taking over J&L in 1947. Though deeply conservative, Moreell welcomed unions, considered unilateral management corrupting, and called United Steelworkers president Philip Murray “a true friend.” Because the current labor situation was “so bad that we must experiment,” Moreell once wrote, he was even open to some form of worker participation in management—the so-called Scanlon Plan of tying labor incentives and bonuses to company performance. Big Steel leadership and J&L’s executive committee—suicidally, it would turn out—had no interest.
It’s no coincidence that J&L workers often say that their strikes in the ’50s were directed less at the company than the industry at large. During Moreell’s eleven-year tenure, J&L emerged as a far more benign force in Aliquippa and, despite all its tough declarations, never ceased being a benefactor. Indeed, the company is universally remembered warmly today because it managed, in its retreat from absolute power, to create a sense that it cared about its workers as more than mere employees.
“J&L made us all middle class,” said Gino Piroli, who began his twenty-two-year stint at the Aliquippa Works in 1946. “I always say they were our big brother, because if you needed a bandstand for the Italian festival? They bui
lt it. Memorial Day? They built the bandstand for the ceremonies. You needed a flagpole; they’d give you the flagpole. They really looked out for the people. After the union got in, they were more generous to the people. They weren’t a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ then.”
Nothing better demonstrated that the two antagonists could unite for a common good than the building of Aliquippa Community Hospital. Pushed by the indefatigable Nick DeSalle, an Italian immigrant and former J&L steelworker, the company agreed to sell the town thirty-three acres of land for $1 and give another $1 million in matching funds if DeSalle could first come up with the base. Each payday for the next twenty-five months, J&L workers pitched in whatever amount they could. Some 13,934 hands made donations totaling $2.3 million. In May 1957, the hundred-bed facility opened, but not before thousands lined up to tour the gleaming halls and rooms to see what, exactly, they’d all pulled off together.
And why not? It was a civic triumph, truly collaborative, and hard proof that J&L wasn’t the only entity capable of making the town better. Labor’s rise as the town’s countervailing force was now cemented on a hill in New Sheffield. It seemed there was nothing that collective action couldn’t accomplish—ensuing hospital additions would expand capacity to 204 beds—nor any reason to think that the good times would end. And thus, for one short generation, the worker class in Aliquippa, and nationwide, would have its golden age.
At first glance, such a dreamy term hardly seems apt. Yet when you hear whites, especially, speak of the town then as “wonderful” or “beautiful,” they’re not describing how it looked. They’re talking about how Aliquippa made them feel. This is not just because of its three dozen bars, or the money to be made, or the friendly face of the old waitress, Crystal, at the Mill City Inn—though that all helped. You didn’t need to take the ride into Pittsburgh for a wedding dress or jewelry anymore; Aliquippa was the de facto capital of Beaver County. And it hummed.
Paydays felt like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. On weekends couples descended upon Franklin Avenue from the different Plans. They’d drop kids at the library, get their fishing gear at Sol’s, gold rings at Eger’s, shoes from S&S, all of it on the car-jammed main street laid out atop the old Logstown Run, where rainwater from the hills gathered into the main sewer line under their feet. In the late ’50s Franklin Avenue accounted for 60 percent of the county’s retail sales. There were the three movie theaters, a G. C. Murphy, a Dairy Queen, restaurants, drugstores, and soda fountains.
“That drive down there was pretty nice,” Ditka said. “I remember when you’d get your car, you’d cruise. Just like any other kid in America: You’d cruise in the car, and see chicks, and whatever. . . . We all went through it. My buddy Bobby Joe Rockwell, he was the first one; his dad let him drive the Oldsmobile before anyone had one. Billy Glass: I remember these guys, drive around in those cars. Aah, we thought we were the goddamned cat’s meow. We didn’t know how many people were laughing. . . .”
It was hardly a life of ease. Strikes drained bank accounts and jangled nerves. The rotation many workers had to make between the day’s three eight-hour shifts, or “turns”—one week working 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., the next week 4 p.m. to midnight, the next midnight to 8 a.m.—ravaged sleep and wrecked marriages. The attendant chemicals later unloosed cancers and ills that guaranteed a shorter, compromised life. Yet, for the first time a particular type of man and woman—lower middle class, lacking college education, and with little more to offer than a foreign accent, muscle, and sweat—could stick out a steel-toe boot and gain a foothold on the American Dream. They weren’t disposable. They weren’t at war with the community; they were a vital part of it. A workingman could make enough now to buy a four-bedroom house for $12,500, take vacation without fear of losing his job, buy a boat, plot retirement. He could send kids to college without needing a loan.
Looking back, Ditka says he came to understand that his dad’s discipline instilled a work ethic and self-discipline he otherwise might never have had. Big Mike Ditka, smaller than his oldest son by the fall of 1956, had always seemed satisfied with what was a fine lot. “You have a job with A&S,” he’d say, referring to J&L’s railroad, “you’re set for life.”
But that was just the fallback plan. Big Mike’s own father had been a burner; he didn’t want his four kids working the mill, too. He pushed his son to keep his grades up, keep playing, in hope of a scholarship. The future “Iron Mike” didn’t have to be told twice. A high school tour of J&L killed any interest in a job there—and he wasn’t alone. In Aliquippa, what was once a ripple had become a tidal change of attitude. Even as the high school population boomed, enrollment in vocational shop courses kept dropping. A mill job was seen less as an end than a means, and the message at home was clear: I work here, so you don’t have to.
“My dad was what they called a ‘scarfer,’” Evasovich said. “They had these large ingots, solid ingots maybe fifteen, twenty, thirty feet long, and they’d come out red-hot and my dad would have to stand there—with wood shoes and clothing that was fireproof and the mask—and if there was any separation he would weld it together with an electric torch. If there was no separation but there was some scrap metal in there, he had a little air hammer and had to dig it out. He was only allowed to work twenty minutes at a time because of the heat and the smoke, the smoke always coming up underneath the mask.”
Evasovich’s dad went into the mill at twenty-three and left for good at sixty-two. There was no Ambien or Tylenol PM then; Big John would take the edge off with “Mr. Ditka”—as John still calls him—with beers and shots at Savin’s, and Johnny would have to go fetch him home sometimes. For burns and wounds—for anything, really, ranging from a paper cut to pneumonia—the half-Serb, half-Croat family would spread on a thick black salve that was thought to cure most any ill. Into his senior year, Johnny was in bed by 9 p.m. He made honor roll or he didn’t play ball. He was going to get a scholarship somewhere, his dad said. Johnny worked the wire mill for one summer during high school. That was enough.
“The nail mill, you could only work by signals,” Evasovich said. “You’d stand a foot apart and scream and you couldn’t hear each other. You would have to put stuff in your ears and if you didn’t, you ultimately would be deaf. Dirty, noisy: I began to understand why my dad didn’t want me there. I went down to where he worked and was maybe fifty feet away and I was shielding myself from the heat.”
The next day, his dad came home from work and John said, “I don’t know how you do it.”
“That’s why you’re not going to do it,” Big John said.
In the summer of ’55, as Ditka was preparing for his junior year of high school, Frank Marocco was readying for his freshman year at North Carolina State. This alone was a family miracle; not only had Frank graduated high school, but he’d be the first male to go to college. To ensure Frank wouldn’t give in to fear and, God forbid, stay home, big brother Dominic, a boilermaker high in the union, arranged a miserable summer job sealing oven caps in J&L’s tin mill. First day in, Frank opened his lunch box to find his meal melted. After a week of streaming sweat and shoveling endless piles of sand, going away didn’t seem so bad.
Frank had had his heart set on playing for Duffy Daugherty at Michigan State—had even been squired around campus there by all-American guard, fellow Pennsylvanian, and future hotheaded coach Frank Kush—but Carl Aschman wouldn’t hear of it. A former Aliquippa player, Bill Smaltz, had just become an assistant in Raleigh. “You go down there with Bill,” Aschman said. “He’ll take care of you.” Marocco didn’t argue: You did what the coach said. But immediately it seemed like a mistake—too Southern, too few girls—and when Marocco found out that N.C. State planned on redshirting him, that he wouldn’t even be playing football for another year, he bummed enough money to buy a one-way plane ticket home.
Smaltz phoned Dominic. When Marocco walked off the plane into Pittsburgh Airport, he was startled to see all thirteen
of his brothers and sisters there to greet him.
“What are you doing here?” Dominic said.
“I quit,” Frank said.
Dominic held out his hand. “Here’s a ticket,” he said. “Get back on the goddamned plane at five o’clock and go back down to school. If you don’t, you ain’t got a family.”
Marocco got back on the plane.
Mike Ditka eventually caught that dream like a fever, even if he bristled at the source of it. Nights, he’d come home and tell Charlotte, “Boy, Mom, one of these days I’m going to have four cars, and a big house with a pool. You’ll be able to drive it but Daddy can’t.”
He was different. He was, in truth, a bit crazy. How else do you explain a force like Ditka? There were better athletes, smarter football players, stronger kids to come out of Aliquippa High long before and long after he left, but he was the first to be named first-team all-America in college, the first drafted No. 1 by an NFL team, the first to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl, the first to coach a Super Bowl–winning team, the first inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “Ditka set all the standards,” Yannessa said. “There’s a perfect example of a guy who has this much ability”—he held up two forefingers, five inches apart, and then, grin widening, opened his arms as far apart as possible—“and plays that big.”
Ditka had a tough dad? Who didn’t? Hell, Ashton had a tough dad, too, and if that was enough to earn him a scholarship to play college ball, it didn’t turn Mike’s younger brother into a raging clone. No, Mike was sui generis. Aliquippa had the usual share of bad losers, but Mike treated each setback like the death of a mother. Press Maravich was Ditka’s basketball coach from 1954 to 56, and the best player on the court was Press’s scrawny son. “A little shit!” Mike said of the future Pistol Pete. “He’d shoot the ball better than anybody on our team when he was eight, nine years old.” Press’s hard-core methods were, for Ditka, like fuel pumped into an overflowing tank. He’d had the crewcut his whole life.
