Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  Such ambivalence—the idea that he risked little to make his point—rankles Pipkin still. After earning his education degree at the University of Idaho, he returned to Aliquippa and founded the Negro Youth Improvement Council to raise issues about black children in local schools. He later moved outside Pittsburgh and founded a branch of the NAACP in the northern suburbs, nagged by the notion that his hometown never gave him his due.

  “From that day on I could never get a job in that community; I was more or less ostracized because I stood for something,” said Pipkin, who, in fact, served as chairman of the board of Aliquippa Community Hospital before resigning in 2003. “To this day, I still think I have some resentment from black and white because of what I did.”

  Funny thing, though: If he was ostracized, it didn’t happen right away. None of his actions affected Pipkin’s status in school or with the basketball team. With football season’s end came a reset; he began hoops practice, went on to lead Aliquippa to the WPIAL final in 1963, went on to score 27 points in the loss, went on to be named all-state. “He’s great,” his basketball coach, Frank Janosik, told the local paper after the season ended. “Just great.”

  But that, too, left Pipkin with a sour taste—though maybe it shouldn’t have; Aliquippa, after all, was merely showing its priorities. One thing mattered more than racial strife or even Aschman’s precious program. The football team had figured to be bad that season anyway. Basketball was a different story. That team had a chance to shine.

  “I was the leading scorer,” Pipkin said. “We’d just moved into a new gym. To them, winning was more important. Whatever happened, they forgave me.”

  And why not? The problem still seemed . . . controllable.

  Didn’t teenagers always get into fights? What ethnic group didn’t run into trouble at some point? Blacks vs. whites? Hell, the Serbs and Cros still went at it from time to time: Such friction was part of the town’s DNA. Besides, nearly everybody had a job. In late ’62 the mill was still expanding—a new sinter plant in the blast furnace, a new electrolytic tin line, a new reducing mill, and burgeoning plans to double its landmass by filling in the river out to Crow Island—and the last labor contract had been signed without a strike.

  Indeed, unions were on a roll nationwide, and could boast of having the best ally possible: the man in the White House was still smarting from a showdown with Big Steel bosses the previous spring. Eager to suppress inflation, President John Kennedy publicly accused U.S. Steel of a double cross in April 1962, when it tried, after agreeing to a no-increase contract, to raise its prices by $6 a ton. His famous quip then to aides—“My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now”—wouldn’t go public for years, but his disgust was clear, and he soon forced industry leaders to back down. Kennedy had all the marks of a cake-eater, but to working stiffs he certainly had the right idea.

  And now, a week after Aliquippa tied New Castle, 19-19, he was coming. On the afternoon of October 12, 1962, Kennedy flew into the state for a two-day campaign swing for the Democratic slate in the November elections, starting with a rally centered in a municipal parking lot downtown. About half the town—10,000 to 15,000 people—filled Franklin and Sheffield Avenues, spilling up onto the Plan 7 hillside, enduring hours of waiting and a late rain shower for the first visit ever by a sitting president.

  Everyone, for once, was on their best behavior. The Beaver County Times would record a scene of civic tranquillity: kids tossing yo-yos, boys playing the Italian hand-game “Morra,” women exchanging “recipes and pictures of their daughters’ weddings.” The apparel was a display of mingling classes—“work clothes, slacks, business suits, furs, haircurlers, headscarves, hats, Bermuda shorts, raincoats, Boy Scout uniforms, and dressy dresses”—and the cacophony a song of ethnic harmony: “They spoke many languages while they waited—English, Italian, Polish, German, Lithuanian, Russian, Croatian, Ukrainian and Serbian.”

  Aliquippa police officers were spotted on rooftops scanning the scene. Secret Service men eyed the crowd. They had nothing to fear. The Beaver County Times photo of Kennedy’s arrival, with him standing in his convertible limo and shaking hands with someone as he steps out, is backdropped by a roiling sea of white and black hands waving, black and white faces mixed and grinning. “The crowd loved him,” said Aliquippa mayor Clarence Neish after. “He’s a dynamic personality. You have to see him close to appreciate his personal magnetism.”

  Kennedy took the stage near the old Pittsburgh Mercantile building at 4:05 p.m. He sat briefly in a rocking chair donated by a nearby department store, MISCO, then stood up behind a sign declaring, “Aliquippa Voters I Need You.” Neish was right: to hear JFK unleash even this six-minute piece of campaign boilerplate was to feel a force subsumed by time, tragedy, and his own hypnotic glamor. Kennedy bit off the words and spit them out. He sounded like the last seconds before the first punch.

  “This country has many responsibilities which it carries all around the world, but we cannot possibly carry them unless we are strong and vital and progressive here at home,” Kennedy said, his microphoned voice booming. “A strong, free world begins here in this state, begins here in the United States, and we cannot have a strong United States if we sit still. . . .”

  Kennedy never mentioned the town by name. No one cared. Aliquippa was a party stronghold, and here was its leader: defender of unemployment insurance and Social Security, steward of all the New Deal breakthroughs made a generation before. Standing in the crowd was Joe Casp, son of Ukrainian/Polish immigrants, high school dropout, tank commander at the Battle of the Bulge at eighteen—another piece of evidence of what mill and town were producing then.

  Four Casp brothers had fought in World War II; one died in Germany, another was shot twice. Joe came home, drank away a year as a “52-20 man”—$20 from the government for fifty-two weeks—then went to work in J&L’s wire mill. Mike Ditka served as altar boy, in 1950, when Joe married Ella Oskowski, and by the end of the decade they’d saved enough to buy a house on Irwin Street for $12,500. Casp could be harsh, small-minded, but he raised three nurses and a doctor in that house. He was also one of the founding members, in the early ’60s, of the Quarterback Club, a booster organization that brought in college coaches to speak, that made sure every one of Aschman’s seniors had a sports coat and slacks, and that met every Monday night at the Ukrainian Club to watch film of the previous week’s game.

  Casp lifted his eight-year-old son Bill, the future Princeton grad, up on his shoulders so they could watch JFK together. “Kennedy was Number One,” Joe recalled later. “He had a tan that was out of this world. . . .”

  Yes, racial rumblings and Kennedy’s own callow performance during the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle raised unsettling questions about America at home and abroad. But this was a bread-and-butter town, more than happy just to see the president jab the Republicans. Kennedy cited the fact that, when he took office, Pennsylvania had one of the nation’s highest jobless rates—“nearly five hundred million people.” Few noted the gaffe.

  “Can you tell me how we can put them back to work,” he asked, “if we have congressmen and senators and governors who oppose all the pieces of social legislation so vital to our country in the same way that their fathers opposed it in the thirties, when Franklin Roosevelt was president of the United States?

  Kennedy had been in office nearly two years, but it wasn’t until his showdown with Big Steel the previous spring that he seemed to find both footing and voice. Perhaps he’d never deliver on his immense promise, but the ideal Kennedy personified—the street-smart patrician, the rich man who had adopted the workingman’s vision of life, not vice versa—was now giving a full-throated vow to keep it alive.

  “How can the people of Pennsylvania who live with this problem in the coal mines and the steel mills—how can they support a party which opposes progress in 1962?” Kennedy asked the town. �
�So I come here today and ask your help in electing men and women in this state and in this country who will serve the people, who believe in progress, who believe that the national government has a responsibility.”

  It had been only two weeks since teenagers attacked innocent fans outside the football stadium. But city fathers wondering if their town could behave had nothing to worry about. “No arrests were made,” the Beaver County Times reported. “There were no unruly persons and no incidents of any nature reported.” Kennedy’s voice, then, crackled over the loudspeakers amid a rare moment of calm:

  “Education, medical care for the aged, job opportunities, equal rights: those are the things that this country stands for, and we can get those things only if we elect men who believe in them.”

  “So I come today not as a candidate for office, but as one who, after twenty-one months as president, recognizes how important it is that this great country of ours be dynamic and progressive. . . .”

  By 4:23 p.m., Kennedy was in his car again, riding toward Constitution Avenue. The crowd dispersed quickly, and a Times reporter recorded this exchange with a young boy walking away.

  “‘Who was that man?’” someone asked six-year-old Buster Smith after.

  “‘He’s president of the United States.’

  “‘And what does he do, Buster?’

  “Buster stood erect, rubbed his eyes and answered, ‘I think he saves our world.’”

  Two days later, a U-2 spy plane photographed clear evidence of nuclear missile sites being built in Cuba. Soon the world would be on the brink of nuclear war. But that October evening, the scattering steelmen, housewives, politicians, and cops could be forgiven for feeling that any trouble could be overcome. “What a glorious moment,” Gino Piroli said. “One of our greatest days.” Aliquippa hadn’t just arrived. It belonged.

  8

  Mother’s Oats

  The king was growing weak. You couldn’t sense it at first, because, hell, Carl Aschman wasn’t about to let you. That bad family history, all the quiet talk around the table about a “paper heart,” hung at the back of his mind, but in public he gave every sign of being the same unyielding force. Despite the down years, the nation’s top coaches always took Aschman’s calls, took chances on the players that he assured them could play. “Guys from Aliquippa went to college everywhere in America,” Don Yannessa said. “I can tell you every kid that played in that era and where they went: Arizona State, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pitt, New Mexico State, Arizona, Tulsa, Wichita. . . . They went everywhere.”

  And long after they played for him, Aschman still held the men in his thrall. In 1960, Frank Marocco came home after a fine career at N.C. State—ACC title, an Orange Bowl berth earned and then forfeited after a basketball recruiting scandal, teaming with star quarterback Roman Gabriel—hoping to play pro ball. The Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the Canadian Football League had offered Marocco a tryout and, like a puppy dropping a ball at its master’s feet, he phoned his old coach up at the high school to let him know.

  “I’m going to Canada,” Marocco said.

  “No,” Aschman replied. “Come up here and talk to me.”

  What could he do? Aschman had sent him to Raleigh and that had worked out. Now he was telling Marocco that Canada was no good, to get serious and come coach at Aliquippa. Marocco was newly married, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he were a wild bachelor: he couldn’t say no. He signed a contract to teach physical education and monitor Friday night dances for $4,200 a year, and coach junior varsity for an extra $200. It wasn’t until Marocco told his father-in-law, owner of a fruit stand downtown, his salary that he realized he’d been railroaded. “Come work for me down at the store,” Frank was told, “and you’d make that a lot faster.”

  Aschman was pushing sixty in 1962, but seemed as engaged as ever. He had never been the most exciting teacher, but then, everybody knew why he was there. It wasn’t unusual for his history class, “Problems of Democracy,” to begin with Aschman telling everybody to read a chapter. When they looked up from their books, he’d be diagramming plays, all kinds of X’s, O’s, squiggles, and arrows filling the chalkboard. Weekends, he might cruise by the New Sheffield School field to watch the savage pickup football games, no helmets or pads. Half to see if any of his players were dumb enough to play, and half to see if there was anyone good enough to play for him.

  “Teams of maybe thirty on one side and thirty on another, and we would get hurt,” said George David, a ’65 graduate of Aliquippa High and the future sheriff of Beaver County. “You’d lose teeth. A doctor used to tell me, ‘I hate Sunday afternoons,’ because the emergency room would be full of kids that had a broken leg, broken arm, broken shoulder, black eyes.

  “Coach Aschman? He used to find his football players playing sandlot with us, he’d smack ’em on the head, kick ’em out of there. . . . I remember him coming Sunday afternoons and mad as a hornet, because we were playing with his players: ‘I told you guys! I need them! They got to play! You’re going to hurt ’em!’”

  Everything about him still screamed old school. Every player, no matter how good, was a grunt. None wore a uniform number lower than 50. His Neanderthal view of injuries never changed. “Very sarcastic,” said former receiver Richard Mann. “He would shame you. You might get a stove finger, and he’d say, ‘Let me see it, son. . . . Bring it here, let me see. . . .’ and he’d act like he was spitting on it and say, ‘Wee-wee on it, son! Wee-wee on it! Little finger hurting. . . .’ He was that kind of guy: ‘Now you’re all right! Get back in there!’”

  No one challenged him. For twenty-five years steelworkers had been pushing for safer working conditions, but their sons toiled on under the rules of the old industrial sweatshop: Get hurt? Lose your job. Coaches like Aschman were the spiritual heirs to Tom Girdler’s “dictatorship,” with the “benevolent” part something of a bonus. Given time and space, some players came to feel they’d been little more than interchangeable parts. “I look back and whatever respect I had for him diminished,” Gene Yannessa said. “I don’t think that he really cared about his players.”

  Or maybe it just depended. Early in the 1962 season, Marocco’s wife, Marian, with a one-year-old daughter and another on the way, died of a heart attack. There had been no warning. She was twenty-two. “Took her to a party, she sat down and dropped over dead,” Marocco said. Aschman checked on him constantly in the weeks after, phoning and dropping by the dazed assistant’s home, told him to take as much time off as he needed. “He was very humble,” Marocco said. “The next time I saw him like that was when his daughter died—and that crushed him.”

  By the fall of 1962, Marocco’s former jayvee team had matured into a dazzling collection of college prospects, and he had risen with them to a spot as Aschman’s defensive line coach. It wasn’t a glorious promotion. “I said, ‘Boy, I’m going to be a coach on the varsity!’” Marocco said. “Then I found out what it was like: you go to practice and he’d say, ‘Defense!’ All I did was warm up the line and get the players ready.” Aschman called every set, every adjustment, while his staff took a knee and chewed on straw. After enduring one such season, Marocco had had enough. When the same dynamic began playing out again during training camp in 1963, he threatened to quit.

  “I can’t coach this way,” Marocco said. “This is not what football is about.”

  “What are you mad about?” Aschman said.

  “You don’t even include us. I want to coach defense, I want the kids looking at me and saying, ‘That’s my defensive coach.’ I want to be able to talk to my kids.”

  So then came the first sign: Aschman gave in. He stunned Marocco by handing him his defense—and an immediate test. Aliquippa opened the ’63 season on the road against Steubenville, Ohio’s storied “Big Red,” a team that had finished seventh in the state the year before. It wasn’t even close. Powered by backs Mann and Howard “Hiway” Herring, receiver Matt Gile
s, and quarterback John Tazel, with a huge line—maybe Aliquippa’s best ever—anchored by future Cornhusker Bob Liggett, the Quips offense racked up 32 points. More important, Marocco’s defense forced three fumbles and two interceptions and became the first team to hold Big Red scoreless in seven years.

  You could feel it all over town after that: Aschman’s machine was humming again. The fan fights had eased, and games had been moved back from Saturday afternoon to Friday nights—another sign that things were returning to normal. But few outside the program knew that a transition had begun: Aschman was really letting go. Another assistant, Frank Heinecke, had taken charge of the offense, and even convinced the old man to shuck the old high-top Riddells and let the players wear low-cut cleats. And fifteen minutes before the Steubenville game began, the team manager had pulled Marocco into the locker room. He found Aschman lying on a training table, pale as snow.

  “I got nervous,” Marocco said. “Because he was the guy who controlled me, basically.”

  Aschman tried coaching, but he was too weak. Midway through the contest he handed the team off to his staff. At the time everyone chalked it up to food poisoning or flu, but looking back most assume the episode was a minor heart attack. Aschman coached the rest of the ’63 season, finished 8-1, but those close to him could see a difference. “He didn’t do nothing,” Marocco said. “He changed completely after the heart attack. He was not as demanding. He wasn’t himself anymore. It just wiped him out.”

  His son noticed, too. Carl Jr. had come back home in 1963. He’d kicked around a bit after graduating: a few years studying at Pitt, a year in J&L’s seamless tube mill. Then the draft caught up with him and he found himself in a two-year stint in the Army, met a German woman in Wiesbaden, Germany, picked up a trade in electronics fixing Nike missiles. They had two sons, transferred to a base in Kentucky. When his wife died, Carl Jr. brought the boys, Harald and Carl III, to live with him and his parents in the old house in Plan 6.