Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  Later that night, at the American Serbian Club in Aliquippa, ­Aschman came the closest anyone could remember to crowing. “Let ’em look that up in the records,” he said, “if they don’t think we belonged in that game.”

  On Monday, classes were cut short for a celebratory assembly. Aschman told the cheering students that he was just “a rocking-chair coach,” able to coast because of his gifted assistants. No one took him seriously: He’d just pulled off the greatest turnaround of his career. Aliquippa had gone from suffering its most embarrassing loss to one of the most dominating defensive performances in WPIAL history. Aschman gave a nod to the wake-up call sent by “our good neighbors” from Hopewell, but didn’t want anyone to misunderstand.

  “You are never,” he said, “going to see a defense like that as long as you live.”

  Mann never did get that surgery on his shoulder. “To this day it sticks up,” he said. “I’ve coached receivers all my life, and now I get pains in it because I’ve got older. I get shooting pains up in there. That’s all part of growing old, you know. . . .”

  It was worth it. That ’64 season, indeed, changed his future. Mann did get a scholarship to play football at Arizona State, where he graduated with a degree in elementary education, and he went on to coach receivers for thirty years at major colleges and in the NFL, helped to make talents like John Jefferson, Mark Clayton, and Keyshawn Johnson into stars, won a Super Bowl with Tampa Bay in 2002. In 2013, the Steelers, his seventh NFL team, brought the sixty-five-year-old Mann back home at last when they hired him as wide receivers coach.

  But before all that, during the summer of 1966, Mann had one last crisis to work through. At Arizona State he played for head coach Frank Kush—the militaristic, merciless son of a Pennsylvania coal miner who, for his entire career, tapped Beaver County for kids who’d been raised to take it. During training camp, Mann slammed his right arm onto the turf; fluid seeped into that same shoulder, and he felt the pain all over again. He couldn’t hold a tackling dummy, much less practice. He didn’t dare go to the trainer, and that bone-deep Aliquippa ethos kicked in: Get hurt, lose your job. So Mann quit. He packed, left camp, began hitchhiking to Phoenix just as a thunderstorm broke. He figured he’d fly home. The mill was waiting.

  He never made it. The first car along was a newspaper reporter, sent out by Kush to fetch him. Mann returned to camp, soaked, and a trainer gave him a shot of cortisone. Two days later, he was scrimmaging again. He ended up starting three years at flanker and tight end for Kush, the coach who was eventually fired in 1979 amid charges that he physically and mentally abused his players. Mann, though, never found him all that demanding.

  “You grow up in Aliquippa, you can make it anywhere,” Mann said. “Trust me: What we did in that Raccoon State Park? When I went to Arizona State I was way ahead of most of the guys.

  “And a lot of kids I played with in the sixties that came from California? They had never gone to school with whites. I had. We’d had some problems, but I went to school with ’em. I remember the first time I ever saw an over-easy egg, out at Raccoon State Park. Joe Marchionda, we became real good friends—good fullback from West Aliquippa: when I saw him put that fork in and I saw that . . . running? I had never seen that in my life. I grew, from being around a different race. It made me grow as a person.”

  Mann didn’t know it, but he had emerged from the tail end of something rare—a small moment of balance in the unending struggle between tradition and progress, order and chaos. Back home, the traditions and institutions that gave him the tools to work with, the social norms that kept tempers from overheating, were beginning to buckle. The town’s old guard could sense it slipping away. The ’64 championship was Aschman’s last: he suffered what was publicly called “a minor coronary” during a fishing trip the following summer, and in mid-July 1965, the day he checked out of the hospital, he sent the school board his letter of resignation.

  “I am forced to take this action because of the condition of my health,” Aschman wrote. “It was a matter over which I had no control.”

  He apologized for any inconvenience, and thanked the board for “the opportunity to coach for so many years at Aliquippa. . . . The enthusiastic support and cooperation I have received from my colleagues, my coaches, my squads, the entire student body and the Aliquippa football fans will always live in my memory.” He signed the letter, “Regretfully yours, Carl Aschman.”

  As ever, he didn’t issue a public statement or call a press conference to explain himself. Aschman had been in Aliquippa twenty-four years, brought the town titles, built a vessel for pride that would forever define its identity. Yet no one seemed to find his quiet fade the least bit remarkable. His work was done, wasn’t it?

  Two days later, the Times published a farewell editorial lauding Aschman not only as “a master” of his game but as “a gentleman and a believer in the ideals which characterize the American way of life.” It seems a curious addition, that last salute, unless you were alive then and taking stock, and worried about what came next.

  PART THREE

  October 14, 2011

  . . . . It is, suddenly, a perfect night for football: 51 degrees, a near full moon, the wind a whisper. At 7:02 p.m. the kickoff sails end over end. Beaver, it turns out, is more primed to play than Aliquippa; the Quips miss easy tackles, fall behind 10-0, and even when they do find the end zone late in the second quarter, miss the extra point. Zmijanac stalks along the sideline, eyes bulging. “We can’t even do the simple fuckin’ things,” he yells.

  It doesn’t help that the announcer keeps issuing updates from the nationally televised Hopewell–Central Valley game. Both nearby schools—richer, bigger, populated with the descendants of Aliquippa millworkers—are loathed. Central Valley formed in 2009 as a merger of Center and Monaca’s dwindling school districts, a voluntary move taken, many suspect, to prevent the state from ever forcing their suburban white souls to merge with Aliquippa. As ninety-year-old Dan Casoli, a fixture at The Pit since 1946, said this afternoon from his bed at an extended-care facility, “I hope they both lose!”

  A handful of his contemporaries are tucked now into the only shelter in the place: a roof extension jutting from the backside of a concession stand, marked with the stained white sign—“RESERVED SENIOR CITIZENS.” Some two dozen black and white faces, carved by age and the mill’s heated demands, huddle below in thick coats and scarves, as if on duty. For eighty-four-year-old Joe Letteri, though, the overhang smacks of surrender; he stands all game with the younger men, on an exposed, crowded slab next to the press box. And when the PA announces that Hopewell is winning, the snarls and groans rise as one from both cadres, old and young, and betray the vital truth.

  It’s always Hopewell Township, encircling the 4.5 miles of Aliquippa like a golden horseshoe, that earns most of the hate. It’s Hopewell High that, today, staged a front-page press conference for running back Rushel Shell, the most coveted recruit Western Pennsylvania has seen in years, so he could declare that he’ll be attending Pitt. It’s Hopewell that has a new stadium and a weight room that doesn’t smell like a root cellar—and a team that still can’t win as much as the Quips. And it’s Hopewell, most maddeningly of all, that shrinking Aliquippa High may have no choice but to embrace someday, perhaps soon, sacrificing history and bloodlines to a place regarded as forgetfully arrogant. . . .

  “Rushel Shell’s mother? She lived right behind the bar on Main Street here,” says Quips assistant coach Sherman McBride. “But you want to say because your kid’s going to Hopewell that you’re better? We were fine for you when you were here, but you move a little to the left or right and your shit don’t stink now?”

  Besides, Aliquippa fans figure, they’ve got one even better than Shell—though the world doesn’t know it yet. Around town, they’re calling Dravon Henry “The Chosen One” or, better, “The Next One,” but since he’s only a sophomore, the explosive and elusive tailb
ack has yet to light up recruiters’ radars. That’s how playing for Aliquippa works against you, early on: the team is so dominant that Zmijanac usually pulls his starters midway through. Henry is near unstoppable, but he hasn’t racked up eye-popping numbers—or gotten anything close to Shell’s press—because he’s so often sitting down.

  So Beaver has done everyone a favor. Down 4 points at the half, the Aliquippa players stream into the locker room angry, fully awake. “Time to see what we made of,” says lineman Emanuel Williams. “Now we at the other end of the scoreboard. We running this ball. It’s over. We RUNNIN’ it.” But Henry can’t see this yet; he’s miserable. The team’s longtime doctor, Pat Sturm, nudges him. “It’s a good thing,” he says. “Now you get to play the second half.”

  Beaver opens with the ball. Aliquippa forces a fumble, but surrenders a safety; the grumbling in the stands slackens only upon word that Hopewell is now losing by 11. And it’s here, abruptly, that Aliquippa finds a rhythm, grinding at last down the field: nine plays, 82 yards, Henry bulling in for the touchdown. This time the kick is good: 13-12, Quips.

  At that the night sky, without warning, begins to explode. There are oohs and pointing, the childlike fascination with fireworks. Dwan Walker, standing at his usual perch atop the stands, glances up with a grin: His doing. In May, Walker defied the town’s Democratic machine and all expectations by crushing Battalini in the mayoral primary; with no Republican running, that meant the election. The next day, he walked into A-Rocket Fireworks on Route 51 and paid $5,800 to lock down a display for every Quips home game. That’s traditionally the Democratic Committee’s preserve, but the campaign had been so vicious that Walker wasn’t leaving anything to chance. It was also a way to stick it to the machine, one more time.

  Come November, the thirty-six-year-old Walker will be sworn in as the first black mayor in Aliquippa history. His race, age, and inexperience make it easy to frame the moment as either a civic cry of desperation or a paradigm shift. But it’s also a sign of football’s centrality, the way the program keeps expanding to fill a vacuum once occupied by family, church, mill, or union. Walker and his twin brother, Donald, who won a seat on the city council, played for the Quips before graduating in 1994, coach Little Quips teams, and made Aliquippa football ties a subtext in their vague but emotional pitch—dubbed “One Aliquippa”—to revitalize the community.

  It was a shrewd strategy. Even his fiercest critics can’t question Walker’s love for Aliquippa or its football players, given his good reason to despise both. In 2009 his sister, Diedre, was murdered in front of her twelve-year-old son by James Moon, a running back with the 2003 state title team. Walker found his nephew in the police station, covered in blood. The killing made Walker run for office. No one, he says, had believed in him more than D.

  Now the mayor-elect returns his gaze to the field. When the Beaver band breaks into the sports arena chestnut, “Rock and Roll (Part 2),” he leads a chant: “Hey! You suck! We’re gonna beat the hell out of you!” But Henry doesn’t need any help. He intercepts a pass with six seconds left in the third quarter, and in the ensuing drive Zmijanac calls his number all seven plays, 54 yards of up-the-gut offense that Beaver expects and just can’t stop. What had been a sloppy affair becomes inevitable: Aliquippa’s line is driving Beaver backward, yard by muddy yard.

  “Man,” says Mike Warfield just before Henry breaks loose for the 25-yard score. “He is just pounding them.”

  Warfield came alone tonight, sitting his unmistakable, 6-foot-5 frame in the stands where everyone respectfully gives him room. The Pit is regarded as sacred space, a bubble that gang conflict and crime almost never penetrate. But if one of the program’s more talented quarterbacks, class of ’87, draws plenty of nods, he gets his share of glares, too. It doesn’t matter. “I refuse to NOT go back,” he says of The Pit. “I’m going to go to football games; I’m going to go hang out. I refuse to hide and duck, because I’m doing something I think is right.”

  Five months earlier, Anthony “Ali” Dorsett, nephew of Dallas Cowboys great Tony Dorsett, was sentenced to thirty years in prison for running Beaver County’s biggest crack and cocaine ring, out of Aliquippa’s Linmar Terrace. Warfield grew up in Linmar; his wife had kin in the ruthless crew. Yet, as a state trooper assigned to the Drug Enforcement Administration, he spearheaded the four-year federal and state investigation dubbed “Operation Enough Is Enough” that turned Ali Dorsett from kingpin to snitch, resulted in more than a dozen convictions—and broke, for the moment anyway, a fever of gang-and-drug-fueled gun violence that had gripped the town for more than a decade.

  So this night, at least, the only breaking news is Dravon Henry. He’s racked up 128 yards in the second half alone, 191 total, along with one interception and a drive-killing pass deflection that seals the 21-12 win. The crowd counts down the final seconds; someone sets off an orange-and-black popper in the stands: Halloween is coming. Afterward Zmijanac tries to deflect the media toward his seniors—and away from the fifteen-year-old sophomore who has just announced himself. “He’ll have his time,” Zmijanac pleads. But talent doesn’t follow a schedule. It arrives when it’s ready, and the world is the thing that adjusts. . . .

  I can’t get no satisfaction.

  —The Rolling Stones, 1964

  It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder

  how I keep from going under.

  —Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 1982

  9

  Mr. Lucky

  At the time, it felt like the future. Early in 1964, the most striking benefit yet negotiated by the United Steelworkers began hitting mills all over America: thirteen weeks of vacation. Conceived by labor as a way to create jobs, touted as a hedge against automation and a transitional stage into retirement—and, since it came in lieu of wage hikes, seen by management as a clever way to hold down labor costs—the new perk had a crystallizing power that no dime-an-hour concession or term like “pension” could match. Two decades later, when the U.S. steel industry cratered, the steelworker with thirteen weeks of paid vacation would come to symbolize labor overreach almost as vividly as the Reaganite trope of welfare queens in Cadillacs. Depending on the color of your collar, it summed up unionism’s impact at its best or worst.

  Yet as the thirteen-week bonus began hitting the shop floor in February of that year, the only people concerned with its larger implications were social scientists—amateur and pro—curious to see how workingmen and their wives would handle the endless hours at home. Untroubled workers reveled in the chance to take long trips to Florida, to see their kids’ plays and ball games, but for most the idea of a three-month “weekend” signaled a new and perplexing “Age of Leisure”—one of those cultural predictions that, in retrospect, had about as much chance of coming true as the vision of skies packed with flying cars.

  “The above-average man, the aspiring young executive who not only puts in a long week at the office but takes home a briefcase full of reports to ponder after dinner and on weekends, may easily wind up working longer than did the old 12-hour-a-day steelworker,” intoned LIFE magazine in a warning-shot article titled, “The Emptiness of Too Much Leisure.”

  “All the old rules of who enjoys the most leisure have been turned topsy-turvy in our modern society. . . . Today the richer and more prestigious a man is, the less leisure he is likely to have. . . .”

  The piece, spread over twenty pages and bristling with experts, keelhauls the topic exhaustively, but the most pointed question commands a thick subheadline a quarter of the way along: “What is a steelworker going to do with a 13-week vacation?”

  Joe Letteri built his dream house. He was thirty-six in 1964, and the 24-by-24 home they’d framed on the slab in the back of Gilda’s dad’s home in Plan 11 had gotten small, fast. Joey was born in Aliquippa in ’57, and then bam-bam-bam they came: Bobby in ’59, Richard in ’60, Barbara in ’61. The couple bought adjoining lots—for $
4,400—a mile north out of Aliquippa through Hopewell and into Center Township, off Chapel Road. Joe assembled it the same way he’d built his first one, the way most workers at J&L did: everyone pitched in.

  That was the formula: Go to the lot after work and on weekends, and use any carpentering, pipefitting, ditch-digging skills learned down at the mill to hammer and frame and saw for a few hours when what you really wanted was to sprawl on a couch. Maybe subcontract out the electric or plastering or plumbing, but the rest of the men from J&L did plenty—and for free. Because someday soon, be it next month or next decade, the call to pay them back would come.

  “The house I grew up in, my dad paid a guy to dig the foundation,” said Doc Medich. His father, David, who ran the J&L carpenter shop, moved his wife and only child out to a house he built in Hopewell in 1954. “But he knew somebody that laid block and did cement work, and they did that. My uncle did the electricity and my godfather and my other uncle did the plumbing, and my dad did the carpentry. It was almost like the Amish: Then you’d go help somebody else build their house. He would come home from work, eat, put his clothes back on, and grab his tool kit and go back out the door to work on somebody’s house. He did that an awful lot.”

  Joe’s first thirteen weeks came in the summer of ’64. Few in the general public knew that the benefit was neither awarded to all nor taken annually: The paid extended vacation was for the most senior workers, taken every five years, and most managed to take only one before hitting retirement. But Joe was younger than most. For eight weeks, his brothers and Gilda’s father and guys from the carpenter shop showed up daily with their tool bags and crafted the bones of an eight-room house. When he got his turn working steady daylight—8-4—Joe would head out afterward and hammer away until nine o’clock. The Letteri family moved in August ’65. “It was time,” Joe said. “There was no more room in Aliquippa.”