Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  But in one sense, they never left: Joe still went into the mill, cycling month by month as always through the daylight, then the 4-midnight, then midnight-8 turns—and Gilda was in her twelfth year teaching in town. The Letteris remained, in other words, about as “J&L” as a couple could be. Even after their kids rose through the Center school system, with Joey valedictorian at Center High and Robert and Richard playing football there, and even though most of their new neighbors—Aliquippa exiles themselves—were all too happy to switch allegiances, Joe and Gilda never did. Friday nights would find Joe standing at the Quips’ stadium or wherever Aliquippa played, no matter how far—hands in pockets, half-grin on his face. “Near every game for the last forty years,” he said.

  Even when her kids entered high school, Gilda still knocked her neighbors’ noses out of joint by hanging a massive “Go Quips!” banner outside her Center home. “I know these people didn’t like it,” she said, laughing. “But I don’t care.”

  Much later, after Joe Jr. had gone to Cal Tech and Berkeley and Hollywood and started winning Oscars for visual effects, local reporters would write and broadcast that he grew up in Center. When he travels back from his home in New Zealand now, the homecoming stories essentially tout Joey as one of the most, if not the most, accomplished people to hail from that small slice of Beaver County. And it’s essentially true. But Gilda always corrects them. “He is from Aliquippa,” she says.

  You could always tell. The Letteris taught their kids to attack the world, and leave the niceties to those with clean fingernails. When Joey later saw fraudulence in a last-minute switch of the qualification rules for valedictorian, expanding things so that eight seniors were given the honor, he stood up at his Center High graduation and gave a biting speech condemning it. He had become an astronomy nut by then, brainy in a way Joe Sr., the eighth-grade dropout, could barely comprehend: the boy spent hours each night with his telescope, intending to study cosmology and physics when he got to college.

  And wasn’t that how it should be? The son doing better than the dad? Joe Sr. felt no resentment. When Joey was eleven, he had needed a perch above the ambient light to mount his first telescope. Joe climbed into the attic with hammer and saw and cut open a door near the peak, through the joists and plywood and shingles, one giant hole in all that fine work begun over his first thirteen-week vacation. So what? That was part of the formula, too: Raise up your kids, punch a hole in the goddamn roof, and let them reach for the stars.

  Frank Marocco got word just before Aschman checked out. The Quips’ head coach had been in Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital nearly three weeks in July of ’65, everyone in the know waiting for him to retire when he summoned his young protégé. Marocco made the thirty-minute drive into the city alone. He wasn’t the most logical pick to succeed Aschman; only the King’s blessing would give him a chance. “They’re going to give the job to Pete Fuderich,” Aschman told him. “But you stay and help him.”

  “Okay,” Marocco said. “Whatever you say, I do anyways.”

  On paper, such a safe move made sense. Training camp was beginning in less than a month. Fuderich, a former Quips player himself, had been Aschman’s assistant for sixteen years. But the head coach’s sudden departure revealed a lack of conviction in Aliquippa’s school board and boosters, a deficit of the daring that had landed the WPIAL’s hottest property twenty-four years before. When he resigned, Aschman had been in the midst of a five-year coaching contract paying $2,000 a year. Fuderich was given a one-year deal, paying $1,400—and his tenure soon justified the pay cut. He went 1-8 his first season, and his contract was renewed. He went 2-7 his second, and it was renewed again. Aliquippa won four games under Fuderich in three seasons, lost twice to Hopewell, began a descent so deep that the program almost didn’t survive.

  But Aschman’s sudden departure, disastrous as it seemed, carried one seed for the future. Indeed, if he hadn’t quit when he did, the modern history of team and town would have been wholly different. Because up until that moment, Don Yannessa couldn’t land a coaching job anywhere—and was about to give up. He’d been out of New Mexico State two years, teaching at Aliquippa Junior High and applying for any assistant opening that came up. Rochester, Monaca, and Midland turned him down. Aliquippa High was stacked. “It was a closed shop,” Yannessa said.

  By the summer of ’65, he’d had enough. A buddy from Aliquippa lived in Detroit, and Yannessa took a job in labor relations at Chrysler for $10,000 a year—more than twice what he was earning at the junior high. In July he was settling into an apartment in Detroit, enjoying the idea of a new career, when he heard the low rumble of Aliquippa schools superintendent Sam Milanovich on the other end of the phone.

  “You still want to coach football?” Milanovich said. “Get your ass back here. Aschman had a heart attack, they’re going to hire Fuderich, and he’s going to need a junior high assistant. Fly back and interview with him this weekend. I’m setting it up.”

  Yannessa paid $40 for a round-trip ticket on Northwest Orient Airlines. Now he and Marocco were together, and if they weren’t close, if they were too different—Yannessa whip-smart, eyeing every angle, seemingly unfazed by anyone else’s opinion; Marocco dogged and half-sure the world was out to get him—to be full allies, they knew they could help each other. Fuderich’s doleful tenure ended with the ’67 season. “We got our ass kicked,” Yannessa said, “and we all got fired.”

  Marocco was again passed over for the Aliquippa head coaching job in the summer of 1968. The board cycled through three more hapless coaches—Richard Jeric, Jack Laraway, and Dave Strini—in four years, touching off a fatal spiral of losses begetting declining interest begetting more losses.

  But the problem was bigger than coaching. Rising take-home pay made migration to bedroom communities almost mandatory; for the first time in its history, Aliquippa’s population shrank in the ’60s, declining 16 percent to 22,277. Meanwhile, football’s my-way-or-the-highway ethos wasn’t resonating as much with kids; black-booted legend Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts, a Pittsburgh product who’d worked the summer of ’56 as a “monkey man” on an Aliquippa Works pile driver, was their dads’ quarterback. The boys who played now increasingly modeled themselves after brash types like Beaver Falls’ Joe Namath, the upstart Jets passer who sported white cleats and would soon guarantee a Super Bowl win over Johnny U’s Colts. Be it in the NFL or locally, old-guard values were losing their grip.

  It came as no consolation that Aliquippa’s twin, archrival Ambridge, had hit an equally disorienting patch. Marocco applied for the Bridgers head coaching job, but found himself spinning on the same merry-go-round. “It was the funniest thing,” Yannessa said. “First, they hired a guy named Miller from Wilkinsburg who’d won a WPIAL title—new head coach and Marocco’s going to be an assistant there. Miller keeps the job three, four days and reneges on it. Go through the process again: I’m running over there with Marocco all the time politicking, trying to get him the job, because I know there’s going to be in it something good for me.

  “Guy named Rip Scherer gets the job: Marocco’s out again. Frank’s going to be an assistant for him. And I’m going to get stuck working for Jeric, back at the junior high level in Aliquippa, and I want to move up. Then Scherer keeps the job three, four days and he reneges on it; job open again, and it’s the end of July. They’re going to camp in two weeks, and so embarrassed over there they hire Marocco to a three-year contract. I become first assistant, go over there and teach English and economics, work for Frank. I’m delighted. Great opportunity.”

  Theirs were pure career moves, leaving to work for their historic enemy. The era’s tensions and social stresses had yet to surface on Franklin Avenue; though 1967’s long hot summer was marked by racial violence and upheaval in 150 American cities, Aliquippa had remained calm. “Beautiful,” Yannessa said. “It was where you wanted to be.”

  That didn’t last. For the next four years, he
and Marocco worked just across the Ohio, close enough to see the cracks widening in their hometown. “There were times,” Yannessa said, “we chuckled and said, ‘We got out of there just in time.’”

  If Mike Ditka was the town’s template for success, the snarling trailblazer for the line of football greats to come, there had to be a pioneer for promise squandered, too. Because that, too, is the Aliquippa fate. The scouts, journalists, fans, and fellow coaches who’ve seen them come and go for decades take a twisted delight in saying that for every wonder who made it, three others came home muttering, “Woulda, coulda, shoulda. . . .” Georgie Suder might’ve been the first.

  He had the bloodlines. His dad, “Pecky,” had squeezed everything out of his own talent: flanked thirteen years of major league ball around service in World War II, managed a couple more years in the minors, and then came home to work as a guard at the Beaver County Jail. In November of 1964, Pete was named deputy warden there, and his son had begun to slide.

  Georgie had inherited the Aliquippa disdain for status and authority, too; just as his uncle had once cussed out Honus Wagner, Georgie loved taking the world’s winners down a peg. When some hotshot home for the summer would show up at the Morrell Park game, wearing his big-time college colors and declaring, “I got next,” Georgie was the one snapping, “Motherfucker, go back to Hopewell. You ain’t got next here!” It was even better if the guy pointed at his shirt and sputtered, “But I play at LSU. . . .” Then Georgie slammed the door. “You can’t play here,” he’d say. “Get out.”

  His talent lent him the authority: Suder was a superb second baseman, having led Aliquippa’s baseball team to the 1960 WPIAL final, and an even better basketball player. “One of the greatest athletes I’ve ever seen,” Zmijanac said.

  “I’d go along with that,” said his uncle, George “Juke” Suder. “He was terrific. God, to see him play? If you weren’t awake he’d hit you in the face with the ball. He was so smooth out there. Oh, what a kid. What a waste. Baseball player? Basketball player? Anything.”

  In 1961 Georgie’s high-scoring shooting led Aliquippa’s coach, Frank Janosik, to predict that “he’ll keep the name of ‘Suder’ in the limelight for a long, long time.” But Georgie hadn’t come of age like his dad and uncle, laden with immigrant fear and Great Depression values that regarded the waste of anything—food, soap, talent—as a kind of sin. He landed a scholarship to Maryland, led the Terrapins freshman team in scoring, and was bounced his second year because of failing grades. In 1963 he came back blazing—17 points against West Virginia, 16 against Georgetown, double figures against N.C. State and Clemson—to lead the young Terps varsity. “George Suder Is Star at Maryland,” proclaimed the Beaver County Times. But that was the high point.

  Georgie led Maryland with 13 points per game that season, but the young team limped to a 9-17 record. Then his chance to star in the storied Atlantic Coast Conference slipped away. “Was going to start—got thrown out of school for stealing,” Zmijanac said. “Had offers from the Red Sox, New York Mets—turned ’em down, didn’t want to play baseball. Ended up going to Youngstown State, walked on the court the first day, and the coach said something to him that he took as demeaning. Georgie said, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’”

  Suder would experience the occasional shiver of regret, but he wasn’t good enough to bounce back into form whenever he pleased. He tried out for the Pittsburgh Pipers before the team’s inaugural American Basketball Association season in 1967, but was cut after three days. In truth, he seemed more interested in gambling at cards, or the small-bore victories he’d carve out with Zmijanac as they barnstormed around the area throughout the mid-sixties, playing for the “Aliquippa Atkinsons” in the Sewickley YMCA league, or dominating games for Aliquippa’s entry in the Serb National Federation Basketball Tournament in Canton, Ohio.

  “Just wasted his life,” Zmijanac said.

  Zmijanac came from the other direction: Nobody ever considered him can’t-miss. He had graduated from Edinboro State College, up near Lake Erie, in ’64, received his draft notice a day later, and rushed home to take a job teaching English at Aliquippa Junior High. “Either that,” he said, “or go to Vietnam.”

  The new war was hanging over all young males by then. Kennedy’s escalation had placed 16,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by the time of his death in 1963; by the end of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson would raise the commitment to 184,000. In May 1965, the first of fourteen Aliquippans lost in the conflict died in a combat plane crash. But plenty would survive, too, and some even seemed to find purpose in the military.

  One, a classmate of Zmijanac’s at Aliquippa High named Edward Surratt, was a fixture of black Aliquippa. His father, Arthur, had worked tirelessly at different jobs all his life, risen from butler to J&L hand to owner of a successful refuse-hauling business; every year, at a time when few black families had cars, Arthur would buy a brand-new Chevrolet convertible. “Had it all: Surratt was an only child,” said Salt Smith, who grew up a block away in Plan 11. “His mother and father were middle-class when there was no such thing as a black Aliquippa middle class.”

  But Eddie was twice arrested his senior year of high school, for loitering and prowling, and broke a policeman’s nose resisting one of the arrests. Drafted into the Army in early ’64, he faced charges while in the service for incidents involving assault, reckless driving, an unregistered gun, and going AWOL, and had another charge, for prowling, dismissed. But in mid-1965, the local paper featured a photo of a grinning, helmeted Surratt; he had completed airborne training. After leaving the Army with an honorable discharge in 1965, he enlisted in the Marines the following year, and by late 1967 was engaged in search-and-destroy missions to flush enemy fighters out of tunnels and shelters. He was promoted to platoon sergeant, and returned three years later with a Purple Heart and the Republic of Vietnam Cross of Gallantry.

  Zmijanac, safe at home all the while, was smart enough to know how good he had it. His mother still lived in Aliquippa, remarried now and hearing daily about the rising racial division in the schools, about the cheerleaders and the Brown-Bag Brigade. “You have to get out of there,” she kept telling her son. But Mike was enjoying himself. He was in his twenties, with money in his pocket—$4,700 a year—and twice-a-week pickup games across the bridge in East Liverpool.

  “If there were a hundred fuckin’ guys there trying to play, there were five hundred—up on railings, everywhere—watching,” Zmijanac said. “Nobody keeping score except us. Nobody called any fouls. Connie Hawkins and Jimmy McCoy, a legend in Farrell, and Simmie Hill would pick up. Fifteen guys’d get to play. The only two white guys within ten miles of the place were me and Georgie.”

  Hawkins was a high-flying New York playground legend with massive hands—Dr. J before Dr. J—not to mention an innocent railroaded out of an NBA career after a nonexistent point-shaving scandal during his freshman year at the University of Iowa. He would eventually be cleared, and later gain a spot in the Basketball Hall of Fame. But in 1966 and ’67, after a stint with the Harlem Globetrotters, Hawkins was living with his wife on Pittsburgh’s North Side, broke, waiting out his lawsuit against the NBA, and playing games all over the area to stay sharp. One summer night at the Zernich compound in Center, he and Georgie and Zmijanac engaged in an epic run of five-on-five, then drank and swam until well past midnight.

  At twenty-seven, Hawkins signed with the ABA’s Pittsburgh Pipers for their inaugural season in 1967–68, and went on to lead the league in scoring, lead the Pipers to the championship, and be crowned the ABA’s regular-season and playoff most valuable player. In the lovably chaotic way of the ABA, the Pipers moved to Minnesota the next season, then returned to Pittsburgh in 1969. And at some point after that first season, after a game in East Liverpool, Hawkins pulled Zmijanac aside and told him, “I got you a tryout with the Pipers.”

  Maybe it was because Georgie had been cut, and Zmijanac knew he was n
o better. Maybe it was because the Pipers were anything but a solid operation, and paying role players $1,000 less than his teaching salary. Maybe he was scared to fail.

  “I didn’t go,” Zmijanac said. “Could I have made it? I don’t know. I never regretted it. Just the fact that, in my heart, I know I could play with Simmie Hill and Norm Van Lier and Connie Hawkins—I could actually be on the same court and play and be good enough to play with them?—is enough.”

  For a generation, the social fabric of Aliquippa had been left to expand, roil, and preen on its own. J&L had stopped telling people where to live in the ’40s but, like a discarded glove retaining the form of a hand long removed, most ethnic enclaves remained intact. West Aliquippa was still Italian. Blacks still lived mostly in Plan 11 and Logstown. Whites still dominated Plan 12, where school and stadium sat. But the no-frills stock of low-income housing built for war workers—Linmar Homes, where the Ditkas lived, nearby Linmar Terrace, and Griffith Heights—was showing its age. Parts of town had sunk into squalor. Just off Franklin Avenue, above where crowds had cheered JFK, rose a narrow stretch of asphalt that newspapers termed “blighted” and the harsh called a slum. Whites now called it, simply, “The Hollow.”

  It wound up Superior Avenue toward the high old farmland once known as McDonald Heights, but the “superior” had grown more and more ironic. Now the district was just ratty apartments, cramped businesses, plenty of small-time and violent crime, and one church. “It was like Gunsmoke,” Salt Smith said. In the early days, this slab of Plan 7 had been dominated by Slavs, but blacks had a presence that, with time, slowly grew. They called it “The Holla.”