Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  Campbell turned twenty-three during the 2010 season—his final year of college eligibility—that he played cornerback for the Vulcans, suddenly the old guy. He started four games, appeared in all twelve, finished with 29 tackles. He showed up for meetings. He did not oversleep. He made sure to take his medication. “I quit putting blame on everything around me,” Campbell said. “Because in reality it’s your choice. You have a choice to get up in the morning or not. You have a choice to work out or not. You have a choice to go to class or not. You’re reflected by the choices you make and I was making no choices at all—by sleeping. That’s even worse. That was basically saying: Bump you. I don’t care what you all say or do, I’m going to do what I want to do, and what I want to do is go to sleep. Bump everybody.”

  But at Cal U and beyond, Tommie wanted to run again. He went to the Cactus Bowl All-Star Game, lit up NFL scouts’ eyes and stopwatches with his 40-yard times of 4.33 and 4.31. Suddenly Campbell’s past and age didn’t matter. The Tennessee Titans drafted him No. 251, the fourth-to-last pick in the 2011 draft. A 90-yard, game-winning interception for a touchdown against the Bears in preseason sealed his rise. He signed a four-year, $2.09 million contract. He’d made the league at last.

  Campbell played three years in Tennessee, another in Jacksonville, mostly on special teams and as a backup defensive back, countering niggling injuries with preseason heroics—an 84-yard kick return here, a 65-yard punt return there. He was never a starter, never broke out as a star. But he became a steady, tough, fully awake professional. That’s more than most can say.

  When he walks through an airport these days, Pittsburgh or any other, Campbell carries a fine bag, and the clothes inside are expensive and clean. He eyes the men pushing carts, the men with short brooms and dustpans. He may not say a word, but when he stops at a urinal and sees the blue water, it comes back: Tommie can smell his past. He used to be so careless with trash, leaving cups and wrappers where they’d fallen. Now, no matter how long it takes, he leaves no trace of himself behind.

  On June 6, 2010, sixty-six years after D-Day knocked Aliquippa High’s first champions off the front page, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a piece about historical salvagers picking through the dusty, soon-to-be-­demolished offices of the old J&L tin mill. After reaching the third floor, they pushed open a door, and the day crashed in before them. “Last one to die,” read a scrawl of white graffiti on one wood-paneled wall, “please turn out the Light.”

  Those offices are gone now. What remains on the seven-and-a-half-mile stretch that was once J&L is the U.S. Gypsum plant. employing 120; a building products concern, employing 72; the fifteen-year-old Beaver County Jail; and a few other minor industries. What remains, too, is sixty-five-year-old C. J. Betters, who controls most of the stricken land and whose son Charles II—armed with a $37,000 pistol-like instrument that can read the metal composition in the stingiest clod of earth—helped find a way to wring more cash out of it when no one else could. In nearly a century of operation, the blast and basic oxygen furnaces had produced some 200 million tons of slag—composed mostly of the residual limestone or dolomite used to purify iron—and dumped it into any available lot, crack, or stream. Half is recoverable. The other half lies under the Ohio River.

  Betters’ first foray on the site, a purchase of 1,200 acres in 1993, cost him $1.25 million; he meant to build a casino until, two years later, Pennsylvania lawmakers outlawed riverboat gambling. Slag was not even Plan C. But early efforts there netted $3.50 a ton and helped bankroll the scrubbing of the U.S. Gypsum parcel, and Betters figures that in the twenty years since, Beaver County Slag, Inc., has exhumed nearly twenty million tons. Hand-tooled, air-shattering, Rube-Goldberg-like machines sift and sort the stuff all over the old J&L footprint, and magnets extract the metals. Mills buy the scrap, melt it down for reuse. Construction companies buy the remaining crushed rock for cement and subbase on road and construction projects.

  It has none of gambling’s jingle or sheen: the work is dirtier, more unpredictable, and the chips are far bigger. Slag now averages about $9.50 a ton, up from the $7 per when Betters officially started—and by 2011 the business was racking up annual revenues nearing $5 million. Between all the slag, as well as a century and seven miles’ worth of reinforced rebar, “blue concrete” blast furnace foundations dropping three stories deep into the earth, and the iron “buttons” (500-ton boulders left over, like solidified sugar in the bottom of a teacup, after a ladle pour) buried God knows where, Betters and his boys figure to have their hands full for years.

  One November Saturday, Betters hopped out of his truck at the sight of one such dirt-caked, massive plug of iron, now worth near $200,000 apiece. For a time, they used to burrow past such hulks to reach $7 slag. “We bring ’em, we break ’em, we knock the slag off ’em,” he said. “Then we sell these buttons to a steel mill. This product today is worth about four hundred dollars a ton.”

  Betters shrugged. “We do stuff nobody wants to do,” he said. “It’s ugly, nasty, dirty, and hard.”

  Then again, Betters’ Lebanese grandfather, his hard-drinking, heavy-handed father, and most of his uncles spent decades working at J&L. The family moved to Center before Chuck went to high school; he says his classmates named him “Most Likely to Go to Jail.” Betters took over his dad’s plumbing business, built a small empire with construction projects as far away as Texas and Detroit. Aliquippa always loomed, in his mind, as reminder and opportunity.

  Betters spent two decades shifting cash from other businesses to launch the slag concern, scrub the J&L brownfields, build state-of-the-art docks to lure industry back. When, in 2008, bankruptcy claimed Aliquippa Community Hospital—that beloved, $3.3 million monument to management-labor teamwork, and home to 270 jobs—he bought it for $250,000, tried a revival, then tore it down. He has amassed debt in the millions, thrown money at candidates for the state house and Congress.

  Lately he’s been buying up what he calls “yellow iron”—heavy construction vehicles for rent—to cash in on the natural gas boom, sure that the fuel giants will soon be harpooning acreage all over Beaver County. He’s also angling to develop a long-term health care facility on the old hospital site—and as many residents trust his motives as don’t. Betters does want to make money. He insists that isn’t all. “There’s something relative to my legacy, and my family’s legacy, in this town, working in this mill,” he said. “The day that I put USG over there? I felt real good about it. It didn’t create a fraction of what used to be here, but there were three hundred direct jobs and several thousand indirect jobs. I felt pretty fucking good about that.

  “I’m pretty comfortable; my kids are going to be okay. I’m worry­ing about my grandkids. Because I think about when I was growing up, the opportunities, and the lack thereof now, so I very much care about doing this. People tell you about air pollution: I lost a daughter, thirty-seven years old, from colon cancer who never smoked and drank. We have no history of that in our family. How’s that happen, the cancers? Young kids getting these different diseases, and you wonder, Is this environmental? Believe me, that made a profound impact.

  “But I also look what’s out there, and the biggest employers are meth labs, trafficking drugs. I’m going to let you talk to a couple employees today. And you tell me when you leave, is it just monetary? Because no fucking person in his right mind would do what I’ve done.”

  He drove to the J&L site’s northern tip, up a dirt grade onto a vast plateau: windswept, sun-washed, and empty but for two men. They were goggled, wielding acetylene torches amid a landscape of jutting rock and gnarled metal. A rusted ladle squatted ten feet away, unhinged, the kind they cut and buried when a worker fell screaming into the molten pour. Here—thirty years after it closed—the mill was producing product still, belched up through the crust like splinters working through skin. Up here, somewhere, serial killer Eddie Surratt supposedly dumped a body. Not far off, a dying Eddie Humphrie
s was found.

  The six-hundred-acre site was once considered so toxic that the state’s Department of Environmental Protection ordered it capped with dirt, fenced, and padlocked; Betters’ crew has been toiling away on it for more than a decade. As he approached, the two men dialed down their torches. The oldest, a forty-nine-year-old white man named Fred, stole once from Betters and served time; after his release, Betters rehired him. The second man was twenty-five-year-old Tony Gaskins, who shot ex–Aliquippa running back James Moon four years before Moon killed Diedre Walker and then himself. Though far younger than Fred, Tony seemed to be in charge.

  “Did we hit it?” Gaskins said.

  “Yes, you did,” Betters said.

  “I didn’t know that till right now.”

  In September, Betters had dangled a proposal to Gaskins and his crew of thirteen: cut and sort seven thousand tons of pitscrap by the end of the year, and you’ll get a $100,000 bonus to split among you. For men making $13 an hour, that $7,142.82 apiece would come in handy. Of course, Betters didn’t bother telling the men they had hit their number the month before. That’s good management, old school: If they’re pushing hard, why give them reason to let up?

  Gaskins didn’t mind. Betters had saved him. After serving his sentence for shooting James Moon, Gaskins had fallen back into the old corner rhythm: hung out, hustled drugs. But the birth of his daughter, Jayde, and the fact that “my buddies kept getting killed” proved a sobering combination. Gaskins took a job washing dishes at Betters’ country club. Walking away from the street’s faster money wasn’t easy.

  “I’ve thought about it, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But I can’t go that route, because I have a family. It’s not about me anymore. When I was out doing all that, I didn’t have a kid or a girlfriend or wife or whatever. I was by myself and I didn’t have a caring bone in this world but to make money and take care of myself.”

  Betters eyed Gaskins for months at the club, heard about his criminal record. Gaskins didn’t pretty up the tale. Betters liked the honesty, his intelligence and hustle. “White people in this town don’t like to give blacks a chance to show what they can do,” Betters told him. “I’m willing to give you a chance.”

  It was also one old man’s chance to reset the American Dream, wind it back to its roots: hand a desperate man a shovel and see how much he digs. That was 2010. “It took a year to beat that jive-ass shit out of him,” Betters said. “But once he got past that I knew he was going to fly.” Gaskins has worked for him ever since.

  “I stay there because I got things now in life that I thought I would never have,” Gaskins said. “I got a home I never had before of my own, I’ve basically got my family going, getting ready to have another kid here in February. My parents weren’t that fortunate, but once I started working for Chuck? Basically everything I ever wanted? I’m getting it.”

  20

  Family Matters

  It was late 2010 when Tony Dorsett started feeling the pull, and strong: Family. Roots. Blood. Part of it was his mother, Myrtle, mind honey­combed by dementia, rattling around in the house in Center that he’d bought with his rookie bonus check. He was flying in from his home outside Dallas nearly once a month now, the plane’s approach sometimes taking him over the stadium in Hopewell that was renamed, in 2001, in his honor. Each time he found himself visiting old haunts—the childhood playground in Mount Vernon, the twelve-mile training route he used to run up Monaca Road, Jack Chapman’s bar in Plan 11 where that window broke and everybody scattered. He recognized fewer faces. He was pushing sixty, starting to forget things, too. Often, he felt like he was the ghost.

  “The thing I’m disappointed in?” Dorsett said one golden, leaf-strewn September afternoon, gunning his Chrysler 300 up Fifth Avenue, eyeing the chunked asphalt, the crumbling curbs, the growth spilling between slats and pressing in from woods once beaten back. “I understand that it’s hard to get jobs. But see the side of this hill? It’s like the weeds are overtaking the community. People used to have a sense of pride about themselves, and it seems like that’s diminished. My mother used to tell me: ‘It’s not what you got. It’s what you do with what you got.’

  “But see it now? It’s never been like this, man.” He rolled through the old heart of Plan 11, corner of Fifth and Jefferson, the sun-bleached lots that used to make up the Funky Four Corners. “There used to be stores and clubs. The city or somebody should be able to clean this up, but people just don’t give a damn anymore. It’s just gone, man.”

  He drove half a block. “That’s the funeral home my brother was in,” Tony said.

  That, just a month earlier, may be the biggest draw. The death at sixty-one of the original “TD” stirred something in Tony, if only because any idol’s fall will trouble the soul. The first time Tony noticed was during his playing days, a Cowboys road trip to Philadelphia: Tyrone’s eyes glassy, attention shot. Tony started giving his brother money, pried him out of Aliquippa, got him placed in rehab in Dallas. Tyrone checked himself out. “Okay,” Tony said. “Just stay here with me then.”

  But Tyrone had to get back to Aliquippa. “That’s the problem,” Tony kept telling him. “Don’t go back.”

  “I can fight it,” Tyrone would say.

  He couldn’t.

  “It was hard to watch him decay,” Tony said. “Here was my brother who’d been one of the best dressers, beautiful girls, nice cars. Then I see him go completely down, just don’t even care, it seemed like. I had to force myself to understand what an addiction like that can do. I’m a mama’s boy and I’ll fight a herd of elephants for her. I couldn’t understand why my brother was stealing from my mother.

  “You’ve to understand the disease, what it does to people—because it’s not really them. Ooh, I got this real bad feeling in my mind about my brother. I was never taught to hate. You know what I’m saying? I can’t hate my brother. But I had a strong dislike for my brother because of what he was doing. I stopped giving him money, because I was, like, ‘This is all you’re going to do with it; I’m not going to feed that.’ But he couldn’t even see what I was talking about.”

  Now Dorsett was steering his way back down to Franklin Avenue. He went on to speak of the way his father died of a stroke at sixty, back in ’84, how it broke him to see such a strong man, with that big, proud gut, helpless in Aliquippa Hospital. “Daddy, get up,” he pleaded to the prone figure. “Get up. . . .”

  But seeing Tyrone was worse. Tony’s voice was a croak now.

  “Those last days when I was here? I swear to God,” he said. “I’m going to tell you the truth: The smell of, of . . . him. Because he was passing stool and I’ll never forget . . . I’ll never forget the day when the nurse pulled back the cover on him and was checking him. I was standing in the room and I had to turn away from looking. It was horrible, man. He was skin and bone.”

  Aliquippa could look that way, too. The hospital had been gone since 2009; of the 9,438 people still living nearly a quarter were age 65 or older and 36 percent of those below age 18 lived below the poverty line. Dorsett rolled past the police station, the monument “to the workers of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation and LTV who made the impossible possible in the production of steel.” He parked nearby, wandered the downtown’s dustied emptiness, recognized some faces. “Man,” he said to the men. “Everything’s shut down.”

  “Only one thing that ain’t shut down, Tony,” one of the men replied. “The bullets.”

  Yet, during the days of Tyrone’s funeral, for the first time Dorsett told his wife, “Let’s look at some houses. I think I want to move back closer to my family.” Maybe somewhere near Pittsburgh. Maybe someplace closer. He didn’t trust the town anymore, not to live in anyway, but maybe being near would ease some of the ache.

  “Every time I come back, the feeling’s there more and more,” he said, heading again up Monaca Road. “It hurts me to see it, but thi
s is Aliquippa. This is me. This is where I got everything.”

  Salt Smith and the rest of the Democratic establishment felt the threat rising. More people were talking about Dwan Walker as the May 2011 primary loomed. Maybe it was just words, but Walker never let up, never stopped the sell that didn’t feel like selling; besides, maybe change alone could bring about change. The kid promised to try to bring jobs, start a lottery, be visible and accountable, to find options for kids besides football and drugs. He told reporters and citizens how he wanted to work with Chuck Betters—Mayor Battalini’s longtime foe—to revive the mill site and town. Yet he didn’t seem bought and paid for.

  “I did not contribute one cent to that campaign—although I would’ve dumped a lot of money in it if somebody had come to me,” Betters said.

  Through the winter and spring of 2011, things got nasty. One rumor had Battalini calling Walker a racial slur; Dwan accused Battalini of lying and stealing. Despite the fact that his ticket was aimed squarely at his own cousin, councilwoman Lisa Walker, some wondered if Dwan’s family ties to the likes of Vance Walker—whose sex-on-prison-furlough episode brought down Peep Short—and Ali Dorsett (cousin of his first cousin, Anthony Dorsett Jr.) would give criminals the run of City Hall.

  The Democrats’ dominance had long rendered the November general election a formality: primary day is Election Day. On May 17, 2011, Walker crushed Battalini, Smith, and the Democratic machine 1,604 votes to 805 to win. Battalini refused to endorse the ticket in the upcoming general election but, he said, “This kid: I give him credit. He worked. The white people didn’t come out to vote. They just took for granted that I was going to win. I never thought that I’d see a black president; he’s here now. And I’m probably going to be the last white mayor in Aliquippa. I think it’s shocking.”