by S. L. Price
And, then, for six months . . . nothing. It wasn’t until election night, November 8, 2011, that D’s prediction officially came true: Dwan Walker, thirty-six years old, former Quips receiver, became Aliquippa’s mayor. With no Republican opponent, he spent the day moving precinct to precinct, inviting folks to the victory party at Captain’s Corner, the runty tavern down the road from where Big Mike Ditka drank and James Naim’s body fell.
That night, Walker smiled and hugged everyone in sight. His grandmother Rose, seventy-seven, clutched his arm. “I lived to see it,” she said. “I lived to see a black mayor.”
Folks started leaving near midnight. Walker stepped into the parking lot; every few seconds, the bar door banged open and another face called out good night. He smiled at each, but soon his voice cracked: it was unbearable, really, how winning felt like loss. Then Mayor Dwan Walker began to weep.
“I was trying to be calm but . . . I miss her,” he said. “I know she’d have walked in that door and been happy for me: I told you you could do it! There ain’t nothin’ in this world I want more: Have her put her arms around me and tell me, ‘Brah, it’s going to be all right. I’m with you.’”
Yet, even by then their accomplishment had become old news. Whether Walker’s election could even slow Aliquippa’s demise was the only question.
“Twenty-five years? At the rate it’s going now, it won’t be here in five years,” Battalini said. “I should be maybe a bit fairer to this kid and give him a chance. I just see that he don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. He’s got the wrong people behind him. He’s got people that are worried about themselves. Chuck Betters has already got his claws in his back. Kid has no experience whatsoever: Betters is going to end up running this town.”
Not immediately, though. Four months after Walker’s election, in March 2012, Betters’ holdings of more than 75 percent of J&L’s old seven-and-a-half-mile stretch along the Ohio River were rejected by Royal Dutch Shell as the site of its new, $2.5 billion ethane catalytic cracking plant. Aliquippa, like much of Western Pennsylvania, sits atop both the Marcellus and Utica shale fields. Though the natural gas boom has far less community-building clout than Big Steel—the finished cracker plant calls for only a few hundred permanent workers—the project still would’ve provided an estimated 10,000 direct construction jobs and created a secondary market for perhaps 6,000 more. But Shell chose a site just a few miles away, on the Potter/Center Township line.
“I still think we’re going to get some bounce-back,” Walker said after. “We’ve got a pipe-coating plant that’s looking to get some of that land, an ethynol plant. Only Aliquippa’s got two miles of riverfront that’s ready to go. The new docks are right there. So anybody that wants to come here, we’re ready.”
By then Walker had lost his marriage, his job at FedEx, and forty-two pounds, but he still bubbled with hope, tinged with a bit of desperation. “One thing I’m trying now, I got a production favor I’ve called in and I’m going to start making DVDs and sell my city to everybody who’s interested,” he said. “General Electric? I don’t care who it is. I’m going to try to mass-produce fifty thousand copies and send ’em off to top execs and let ’em know that Aliquippa’s here to do business, man. I don’t know what they’ve heard before, but we’re here now.”
Walker spent the rest of his first year trying to craft a recovery plan that would move the town into solvency and shed, after twenty-five years, its Act 47 status as a distressed municipality—an uphill slog with ever-declining revenues. Meanwhile came this cosmic slap: in September 2012 Battalini hit on six scratch-off Pennsylvania Lottery tickets and collected $15,000; two months later, he won top prize—$300,000—in the state’s “Trim the Tree” game. Sure, Aliquippa’s new mayor was young and eager. But the loser had all the luck.
Meanwhile, the tragedy that pushed Walker into politics remained raw in Plan 12. More than two years later kids were still congregating on the corner where Tiquai Wallace died, and no one dared paint over the graffiti tributes. Up at the high school all eyes were on running back Dravon Henry, who each week took the field with a dedication, “RIP WALL,” scrawled by a black Sharpie on the white tape strapped to his wrists.
The afternoon of his last day alive, Tiquai had played pickup basketball with Henry. He didn’t have fun. The thirteen-year-old Henry’s athletic gifts had already marked him as the heir to Law and Revis, and that Friday in 2009 he was having his way with Tiquai, a year older but starting to realize that the implied dominance of age was a lie. “I was winning and he was getting mad, kept trying to throw the ball at me, and I just kept going around him, scoring,” Dravon said. “And then he told me, ‘I’m going to go to this party. . . .’”
Now it was a November Sunday, 2011, and Dravon was sitting with his parents on a thick couch in the front room of the family home. His sophomore season was nearly done; he had proven himself an explosive offensive force, and an even more devastating ball hawk on defense. Aliquippa High would go on to win its fourteenth WPIAL football championship later that month, with Dravon more than redeeming himself for his two fumbles in the failed title game the year before: He would make the key crushing tackle on Jeannette’s live-wire quarterback Demetrious Cox on fourth and 4 to set up Aliquippa’s game-winning, 96-yard drive in the final three minutes; he would rush for 96 yards; he would intercept Cox’s last-gasp pass with twenty seconds to play to seal the 14-7 win.
Already, recruiters from Alabama, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, and West Virginia were circling hard. They would hang there, of course, for the rest of his high school days as Dravon racked up 5,454 career yards rushing—the all-time Aliquippa record —and established himself as one of the nation’s best prospects at defensive back. Talent was only one reason; Dravon hadn’t gone with Tiquai to that party. His parents kept a tight grip. They had a firsthand feel for Aliquippa’s dual nature.
Dravon’s dad, Roland Henry, had won a WPIAL title in ’96 as a tight end and a state title in basketball in ’97, went on to get a business degree at Thiel College; his mom, Shanell Askew, grew up in Valley Terrace in a family fractured by drugs, jail, and death. She was fifteen, still a student at Aliquippa High, on the October day she had Dravon. Soon after, she took her baby to class.
“I didn’t know what else to do; I had nobody to keep him,” Shanell said. She kept going, too, even after school officials told her it wasn’t allowed, and the following spring Aliquippa High gave in and opened a student day-care center. “So he’s been in school all his life,” she said. “Dravon, I believe, from day one to now probably missed five days of school. His attendance is perfect. That’s what he knows.”
It wasn’t until the next morning, after he woke, that Dravon heard about Tiquai’s awful end. Text after text filled his phone—Wall St. died. . . . Wal died. . . . Wall is dead—and Dravon panicked and ran out of the house and up the street, where his teammate, Jyier Turner, told him that it was true. “I just stood there,” Dravon said. “Shed a couple tears.”
He didn’t go to the funeral. But before every Aliquippa game, Dravon would point to the sky, he said, “for all the people who’ve passed away in ’Quipp.”
As he explained this, the sound of a motorcycle sputtering into silence could be heard outside. Footsteps fell, the front door cracked: David L. Askew III, Shanell’s thirty-year-old muscled and smiling brother, appeared in the room. He was wearing a New York Jets jersey, No. 24, with “REVIS” stitched on the back. The Jets had won this afternoon, and Darrelle alone had forced three turnovers. Talk turned to Aliquippa’s football genes. Shanell and David’s dad played at Aliquippa High; their grandfather, Ossie Foster, became its first 1,000-yard rusher in 1979; an uncle, Chad Askew, was talented enough to earn some tryouts in the NFL. Not David, though.
“No, no,” he laughed. “I just look like I played.”
Still, he has more of a claim on local football lore than most. His son, Kaezon Pugh, a ru
nning back two years behind Dravon, has been tagged as the next “Next One.” And in December 2010, Askew married Diana Gilbert, Darrelle Revis’s mother, tying even tighter the bond between the town’s once and future stars. That raised eyebrows in town, and not just because of the age difference.
In December 2002, Askew and twenty-seven-year-old George Horton—both aligned with Jamie Brown and Tusweet Smith, each fingering the other as the triggerman—pleaded guilty to the third-degree murder of Eddie Humphries, twenty-six, in August 1999. Humphries had been found up the hill on Tank Road, dumped over the border in Hopewell, dying of a gunshot wound to the chest and gasping the words, “George . . . David.” The case languished for nineteen months, until the killing of Officer James Naim and the subsequent grand jury investigation flushed out three witnesses who saw Humphries on his final day with Horton and Askew.
“When the Naim case happened, the brutality of it, I reminded my boss of this previous homicide,” said Timmie Patrick, the Beaver County detective who would go on to be Dravon and Kaezon’s running backs coach at Aliquippa High. “I said, ‘If we don’t solve this case, we’re going to have more bodies.’ So my boss asks for cooperation from Hopewell police, they turn over their material, and I produced a material witness within two days that observed George Horton, David Askew, and the deceased getting into a van before he was found murdered.”
Askew served seven years of a maximum fifteen-year sentence for the crime. “At first I tried blocking it out,” Askew said of the killing of Eddie Humphries. “I blocked it out for four years, and tried to justify in my head that what I did was kind of right—because if I didn’t do it he was going to get me. But I was in prison watching Oprah, and a lady there had lost her son in a fire—little boy died in a fire—and the look on the mother’s face and the way she was crying, I was like, I made somebody’s mom feel like that? That’s the first time I really understood how big it was what I did. . . . And I still feel bad for what I did.”
After he paroled out in 2008, Askew bumped into Revis’s mom at an Aliquippa tire shop. Gone were the wiry frame and flamboyant braids of his criminal days; prison had bulked Askew up, lent him gravity. “He was different,” Diana Gilbert said. “We went on a date and I could tell by the way that he talked, his demeanor. He was talking to me from his heart and I’m looking in his eyes and I was like, He is so genuine.”
Many are convinced that Askew has left his old ways behind. “Got caught in that spiderweb,” said Sherm McBride. “Great guy now.” Still, when Diana finally brought Askew to New Jersey to meet Darrelle, Revis’s first question was, “How’d you hook up with him?” Later, Darrelle pulled Askew aside.
“The only thing I ask is that you don’t hurt my mother,” Darrelle said. “She’s been through a lot. You treat her right.”
Askew has spent his time since working as a personal trainer, cheering Revis and Dravon, monitoring Kaezon, critiquing Aliquippa’s coaches, and posting the occasional pro-Quips rant on message boards. Sometimes he speaks at area schools, because few can testify more vividly about how Aliquippa’s boys are, as he says, “born with one foot to success and one in turmoil, one foot on the field and one in prison.” He hates the place nearly as much as he loves it.
“’Quipp got its own thing that don’t nobody else got,” Dravon was saying that Sunday afternoon. “It’s something . . . I can’t explain it.”
“Like a mystique,” Askew agreed.
Asked how the town would react if the population kept shrinking and Aliquippa High shut down or, worse, merged with Hopewell—if, that is, Aliquippa football disappeared for good—everybody stopped talking.
“I couldn’t imagine it,” Askew said finally.
“I couldn’t imagine it, either,” Shanell said.
“I don’t know what I would do,” Dravon said.
“For there not to be football, they would have to change the water system,” Askew said. “It’s in the water. If I give you a cup of water right now, you would run a forty in four flat!”
Everyone laughed except Dravon, but his mom wasn’t surprised. She found out, long ago, that no punishment was harder on him than the slightest threat to move out of Aliquippa. “It’s worse than a whuppin’,” Shanell said. “You don’t even have to put your hands on him.” Even the idea of vacation hits Dravon like a horror; after his freshman year, when his parents went to a North Carolina beach for a week, he begged off.
“Aliquippa just do something to me, inside,” Dravon said. “I went to Cincinnati, on the road my stomach was hurting and I was, like, carsick. But as soon as I saw that ‘ALIQUIPPA’ sign? I was smiling and happy as ever. There’s something about the town.”
Maybe it takes a native to see it. Because if you didn’t grow up there—or, like Tony Dorsett, you’d been gone a while—the place looked exhausted, beaten. Once past the day-care center, the police station, the library, a minimart and gas station and a few bars, there remained a whole lot of empty on the old stretch heading toward the J&L tunnel. Truck after truck rolled through without stopping. Any new business gravitates to the commercial cluster up on Brodhead Road, closer to Interstate 376 and away from the flash floods that, twice in the past decade, left the county’s onetime business capital under four feet of water.
“Franklin Avenue? The best thing that could happen is bulldoze it and push it into the river,” said Chuck Betters. “Because its infrastructure is inadequate for today.”
There were die-hards, of course. In the spring of 2012, there was still Uncommon Grounds, a Franklin Avenue coffee shop/ministry/arts showcase/halfway house planted in a ravaged storefront by an Australian missionary. Inside, addicts manned the register and poured drinks, and the warm vibe felt nothing like the world beyond. Weekly open-mic shows, usually on Thursday, provided the same rare, safe opportunity to gather that football does on Friday.
But even there, amid a jokey, biracial crowd of the amiable, the earnest, and the aging, light moments came tinged with a sense of foreboding. One March night, a teenage boy sang “Never Gonna Give You Up” as a girl gyrated inside a Hula-Hoop; a woman recited a screed against “Shallow America”; Stephen “The Poet” Suggs provided volcanic readings of his “Police Knockdown”—and the audience cheered them all. It felt like the junior college play you attend because your kid is cast.
Then a middle-aged black man edged toward the stage. The emcee announced Paul McDaniel, and the sight of him was a caution: drooping black pants, broken shoes, a baggy, soiled T-shirt. McDaniel took the microphone, squinted into the spotlight; one or two teeth remained. Humiliation seemed certain. Then the music began, and McDaniel opened his mouth.
The sound was so beautiful that, at first, it seemed like a lip-sync stunt, some cruel incongruity played for laughs. But the wondrous voice kept rising out of that shabby figure, high and raw, Billie Holiday and Marvin Gaye fusing into this hair-raising keen. Many in the place knew McDaniel’s story: there was no greater singer in the county, maybe the state, but word was that you couldn’t ever pay him a cent up front—because then McDaniel might never show.
“I always tell people: You never got it worse than the next man,” Mayor Dwan Walker said a few days later. “But that dude got it worse than anybody, and he’s a great guy. But Aliquippa’ll catch you. It’ll pull you back in with run-ins, or the people around you will pull you back in. Just the nature of this beast.”
McDaniel raised his seamy hands to his face. By then the shock of that jarring sight and sound had faded some, enough to let the words made famous by Nina Simone sink in:
Everything must change
Nothing stays the same
Everyone will change
No one, no one stays the same. . . .
His face crinkled, mouth gaping like a tunnel, McDaniel wasn’t just singing, but it wasn’t exactly performance, either. He was being the song. He looked ready to weep.
. . . The yo
ung become the old
And mysteries do unfold
For that’s the way of time
No one, and nothing goes unchanged. . . .
The audience went still. McDaniel sang on about winter’s turn to spring, the healing of wounded hearts, rain followed by a warming sun. Hopeful ideas, but not when delivered as a dirge: McDaniel’s fingers trailed down his cheeks, pantomiming tears. “Everything must change,” he kept repeating, and there was nothing to do but sit there and take it.
Yet if the town seemed stuck, economically and demographically, if it couldn’t—like many former mill and mining centers—retool or even reimagine a way out of its thirty-year rut, the knack for winning remained. Generations of steelwork, labor and drug wars, ethnic pride, and racial grievance had left a toughness—a cruelty, even—that endured well after the furnaces went cold; call it the final residue, hard and valuable as buried slag. More than any sport, football unearths, sorts, and refines that toughness, providing a continuity found nowhere else. And Aliquippa’s impassioned network of grandfathers, fathers, cousins, uncles, and brothers who once played The Pit demands that each new generation maintain the standard.
So each fall Saturday 160 boys, ranging from five to twelve years old, come to Little Quips field at Morrell Park to suit up in pads and helmets. Each August former stars like Peep Short, Sherm McBride, and Timmie Patrick—along with a dozen other unpaid volunteers—show up to coach Aliquippa High, where 40 percent of the boys, and more than 60 percent of its seniors, play football. And each year the greatest link in the chain, the man who has attended every WPIAL championship football game in the town’s history, who saw Willie Frank and knew Carl Aschman and learned from Hollywood Don, keeps coming back, too.
