To Mom and Dad
Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to David Meinert for permission to quote excerpts from the lyrics to “Candy Cigarette” by The Presidents of the United States of America.
Designed by Mark Corsey
Photo credits:
Jo Hanshaw (photo insert page 3, bottom photo)
Pro Football Hall of Fame/WireImage.com (photo insert page 6, both photos)
Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives, Philadelphia, PA (all other photos)
Copyright © 2006 by Matthew Algeo
All rights reserved.
Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61374-885-5
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Roster: 1943 Phil-Pitt Steagles
Preface: 1941
ONE: A Bad Break
TWO: Keystoners
THREE: New Priorities
FOUR: Making Changes
FIVE: Hatching the Steagles
SIX: Greasy and Walt
SEVEN: Unfit for Military Service
EIGHT: Birds of Steel
NINE: Chicago
TEN: Strikes
ELEVEN: Thanksgiving
TWELVE: Survival
THIRTEEN: Win and In
EPILOGUE: V-J Day
POSTSCRIPT: 2003
Notes
Acknowledgments
Sources
Bibliography
Index
Roster
1943 Phil-Pitt Steagles
(Players who appeared in five or more games)
* Property of the Pittsburgh Steelers. (All others property of the Philadelphia Eagles.)
** Honorably discharged from military service for physical reasons.
Preface: 1941
IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE a date that would live in infamy. That December day was just supposed to be Tuffy Leemans Day. After six seasons, Alphonse Emil Leemans, the New York Giants’ burly halfback, was hanging up his spikes for good. Leemans was one of the toughest players in the National Football League—his nickname was not ironic—but he was also one of the most popular players, among teammates, fans, even opponents. He was self-effacing. He had a good sense of humor. After practice he liked to unwind by helping his wife make candlewick rugs.
Leemans had been discovered by Wellington Mara, the teenaged son of Giants owner Tim Mara. While visiting Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1935, the younger Mara saw Leemans lead George Washington College against mighty Alabama. GW got throttled, 39-0, but it wasn’t Leemans’ fault. But for him, the Washington Star reported, “the Buff and Blue might have yielded even more points.” Especially impressive were Leemans’ booming punts: twice he booted the ball more than 60 yards—from his own end zone. So taken was Wellington that, upon his return to New York, he practically begged his father to sign Leemans. Wisely, the old man took his son’s advice: the Giants made Leemans their second pick in the first NFL draft the following spring. He proved to be more than just a great punter: He led the league in rushing his rookie season, carrying the ball for 830 yards. He also played excellent defense and returned kicks. He was an all-pro that season—and every season thereafter.
But now it was time for Leemans to move on to more lucrative pursuits—he had his eye on a duckpin bowling alley outside Washington—and the Giants wanted to give him a big sendoff before his final home game, at the Polo Grounds on December 7, 1941, against the Brooklyn Dodgers. (Professional football teams routinely “borrowed” the name of their local baseball franchise, much to posterity’s confusion. There were even two different pro football teams called the New York Yankees in the 1940s.)
It was a perfect day for football, clear and cool, not a cloud in the sky. The massive stadium was packed with more than 55,000 fans, the league’s biggest crowd of the season. Looking a little sheepish, Leemans accepted his parting gifts: a silver tray in the shape of a football and a small trophy, presented by Giants captain Mel Hein; a gold watch from his George Washington coach, Jim Pixlee; and $1,500 in defense bonds, presented by Jim Farley, New York State’s Democratic boss, former Postmaster General—and ardent Giants fan.
Smiling, Leemans stepped up to the big microphone.
“Fans, teammates, my former coach, George Washington alumni, and”—sotto voce—“the Brooklyn Dodgers.” The crowd roared with laughter. Leemans gave a brief, heartfelt speech in which, according to the New York Times, “he thanked every one for everything.”
The rest of the day was sure to be anticlimactic: With a record of eight wins and two losses, the Giants had already clinched the Eastern Division title for 1941. They would play the Western Division winner for the league championship in two weeks, so today they would play hard—but not too hard.
With six wins and four losses, the Dodgers were playing for nothing but New York City bragging rights.
The game down in Washington that Sunday was meaningless, too. The Redskins were hosting the Philadelphia Eagles. Both teams had long been eliminated from playoff contention. The Redskins were ending their worst season since moving from Boston in 1937. The Eagles were guaranteed to finish with more losses than wins, just as they had every year since joining the league in 1933.
But the weather was spectacular in Washington, too, and the capital, weary of all the war talk and eager for outdoor diversions before the dreary Potomac winter took hold, turned out in force. Griffith Stadium, a dilapidated old battleship of a ballpark on Georgia Avenue NW, was nearly sold out. More than 27,000 fans filled the place, enabling the Redskins to set a new single-season attendance record: 194,450. Among the crowd were hundreds of servicemen, dapper in their long, double-breasted dress coats (soldiers in beige, sailors in dark blue), chatting, laughing, flirting with the girls working the concession stands, sipping hot cocoa or coffee (or maybe a little contraband whiskey). One of the servicemen at the game was a young naval officer named John F. Kennedy.
Not to be outdone by the Giants, Redskins owner George Preston Marshall orchestrated two “days” at Griffith Stadium that Sunday. One was for Bob Hoffman, a Redskin who was stricken with tuberculosis midway through the season. Hoffman was recovering nicely but was “believed to be under heavy expense.” Collection boxes were placed throughout the stadium, the contents of which would be forwarded to the ailing player. It was also “Georgetown Day,” to honor the four Hoyas taking part in the game: Clem Stralka of the Redskins and Lou Ghecas, Joe Frank, and Jim Castiglia of the Eagles. In a pregame ceremony each was presented a brand new suitcase by Al Blozis, a Georgetown senior and star tackle on the school’s football team, who had the honor of representing the student body.
Of the three games that Sunday, the only one that really meant anything was at Comiskey Park in Chicago, where the Cardinals were hosting their cross-town rivals, the Bears, before a crowd of 18,879. Usually the rivalry was phlegmatic—the Bears almost always won, and easily—but this game was different because there was a lot on the line. If the Bears won, they would tie the Green Bay Packers for first place in the Western Division, forcing the first divisional playoff game in league history. (The Packers had already finished their schedule, and many of them were in the stands to root the Cardinals on.) The Cardinals had something to play for as well. They were out to avenge a 53-7 whipping that the Bears had administered to them eight weeks earlier. There were no “days” at Comiskey that Sunday, only football.
The games in New York and Washington kicked off at 2:00 p.m., Eastern Time. The Chicago game began 30 minutes later.
At Griffith Stadium in D.C., the Eagles, who were 14-point underdogs, surprised everybody by quickly taking a 7-0 lead over the Redskins. Eagles halfback Jack Banta, who’d been cut by the Redskins earlier in the season, gained a measure of revenge on his old team by scoring the touchdown on a nice seven-yard run. Nick Basca, a rookie from Villanova, added the extra point. At the top of the stadium, in a rickety press box reeking of cigar smoke, the sportswriters, lined up behind their Underwoods and L.C. Smiths, kept one eye on the field and another on the Associated Press Teletype machine, which was spitting out reports from the other two games. In Chicago, the Cardinals were leading the Bears 7-0 in the first quarter. In New York, the Dodgers were beating the Giants by the same score early in the second quarter. It was shaping up to be a day of upsets.
Then, at around 2:45 p.m., the Teletype machine pounded out an enigmatic message: CUT FOOTBALL RUNNING.
Pat O’Brien, the AP man at the Eagles-Redskins game in D.C., turned to his friend from the Washington Post, Shirley Povich, and shrugged: Must be a problem with the wires.
But then came this: PEARL HARBOR BOMBED.
Then this: WAR ON.
The writers huddled close around the machine, silent and disbelieving. They were the only people in the stadium with any knowledge of the events unfolding, at that very moment, half a world away.
“For a few moments it was our exclusive secret,” Povich later wrote. “And hard to grapple with was the stupefying news.”
Jesse Jones—commerce secretary, presidential confidante, and one of the most powerful men in Washington—was enjoying the game from a box seat on the 50-yard line. An usher approached and handed him a note. Jones read it, got up, put on his coat and hat, and left the stadium in silence.
Another usher was dispatched to locate Edward A. Tamm, the assistant director of the FBI, and escort him to the stadium switchboard. Tamm was patched into a call with J. Edgar Hoover, who was in New York for the weekend, and Robert L. Shivers, the special agent in charge of the bureau’s Honolulu office. Shivers held the phone out his office window. Tamm and Hoover could hear the explosions emanating from Pearl Harbor.
Soon Griffith Stadium echoed with cryptic announcements.
“Admiral W.H.O. Bland”—the head of the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance—“is asked to report to his office at once,” the public address announcer solemnly intoned, the words bouncing around the stadium like a wayward punt.
“Mr. Joaquin Elizande”—the resident commissioner of the Philippines—“is asked to report to his office.” The announcements grew more frequent, and urgent. Newspaper reporters and photographers were asked to report to their offices as well. The press box rapidly depopulated. By halftime, just a single photographer was on the sidelines.
But the big news—the outbreak of war—was never officially announced at Griffith Stadium.
“We don’t want to contribute to any hysteria,” the Redskins’ general manager, Jack Espey, said at the time. Years later, though, Redskins owner George Preston Marshall gave a more prosaic explanation: “I didn’t want to divert the fans’ attention from the game.” So, between the four-star pages, the PA announcer droned on with the usual announcements.
“Seymour hit off tackle and picked up about three yards.”
“That pass, Baugh to Aguirre, was good for about eight yards.”
But the crowd knew something was amiss.
“By the end of the half, there was a buzzing in the grandstands,” the Washington Post’s Shirley Povich wrote. “Inevitably, shreds of the story began to ripple beyond the vicinity of the press box.”
But those ripples never reached the players on the field.
“We didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Sammy Baugh, the Redskins’ star passer remembered. “I had never heard that many announcements, one right after the other. We felt something was up, but we just kept playing.”
Similar scenes unfolded in New York and Chicago: big shots were paged, the games went on, and the fans in the bleachers were oblivious. Perhaps it was just as well, considering the hard times ahead. For tens of thousands of Americans, a professional football game would be their last carefree diversion for many years. For some—including some on the field—it would be their last ever.
In the end, December 7, 1941, wasn’t a day of upsets. The Redskins came from behind to beat the Eagles, 20-14. The Bears came back too, beating the Cardinals to force a playoff with the Packers. Only the Dodgers held their early lead, beating the Giants 21-7 and ruining Tuffy Leemans Day. Fans streaming out of the stadiums were greeted by newsboys hawking extra editions that confirmed the dreadful rumors: “U.S. AND JAPS AT WAR.” More than 2,300 sailors, soldiers, and civilians at Pearl Harbor were dead.
The next day, President Roosevelt went before Congress and declared, “The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Both chambers passed a declaration of war, with only one lawmaker—Montana Representative Jeanette Rankin—dissenting. Across the country, shock gave way to panic, and in San Francisco, air raid sirens wailed as dozens of “hostile planes” were sighted over the city. The planes weren’t real, but the fear was.
Football was rendered utterly inconsequential. The day after Pearl Harbor, reporters asked Giants head coach Steve Owen what he thought about the upcoming playoff game between the Bears and the Packers. Owen, a rotund and usually jovial Oklahoman, answered gravely in his slow Southern drawl: “I don’t know what is going to happen.” He seemed so serious. It sounded as if he were talking about the war, not a football game.
Professional football players contributed mightily and often heroically to the war effort. Those who could fight, fought. Bob Hoffman, the tubercular Redskin, recovered well enough to serve four years in the military, not returning to the NFL until 1946. Each of the four Georgetown alums honored before the Eagles-Redskins game on Pearl Harbor Day also went off to war, as did Al Blozis, the Hoya football star who presented them with luggage. Blozis, however, never returned. After Georgetown, he played two seasons with the Giants. Then he enlisted in the Army, only to be killed on a battlefield in France. Nick Basca, the Eagles’ rookie kicker that day, would meet a similar fate.
In all, 638 NFL players served in the military during World War II. It’s an impressive number, especially considering the league only had about 330 total roster spots when the U.S. entered the conflict. Three hundred fifty-five NFL players were commissioned officers. Sixty-nine were decorated. Nineteen (including Al Blozis and Nick Basca) died for their country. Two—Jack Lummus of the Giants and Maurice Britt of the Detroit Lions—were awarded the Medal of Honor.
By the spring of 1943, with the war still raging and no end in sight, the 23-year-old National Football League was facing a crisis unimaginable today: a shortage of players. The Pittsburgh Steelers had just six under contract. The Dodgers had none. Front offices suffered, too. The owners of the Dodgers, the Eagles, the Bears, and the Cleveland Rams were on active duty. But the league persevered. Aging stars were lured out of retirement, and a few active servicemen managed to get leave for games—though not always through official channels.
But mostly the league subsisted on players who’d been deferred from the draft. Some had families to support. Others worked in essential war industries. The lion’s share, though, were physically unfit for military service. They had ailments that precluded military careers but not football careers: ulcers, flat feet, partial blindness or deafness, perforated eardrums. It was these men—known, sometimes derisively, as 4-Fs (for their draft classification)—who really kept the NFL alive.
One team in particular emblematized the lengths to which the NFL was forced to go during World War II: the Phil-Pitt Steagles. Created by merging the Steelers and the Eagles, the Steagles were a wartime anomaly, like ration books and air-raid drills. The team’s center was deaf in one ear, its top receiver was half-blind, and its best running back had ulcers. Yet, somehow, this woebegone group—including center Ray Graves,
tackles Ted Doyle, Frank “Bucko” Kilroy, and Vic Sears, halfbacks Johnny Butler, Jack Hinkle, and Ernie Steele, and quarterbacks Allie Sherman and Roy Zimmerman—melded to form one of the finest pro football teams either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia had ever seen, and captured the hearts of sports fans nationwide. And they did it all while working full time in defense plants, and in spite of the fact that their two head coaches could not abide each other. Perhaps no team in NFL history has overcome more enormous and unusual obstacles and adversities than did the Steagles.
Professional football’s 4-Fs didn’t storm the beaches of Iwo Jima or Normandy. They couldn’t. But they were, in smaller ways, heroic. In America’s darkest hours, they gave the nation something to cheer about, and their accomplishments, often in the face of long odds, exemplified the spirit that won the war. They also saved professional football. Without them, today’s NFL, its 32 franchises now worth a combined $26 billion, might not exist. They didn’t know it, but they were pioneers. This is their story and the story of their times.
1
A Bad Break
AL WISTERT NEVER EVEN WANTED TO CARRY THE BALL. He was a tackle, for crying out loud. Halfbacks carry the ball. Fullbacks. Even quarterbacks sometimes. But not tackles. Tackles hunker down on the line of scrimmage. On offense, they make blocks. They give the quarterback time to pass. They clear a path for the real ball carriers. If a tackle touches the ball, something’s gone horribly wrong: there’s been a fumble. But Wistert’s coach at the University of Michigan, the innovative and mercurial Herbert “Fritz” Crisler, thought, since nobody ever expects a tackle to run with the ball, why not have him run with the ball? It was the kind of contrarian brainstorm that Crisler loved. Wistert had his doubts, though. He’d never carried the ball in a real game. Ever. But who was he to question the legendary Coach Crisler?
So here he was now, lining up in his usual spot at left tackle, down in a three-point stance. It was October 18, 1941, a golden Saturday afternoon, and Michigan was in hostile territory, playing Northwestern at Dyche Stadium in Evanston, Illinois. It was a big game. Both teams were undefeated. The loser would be all but eliminated from the Big Ten Conference race. It was also the Wildcats’ homecoming game and the stands were filled with 47,000 screaming fans. Wistert could barely hear halfback Tom Kuzma shout, “Hut!” Center Don Ingalls snapped the ball back to Kuzma.
Last Team Standing Page 1
