“I can let you have a print for $156.”
“Sold,” said Neale gleefully.
For the next three months, Neale spent up to five hours a day holed up in Lex Thompson’s New York apartment studying the film. By the time he emerged, he had memorized every block, run, fake, and pass in the Bears’ offensive arsenal. But Neale was not interested in merely replicating the Bears’ T formation. He was determined to improve upon it. He added more running plays, incorporating the best aspects of the wing formations. In the fall of 1941, the Eagles joined the Bears as the only NFL teams using the T.
Some college coaches also embraced the T formation, notably Army’s Red Blaik, Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy, and Stanford’s Clark Shaughnessy. But most coaches, college and pro, resisted it, often bitterly. They thought its use of deception was unsportsmanlike and its use of passing unmanly. In 1943, University of Minnesota head coach Bernie Bierman dismissed the T formation as a flash in the pan. He predicted, “I don’t think the T will be any more widely used than the single wing, the short punt or any of the other old standard formations.” How mistaken he was: The T would eventually come to dominate football, though it would take a while. The Steelers didn’t abandon the single wing for the T until 1952, becoming the last NFL team to do so.
The Steagles’ summer practices ended on August 6, though Bill Hewitt, the former all-pro end who’d been coaxed out of retirement by Bert Bell, organized occasional workouts thereafter.
“As peppy as a college freshman just starting a football career,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Art Morrow, “Hewitt’s enthusiasm has proved so infectious that it has spread throughout the squad.” Even persnickety Greasy Neale pronounced himself pleased with the results of the practices.
“On the whole,” Neale told Morrow, “I think we had a very satisfactory preliminary practice…. It is still too early to predict any championships, or anything of that sort, but I am convinced we benefited greatly by this early work.”
Neale’s optimism was a tad premature. The Eagles and the Steelers hadn’t even merged yet, at least not on the field. The real challenge would come later that month, when training camp officially opened across town, near the campus of St. Joseph’s College. That’s when the Pittsburghers would be added to the mix. That’s also when Walt Kiesling would arrive, and Neale would have to begin sharing the head coaching duties.
ON AUGUST 25, 1943, just four days after Lewis Hershey announced that pre-Pearl Harbor fathers would be drafted beginning October 1, NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden decreed that team rosters for the upcoming season, which had been reduced from 33 to 25 players back in April, would now be increased to 28. Layden claimed the change was due to an “improved manpower situation,” but its real purpose was to allow teams to stock up on players before the beginning of the Father Draft, which would undoubtedly decimate rosters. (Some owners had wanted to increase roster sizes even more, to 35 players, but Layden feared running afoul of the Office of Defense Transportation, which had ordered the NFL to keep travel to a minimum.)
The next day, August 26, the Steagles went a step further to guard against the Father Draft.
“We’re going to insist that every man work at least 40 hours a week in an essential industry, along with playing football,” said Al Ennis, the Eagles’ publicity director. “We don’t want anyone pointing a finger at our players and charging that they aren’t contributing to the war effort, even though we think football has a definite place in the American way of life.” Ennis said many players were already working in defense plants anyway, and the team would help place the rest. He also said employers had shown a willingness to be flexible in allowing the players to moonlight for the Steagles. The team would run a “swing shift” training camp, with two practices per day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Players could attend whichever session suited their schedules best. Furthermore, Steelers co-owner Bert Bell said, “Pittsburgh gridders-workers who can’t get away from local jobs will be allowed to appear on Sundays only.” That meant Steelers tackle Ted Doyle could keep his job building uranium-enrichment components at the Westinghouse factory and still play football—just as he’d proposed in his June letter to Bell. It would make for a punishing autumn.
“In 1943 I lived in Pittsburgh all during the season,” Doyle recalled. “The team was in Philadelphia. I would take a train on, say, a Friday night or a Saturday night or whatever—the day before the game—and go into Philadelphia or wherever the game was to be and then I would get a little briefing before the game, any changes in plays and those things. Then we’d play the game. I’d take the train back home Sunday night. If it happened to come back through East Pittsburgh in the morning, I’d get off the train and go to work.”
Bert Bell first came up with the idea of requiring players to do war work shortly after Pearl Harbor.
“Why couldn’t our professional squads be employed in defense work, cut down on the weekly practice, play on Sundays and thus combine the two and do double duty for the good of all?” he’d asked rhetorically in early January of 1942. “It isn’t going to be enough to play, pay taxes, buy Defense Bonds and continue as before.”
Nothing came of it in 1942, but shortly after the Steelers and Eagles merged, Bell pitched the idea to his partner Art Rooney and Eagles owner Lex Thompson, both of whom enthusiastically endorsed it. (So did Eagles head coach Greasy Neale, who had worked full time in an airplane factory while coaching and playing for the Dayton Triangles during World War I.) Their motives were not purely patriotic. Section 5(e) of the Selective Service Act authorized the deferment of “those men whose employment in industry, agriculture, or other occupations … is found … to be necessary to the maintenance of the national health, safety, or interest.” By August 1943 nearly 2.4 million men had been spared induction through occupational deferments. (They were classified 2-A, 2-B, or 2-C, depending on their occupation.) While they were compelled to work at least 40 (and sometimes 48) hours a week in an “essential” industry, these men were free, in most cases, to play football on Sunday afternoons.
The task of determining whose employment was “necessary” and which industries were “essential” fell to Paul Vories McNutt, a former Indiana governor and chairman of the War Manpower Commission. President Roosevelt created the commission in April 1942 to mobilize the civilian workforce. In essence, McNutt was in charge of making sure war plants had enough workers. In August 1943 he issued two lists of occupations and activities, one labeled “non-deferrable,” the other “essential.” Workers on the first list were subject to immediate induction. Workers on the second were automatically eligible for deferment. The goal was to drive men from low-priority jobs to high-priority jobs.
The lists were marvelously detailed. Among the non-deferrable jobs: sign painter, taxidermist, florist, barber, bartender, gardener, soda jerk, lavatory attendant, and the manufacture of pinball machines, academic caps and gowns, and ornamental shoe buckles. (The “status of idleness” was also considered a non-deferrable activity.) The “essential” list encompassed 149 activities, from aircraft-engine mechanic to x-ray equipment serviceman.
“The time has come,” McNutt said, “when every worker must justify himself in terms of his contribution to the war program.”
McNutt’s goal was to keep men working in essential industries—thereby keeping them out of the Army. This put him in diametric opposition to Lewis Hershey, the head of Selective Service, and inevitably led to conflict between the two men. To make matters worse, McNutt was Hershey’s boss, since Roosevelt had given the WMC authority over Selective Service. (One of Hershey’s subordinates joked that Selective Service’s insignia should be “a Hershey bar with McNutts in it.”) Both McNutt and Hershey were Hoosiers, born and raised in Indiana, but their personalities were as different as Indianapolis and Amsterdam. Hershey was a blunt, no-nonsense military man. McNutt was a smooth-talking, silver-haired politician. Hershey believed McNutt’s list of “essential” activities was too broad.
After all, how critical were tanners to the war effort? He wrote McNutt, “I will not transmit any order from you for classification,” and notified draft boards that the WMC chairman’s lists were merely advisory and not binding, ironically citing the very autonomy that had undermined Hershey’s efforts to draft fathers. A perturbed McNutt complained to Roosevelt, who reasserted the WMC’s supremacy.
Occupations and industries that did not appear on either of McNutt’s lists existed in a kind of bureaucratic no-man’s-land. Men engaged in those activities—including bank and grocery store clerks, automobile repairmen, and tailors—were subject to induction when their draft numbers came up in the normal course of events. Among this group, too, were professional athletes. As far as Paul McNutt was concerned, they were neither nonessential nor critical.
“The usefulness of the sport is a separate question from the ‘essentiality’ of individuals who play it,” McNutt explained cryptically. “Thus it may well be that it is desirable that Blankville have a ball team. But Blankville may lose certain members of that team to higher priority industries—even members that might be ‘essential’ to winning the pennant. The pennant is not ‘essential.’” In other words, the only way for a professional athlete to secure an occupational deferment was to work a second job in an essential industry.
The Steagles were the only pro sports team to require its players to take war jobs. On the whole, the players did not object to the extra work. Most of them needed the money anyway. In the NFL, a salary of $200 a game was typical. At the Budd factory in North Philadelphia, experienced workers were commanding as much as $73 a week. Annualized, the factory job was more lucrative.
And the war plants were eager to hire the players. In 1943, demand for workers was so intense that unemployment fell to under two percent—still a record low. One third of the shipyards on the West Coast were behind schedule. Desperate plant managers began “scamping” workers—stealing them from other plants. In Buffalo, one factory sent telegrams to another factory’s workers, offering them higher paying jobs immediately. One personnel manager complained that “the way to get one good man is to hire four because three will quit.” Wartime employers were caught in a bind: as the number of soldiers increased, so did the number of workers required to feed, clothe, arm, and transport them, while the number of available workers simultaneously shrank. The United States produced a staggering amount of materiel during the war: 8,200 warships, 86,000 tanks, 300,000 planes, 15 million guns, 20 million helmets, 41 billion rounds of ammunition. It took an estimated 20 million workers to make it all—a force nearly twice the size of the military’s. The war stimulated many changes in the American workplace, changes that were both momentous and contentious.
On June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which called for “the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color or national origin.” Black leaders hailed the order as “the most significant move on the part of the Government since the Emancipation Proclamation.” During the war, the number of African-Americans employed in the manufacturing sector rose by 600,000 to two million, and the percentage employed in war plants jumped from 2.5 percent to almost ten percent. The changes were not unanimously acclaimed. When the federal Committee on Fair Employment Practice directed Southern railroads to hire more black engineers and conductors, the popular syndicated columnist Raymond Clapper complained that only “mischief, disunity and further irritation of race relations” would result. The committee, Clapper wrote, was ignoring “the deep complex of human emotions bound up in the matter.” In early June of 1943, some 25,000 white workers at an engine plant in Detroit walked off the job to protest the promotion of three black workers.
Equally contentious was the reaction to the influx of women in the workplace. About six million women worked in defense plants during the war. Many took jobs long reserved for men. They were welders, electricians, toolmakers, plumbers, mechanics, and, yes, riveters. They contributed mightily to the war effort and discovered a new world outside the home. As a female worker at the Puget Sound Navy Yard put it, “somehow the kitchen lacks the glamour of a bustling shipyard.”
More than one-third of the female war workers were married and had children younger than 14, a statistic that was widely regarded as alarming. The fear, as with the Father Draft, was that children would be neglected. It was a fear that was not completely unfounded. Exposés in Fortune and the Saturday Evening Post depicted children locked alone in freezing houses and sleeping in automobiles while their mothers worked. In response, the government began funding day-care programs for the first time. The Swan Island Center at the Kasier shipyard in Portland, Oregon, was a model day-care center. It operated around the clock to accommodate mothers on every shift. The cost, including meals, was 75 cents per child per day ($1.25 for two children). By the end of the war, more than 3,000 publicly funded day-care centers were caring for more than 130,000 children across the country. The centers were also credited with dramatically increasing worker productivity.
The mere sight of women in coveralls was enough to trigger conniption fits in some. It appalled the popular advice columnist Dorothy Dix (real name Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer; definitely not to be confused with the nineteenth-century social activist Dorothea Dix).
“The reason that women pass up the frills and furbelows of their sex for the hard-boiled shirts and tubular britches of men,” Dix wrote in 1943, “is because they are so naturally lacking in femininity that they try to turn themselves into imitation men as a compensation for not being the real thing.” In a Philadelphia Evening Bulletin story headlined “Will Slacks Produce a Crop of Old Maids? ‘No,’ Girls Say, ‘We’ll Get Our Men After War,’” an 18-year-old shipyard worker named Eleanor Penczak defended her “masculine” attire: “We’re here to work—not to look glamorous. And anybody who thinks our main job in life should be to go around looking feminine just doesn’t appreciate the needs of the day.”
Women working in war plants were sometimes subjected to virulent sexual harassment. Catcalls were common.
“You’d think those fellows down there had never seen a girl,” said a sympathetic male at the Boeing plant in Seattle. “Every time a skirt would whip by up there, you could hear the whistles above the riveting, and I’ll bet the girls could feel the focus of every eye in the place.”
Labor shortages allowed women to make inroads even in the resoundingly virile world of football. In the fall of 1943, Bell Township High School in rural western Pennsylvania, apparently unable to find a qualified and willing male, hired a 22-year-old gym teacher named Pauline Rugh to coach the football team. Rugh was a recent graduate of Penn State, and she returned to her alma mater for a quick tutorial.
“It is physically impossible to teach you all about football in three days,” Penn State coach Bob Higgins lectured her, “but we’ll get you started and then depend on you to ask questions as new problems arise.” In newspaper stories Rugh was invariably described as “comely.” Typical was what Red Smith, later a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, wrote in the Philadelphia Record: “As far as local records show, Miss Rugh is the first she-coach of a recognized team of males in the history of the sport. What’s more, she is reliably described as a very tasty dish, a blonde with a couple of eyes like this, O O, and a throbbing contralto voice.”
Rugh seemed uncomfortable with all the attention. She did her best to avoid the reporters and “picture men” who camped on her doorway. Yet her attempts to shun publicity only stirred more interest in her story. “This,” noted the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Havey Boyle, “probably, is a technique that works in other feminine adventures, too, marriage being one of the more notable.”
Bell Township High School’s wartime experiment, however noble, failed. The team lost all eight games it played and was outscored 219-13 in the process.
The Eagles and the Steelers hoped their own wartime experiment would en
d more happily.
7
Unfit for Military Service
At 8:00 A.M. ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1943, Al Wistert, fresh off the college all-star game and his draft physical, reported to the Steagles training camp, which had already been under way for ten days. He could hardly believe his eyes. To reduce travel, Commissioner Elmer Layden had ordered all NFL teams to hold their camps close to home. The Steagles chose for their training site a hard, rocky field at 54th Street and City Line Avenue, between a Standard Oil gas station and a dumping ground for construction debris. Bits of broken glass and tin cans were scattered everywhere. It was a far cry from the immaculate, manicured grounds Wistert had enjoyed at the University of Michigan. The locker room, a short walk away in a field house at St. Joseph’s College, was cramped and musty. Three dim lightbulbs hung from the ceiling. The showers consisted of three nozzles sticking out of the wall, with a wooden grate for a drain.
“I was thinking that the NFL was the next step up,” Wistert recalled. “I could hardly see my way around the locker room, and the lockers were so small that I couldn’t get my shoes in. I had to stand them on end to get them in the locker. And I’m supposed to be stepping up in class? Holy smokes!”
Wistert changed into his pads and charged onto the field. The team was supposed to hold an intra-squad scrimmage that morning. But Greasy Neale and Walt Kiesling were nowhere to be found. The team’s two coaches, who were both living at the Hotel Philadelphian, had not received their wakeup calls, so the players just lolled about in the late-summer heat. Wistert approached Bill Hewitt, who was sitting on a rock smoking a cigarette.
“You couldn’t miss him,” Wistert said. “He looked like a gorilla.” Hewitt had played football at Michigan with Wistert’s older brother Whitey, and Wistert was counting on Hewitt to show him around and introduce him to his new teammates. But when Wistert offered his hand to Hewitt, the Offside Kid just got up and walked away without saying a word. In fact, all the players ignored Wistert, because they were envious of his supposed $4,500 contract.
Last Team Standing Page 9
