Last Team Standing

by Matthew Algeo

  And the list went on for the Steagles. End Larry Cabrelli had a bad knee. Fullback Charlie Gauer had a bad knee and ulcers. End Bill Hewitt and quarterback Allie Sherman had perforated eardrums. Halfback Jack Hinkle had ulcers. Fullback Ben Kish and end Tom Miller had disqualifying head injuries. Center Al Wukits had a hernia. Guard Eddie Michaels was so deaf he had to take his helmet off in the huddle to hear the play being called.

  “Let’s face it, there was a war going on,” Vic Sears said. “If you were healthy you were in it.” The preponderance of 4-Fs in the NFL was not entirely coincidental. Football players were probably more likely than the average draftee to have disqualifying conditions, due to the violent nature of their profession. Head injuries, perforated eardrums, crippled joints, and broken bones were occupational hazards that could also keep a man out of the Army.

  There was a special bond among the Steagles’ 4-Fs, who believed, in some small way, they were contributing to the war effort. If they couldn’t fight the war, at least they could take people’s minds off it.

  “I think everybody realized that somewhere on the home front we oughta have some entertainment,” said Ray Graves. “We all realized that we owed something to entertain in our capacity. It was a challenge that we all accepted in a real rough time.”

  The Steagles weren’t all 4-Fs. Halfback Dean Steward was classified 1-A and was just waiting for his local draft board to call him. (It did, but not until the end of the football season.) Guard Rocco Canale was in the Army. Canale, a five-eleven, 240-pound lineman from Boston College whose brawny physique earned him the nickname “The Walking Billboard,” was stationed at Mitchell Field near New York City. His commanding officer was sympathetic to his desire to play pro football and agreed to let Canale play for the Steagles on weekends.

  A similar arrangement allowed Frank “Bucko” Kilroy to play for the Steagles. Kilroy, a 240-pound redhead, was a punishing lineman with a reputation for playing rough. In one scouting report he was described simply as “MEAN.” Life magazine once identified him as the dirtiest player in the league. (Kilroy sued the magazine for libel and won an $11,600 judgment.) Kilroy was in the Merchant Marine, so he was automatically deferred from the draft.

  “I was doing mostly convoy duty in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, first on cargo ships and then on transports,” Kilroy said. “You name it, I was on it. Scary.” But, like Rocco Canale, Kilroy had understanding superiors. “Believe it or not, they’d ship me back to New York for the football season. I used to come into Philadelphia on Friday night and practice two days with the team and then play on Sunday. But the moment the football season was over I was back on the North Atlantic on convoy duties.”

  During the war, numerous servicemen and mariners managed to get away from their duties long enough play a little pro football. In 1944, Hank Soar was stationed in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, but still played for the Giants. Tim Mara, the owner of the team, “didn’t like it because I wasn’t there working out all week long,” Soar recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t like it either but what the hell can I do about it? I’m in the Army!’”

  Another player who was on active duty was the Green Bay Packers’ Tony Canadeo. In 1944, he was in the Army, stationed at Fort Bliss in Texas. When his wife had a baby that fall, Canadeo was given a furlough to return home. When Packers head coach Curly Lambeau found out he was back in town, he convinced him to suit up again, and Canadeo played three games for Green Bay before returning to Fort Bliss.

  Of course, most servicemen couldn’t play pro football on the side. Once they were inducted, their careers were put on hold—sometimes permanently. A few days before the Steagles played the Bears in an exhibition game in Philadelphia on September 16, fullback Joe Hoague informed Walt Kiesling and Greasy Neale that he had passed his Navy physical. Hoague, who had played for the Steelers in 1942, was ordered to report to Fort Schuyler in New York on September 28. As a going-away present, Kiesling and Neale put Hoague in the starting lineup against the Bears, his last pro football game until 1946. During training camp, the Steagles also lost Frank Hrabetin to the Navy. At six-four, Hrabetin was just two inches shy of the maximum allowable height for induction. Hrabetin had played tackle for the Eagles in 1942. Like Hoague, he wouldn’t return to pro ball until after the war. Hoague and Hrabetin were fortunate. By the time many players returned from the war, they were too old or too infirm to return to the game.

  LATE ON THE NIGHT OF FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1943, the Steagles gathered at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia and boarded the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Pittsburgh Night Express. Most of the players rode coach, as sleeping car accommodations were reserved for high-priority passengers. The train chugged westward through the night, across the Amish farmland of Lancaster County, down into the Susquehanna Valley, and over the Alleghenies along Altoona’s famous Horseshoe Curve, a serpentine stretch of track that connected the Midwest to the Eastern seaboard and was considered so vital to the war effort that it was under military control for the duration. The trip took more than seven hours. It was a long way to go for a home game. When the train finally pulled into Pittsburgh’s Penn Station early Saturday morning, its brakes hissing, the players, tired and stiff after the long ride, wearily divided into two groups. The Philadelphians squeezed into cabs and headed to the Schenley Hotel. The Pittsburghers scattered for their homes. That night the two groups reunited at Forbes Field for the debut of the Phil-Pitt Steagles. They would play the vaunted Green Bay Packers. It was just a preseason exhibition game, so it wouldn’t count in the standings, but it would go a long way toward determining whether this makeshift squad was any good.

  Wartime Pittsburgh was a dark place. The steel, iron, and aluminum mills were running around the clock. Their furnaces were fired by bituminous coal, and their smokestacks filled the air with a thick smog that all but erased the sun. A pall hung over the city, quite literally. Sometimes it got so bad that the streetlights stayed on all day. A fine black dust blanketed the city, whispering through keyholes and transoms. It was, quite simply, pollution, but the locals had another name for it: black sugar. To them it was manna, a reassuring sign of economic recovery and a reminder that the mills were humming again after a long depression. They gladly and gratefully swept it from their porches in the morning.

  In the darkness and deprivation, the city took a special delight in football. Then, as now, Pittsburgh was a football town. The city was the home of the country’s first professional team (the Allegheny Athletic Association in 1892), three powerful collegiate programs (Pitt, Duquesne, and Carnegie Tech), dozens of legendary high school teams, and, of course, the Steelers.

  Pittsburghers weren’t sure what to make of the Steagles, though. They felt like they’d gotten the short end of the stick in the merger. Of the 33 players on the Steagles roster for the Green Bay game, just five had played for Pittsburgh in 1942. Steelers fans were also miffed that only three “home” games would be played in Pittsburgh—and one of those was the exhibition against Green Bay. It didn’t help matters that the team wore the Eagles’ colors of green and white instead of the Steelers’ black and gold.

  To reassure Pittsburgh fans that the Steagles were, indeed, their team, Al Ennis, the Eagles’ publicity director, published “A Message To The Loyal Pittsburgh Fans From The Philadelphia Eagles” in the program for the Packers game.

  “The object of the merger,” he wrote, “was to provide the loyal fans of both cities with a team worthy of their support…. We don’t say we will win the championship, but you can depend upon this—we’ll be in there fighting for it every minute of every game.” The program also included a skit poking fun at the team’s unofficial name:

  J.Q. Fan: “Jeeves, bring me my top hat, cow bell and cane. I’m off to Forbes Field to follow the Steagles!”

  Jeeves: “The what, mawster? Are you sure you are feeling well, sir?”

  J.Q.: “Certainly I’m all right, I feel great!”

  Jeeves: “Well sir, I was only won
dering why you were going out to chase some silly old dawgs on a nice night like this, and in Forbes Field, of all places, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  J.Q.: “I do mind you saying so. And I didn’t say beagles, Jeeves, you blockhead. I said ‘Steagles’—spelled S-T-E-A-G-L-E-S.”

  If Steelers fans found it hard to embrace a team comprising mostly Philadelphia Eagles, many Eagles found it just as hard to represent Pittsburgh on the field.

  “The Eagles, we all felt like it was our team,” remembered Ray Graves. “It was a wartime creation that we had to live with. The Eagles did feel like the Eagles should have been first [in the name]. It should have been Eagles-Steagles.”

  Tackle Al Wistert concurred: “I never had any feeling that we were a Pittsburgh team…. Frankly, we didn’t think about Pittsburgh being one of our hometown locations.” Ted Doyle, a Steeler, respectfully disagreed. He said it definitely felt like the Steagles represented Pittsburgh. Vic Sears, an Eagle, subscribed to neither point of view.

  “We were Steagles,” Sears said. “We weren’t Eagles. We weren’t Steelers. We were Steagles.”

  In any event, Pittsburgh was at least willing to give the Steagles a chance. An impressive crowd of 18,369 turned out to see the quasi-home team take on the Packers at Forbes Field.

  Opened in 1909, the ballpark was named for John Forbes, the British general who captured Fort Duquesne from the French in 1758. Built on a pie-shaped parcel in the Oakland neighborhood two miles east of downtown, the ballpark’s grandstands wrapped around the baseball infield in a narrow V shape, like a giant pair of tweezers, which made it a good venue for football, since the fans were relatively close to the action along both sidelines. One end zone was in the trough of the V, where home plate was for the park’s primary tenants, the Pirates. The other was in right-centerfield, at the open end of the V. The turf was as hard as a sidewalk (or a pavement, as Philadelphians call it), supposedly to benefit the groundball-hitting Pirates. It was also the dirtiest field in the NFL, covered as it was by a thin layer of black sugar. After playing there “it took you two days to get the soot out from under your fingernails,” remembered Steagles tackle Bucko Kilroy.

  Green Bay was a formidable opponent. The Packers had finished 8-2-1 in 1942, finishing second to the undefeated Bears in the Western Division. Veteran receiver Don Hutson, who doubled as the team’s kicker, held so many records for receptions and scoring that his nickname was “Mr. Most.” The Packers’ best passer, Cecil Isbell, had retired, but head coach Curly Lambeau found two able replacements in Tony Canadeo (known as “The Gray Ghost of Gonzaga” for his prematurely gray hair and his alma mater) and Irv Comp, a rookie from tiny Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.

  Lambeau himself was returning for his 25th season at the helm of the Packers. He’d organized the team in 1919, when he was just 21, securing the sponsorship of the Indian Packing Company. Two years later Green Bay joined the nascent National Football League, winning five championships between 1929 and 1939.

  Although he’d been practicing with the Steagles barely two weeks, Roy Zimmerman was tabbed by Greasy Neale to start the game at quarterback. Neale mainly wanted to see how well the veteran passer was learning the T formation. Allie Sherman, the 20-year-old rookie from Brooklyn College, still hoped to win the job by the time the regular season began.

  The Packers won the coin toss and elected to receive. At 8:30 p.m., Zimmerman kicked off for the Steagles. But instead of booting the ball far downfield, he tried an onside kick. The Packers were caught napping. The Steagles recovered the ball on the Green Bay 38. Three plays later, halfback Jack Hinkle took a handoff from Zimmerman and carried the ball into the end zone from seven yards out as the crowd roared in appreciation. Maybe this was a team worth rooting for after all. Less than a minute into the game it was 7-0 Steagles. But the Packers, who had never lost to either the Steelers or the Eagles, quickly retaliated, tying the score on a 55-yard touchdown pass. After a Zimmerman field goal, Green Bay scored another touchdown, and at halftime the score was Packers 14, Steagles 10.

  It was an unseasonably chilly evening, and many fans, still accustomed to Pittsburgh’s stifling summer heat, had come to the game in short sleeves. As the game wore on, and the mercury dipped into the 50s, some resourceful spectators kept warm by burning newspapers at their feet, an egregious violation of municipal codes and common sense. By the intermission small fires dotted the grandstands, casting the ballpark in an orange glow.

  In the third quarter the Packers scored another touchdown, on a 55-yard pass from Canadeo to Hutson. By now the Steagles’ “train legs” were showing. They looked tired and slow. Green Bay, on the other hand, was well rested. To minimize travel, the team had arrived in Pittsburgh the previous Monday, on its way home from an exhibition game in Baltimore. While the Steagles spent the week toiling in shipyards and factories, the Packers took up residence at the only hostelry that could accommodate them for so many days: the Northside YMCA. (“Hotel reservations were hard to get,” Canadeo recalled of the war years, “but we just put a lot of people in a couple of rooms.”) The Packers had been practicing all week at a playground on Monument Hill, romping through drills “like college boys,” according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Rarely in NFL history has the visiting team arrived four days before the home team.

  In the final quarter, Green Bay added a touchdown on a returned fumble, making the final score 28-10. The disappointed fans stomped out their fires and filed for the exits. The next day the Steagles rode the train back east to Philadelphia, completing the 600-mile round trip for a home game. Monday morning they were back at work.

  Despite the loss, Greasy Neale and Walt Kiesling saw some promising signs in the Green Bay game. The Steagles had more first downs than the Packers (17-11) and more total yards (484–399). On offense the linemen were stellar, opening gaping holes for the ball carriers in their wake. Jack Hinkle alone rushed for more than 200 yards. The Steagles “did everything but win,” Art Morrow wrote in the Inquirer the next day.

  But not all the reviews were so positive. Roy Zimmerman passed for just 29 yards, and the Steagles fumbled the ball three times, a malady that would plague them all season. Most disappointing of all, however, was the play of former all-pro end Bill Hewitt, the highest-paid Steagle. At 34, Hewitt was a shadow of his former self. He missed several tackles, and the explosive quickness that had earned him the nickname The Offside Kid was gone.

  “Bill was out of condition and I felt so sorry for him,” recalled tackle Vic Sears. “It was terrible. It was not Bill’s fault. It was people comin’ in and thinkin’ he can skip five, ten years and still play. You can’t. It was sad.”

  Hewitt had actually been retired less than four years; it only seemed like he’d been away much longer than that. In the interim he’d held physically undemanding jobs at an advertising agency and a trucking company. Steagles tackle Al Wistert remembered how Hewitt always reeked of liniment.

  “He spread something like Absorbine Jr. all over his body because it was aching so bad. And in order to get ready for practice or a game he’d cover himself with liniment.”

  Hewitt was also having a hard time playing with a helmet on. Returning to the sidelines, he would often throw it off, in frustration and contempt. Said Steagles end Tom Miller, “He’d take that helmet off and he’d throw it into the sidelines and Greasy would pick it up and tell him, ‘Put this on! You gotta wear it!’ He hated that helmet.”

  On the whole, though, Greasy Neale pronounced himself pleased with the Steagles’ showing against the Packers.

  “The mistakes we made were all honest ones,” he said after the game. “I really cannot blame the players for them. I think they learned a lot from this one.”

  The Steagles would get another crack at the Packers in the regular season, and the stakes would be much higher.

  Neale and Kiesling didn’t have much time to prepare for the Steagles’ second and final preseason game, which was the following Thursday nig
ht in Philadelphia against the fearsome Chicago Bears. To win, the Steagles would have to play much better than they had against Green Bay. Still, Neale was confident: “Any team that can outgain the Packers by nearly 100 yards must be regarded as a threat. I would not go so far as to predict a victory over the Bears, but I certainly feel that the Eagles”—Neale couldn’t bring himself to call his team anything else—“have a chance.”

  PHILADELPHLA, LIKE PITTSBURGH, was a wartime boomtown, and the city’s factories were specially retooled for the times. Instead of steam engines, the Baldwin Locomotive Works turned out light tanks. Instead of railroad cars, the Budd Company made airplane parts and ammunition. Four shipyards along the Delaware River churned out vessels for the Navy and the Merchant Marine. More than 500 companies in and around Philadelphia held defense contracts totaling more than $1 billion. By 1944, one of every four workers in the city was directly employed in war production. Probably even a greater proportion had, at one time or another, visited Shibe Park.

  Opened in 1909 (the same year as Forbes Field) and named for one of the owners of the Philadelphia Athletics, the ballpark was the city’s primary civic venue, a kind of secular cathedral. Built in the Beaux Arts style, with a magnificent domed tower rising five stories over the main entrance at 21st and Lehigh, it hosted political rallies and religious revivals as well as sporting events. Shibe Park was a gathering place for bluebloods and the new blood alike.

  Despite hot, sticky weather and a persistent rain, more than 30,000 fans packed the ballpark on the night of Thursday, September 16, to watch the Steagles make their Philadelphia debut in an exhibition game against the Bears. The unusually high turnout was the result of the visiting team’s renown, as well as a relentless promotional campaign on the part of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which sponsored the game as a fund-raiser for its charitable arm. As pro football games went, it was a glittery affair. Inquirer publisher Walter Annenberg was there, of course, as were Philadelphia Mayor Bernard Samuel and most of the City Council. Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall also attended, as did New York Giants owner Tim Mara. Eagles owner Lex Thompson was present too. Thompson had just completed officer training school and was now a second lieutenant in the Army. According to the papers, he was able to get a “brief leave” to watch the game.