Consider the phrase “Workers’ Paradise.” For most it’s a contradiction that, throughout communism’s decidedly earthy run, was impossible to take seriously. Yet perhaps the final irony of Karl Marx’s vision, the ideal that spawned the Paris Commune, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, endless Red Scares, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the Vietnam War, is that for a time nowhere came closer to realizing it than profit-driven company towns like Aliquippa.
Most there, of course, would have paled at the notion. Yes, postwar Aliquippa was hard-core Democratic, thick with New Deal true believers. But for four years the town had pumped out the weaponry and sent off its youth to die for the American Way; as late as snowy January 1949, sacrifices like Johnny Reft were still coming home in sealed coffins. To suggest any link with the Cold War foe whose iron curtain had clanged down over their relatives’ lives, who then claimed 37,000 more American war dead in Korea, was to invite a punch in the face.
Yet this was the era when locals began describing J&L fondly, and downtown as “lovely”; the idea of smoky, clamorous Aliquippa as a blue-collar standard was taking hold. In 1953 the domestic steel industry, with J&L its fourth-largest producer, employed 650,000; J&L was spending $676 million in a decade-long drive to expand capacity by 35 percent. By the end of the ’50s, the Aliquippa Works employed some 15,000 employees—13,550 of them hourly, unskilled to semiskilled workers whose entry qualifications were little more than a clean police record and the ability to endure monotonous, hazardous work.
Aliquippa’s population stabilized at just over 26,000 after World War II. After the close of Ellis Island as the prime immigrant gateway in 1954, the best place to find a cross-sample of the nation’s newest citizens was on a shop floor; locally run, union-backed “Americanization” programs, mandated in more than thirty states, only sped the melting pot’s boil. Saturdays at Aliquippa High, five instructors taught immigrant children and adults English and “the customs and ideals of a new land,” and prepared them for the naturalization exam. Runoff from the war—the broken and displaced—flowed for years.
“Between 1946 and 1950 there was a dramatic influx of Europeans,” wrote Aliquippa schools superintendent Lytle Wilson of his system’s population. “Americanization classes were filled to capacity. Young boys and girls from Europe came at the rate of four and five a month. They came from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Syria, Rumania, and Portugal. Three came from concentration camps. Evening classes were comprised of adults over forty years of age. From 1949 to 1950 the classes prepared for citizenship two hundred immigrants between the ages of nine and sixty-two. Twenty of these had come from German concentration camps; many had a fine educational background, and were lawyers, teachers, engineers, architects. They represented Russia, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Greece, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Ukrania.”
But this was a headier, more cynical mix than the one that had built the town two generations before, and decidedly less docile. Indeed, the war only completed what labor’s New Deal victories had begun. Gone was J&L’s iron grip over the town’s politics, police, and planning, as well as any sense of noblesse oblige. In its despotic prime, the company had built streets and infrastructure, a quaintly gorgeous library, a slew of ball fields and recreational facilities. Then, in 1940, chairman of the board H. Edgar Lewis announced in the Aliquippa Gazette, “The days when J&L would build swimming pools, homes and public buildings and present them—complete and wrapped in an attractive package—to the people of Aliquippa are over.”
Meant as an on-high pronouncement, Lewis’s statement was actually an acknowledgment of a new reality. The combination of progressive politics, the Supreme Court, and national emergency had forced American industrialists to accept a partnership—often hostile, and increasingly unequal—with labor. War’s end unleashed grievances bottled up by years of no-strike pledges, and a wave of industrial walkouts nationwide. In January 1946 some 750,000 steelworkers struck for an 18½-cent-per-hour wage hike. Three weeks later, management caved.
In June of the following year, a Republican Congress tried rebalancing the scales. Enacted—over President Harry Truman’s veto—as a corrective to the Wagner Act’s wholly pro-union provisions, the Labor-Management Relations Act sponsored by Ohio Senator Robert Taft and New Jersey Representative Fred Hartley outlawed union practices such as secondary strikes and the “closed shop” requiring union membership for employment, and banned communist leanings in union leadership. Most dramatically, Taft-Hartley empowered the president to step in, with the legal might of strikebreaking injunction, if an impending or ongoing strike was deemed a threat to national interest or safety.
Union heads declared Taft-Hartley a “slave-labor law,” and spent much of the next decade fruitlessly pushing for its reform or repeal. But their rhetoric was continually undermined by an age of prosperity: Between the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, steady U.S. military spending, and a booming U.S. auto industry, the demand for steel I-beams, welded tubes for water lines, seamless tube for oil and gas pipe, wires for bedsprings and field fencing, tin cans, pails and nails, fenders, tailpipes, and other car parts seemed limitless. For steelworkers the end of every three-year contract brought another nationwide strike, and victory. Their six-week action in 1949 won funded pensions and health care. A fifty-three-day walkout in 1952, marked by Truman’s illegal seizure of the steel industry, landed significant wage and benefit hikes and recognition of the union shop. Thirty-four days out in 1956 earned the rank-and-file 45 cents more per hour and guaranteed 80 percent pay a year during layoffs.
J&L, meanwhile, had come a long way since the kidnapping of Georg Isasky. Its new chairman, Admiral Ben Moreell, had made his name as commander of the “Seabees,” the Navy combat construction battalion legendary for its harried production of airstrips, docks, and roads in the Pacific Theater, before taking over J&L in 1947. Though deeply conservative, Moreell welcomed unions, considered unilateral management corrupting, and called United Steelworkers president Philip Murray “a true friend.” Because the current labor situation was “so bad that we must experiment,” Moreell once wrote, he was even open to some form of worker participation in management—the so-called Scanlon Plan of tying labor incentives and bonuses to company performance. Big Steel leadership and J&L’s executive committee—suicidally, it would turn out—had no interest.
It’s no coincidence that J&L workers often say that their strikes in the ’50s were directed less at the company than the industry at large. During Moreell’s eleven-year tenure, J&L emerged as a far more benign force in Aliquippa and, despite all its tough declarations, never ceased being a benefactor. Indeed, the company is universally remembered warmly today because it managed, in its retreat from absolute power, to create a sense that it cared about its workers as more than mere employees.
“J&L made us all middle class,” said Gino Piroli, who began his twenty-two-year stint at the Aliquippa Works in 1946. “I always say they were our big brother, because if you needed a bandstand for the Italian festival? They built it. Memorial Day? They built the bandstand for the ceremonies. You needed a flagpole; they’d give you the flagpole. They really looked out for the people. After the union got in, they were more generous to the people. They weren’t a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ then.”
Nothing better demonstrated that the two antagonists could unite for a common good than the building of Aliquippa Community Hospital. Pushed by the indefatigable Nick DeSalle, an Italian immigrant and former J&L steelworker, the company agreed to sell the town thirty-three acres of land for $1 and give another $1 million in matching funds if DeSalle could first come up with the base. Each payday for the next twenty-five months, J&L workers pitched in whatever amount they could. Some 13,934 hands made donations totaling $2.3 million. In May 1957, the hundred-bed facility opened, but not before thousands lined up to tour the gleaming halls and rooms to see what, exactly, they’d all pulled off together.
And why not? It was a civic triumph, truly collaborative, and hard proof that J&L wasn’t the only entity capable of making the town better. Labor’s rise as the town’s countervailing force was now cemented on a hill in New Sheffield. It seemed there was nothing that collective action couldn’t accomplish—ensuing hospital additions would expand capacity to 204 beds—nor any reason to think that the good times would end. And thus, for one short generation, the worker class in Aliquippa, and nationwide, would have its golden age.
At first glance, such a dreamy term hardly seems apt. Yet when you hear whites, especially, speak of the town then as “wonderful” or “beautiful,” they’re not describing how it looked. They’re talking about how Aliquippa made them feel. This is not just because of its three dozen bars, or the money to be made, or the friendly face of the old waitress, Crystal, at the Mill City Inn—though that all helped. You didn’t need to take the ride into Pittsburgh for a wedding dress or jewelry anymore; Aliquippa was the de facto capital of Beaver County. And it hummed.
Paydays felt like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. On weekends couples descended upon Franklin Avenue from the different Plans. They’d drop kids at the library, get their fishing gear at Sol’s, gold rings at Eger’s, shoes from S&S, all of it on the car-jammed main street laid out atop the old Logstown Run, where rainwater from the hills gathered into the main sewer line under their feet. In the late ’50s Franklin Avenue accounted for 60 percent of the county’s retail sales. There were the three movie theaters, a G. C. Murphy, a Dairy Queen, restaurants, drugstores, and soda fountains.
“That drive down there was pretty nice,” Ditka said. “I remember when you’d get your car, you’d cruise. Just like any other kid in America: You’d cruise in the car, and see chicks, and whatever. . . . We all went through it. My buddy Bobby Joe Rockwell, he was the first one; his dad let him drive the Oldsmobile before anyone had one. Billy Glass: I remember these guys, drive around in those cars. Aah, we thought we were the goddamned cat’s meow. We didn’t know how many people were laughing. . . .”
It was hardly a life of ease. Strikes drained bank accounts and jangled nerves. The rotation many workers had to make between the day’s three eight-hour shifts, or “turns”—one week working 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., the next week 4 p.m. to midnight, the next midnight to 8 a.m.—ravaged sleep and wrecked marriages. The attendant chemicals later unloosed cancers and ills that guaranteed a shorter, compromised life. Yet, for the first time a particular type of man and woman—lower middle class, lacking college education, and with little more to offer than a foreign accent, muscle, and sweat—could stick out a steel-toe boot and gain a foothold on the American Dream. They weren’t disposable. They weren’t at war with the community; they were a vital part of it. A workingman could make enough now to buy a four-bedroom house for $12,500, take vacation without fear of losing his job, buy a boat, plot retirement. He could send kids to college without needing a loan.
Looking back, Ditka says he came to understand that his dad’s discipline instilled a work ethic and self-discipline he otherwise might never have had. Big Mike Ditka, smaller than his oldest son by the fall of 1956, had always seemed satisfied with what was a fine lot. “You have a job with A&S,” he’d say, referring to J&L’s railroad, “you’re set for life.”
But that was just the fallback plan. Big Mike’s own father had been a burner; he didn’t want his four kids working the mill, too. He pushed his son to keep his grades up, keep playing, in hope of a scholarship. The future “Iron Mike” didn’t have to be told twice. A high school tour of J&L killed any interest in a job there—and he wasn’t alone. In Aliquippa, what was once a ripple had become a tidal change of attitude. Even as the high school population boomed, enrollment in vocational shop courses kept dropping. A mill job was seen less as an end than a means, and the message at home was clear: I work here, so you don’t have to.
“My dad was what they called a ‘scarfer,’” Evasovich said. “They had these large ingots, solid ingots maybe fifteen, twenty, thirty feet long, and they’d come out red-hot and my dad would have to stand there—with wood shoes and clothing that was fireproof and the mask—and if there was any separation he would weld it together with an electric torch. If there was no separation but there was some scrap metal in there, he had a little air hammer and had to dig it out. He was only allowed to work twenty minutes at a time because of the heat and the smoke, the smoke always coming up underneath the mask.”
Evasovich’s dad went into the mill at twenty-three and left for good at sixty-two. There was no Ambien or Tylenol PM then; Big John would take the edge off with “Mr. Ditka”—as John still calls him—with beers and shots at Savin’s, and Johnny would have to go fetch him home sometimes. For burns and wounds—for anything, really, ranging from a paper cut to pneumonia—the half-Serb, half-Croat family would spread on a thick black salve that was thought to cure most any ill. Into his senior year, Johnny was in bed by 9 p.m. He made honor roll or he didn’t play ball. He was going to get a scholarship somewhere, his dad said. Johnny worked the wire mill for one summer during high school. That was enough.
“The nail mill, you could only work by signals,” Evasovich said. “You’d stand a foot apart and scream and you couldn’t hear each other. You would have to put stuff in your ears and if you didn’t, you ultimately would be deaf. Dirty, noisy: I began to understand why my dad didn’t want me there. I went down to where he worked and was maybe fifty feet away and I was shielding myself from the heat.”
The next day, his dad came home from work and John said, “I don’t know how you do it.”
“That’s why you’re not going to do it,” Big John said.
In the summer of ’55, as Ditka was preparing for his junior year of high school, Frank Marocco was readying for his freshman year at North Carolina State. This alone was a family miracle; not only had Frank graduated high school, but he’d be the first male to go to college. To ensure Frank wouldn’t give in to fear and, God forbid, stay home, big brother Dominic, a boilermaker high in the union, arranged a miserable summer job sealing oven caps in J&L’s tin mill. First day in, Frank opened his lunch box to find his meal melted. After a week of streaming sweat and shoveling endless piles of sand, going away didn’t seem so bad.
Frank had had his heart set on playing for Duffy Daugherty at Michigan State—had even been squired around campus there by all-American guard, fellow Pennsylvanian, and future hotheaded coach Frank Kush—but Carl Aschman wouldn’t hear of it. A former Aliquippa player, Bill Smaltz, had just become an assistant in Raleigh. “You go down there with Bill,” Aschman said. “He’ll take care of you.” Marocco didn’t argue: You did what the coach said. But immediately it seemed like a mistake—too Southern, too few girls—and when Marocco found out that N.C. State planned on redshirting him, that he wouldn’t even be playing football for another year, he bummed enough money to buy a one-way plane ticket home.
Smaltz phoned Dominic. When Marocco walked off the plane into Pittsburgh Airport, he was startled to see all thirteen of his brothers and sisters there to greet him.
“What are you doing here?” Dominic said.
“I quit,” Frank said.
Dominic held out his hand. “Here’s a ticket,” he said. “Get back on the goddamned plane at five o’clock and go back down to school. If you don’t, you ain’t got a family.”
Marocco got back on the plane.
Mike Ditka eventually caught that dream like a fever, even if he bristled at the source of it. Nights, he’d come home and tell Charlotte, “Boy, Mom, one of these days I’m going to have four cars, and a big house with a pool. You’ll be able to drive it but Daddy can’t.”
He was different. He was, in truth, a bit crazy. How else do you explain a force like Ditka? There were better athletes, smarter football players, stronger kids to come out of Aliquippa High long before and long after he left, but he was the first to be named first-team all-America in college, the first drafted No. 1 by an NFL team, the first to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl, the first to coach a Super Bowl–winning team, the first inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “Ditka set all the standards,” Yannessa said. “There’s a perfect example of a guy who has this much ability”—he held up two forefingers, five inches apart, and then, grin widening, opened his arms as far apart as possible—“and plays that big.”
Ditka had a tough dad? Who didn’t? Hell, Ashton had a tough dad, too, and if that was enough to earn him a scholarship to play college ball, it didn’t turn Mike’s younger brother into a raging clone. No, Mike was sui generis. Aliquippa had the usual share of bad losers, but Mike treated each setback like the death of a mother. Press Maravich was Ditka’s basketball coach from 1954 to 56, and the best player on the court was Press’s scrawny son. “A little shit!” Mike said of the future Pistol Pete. “He’d shoot the ball better than anybody on our team when he was eight, nine years old.” Press’s hard-core methods were, for Ditka, like fuel pumped into an overflowing tank. He’d had the crewcut his whole life.
“Did you ever see a lion jump through a hoop of flames?” Press Maravich said to a New Orleans newspaper in 1986. “That’s how Mike was.”
And basketball wasn’t even his sport. When Ditka showed up at Raccoon Creek State Park for camp his senior year, you could see the difference. The season before, he’d been just another player on the ’55 championship team. But now he’d grown two inches, put on twenty pounds. Aschman took one look at Mike’s nearly 6-foot-2, 185-pound frame and switched him to fullback. Between the previous year’s passing drills and all his running in the fall of 1956, the foundation for Ditka—the man who would revolutionize the position of tight end from a blocker to a dynamic, game-changing pass receiver—was being laid. “I didn’t think he was very good until his senior year,” said Evasovich, a junior in ’56. “Then I thought: Who the hell is this guy?”
But already Ditka was known as the guy who, when a teammate had his leg broken on a clean hit against Beaver Falls, walked into the opposing team’s huddle and threatened to kill them all. Aschman loved that, of course, because such passion couldn’t be faked. Some tried. Gone from the ’55 team were four of the “ugly men” Aschman so dearly prized, and in the second game of the ’56 season Aliquippa traveled to McKeesport and got hammered, 25-6. Ditka began tearing the locker room apart afterward, screaming, berating himself, smashing lockers, throwing anything he could lay his hands on. The rest of the team began doing the same.
Aschman consoled Ditka. The others, he ripped. One boy tried sobbing, “I didn’t do a good job! I didn’t play hard enough!”
“Don’t worry,” Aschman snapped. “You won’t be in there next week.” The message was clear: Ditka does this. The rest of you don’t even try. You’re not him.
The Indians won their next three, but the season was a struggle. Ditka played even better on defense—inside linebacker—burrowing in on every tackle, never quitting. “Oh, my God,” Yannessa said. “Mike was a pain in the ass to play with.” Down 20-19 to Sharon with little time left and Sharon punting, Ditka was sure that a complicated, rarely used set, where the defensive linemen would somehow crunch the offensive linemen’s shoulder pads and neutralize them, would result in a blocked punt, a recovery, a win.
“It was the goofiest thing,” Yannessa said. “It only worked in practice and only if the other guy was passive. So Ditka was the linebacker behind us and he’s telling us, ‘You pull him! And you pull him! And I’ll go through there! I’ll block that punt!’ Well, we don’t block the punt, and with forty-eight seconds left we get the football and we don’t manage anything and we lose. Now he’s on the field, bitching at everybody, bitching at me; he wants to take it into the locker room and I’ll never forget, I finally told him: ‘Mike, fuck you. You think you’re the only guy that hurts when we lose?’” And Ditka glowered, and growled, and finally stalked away.
He wasn’t all intensity, though. Ditka was named “Most Popular” in the class of ’57—along with his future wife, Margie Dougherty—and was alternately president, vice president, and treasurer of his homeroom, and a member of the astronomy, conservation, fishing, and hunting clubs. As a student he got Bs in English and social studies and Ds in French and math. Two weeks later, on the night before the Duquesne game, Evasovich drove Mike up to Plan 12 to see Dougherty. Ditka tried showboating with a flip off the back porch and ended up tumbling forty feet down a grassy ravine. The next day, sore before the 28-12 loss even began, he still made 80 percent of the team’s tackles.
“Might’ve been the best game I’ve ever seen a high school kid play,” Evasovich said.
But it couldn’t save the season. The Quips lost four games in 1956, including an embarrassing, 53-13 finale against Mike Lucci–led Ambridge, with Ditka swarming, taunting, tackling every available Bridgers jersey—only to walk away from his final high school game furious and convinced that the Quips had given in. Scouts were watching. Aschman played favorites, and if he liked a player he would make the calls, cultivate the coaches, pull any string to get colleges interested. If he didn’t like a kid? Well, he just didn’t. “I was okay, but I had fifty offers—because of him,” Ditka said. “Because if Coach Aschman recommended you, everybody would give you an offer. Clemson, Miami, Minnesota, Michigan State, Penn State, Pitt, Notre Dame, everywhere—because of him, not me. Pretty crazy stuff: that’s how much he was respected.”
The recognition did nothing to diminish Ditka’s fire; what’s remarkable was just how little such outward signs of success would register. His dad might’ve looked at sports as a way out, but for Ditka “it was personal,” he said. He simply had to be better than everyone else, always, and when his high school football career ended Ditka moved on to basketball. During one game his senior season, with Press Maravich gone on to college coaching, Mike missed a layup, punched the wall in a rage, and broke his wrist. In the summer, when one might have expected him to ease up, to protect his body and psyche for college football, Ditka poured himself into American Legion baseball.
“I was there the day he chased Ash over the center-field fence,” said Mike Zmijanac, on a local ball team for the first time then at the age of thirteen. “He scared the hell out of me. He was so big and tough, I was such a skinny little kid. We were playing Beaver Falls late in the year. I was the last guy, probably batting twelfth—last out of the game, couple runners on. If I make an out, we lose; if I get a hit, we win. He told me: ‘If you don’t get a hit, I’m killing you. I’m ripping your ass.’ I’m a right-handed hitter, hit a little looper over the first baseman’s head. I was never so glad of anything in my life.”
Ditka’s parents loved Penn State, if for no other reason than the beaky charm of head coach Rip Engle’s top recruiter, Joe Paterno. Mike had committed to the Nittany Lions for the fall of ’57 and, up to just a few weeks before the semester began, intended to enroll there. Though Mike was only an average science student, Aschman had latched onto the idea that he should dedicate his college studies to a future spent jamming those meathook hands into people’s mouths. “He wanted me to be a dentist,” Ditka said.
The idea has been a source of delight ever since. “Mike Ditka as a fucking dentist?” Yannessa said. “You got a better chance of seeing Jesus pulling teeth. Start bitching about the fact he’s hurting you and he’ll punch your lights out.”
Yet dentistry was the hook that the Zernich brothers—Pitt boosters all, including Mickey, the star of the ’49 basketball team—used to pry Ditka loose from Paterno. Mike wasn’t thinking about playing pro football yet; the idea still was to use sports to pay for college. On August 18, thinking he’d be going to Happy Valley, Ditka joined Aschman and the rest of the Quips at Raccoon Creek State Park for training camp, looking to get in shape for freshman year of college ball. Paterno showed up and stayed three days in the cabins with the rest of the coaches, ostensibly to advise Aschman on some new offensive wrinkle. But everyone knew: He was keeping tabs on his prize.
“And guess what? At the last minute, the Zerniches told him, ‘We’ll guarantee you we’ll get you into dental school if you go to Pitt,’” said Yannessa, the future Aliquippa coaching legend who was then a senior tackle. Paterno was livid. It would be twenty-eight years before he set foot in town again. “Let me tell you something about Joe,” Yannessa said. “I’ve been to Joe’s house; that’s how close I was with him. He’s an Italian, Sicilian-Calabrese mix from Brooklyn, New York. He held a vendetta against Ditka and Aliquippa ever since.”
But for the town, losing a pipeline to Penn State was a small price to pay. Eventually Ditka’s success at Pitt and beyond, along with that often-unbearable, somehow comic, always unflagging intensity, would slowly become the prime example of the Aliquippa way: Yes, you work hard, and yes, you win. But you also have to be a bit larger than life. You have to succeed in a way that the whole county, state, nation will be forced to notice.
“Everybody in my family worked in the mill; that’s what we knew,” Yannessa said. “It wasn’t until I was a junior and Mike was a senior that some people said, ‘If you get your grades in order, you can get a scholarship playing football’—and then so many of our guys did get scholarships. That’s the first time the light came on: maybe I can escape.”
In 1953, Gino Piroli—future Aliquippa postmaster, future Aliquippa historian, forever devoted partisan of Aliquippa High sports—moved to Hopewell. That’s what you did in Aliquippa then, given the chance. Piroli had been married four years, had worked as a pipefitter at J&L for eight, and now he was making enough to leave the row house life, the ever-more-cramped neighborhoods in West Aliquippa or Logstown or Plan 11. It wasn’t like his dad’s time anymore—come through Ellis Island, live so close to the mill that you could feel its daily heave like a beast breathing until the day they cart you away in a box. Housing developments were springing up all over the former farmland surrounding the borough, out in townships like Center, Independence, Raccoon, and, of course, Hopewell: a man could carve out some space there, some quiet at last. Hadn’t they had enough excitement?
After all, in 1944, at eighteen Piroli had gone to Pittsburgh and chose induction into the Navy with his buddy, Juke Suder. He served on a Fletcher-class destroyer, the USS Irwin, at the bloodbath of Okinawa in the spring of 1945, with Japanese kamikazes plummeting like hellfire out of the sky; Gino’s ship was right there on July 29, 1945, when one Zero tore into the fire control deck of the USS Cassin Young and killed twenty-two men. Only three of the nine Fletchers at Okinawa survived untouched. His was one. Sometime that year, nineteen years old, he was sorting through a batch of letters. “I guess you heard what happened to us . . . ,” his sister began. His father, Oreste, a railroad worker at J&L for three decades, had been crossing the street to work when he was hit by a car and killed.
When Gino returned, his mill job was waiting. “On the employment card when I got hired again, they had name, address, age, and had a thing that said, ‘Nationality,’” Piroli said. “And they put ‘Italian.’ I said, ‘Hot damn, I’ve been in the war for two years and I’m still not an American?’”
Moving to Hopewell was the most tangible reward for the promise people had fought for: a better life. In Hopewell you could get away from the street noise, the bars, the casual ethnic tension; you could count a day’s cars on Brodhead Road on one hand, raise kids in peace. At least nine other veterans moved onto Gino’s street in the new development, Crestmont Village, with its three-bedroom bungalows, $13,000 apiece—living room, kitchen, maybe a basement. Many of their children would graduate high school the same year. All the men drove to the mill now, coming in from Hopewell or Center or even from as far away as Moon Township. Vince Calipari, of Coraopolis, the father of future Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari, commuted into Aliquippa as a young man to work in the blast furnace, sweating off five pounds every eight-hour turn. He lasted a year. Driving later on Route 51 with his son, Vince would point to the blazing fire skimming along the horizon. “You see that red line?” he’d say. “I used to work right beside that thing. If I’d stayed, I would’ve died.”
For those who did stay, the compensation carved out by the union—an average wage of $24 a day, pensions, an hourly minimum of $1.96—enabled steelworkers to put some distance between work and home, take a step up the social ladder. And Aliquippa was just a small sample: starting in 1950, eighteen of the nation’s twenty-five biggest cities began a thirty-year slide in net population; U.S. suburbs, meanwhile, grew by 60 million people. “Nobody blames them,” Zmijanac said. “It was just natural. . . . You do what’s best for you and your family.”
Still, Hopewell was just a place to lay your head then. Downtown Aliquippa was home. The men went there to work, to pick up school supplies or groceries when the whistle blew, to drink. The whole family went back for big days like January’s Orthodox Christmas or the San Rocco Festival in August—a weekend of parades, the Sons of Italy and Musical Political Italian Club bands, the bishop of the Pittsburgh diocese waving—to honor the patron saint of Patrica, home village to so many Italian clans. They went on weekends to visit Mom and Pop, who just refused to move, and Sunday nights the unattached—or not—would drive in for the weekly dance in West Aliquippa, up on the second floor of the Sons of Italy hall. Cost a quarter admission: somebody spun records, and the hardwood floors squeaked from all that shoe leather and sweat.
In later years you went to Villa’s Lounge, the nightclub on the upper end of Franklin Avenue, to see Diana Ross and the Supremes, Dionne Warwick, Ike and Tina Turner when they were all obscure and hungry, or to watch Dr. Steve Zernich, fresh from the operating table at Aliquippa Hospital, carousing with his latest dazzling woman. Closing time, they’d often end up—entertainers and all—at the good doctor’s house, where the party only picked up steam.
“Those were the wild days,” said Joe Letteri. “After that you settle down.”
Joe married up. He’ll be the first to tell you, when he landed Gilda Cappella, a schoolteacher at Jones Elementary in 1955, his life took the turn that made everything good happen. Except for the war, he’d work the same operation for thirty-nine and a half years: J&L carpenter shop, building scaffolds and platforms and doing the latest odd repair. “Only five, six years of schooling, but I had a pretty good job,” Joe said. “My two brothers were both bosses, foremen; I wasn’t that lucky. They come up through the ranks.”
But he was lucky too. After marrying at twenty-seven, Joe moved out of his father’s home in West Aliquippa, built a 24-by-24-foot home on a concrete slab behind his father-in-law’s house in Plan 11. The money he’d been paying his parents for a decade? His mother had saved it all, and presented it back to him when he married. Joe and Gilda and the kids wouldn’t make their big move out of town for another eight years, but the eight-room house they’d later build in Center was on the horizon. Aliquippa gave them that. “It wasn’t a perfect Eden,” Gilda said. “But you could make a living.”
And there, in the simplest terms, was the small-bore miracle at work in the country then. Few stopped to wonder at the historical anomaly that allowed for it; indeed, in the future many would mistake the era for a national birthright meant to last forever. After the war, the U.S. had emerged as the world’s preeminent power, virtually unchallenged as an industrial colossus. With Britain exhausted, Europe and Japan flattened, and China and South America still in their economic infancies, America accounted for 64 percent of the planet’s steel production.
Management concessions through the 1950s could be seen as repayment for past sins or an overdue sharing of the wealth, but they were actually the result of a market misread, the idea that any wage and benefit increase would be passed along to industries—particularly automotive and construction—that were dependent on steel. That devastated countries like Japan could ever rebuild enough to seriously challenge American primacy seemed beyond imagining, yet the evidence kept mounting. By 1950, the U.S. was producing 46.6 percent of the world’s steel; a decade later it accounted for 25 percent. Averse to innovation and engulfed in a “malaise,” as former J&L vice president Harold Geneen once described it, that they would never quite shake, by the mid-fifties steel management had grown fat, happy, and slow.
In retrospect, of course, the trend lines all but begged for agility. Endless union demands meant ever-higher employee payouts. Large-scale investment was needed to replace facilities ravaged by wartime production; the introduction of the far more efficient basic oxygen furnace overseas had rendered America’s classic open hearth and Bessemer converters obsolete. The price of steel, meanwhile, wasn’t keeping up with costs. “The handwriting was on the wall,” Geneen wrote. “Many could not see it at the time, and those who could see into the future seemed powerless to do anything about it.”
The bosses, later, would bear much of the cultural blame for the resultant crash, if only because steelworkers would bear the most horrible scars. But with their relationship poisoned by decades of mistrust, violence, and zero-sum posturing, it’s near impossible to imagine either camp having been capable of recalibrating for the long term. Labor-management partnerships in the face of job losses and shrinking market share were decades away; for the moment the two sides were determined to slice whole pieces off the other, get “concessions,” and “win.” And labor was winning a lot.
Indeed, the pendulum swing had been so laudable, the improvements for the worker—from the winning of what Piroli calls “dignity” to safer conditions and sane hours to the lifting of an entire multitude into middle-class pay and values—so patently “productive” for the culture, that no one could mark the exact moment when it tripped into excess. J&L workers never committed anything so extreme as the kidnapping of Georg Isasky, but late in the ’50s they began—like all of American labor—edging into a mind-set that would, later, have many declaring that they too had gone too far.
“To the other extreme,” said Paul Radatovich, a commander with the Pennsylvania State Police who grew up, the son of a steelworker, in nearby New Brighton and studied political science at Pitt. “You could argue that the steel industry actually started to die right after the Second World War because we were the only major power not domestically devastated. Our dollar was artificially inflated; labor in Europe was cheap. So we go over there and companies that were really domestic at that time—U.S. Steel, Gulf Oil—became diversified, international; they were investing in Japan and Germany.
“So if we’re building these automated plants in the early fifties in Japan and Germany, how is J&L—where the furnaces are built in 1901, 1903, 1905—able to compete with an automated plant in Germany or Japan that’s also paying one-third the labor cost because their workers don’t have thirteen weeks vacation, and don’t get time and a half to work overtime? All these things the union fought for, at some point actually became the knife that slit their own throat.”
Abuses in a plant the size of the Aliquippa Works had gone on since it opened; stories are still told of men, in the ’30s and ’40s, who came to work drunk and somehow remained employed. But what began as union rules to protect workers from employer abuse, from arbitrary firing because the boss wanted to hire his brother-in-law or a willing wife’s husband, over the next few decades would ossify into rules for the sake of rules, a labor force interested less in producing competitive, quality steel than in preserving hard-won gains. “The biggest concern for unions in those days,” Piroli said of the 1970s, “was protecting people who didn’t want to work.”
But the first glimmers at the Aliquippa Works could be seen long before. John Evasovich came back one summer in the late ’50s to work the wire mill, “and I wanted to do more work and wasn’t allowed to do it because that was not in my job description,” he said. “I was a laborer in the wire mill and when they would make this one kind of wire they would have scraps, and my entire job was to sweep up the scraps and dispose of them. When that was done, I volunteered to do other things and was not permitted. That amazed me.”
It was inevitable that the union hall would become a power center: control a man’s job, and you all but control the man. Union connections could make all the difference; Yannessa had uncles in the local, so a summer job at the mill during high school and when he came home from playing football at New Mexico State was always a lock. Even those benefiting, like carpenter Melvin Kosanovich, who worked more than two decades as a general griever for Local 1211, found it disturbing. “The union had very much power, a lot of power at times, too much power, because most of the things we done we had a lot of power,” he recalled. “We had a lot of hiring.”
J&L was producing more steel annually than at any other time in its history, and in 1959 set new records for sales and income; its second-quarter revenues, $316,384,000, put the steelmaker on pace for a billion-dollar year. But the way Kosanovich tells it, union officials were now given nearly the same due as Mauk’s policemen in the ’20s. “Whatever we wanted they gave us, because they were making money,” he said of J&L management. “Things got slacked and they couldn’t afford to pay those things, but, yes, we had too much power. At times I think the company had too much power, but I think union had more power.”
“You know what?” said Yannessa, whose father worked as a crane operator at J&L for forty years and whose many uncles all worked there. “Everybody says, ‘You got that steel-mill mentality. People that work in the mill are tough.’ Yeah, they were tough guys, a lot of ’em, but a lot of ’em were lazy, laid-back, didn’t do a good job on the job. They ended up union employees and a lot of it led to the demise of the steel industry in America.”
At 11:25 p.m., July 14, 1959, a large parade of members of Local 1211—with 12,000 members the largest local in the state, and third biggest in the nation—marched behind a cluster of picket signs and American flags down Franklin Avenue toward the Wye, the tunnel, the mill. All had been drilled weeks before in their strike duties, and then again at 7:30 this night; near J&L the marchers efficiently broke ranks, spreading wide to cover the five entrances of the Aliquippa Works. Some 2,000 men and women from the midnight shift stopped on their way out to take in the scene, but by 12:45 a.m. only two gate pickets were left. “This Plant Is On Strike,” read the sign. “Aliquippa Local 1211.”
It would be the longest American steel strike yet: 116 days of banked furnaces, 500,000 idle steelworkers, and 250,000 more in secondary industries. Industry losses totaled $248 million a week; in Beaver County alone workers lost $45 million in wages. Some, like Joe Letteri, had a working wife and barely felt the pain. “I didn’t have a problem with it,” he said. “I just laid around and didn’t do nothing. Go on a picket line once in a while, and that was it.” But the walkout savaged most workers’ savings. Aliquippa’s local was flush enough to give out weekly turkeys and sponsor a thumb-nosing, community-wide party on Labor Day; a food bank supplied struggling families with flour, rice, dry milk, and powdered eggs.
Concerned with the long strike’s threat to both the economy and defense, in early October President Eisenhower unleashed Taft-Hartley by asking for a board of inquiry; informed that there was no chance of a settlement, he ordered the steelworkers back to work. Arguing that Taft-Hartley was unconstitutional, the union went to court and lost at every level, capped by a November 7 decision by the Supreme Court that upheld a district court injunction forcing workers to return to their jobs for an eighty-day “cooling-off period.” The 8-1 ruling effectively put the strikers on the wrong side of the law and became a landmark of antiunionism; it had been more than two decades since labor had felt so bullied. Management wasn’t happy, either: steelmakers were outraged that Ike had taken so long to act.
Workers filtered back to J&L slowly, unsure whether they’d be back on strike when the eighty days expired. But the prospect of fresh paychecks with Christmas coming was a relief, and besides, Aschman had fielded another distractingly superb team. Aliquippa won its first ten games, beat a still-maturing Joe Namath of Beaver Falls and Ambridge handily, and came within two points of winning another WPIAL championship when Charleroi edged the Quips in the final, 13-12. It felt good to get back to the routine.
And when a deal got done on January 9, 1960, it seemed the union had walked away with another win. One of the union men back from signing the pact with J&L was on the front page of the Beaver Valley Times, grinning. “Best we’ve ever gotten,” he said, and if it wasn’t quite that, the contract was still pretty good: a raise of 39 cents an hour spread over the next thirty months, automatic cost-of-living increases for the first time, increased pension and health benefits.
But that was just money; it would take time for the less obvious losses to reveal themselves. As the Wagner Act had been cemented by the ’37 strike, so Taft-Hartley was now actualized by Eisenhower’s action and the Supreme Court’s decision. Worse, with their mills quieted for four months, America’s steel firms had turned to Japanese and Korean sources to fill any shortfall in their orders. With no drop-off in quality—and U.S. steelworkers averaging $3.10 an hour and the Japanese about 50 cents—the benefits of offshore manufacturing had been made tantalizingly plain. In 1959, for the first time since the turn of the century, U.S. steel imports exceeded exports. No one knew it yet. But the underbelly had been exposed.