On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon, who’d won the presidency seventeen months earlier in part because of a promise to end the war in Vietnam, announced his decision to expand the conflict by ordering a bombing of enemy bases in neighboring Cambodia. He did so in a nationwide speech marked by a vision so bleak, so overarchingly apocalyptic, that it reads today like a cultural cry for help. And in a way, it was.
“My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” Nixon said. “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without. . . .”
Such imagery, of course, was startling enough, but the self-analysis was even more unsettling—and resonated long after the war’s details had been forgotten. “If,” Nixon went on, “when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world. . . .”
This was, of course, one man’s alarmist justification for the stark reversal of a pledge, just ten days before, to withdraw 150,000 troops from Vietnam; and Nixon’s core persona was marbled with darkness and paranoia. But he was also a brilliant politician with a career long sustained by shrewd readings of the national mood. One June 1970 poll had 59 percent of Americans supporting the Cambodia decision—end-of-days rhetoric and all—even with the virulent negative reaction it sparked in Congress and on campuses. Nixon wasn’t alone.
It’s impossible to pinpoint when, exactly, the white American center began doubting its core faith in political and social institutions, in the idea of the United States as an ever-renewable engine of progress; the transformative era known as “the Sixties,” that eleven-year period between Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and Nixon’s resignation in 1974, spawned so many wrenching events that each one has been cited as the moment when cynicism took hold as a mainstream attitude.
Yet the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X and King, the prevaricating Vietnam maneuvers of Lyndon Johnson, the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick and Senator Ted Kennedy’s subsequent silence, were but touchstones amid a broader landscape of urban unrest, a rising divorce rate, the “communication gap” between young and old—and outnumbered occasional mood-lifters like the 1969 landing of the first man on the moon. By the spring of ’70 the old social compact—family ties, automatic respect for elders, the idea of “my country right or wrong”—lay in tatters. Few dared invoke the usual visions of America as a “city upon a hill” or the “last, best hope of earth.” To many, both nation and notion felt unmoored.
Four days after Nixon’s speech, National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University during a campus demonstration. That was White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman’s touchstone; thus began, he later wrote, the administration’s slide into Watergate, presidential resignation, national disgrace. Four days later, in response to—and protest of—the Cambodian invasion, more than 4 million students walked out in the largest college strike in U.S. history. Some 100,000 protesters descended on Washington, D.C. Students and police clashed at twenty-six universities. Armed insurrection seemed possible; the military was called in to protect the White House.
White House counsel Chuck Colson recalled seeing troops from the 82nd Airborne sprawled in the basement of the Executive Office Building then and thinking, “This can’t be the United States of America. . . . This is a nation at war with itself.” On May 8, construction workers in New York City attacked student protesters. Just before dawn on May 9, Nixon—accompanied by his butler, Manolo—appeared unannounced among protesters camped at the Lincoln Memorial, looking, indeed, like a giant helplessly out of his element. Students gathered around to hear him ramble about the war, the plight of blacks, the wiping out of American Indians. Some were from Syracuse University; the president remarked that they had a good football team.
“Look at the situation,” Democratic congressman Thomas “Tip” O’Neill said then. “No nation can destroy us militarily, but what can destroy us from within is happening now.”
While wrenching, the centering of Vietnam protests on college campuses at least made for a bit of clarity. The media could point to a defining hub—complete with built-in, dramatic visuals—for an often amorphous “movement.” Antiwar strategists could expect receptive audiences of teachers and students. And opponents could dismiss protesters as elitists who didn’t speak for what establishment types called the “silent majority”: the mass of Americans who liked the war and their nation just as it was.
But racial inequality was a far different issue, one lacking instantly recognizable targets like a president or soon-to-be-drafted eighteen-year-olds. America’s “race problem” offered little in the way of battlefield “wins” and “losses,” and presented nothing resembling an “exit strategy.” There was no “silent majority” at a distance from the tumult. The war was here. They were the tumult. And their children were the first to feel the pain.
By the time bullets began flying at Kent State, Aliquippa, sitting just eighty-five miles southeast, was already a fortnight into its own violent crisis. It began with a growing sense of inequity in the schools; discipline for misbehavior and small-scale racial spats was increasingly falling hardest on blacks. Of the 174 Aliquippa junior and senior high students suspended during the 1969–70 school year, 162 were black; the five students expelled permanently were all black. Long-simmering tempers between the races began to snap.
“I remember you getting around a group of ’em, the whites, and they would say anything to you,” said Chuckie Walker, a junior at Aliquippa High that year. “Teachers always played favoritism with ’em, in my time—always. Literally, they’d talk down to you.”
On April 21, 1970, English teacher Melvin Steals took his junior high classes on a field trip into Pittsburgh. First stop was the Highland Park Zoo, and second was the Gateway Theater to see a new movie called Halls of Anger—an unflinching account of the travails of five dozen white suburban students bused into an inner-city Los Angeles high school populated by 3,000 blacks. It was a logical step: in his two years teaching, Steals had been a vocal critic of Aliquippa race relations—and “anathema,” as he puts it, to many of his white colleagues and bosses. “We used to have meetings in Jones School and I’d dress like H. Rap Brown and we’d really exhort the crowd,” Steals said. “There was a lot of tension.
“I would come into the men-teachers’ lounge and they would get up en masse and walk out. And if I sat down in the crowded lunchroom at the table where the teachers sat with my tray, the others would get their trays and get up and walk away.”
The film, starring soon-to-be-stars Jeff Bridges, Edward Asner, and Rob Reiner, depicts a high school with the reverse makeup of Aliquippa’s, but the same explosive divide: fights, repeated mouthings of “nigger” and “honky,” all-black and all-white lunch tables, a word-of-mouth assigning of “white-only” or “black-only” designations to water fountains. At Aliquippa High, meanwhile, another student boycott of the cafeteria over the lack of black cheerleaders was in full swing, complete with a new Brown-Bag Brigade.
In a letter to the Beaver County Times two weeks later, Steals denied that his trip to the theater had anything to do with the subsequent unrest. In fact, he wrote, the school principal and his fellow teachers—“impressed by the good results” of the “properly motivated” group he had first taken to Halls of Anger, “and perhaps fearful of the growing unrest within their classes”—the next week led a field trip of five hundred Aliquippa junior high kids to watch the same film at the State Theater in downtown Aliquippa.
“Obviously,” Steals wrote, “the students attending this showing were not properly motivated.”
In the days following that second field trip to Halls of Anger, black students reportedly designated water fountains at the junior high school “white-” and “black-only,” and refused to sit in assigned seats unless they were next to a “soul brother.”
“We went to the show, and it was like a white movie, how they disrespecting blacks, calling them ‘niggers’ and whatever,” said Sharon Casterlow, a junior high student then who would go on to marry fellow student Chuckie Walker and raise Dwan Walker, Aliquippa’s first black mayor. “So when we went to school the next day, you were mad as hell.
“Somebody white looked at you and said something? You were pissed about that movie; it was in your mind. You going to disrespect me? So you automatically jumped off.”
Soon word spread: Blacks intended to make Friday, May 1, a “Halls of Anger” day in the junior and senior high schools by starting a riot. Some white kids told their parents and tried to beg out of going to school. Other whites met at the Eat’n Park restaurant the night before to make a plan to stow baseball bats under the steps outside Room 29 in the high school. By the time Friday’s first bell rang, nerves had been rubbed so raw that the fear became self-fulfilling. “The white parents began to take their kids out of the school,” said Steals, “and finally there was nothing left but black kids—who rioted.”
An unnamed teacher later described a scene “of utter chaos at the junior high, a disintegration of law and order and no respect for authority.” Windows were broken. “It happened in this hallway,” said Zmijanac, a junior high teacher then, speaking one morning in what is now the Aliquippa High football office. “I remember the girl, Vera Motten, threw a big rock through that window over there. I taught in that hallway down there, and it was horrid. As bad as you can picture.”
Quickly, the mayhem spread a half-mile down the hill, to the high school. Down on the ground floor there, in Room 29, the sound of rumbles and crashes from the floor above seeped through the ceiling. A white sophomore, Bill Casp, was sitting through homeroom period when a black student named Fred Peake, a rising track star and football player, suddenly said, “We got to get out of here.” Peake led the mixed class of some twenty-five blacks and whites into an empty home economics classroom nearby. They locked the door from the inside, and could hear the rampaging on the floor above. Everyone hidden in the home ec room emerged unharmed.
“Why’d you do that?” Casp asked later.
“Because you’re my friend,” Peake replied. “I didn’t want anybody to get hurt.”
“That’s the way we were,” Peake said. “The class of ’72 was close-knit, did a lot of things together. There were times when you were not going to let stuff happen—white or black, green or yellow.”
Administrators sent students home early that day. A group of forty high school “youths”—and reportedly some adults—then ransacked a local A&P supermarket, overturning displays and causing thousands of dollars in damage. The arrival of a police car scattered the crowd; when it gave chase up Monaca Road, a brick crashed through the windshield. As the officers tried to step out, they were hit with a hail of rocks from a crowd estimated at two hundred.
Schools opened as usual the following week, but on Tuesday, May 5, the conflict reignited in the high school cafeteria, where the moment the bell rang to end the second lunch period, two black girls and a white girl began fighting. “It started as a sit-down situation in the cafeteria,” Chuckie Walker said. “A fight started and then everybody jumped up and chairs started throwing.” Within seconds the melee expanded to more than 270 students. Lunch trays went flying. Girls were seen backed against the walls, screaming.
“Then it went from the lunchroom up into the classrooms, out into the parking lot, up toward the junior high,” Walker said. “Kids were coming out, and I remember one of the little kids coming down holding his head, saying a guy hit him in the head with a stick.”
Rocks flew. A knife flashed. Police arrived: five white high school students were found to be carrying chemical Mace, hoses, a physician’s scalpel, and a blackjack. Some whites reported seeing blacks with knives, but police found no weapons on black students. When the Beaver County Times asked the cause of the rioting, school board president William Zinkham said it had been building for two decades, and “the kids finally exploded.”
Pressed for specifics, Zinkham could come up with only one. “Some people want to know why the school can put five black students on a basketball court and nine of eleven on a football team but don’t have a black girl on the cheerleading squad,” he said. In fact, he was wrong: that year’s varsity cheerleading squad did feature one. But her uniqueness made nearly the same point. “It’s harder for a black girl to become a cheerleader,” Zinkham continued, “than it is for her to be named to the National Honor Society.”
The crisis went deeper, of course, than cheerleaders or a movie. A sense that the town’s white leadership didn’t seriously account for black concerns, didn’t truly listen, had been building for generations. Blacks accounted for 42 percent of Aliquippa’s school population, yet students were now on their third boycott in eight years regarding cheerleader representation—with one girl to show for it. When they went home to Plan 11 and its declining housing stock, they heard parents complain about redlining and the lack of mobility at J&L, saw them diverted at every turn from that upward path to the middle class—and saw no reason to think that anything would change. And the nation outside hardly looked better: hundreds of U.S. cities had been buckled by race riots since 1965.
Classes across the city, in all Aliquippa schools, were canceled for the rest of the week, then again for a day the following week. Sheriff’s deputies were brought in to patrol the halls, and seven junior high students were arrested after thirty whites attacked a group of blacks. That same May morning, a group of fifty black students gathered at the high school, demanding to talk to the superintendent, and then rushed to Room 225, interrupted a class, and injured some of the white students.
All the closings, reopenings, “cooling-off periods,” and rumors of closings ravaged the school calendar. In all, nearly the entire month—fourteen school days—of instruction was lost. For the rest of the spring, and into the summer of 1970, administrators suspended classes intermittently—but refused to shut the doors for good. Attendance plummeted. “They tried to keep the school going,” said Zmijanac, who was teaching eighth- and ninth-grade English then. “I have a grade-book here somewhere that shows the exact date where the kids stopped coming to school.
“And out there, outside that door? National Guard stood out there, with guns, for six weeks. And every day the kids who wanted to come to school? There were some. One black girl would come every day and sit in my classroom. Just one girl. I wish I could remember her name. . . . And we used to talk. She’d say, ‘My father says I have to have enough courage to come here. He drops me off and picks me up.’ I used to give her books to read, that kind of thing.”
But such quiet acts gained little notice. King’s message of passive resistance had lost its cachet among many younger blacks; the militant message of Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton’s Black Panther Party advocated empowerment and armed revolt, loud and extreme. For centuries blacks had endured slavery, lynchings, third-class citizenry, discrimination in housing, jobs, and schools—often quietly, often nobly. But this was a time of violence, at home and abroad, televised nightly into American living rooms. Grievances, large and small, would not pass unanswered. Everybody, it seemed, was dead set now on making a statement—or else.
“It was tough,” said Carl Legge, a ninth-grader at the junior high in 1970. “I grew up with a lot of black people and they were all my friends all my life, then all of a sudden they turned cold on me. I questioned a guy one time, down the mill, later on in life: I say, ‘Hey, we grew up together and you wouldn’t even talk to me when we went to junior high and high school.’ He says, ‘There was a lot of pressure on us. If we were seen conversing with white, it’d have repercussions.’”
Battle lines were drawn. Positions were hardening fast.
“White student threw an apple and struck a black student. Black student demanded white student be identified and expelled,” read one passage of the state report detailing the school clashes. “Fifty-one white students held; when questioned, eight said they would be willing to get killed fighting blacks. The black student Ad Hoc Committee expressed a similar sentiment about white students.”
Amid the upheaval, a ghost continued to make his rounds. Since he had retired in 1965, weathered, frail Carl Aschman was seen at the school, St. Titus Church, the firehouse, the football field—but rarely heard. It was as if, stripped of his vocation, he had lost that part of himself he’d indulged only as a coach; the man didn’t have a harsh word for anyone anymore. He kept busy substituting as a teacher in the area, showing up in Aliquippa one week, Ambridge the next. Don Yannessa would give his old coach a ride sometimes, pick him up at home and take him over the river.
“He was a bigger-than-life figure, the way I thought about him: constantly on edge, screaming, ranting, raving,” said Yannessa, who was teaching and coaching at Ambridge then. “It wasn’t till I got older and came back from college that I got to know him really good. I would pick him up in Plan 6 and drive him to work. I got to know him in a different perspective. He was gentle and . . . a nice guy.”
Doctor’s orders had something to do with it. Word circulated that Aschman had been told to stay away from Aliquippa games because the emotion would tax his heart. But he also knew that his presence would put pressure on the school’s succession of struggling coaches, that fans would always ask what he thought of the new guy. He would show occasionally at Aliquippa’s training camp, but cut short any talk about football. If a sportswriter got him to say, about some opponent, “They wouldn’t have run that against us. . . .” it was considered a coup.
The other factor, of course, is that Aliquippa football had sunk to a heartbreaking low. The Quips won just six games in the five seasons after Aschman finished coaching and then, during two-a-day workouts at Edinboro State College in August of 1969, junior Aliquippa tackle Ron Vincich collapsed and died. “It was one of those days when it was just too hot; he overheated, hyperventilated, and we couldn’t cool him down,” Peake said. “We couldn’t rescue him. He was a really big kid. That hurt us real bad.”
The combination of racial problems and coaching ineptitude, meanwhile, shot the roster full of holes. Hopewell, Beaver Falls, Ambridge: Everybody beat up on Aliquippa during the fall of 1969, and the team went 0-10. Worse, almost no one seemed to care.
So come Friday nights, Aschman wouldn’t go to Aliquippa Stadium. He’d ride instead to Ambridge, cheer his old archrival, watch his protégé, Frank Marocco, make a go of it as head coach. The football was better and, besides, he needed the distraction. One night in 1968, Aschman’s thirty-one-year-old daughter, Susan, a home economics teacher and cheerleading advisor at the junior high, went to sleep and didn’t wake up. No one ever knew why, but the family curse, that “paper heart,” was always the prime suspect. Aschman’s wife, Sarah, was devastated. It hit Carl even worse.
“It was very hard on my father, especially,” said Carl Aschman Jr. “He just never really got over her dying.”
Small consolation came in the knowledge that Susan passed away in bed, and never had to have her probable heart condition tested in the school turmoil of two years later. Indeed, when Aschman himself died of a heart attack at sixty-eight, on Thanksgiving Day 1971, it was easy to view him as a figure from a more fortunate, unquestioning era. The King had gotten out just in time, it seemed, untouched by the furies now roiling town and country.
But his family didn’t go unscathed. In May 1970, Aschman’s grandson, Harald, a seventh-grader at the junior high, was attacked by black students in a stairwell. Why? “He was the first one down the steps,” said his father, Carl Jr.
“I happened to be white,” Harald said. “I was by myself going to my locker and there was about eight or nine blacks down there. I only knew one of them; they weren’t in any of my classes. I didn’t provoke ’em or do anything. They threw me down the steps and started pounding on me.”
And that was that. Carl Jr. pulled his son out the Aliquippa school system and sent him to St. Titus—where the waiting list had suddenly grown very long—for eighth grade, and then on to Quigley Catholic High in Baden. Harald played some football there, across the river. Soon the only thing in Aliquippa carrying on the Aschman name was the aging stadium up on the hill, and the boys inside who’d been left behind.
Aschman wasn’t the only one. Ghosts were beginning to haunt heavy then. That’s what happens when life gets harder: reminders of better days, of the way this town or family used to look and feel, mock even the most hard-boiled soul. And Tony Dorsett was hardly that. A mama’s boy from the start, forever scared of his father’s hard hand or his older brothers’ jeers, young Tony assumed an eyes-wide cast so pronounced that his dad nicknamed him “Hawk.” It stuck. But the best football player the place ever produced always felt more prey than predator, wary of what he might see next.
That quality made Dorsett. The skinny kid learned to juke, dodge, and corner so well—made near every rush, in fact, look like a hare fleeing a pack of wolves—that he went on to win the Heisman Trophy, a collegiate national championship, a Super Bowl title, and a place in pro football’s Hall of Fame. To become great in a brutal sport can be a transformative act; for long stretches Dorsett could even convince himself that his career was about records or supremacy or fame, and not about a conquest of fear.
But ask him about his first years, and Dorsett will show you the truth. When he’d dress out for Pee Wee games, Tony would beg the coach not to put him in, then drag his pants in the dirt on the way home so the family wouldn’t suspect. Once his brother Keith saw eleven-year-old Tony shrinking along the sideline, and screamed at him to get his hesitating ass out for kickoff. The ball, of course, came straight to him. “I took off like a rabbit,” Dorsett said. “I was running up and down that field, went zigzagging because I was scared to death. I went about seventy-five yards for a touchdown the first time I touched the ball.”
Then there was his maiden game against Aliquippa. He was in ninth grade, playing for Hopewell Junior High—high school ran tenth thru twelfth—and all week brothers Keith, Ernie, and Tyrone had been riding him at meals, at bedtime, between shots at the pool hall: You’d better win. . . . “Make sure you’re at the game,” fifteen-year-old Anthony—as he was known then—would answer, but he was hardly sure of himself. The older Dorsetts had starred for Hopewell, and everyone always said they were bigger and faster than Anthony was. And, besides, he was a wreck. Just a month before, he had watched their oldest brother die.
Melvin Dorsett never played for Hopewell. He dropped out of school, liked to drink wine, worked the mill some, had a heart condition: “My brother was a rough dude, man,” Dorsett said. In August of 1969 Melvin was twenty-seven years old, and out of time. “That one morning, my brother—I think it was Keith—came running in, ‘Mom, something’s wrong with Melvin!’ So they called the ambulance. I thought I saw him die in the house. They said he died at the hospital, but I saw him.”
That it all happened so quickly—youth to death, promise to waste—was a shock; but then, the family always did move fast. Their daddy, Wes Dorsett, known to his family as “The Big Apple,” had fine wheels himself and used to race beside his boys with a switch, goading and lashing at their legs. Ernie was known as “Speed Disease.” Late in his career, a thirty-four-year-old Tony reportedly ran a 4.38 40-yard dash, and it’s a measure of his younger self that many NFL peers believed it. But Melvin was the family legend. He’d run lightpole-to-lightpole races up on The Hill, everybody laying down bets. Challengers came in from all over Beaver County.
“He used to take their money,” said Quips assistant Sherman McBride. “He was the fastest Dorsett. Tony didn’t have nothing on Melvin.”
“Talk about speed?” Tony said. “My brothers all had speed, but he was the one I’d watch at the park Fourth of July, everybody playing softball, and it was amazing the stuff he’d do. He ran from left field to right field and caught a fly ball—the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen in my damn life. It was almost like he could play the outfield by himself.”
After Melvin died in the family house, Dorsett found it impossible to sleep there. Moving in with his older sister helped, but he kept the light on all night. And now summer had turned to fall and it was time to play the Quips, their roster loaded with buddies like Fred Peake. In truth, Dorsett had far more friends on that team than on his own, so bragging rights were a worry, and his brothers were pushing him, so that was a worry—and he didn’t know how he’d do, so that was a worry, too. But then the game started. Dorsett unleashed a breathtaking run, then looked up to the corner high in the stands where his family always sat. He saw his brothers. And then he saw dead Melvin.
“People always say they see visions,” Tony said. “And what I saw was an image of my brother. I know people might think I’m crazy, but I made a great play, and I looked up to see my family and I saw him. I saw a vision, clear as could be. . . . He had a smile on his face.”
Hopewell Junior High beat Aliquippa that day in 1969, and Hopewell Senior High beat their counterparts that season, too. No one was surprised. The tables had completely turned since Hopewell’s shock win in 1964; the Vikings were the power, Aliquippa the pawn. That, more than anything, accounts for the persistence of a counterfactual query: What if Tony Dorsett had played for Aliquippa?
Hopewell folks dismiss the entertainment of this notion, of course, and it’s true that no previous Dorsetts ever went to Aliquippa High. But talent-poaching is a constant of high school sports, and with Dorsett, it would’ve been easy. The boundary between Aliquippa and Hopewell runs through the middle—right through one home’s kitchen, in fact—of the Mount Vernon housing project in Plan 11 where the Dorsetts lived, and hopping it for one school or the other is a time-honored tradition. McBride, for example, grew up in the ’70s with his mother on the Aliquippa side and a dad wanting him to go to Hopewell; in eighth grade, Sherm moved in with his father in a house over the line. Sherman lasted just a few days at the school: a neighbor told on him.
He wasn’t alone. Hopewell in Dorsett’s day was known as “Whiteyland” to Aliquippa blacks, and its high school enrolled only a token handful. In the 1960s, Mount Vernon had been one of the first places to feel the effect of school busing as a way to ease desegregation; each day, black kids trooping out of their homes for the two-mile walk to Aliquippa High would look up to see a bus taking half their neighbors off to Hopewell. Tony grew up living the life of an Aliquippa black in Plan 11: his father worked the open hearth at J&L. His older brothers were part of a local gang called the Bugaloos, drinking beer, hustling. Tony ran some with the Baby-Baby Bugaloos, when they tried to stir trouble in Aliquippa.
And when it came to playing Midget League football—at the pivotal, high-school-deciding age of thirteen to fourteen—Dorsett wasn’t even allowed to play in Hopewell due to hazy rules about age and weight limits. He and his best friend, Mike Kimbrough, played instead for the Aliquippa Little Steelers. In any other era, he was there for the taking.
But in the spring of 1970, just as the Aliquippa schools were becoming bedlam, Dorsett was a ninth-grader walking the calm, safe, football-happy halls of Hopewell Junior High. Even so, his mother, Myrtle, was taking no chances: she kept Tony home a few days when Aliquippa’s rioting hit its peak. If Dorsett had once been a candidate to play for the Quips, that day had passed. In “1970, ’71, ’72, you didn’t want to go to Aliquippa,” Zmijanac said. “It was a terrible place to go to school.”
Indeed, any Aliquippa football player with talent was looking to get out, too. “I almost attempted to do the same thing,” said Peake, Tony’s teammate on the Little Steelers. “It was a struggle playing for Aliquippa, even though it was my home. The chance to win a ball game every once in a while was zero to none.”
So it is that many in Aliquippa today chalk Dorsett up as a hidden casualty of the era: the one that got away. Two years later Don Yannessa—all charm and gab and grins—would come back and begin the program’s revival. Dorsett was finishing up his marvelous Hopewell career for coach Butch Ross then and, forty years later, the memory still stings. Yannessa has no doubt what would have happened if he had been in charge.
“I never would’ve let him play for Hopewell,” he said. “I’d have got his ass. I never lost anybody to Hopewell; I used to get ’em from Hopewell. I used to take their players. When I got the job in Aliquippa I never lost a player to Hopewell again.”
Juke Suder was pouring drinks the night Aliquippa came undone. It was only a matter of time. The town had been edgy since blacks and whites began battling in the schools, and no subject stirs or reveals parents more than the fate of their kids. When children become the opening front in a war, escalation is near inevitable: now the future—no matter that the mill is booming and employing more than 10,000—seems at risk. So it was that, after years of seeing burning cities and fire-hosed black protesters on TV, after all the small-scale skirmishes and boycotts of their own, the two strains, national and local, finally merged. Aliquippa came to a moment of frightful clarity.
Just past 9 p.m. on May 21, 1970, Suder was behind the bar at Savin’s in Linmar. Mike Ditka’s dad, Big Mike, was sitting on a stool, as always, when the street outside Savin’s and the nearby Linwood Tavern filled with restive members of a West Aliquippa softball league. Within minutes, they were battling a group of blacks from Plan 11 who, according to the next day’s Beaver County Times, “had invaded the area and started a fight.” Aliquippa’s mayor, James Mansueti, immediately charged the blacks with planning the riot. “How else,” he asked, “could such a large group arrive at Savin’s at the same time?”
No one in the black community ever explained why so many had gathered then in the predominantly white area, and locals assumed the worst. “They were going to clean out the white people,” said Charlotte Ditka, Big Mike’s wife.
The Linwood Tavern was owned by West Aliquippa’s Joe Battaglini.* “They were going to burn his bar down and one of the bartenders called down West and said, ‘Hey, guys, there’s a big riot starting up here,’” said Anthony Battalini, Joe’s brother, who served as Aliquippa mayor from 2003 to 2011. “That particular night, Battalini’s Lounge softball team played the Panther Athletic Club, and they went up there and cleaned that place all up. They went up there with ball bats and everything—and from that, the blacks actually were so scared they shot all the streetlights out up in Plan 11 because they were afraid the whites were going to go up there and burn them out.”
Police arrived and the blacks scattered, but not before a red Pontiac convertible sped through the area while a man inside fired a rifle at the police chief’s car. Sniper fire, some random and some directed at police, was heard overnight and into dawn, but it wasn’t long before the whites went on the offensive and did some “invading” themselves. Soon after, reports came in of bullets striking the low-income apartments at Linmar Terrace and windows being broken in the Plan 11 homes of blacks. Some blacks were evacuated for their own safety.
A swelling group of Linmar residents—armed with “clubs, chains, steel and iron tools and a machete”—became what the newspaper called “an angry charging mob of chanting whites,” and were stopped from burning down a Linmar Terrace apartment building only when “police formed a human barricade and after taking much jeering and taunting by the group, managed to halt its progress and calm them down to a talking stage.”
“‘We’re not going to let them [black people] cause trouble and run all over Linmar,” one man shouted to the applause of the angry crowd. “We’ve put up with it long enough.’”
That night, four white Linmar residents were treated for injuries—two of them stab wounds—and seven people were admitted to Aliquippa Hospital. The following day the schools again closed, police arrested fifty people, and a citywide curfew of 7 p.m. was imposed. Cars were stoned. Sniper fire was reported. Blacks and whites were found cruising the streets with a total of 450 rounds of ammunition, clubs, bats, knives, revolvers, and “a home-made ball and chain attached to a billy-club type wooden handle.”
The subtle and blatant lines of segregation, drawn up by J&L and cemented by decades of custom, were enforced now with bared teeth. Aliquippa—like Watts after thirty-four died in rioting there in 1965, like the 125 U.S. cities that exploded after King’s assassination in 1968—became an armed camp. “The only time you were allowed up in the school [area], where the white people lived, was during school,” said Sherman McBride. “We weren’t allowed, and if you ran into a certain type you were getting jumped on. Vice versa for whites: if they were downtown, they were getting jumped on by black guys. And in the school, from what my brothers say, there wasn’t a day you didn’t have guys carrying switchblades.”
Neighborhoods, split by the color line, organized vigilante patrols. “Both white and black citizens armed themselves in significant numbers,” said the state report on the unrest. “In certain white communities, so-called ‘walkie-talkie’ groups organized, solicited funds and purchased electronic communications equipment.”
In Plan 6, “King Carl” Aschman took his grandson Harald to a meeting on the old abandoned tennis courts, built in the elite area’s 1920s heyday. “All these neighbors were getting real radical about patrolling the streets and saying, ‘We should have guards at the two big roads,’” Harald said. “But even being the football coach and well known, he didn’t say much of anything.”
Vigilante whites in West Aliquippa, meanwhile, set up roadblocks on the bridge later named for Henry Mancini—the only way in and out of the area. Buses carrying workers to work the North Mill were stopped and searched, with the lunches of blacks checked for weaponry; there was a constant fear in West, the place where the original town was founded, of a black invasion. “Because our houses were so close together, we were worried about them throwing cocktail firebombs over and burning the houses out,” Battalini said. “There was an old Jewish synagogue right there at the bridge, and a .50-caliber machine gun on top of that roof, protecting West Aliquippa. And we had a Catholic priest who went out and bought a Jeep and all the walkie-talkies for us to protect that town.”
Blacks were no less trigger-happy. Larry Stokes, twenty-three years old and Richard Mann’s best friend and teammate on the ’64 champs, was arrested at an Aliquippa gas station with three others—but the concealed-weapons charge hardly did the moment justice. Stokes remembers “hand grenades and shotguns” in the car’s trunk. Police informed the Beaver County Times then that the car held “one 12-gauge shotgun, a .30-30 Winchester rifle, a .32-caliber revolver, one bayonet and two bandoliers of live shells.” Stokes, meanwhile, carried in his mind a mash of Black Panther and Nation of Islam rhetoric advocating violence against “blue-eyed devils.”
“I was preparing myself to kill somebody,” Stokes said. “That’s what they told us to do. But I was so afraid.”
Stunningly, during that tense summer no one ended up getting killed—not by racial shoot-out, anyway. George Medich, intent on becoming a doctor while he played pro baseball, had just graduated Pitt. He spent his time before the June amateur draft working as an orderly at Aliquippa Hospital, operating on high alert. “They always wanted me hanging around the ER . . . just in case something happened—whatever that means,” Medich said.
In later years, residents found themselves downplaying the danger and playing up the Keystone Kops feel of those days: “sentries” with rifles dropping, asleep, out of trees. Or the goofy fear then in outlying townships like Hopewell, Moon, and Center. “Everybody was a nervous wreck that they were going to come up into Center and, ‘Oh, what’s going to happen next?’” said developer Mark Betters.
His brother Joe got so frantic that he fired a bullet through the floor of the family’s home. “When these riots started, the guns were put out—loaded guns on tables in the living room,” Mark said. “There was fear. We had a loaded gun in the living room and we always remember him fooling around or something and he shot a bullet right through the floor into the basement.”
“Pistol,” said another brother, developer C. J. “Chuck” Betters. “Joey was a fucking nutcase.”
But the schools remained ground zero. On June 11, a hundred black students reportedly “invaded” Aliquippa High, breaking eighty windows and trashing the desks and chairs in two classrooms; seven windows were broken at the junior high, and seven students were treated for injuries at Aliquippa Hospital. Three unnamed white youths were arrested and charged with aggravated assault. When they weren’t immediately released to their parents—like the several black youths arrested in earlier unrest—hundreds of furious whites descended upon the front of the Franklin Avenue police station and refused to leave.
Over the next three hours the crowd grew in size and outrage, like a spill of gasoline waiting for a spark. A smaller group of blacks gathered on Sheffield Avenue, the street running parallel to Franklin behind the station. After a gunshot was heard from up the hill, the “black turf” of Superior Avenue, Aliquippa police returned a volley of fire. The panicked white crowd surged into “Police Alley,” the lane running perpendicular, and were beaten back. Sixty helmeted, billy-club-wielding members of the Beaver County Tactical Unit, a riot-police squad of officers from neighboring municipalities, then swept up Franklin Avenue, dispersing the mob with pepper and tear gas. In response to a shower of rocks from the hill, police fired another volley of buckshot into the dark.
To many, the melee downtown was Aliquippa’s nadir, “the worst time,” said Juke Suder. “The blacks are blocking up one side of the street and the whites were on the other side, and they were hollering back and forth, this and that, and some redneck from the white side yells, ‘Let’s go get ’em!’
“And they took off up the alley. . . . and both [groups] went up that Plan 7 hill. And the next thing you know tear gas is flying everywhere, man. Somebody was going to get killed: you knew that. It was burning your eyes like crazy.”
By the end of the night, twenty-eight people had been arrested. One Plan 7 house was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail; no one inside suffered injuries. The following day, some five dozen police personnel ringed the campus of the junior and senior highs; only 29 of some 2,300 students showed and classes were canceled. Many families pulled their kids for the rest of the school year, never to return, and in the ensuing quiet tempers eased. Committees met, and administrators vowed increased dialogue and oversight so that blacks would become more integrated into school activities.
Still, the damage could hardly be undone. In physical terms, the havoc ravaged Franklin Avenue’s status as a shopping destination; the opening, just three months later, of the hundred-storefront Beaver Valley Mall in Center helped guarantee the eventual shuttering of nearly three hundred downtown storefronts. Meanwhile, for more than fifty years black and white, rich and poor—not to mention Slavic, Lebanese, Italian, and Greek—students had arrived at the junior and senior high schools from segregated elementary institutions. Many became close friends. But now the cultural concept of a “melting pot”—in practice, at ground level—lost its allure.
“It calmed down,” Steals said. “They eventually got control of the school, but from that point on white parents of means took their kids out of the public schools. Soon, every day there were about four hundred fifty, five hundred kids who were bused to private schools.”
Because the new exodus folded into the decades-old migration of residents moving out to the spacious enclaves of Center, Hopewell, and beyond, it took time to realize that they weren’t the same. The old was based on hope, and animated by the sense that Aliquippa was still home. The new one was based on fear, animated by the feeling that home was gone for good.
Yet if this was the time that Aliquippa’s identity, its sense of itself as community, began, like some middle-aged body, to lose muscle mass, the bones remained strong. Fatherless homes, like the one Richard Mann grew up in, hadn’t become common yet. Adults still hadn’t cocooned themselves off from neighbors, so elders still felt a responsibility to discipline, advise, or cajole kids who were not their own. When Mann came home in the summer of 1970 from Arizona State—education degree in hand and heartbroken, his pro football dream destroyed by knee surgery—he didn’t want to be anywhere near the game. He spent three months at his sister’s house, steeped in self-pity, figuring he’d get some cushy work at a Pittsburgh YMCA.
But then George Stokes, the man Mann had watched every day growing up on Elizabeth Street heading off to work at J&L, took him aside. Maybe it was because his own son, Larry, had been arrested in the rioting of the previous spring. Or that George, an active member of Aliquippa’s black leadership, could sense the slackness setting in, could tell that this wave of white flight would be taking with it, yes, some bald-faced racists, but also—bit by bit—the town’s stabilizing voices. What would take their place? Here was a young black man with a degree. He needed every hand available.
“You need to go up to the school and help,” George told the young and bitter Richard Mann. “You know football. You ought to go up and coach those kids.”
Mann had had no intention of teaching math at Aliquippa Junior High, much less coaching. Just being on a football field—smelling the cut grass and that sour stink of used pads and tape and socks, or seeing a ball fly—twisted his gut like a knife blade. He missed the game too much. “I didn’t want to be around it,” Mann said. “I didn’t want to do it.”
But then he remembered how George Stokes, railroad worker, had bristled at the mill’s daily reminder of all the higher-paying jobs he would never have because of his skin, but who showed up and worked hard anyway, every day, because that’s what a man with a family does. And Mann just couldn’t say no to Mr. Stokes.
When students returned on Tuesday, September 1, 1970, enrollment was already down two hundred students from the previous spring. Mann was starting his career teaching math at the junior high when he heard some startling news. It was starting again: White students planned to attack blacks. “It was ‘Kill Nigger Day,’” Mann said. “My first day on the job. And they tried to start right in front of my building and I told ’em, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ I’m a young guy, had a big old Afro. If stuff got worse, I don’t know what I’d done. But they moved on.”
That was progress: The violence fizzled where, three months earlier, it would have flared. At the high school, too, junior Fred Peake noticed that his cousin Wanda had been elevated to varsity cheerleading. “Eventually they ended up getting there,” he said. “In my time, there were a couple blacks who were cheerleaders.” But such small steps barely registered: If the football team was any measure, town morale remained abysmal. Only twenty-nine boys showed up to play Aliquippa High football for new coach Dave Strini in August, and by late October the number was down to nineteen.
“He goes 2-7-1, and loses all of his white kids,” Yannessa said. “All the white kids quit and there’s nineteen kids playing; they’re black. What a mess that was.”
Parents, especially, couldn’t shake a nagging dread. Every trend line seemed to be heading south. The just-reported 1970 census results showed that, even as Hopewell’s population had risen to 14,056, Aliquippa’s had dropped 15.5 percent, to 22,277. Drug use in the area was now among the highest in Western Pennsylvania. Even the vicarious pride taken in the town’s famous successes—Ditka in the NFL, Mancini in Hollywood, Jesse Steinfeld in Washington, DC—experienced a chilling turn. On September 25, Ernie Pitts, in 1952 key to Aliquippa’s first football championship and perhaps its greatest all-around athlete ever, a record-setting receiver for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and a four-time Canadian Football League champion, and the father of six, was shot and killed outside his suburban Denver home by his wife.
“We were real close,” said Willie Frank, Pitts’s Aliquippa teammate. “He was out having a few, came home late, and knocked on the door. She thought it was an intruder and she shot him through the door.”
Pitts’s death—he was just thirty-five—was another first for Aliquippa. The too-early demise of America’s best and brightest leaders, politicians, and movie stars would be one of the era’s recurring themes. Now, in a year already soured by harsh division, the era’s random cruelty had finally hit home.
Taken together, such hits couldn’t help but have an effect. Don Yannessa had spent four years teaching and coaching at Ambridge, and during free periods he’d listen to the clipped voices on the police scanners—like a fan taking in radio play-by-play—describing the gunshots and unrest across the river. But he still wasn’t prepared for what he found when he returned to his old high school to take over as head football coach in the summer of 1972.
“It was heartbreaking,” he said. “When I came back to Aliquippa I didn’t recognize it. It was totally different. I had never seen a community change so dramatically in a negative sense as I did in those four years I was gone. It was all racism, and it was white flight—all those bad things. It was ugly.”
* Battaglini spells his surname differently than the rest of the family.