Everything was shrinking fast now. By 1980 Aliquippa’s population was down to 17,094, and the exiting stream never stopped; by ’90 there would be just 13,374 left. Half the world that JFK saw when he spoke downtown had dissolved away. One by one, bars and stores boarded up their windows. Ambition withered. Postures sagged. It was not the time and place to think big.
Yet by force of will, personality, ego, delusion, or spite, that is all Don Yannessa did. He made Quips’ home games—complete with fireworks, an Indian on horseback, the dunt-dunt-dunt, and increasingly winning teams—into community events; packed Carl Aschman Stadium (official capacity, 5,500; oft-reported standing room crowd, 9,000) and made himself the unofficial drum major for Western Pennsylvania football. Publicity for his seniors? One fall he sent out a photo of them posed around a gleaming black Corvette. Media guide? Instead of the usual mimeographed notes, Yannessa provided a booklet with records and results and photo after photo of the players and their wondrous coach. The local newspaper couldn’t send a writer on the road? Yannessa rasped postgame comments into a tape recorder and made sure it got there before deadline. His slick quotes sounded more like those of a network color man than some small town ex-lineman, and that figured: he made no bones about wanting to work in TV someday.
After John Evasovich moved back to Aliquippa, he attended the occasional game. He and Yannessa had been teammates, but barely knew each other. After one win in ’82, Evasovich made the mistake of stopping by to congratulate the coach.
“Johnny, you got to get more involved in the program,” Yannessa said.
“Next year, Don, I won’t be on the road as much,” Evasovich said. “I’ll be happy to.”
The following Tuesday, Evasovich answered his phone.
“Don Yannessa,” said the voice. “Congratulations. You were elected president.”
“Of what?” Evasovich said.
“The Quarterback Club.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Raise money,” Yannessa said. Then he hung up.
The team budget was $36,000 a year and ticket sales brought in $40,000; even as the town frayed, Yannessa’s inky mat of hair, gleaming teeth, and sleek cars only seemed to get shinier. He was making $42,000, teaching English, halfheartedly, waiting for the final bell and practice to start. He had a “QUIPS1” license plate bolted to, yes, that black Corvette. It soon made way for a Cadillac.
By fall of 1984, the forty-five-year-old Yannessa had led the Quips to three of the four previous WPIAL title games—though he still hadn’t won a championship—and become a semicelebrity. National Public Radio and CBS’s Charles Kuralt dropped in to produce features. Aliquippa principal Jerry Montini quipped that Yannessa could’ve worked for Barnum & Bailey—closer to the truth than he knew. Yannessa fed reporters his sense of the absurd and astonishing recall; he made anxious parents feel their kids were special; he fed boosters inside dope. And the entire time, like a ringmaster eyeing both the leaping lions and gate totals, he was sizing everyone up for what he needed next.
Zmijanac, who learned all he needed to know about the game—and, as a far pricklier presence, half of what he needed to know about cultivating people—from Yannessa, watched his mentor navigate the tricky course through black fans, white boosters, stern administrators, fellow teachers, and needy sportswriters. “Ain’t you fucking somethin’?” he’d say. Yannessa would laugh, too.
“The best politician I’ve ever known,” Zmijanac said. “Beautiful.”
In the fall of 1983, 20th Century Fox released All The Right Moves, a high school football film starring young Tom Cruise and set in a dying Western Pennsylvania steel town. At one point the head coach, played by Craig T. Nelson, said a potential coaching job is between him “and you-know-who from Aliquippa.” Everyone in Western Pennsylvania chuckled, but the real inside joke was even better: Hollywood Don had finagled his way onto the production as a technical advisor, and appears in the climactic game as the opposing coach. (“I don’t want to hear that bullshit. Block ’em anyway!”) You-know-who was a natural.
Yannessa plugged his own terminology and plays into the film’s game sequences, and has banged the drum so often about his behind-the-scenes maneuvers that (despite the inconvenient fact that the film was based on a magazine story about Duquesne, Pennsylvania, and filmed in the spring of ’83 in Pittsburgh and Johnstown) many, including Yannessa himself, have come to believe that the movie’s about Aliquippa.
Why not? The town’s fictional name, Ampipe, is clearly based on Ambridge. And the way Yannessa describes it one fall day, pointing out production stills on the wall of his home office, you can feel how the screenwriter, Michael Kane, first fell under his rat-a-tat spell.
“Craig T.—the coach? He stayed here for a weekend,” Yannessa said. “There’s Tom Cruise. I was on location for eight weeks. . . . That was his girlfriend at the time, Rebecca De Mornay. She was pretty. See some pictures here of Craig T. and Cruiser. . . . That’s me and Cruise, right there: tough kid. We put him in the hospital two times; he was pissing blood one time. And this guy here came to me and said, ‘Tell him we’re going to double the football scenes; he’s going to have a double.’ So I went to the hospital to tell him and Cruise said no. He said, ‘If I do it, it has to be real.’”
Not even Joe Paterno could resist Yannessa. It had been more than two decades since the Penn State head coach, bitter over losing Ditka to Pitt, had washed his hands of the town. But in December of 1983, Aliquippa High had a bright receiver named Marques Henderson, and time and Yannessa’s blarney and Joe Pa’s own vaulting ambition made the old grudge seem, well, silly. He agreed to speak at Aliquippa’s annual football banquet, to be held at the Serbian Club.
Late on a Saturday, December 3, Paterno’s private plane landed at Beckett Aviation in Pittsburgh, and Yannessa was waiting. First, he took him to the Quippian Club, the black hub. Paterno took up residence at one corner of the bar, slapped down his first $20 bill. White and black faces crowded around; he bought drinks for the next forty-five minutes, and didn’t the town hear about that for years? Yannessa always reeled in big coaching names, but few bigger than Paterno. And the blacks liked that Joe Pa came to their place first; no doubt Marques Henderson was made aware.
Then Yannessa drove Paterno crosstown to the Serbian Club, the white and black boosters from the Quippian trailing fast behind. Paterno bought more drinks, until everybody finally sat down. Joe Pa spoke, and per his deal with Yannessa, he was hustled off the dais so he could get back on the plane while everyone was still eating. At that point, Porky Palombo, Yannessa’s uncle, handed Paterno a white envelope stocked with $400.
“Just something for coming,” Porky said.
“Put it back in your kitty,” Paterno said. “I didn’t come here for that. I came here for Don.”
Yannessa snorted. “You came here for Marques Henderson,” he said, and even Joe laughed at that. He didn’t take the money, though.
Still, after eleven years at Aliquippa, Yannessa had proven himself great in everything but winning. And no one wanted to hear the excuse that Aliquippa played “up” two classes. Yes, its tenth-to-twelfth-grade enrollment of 449 students technically placed the school in the WPIAL’s Class A division; two schools with larger enrollments, in fact, did compete in Class A. Yes, the Quips ignored reality altogether, skipped past AA (enrollment range 486–688), and insisted on slugging it out in AAA (but, hell, some still insisted that they could play with the big boys competing in the WPIAL’s recently created AAAA division). And yes, Aliquippa was by far the smallest of the thirty-five schools playing in its section, up against Ambridge and its enrollment of 989 students, Hopewell with 917, and the largest, Moon, at 1,140.
Really, it was no shock that his teams had a habit of fading at season’s end; by then, injuries and exhaustion made it impossible to hide Aliquippa’s comparative lack of depth. The Quips kept losing in the WPIAL title game—to Thomas Jefferson in ’80 (enrollment: 924), Steel Valley (770) in ’82, Mt. Pleasant (848) in ’83. “We’ve got the copper trophy three times now,” Yannessa said. “I think I’m going to melt them down into bullets and shoot myself.” Not to his face, of course (Love the guy!), but people were starting to compare him with Bud Grant, the Minnesota Vikings coach who went to four Super Bowls but never won.
Finally, in 1984, just as the shutdown at the mill was hitting another horrific peak—660 jobs slashed at the Aliquippa Works the previous summer—Yannessa broke through. Powered by the unstoppable Rapheal “Pudgy” Abercrombie, a 5-foot-5 butterball who churned his way to a record 4,606 yards at Aliquippa, and guided by quarterback Vic Lay, the ’84 Quips bulled through the regular season, losing just one game—by a single point—crushing Hopewell and Blackhawk, edging Ambridge. In the WPIAL AAA title game at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, a November grudge match against Mt. Pleasant, Aliquippa found itself down by a point with seven minutes to play, facing sixty-three yards of empty.
Just as he had nearly thirty years before, as a sophomore backup on Aliquippa’s 1955 WPIAL champs, Yannessa found himself praying on the sideline. With 5:53 left and Aliquippa facing a fourth-and-6 on its own 41-yard line, he had no choice but to go for it. Yannessa prayed harder. Lay, who hadn’t completed a pass all game, coolly fired a 17-yard strike to Kevin Haley. Minutes later Abercrombie, who finished the day with 240 rushing yards, used the final 12 to score and give Aliquippa the win, 20-15. It had taken Yannessa a dozen years—and those last seven plays—to go from loser to winner. His wife cried.
Twenty years had passed since Aschman’s last season, since Aliquippa had last won. Now the team took the same route home from Pittsburgh that it had in ’55 and ’64 with King Carl, north on the other side of the Ohio River, through the streets of Ambridge, across the bridge and into the guts of the old downtown. Yannessa, riding in the back of a van, nibbled on shrimp cocktail and sipped champagne. At one point he noticed Zmijanac, his defensive coordinator, riding in a nearby car. Yannessa, buzzing now, rolled down a window.
“Hey,” he screamed. “What’d Aliquippa do tonight?!”
It wasn’t the same as it had been, decades back. Still, some five hundred fans were waiting at Aschman Stadium. Men, women, and children kissed the coach, patted his back. Fireworks lit up the sky, and they all sang the alma mater and everyone yelled for him to speak. And stunningly, for perhaps the only time in his life, Hollywood Don said, “No words needed,” and raised the trophy into the cool night air.
Two days later, Sunday’s Beaver County Times spoke of how the win, “helped the townspeople forget their troubles, even if only for a few hours. Politicians weren’t squabbling and insecure workers weren’t thinking about their uncertain futures.” One black man from Plan 11 said, “The community needed this.”
Though Yannessa—spawn of a steelworking family, son of the borough—had told reporters just after the game how happy he was to lift the town’s spirits, though he thanked God for letting him win the big one at last, nothing for him really changed. Something in his nature—call it an extra layer of what-the-fuck confidence—left him unaffected by the usual slings. Yannessa had never been that tormented by big losses, and the long-awaited win came less as blessed relief than It’s-about-time! arrival. And he wasn’t about to become complacent.
The next September, for the 1985 season opener, Yannessa arranged to have three parachutists drop out of the Pennsylvania sky and onto the 50-yard line. One held a sign that read “Fighting Quips,” the second held one reading “1984 WPIAL,” and a third sign read “Champions.” No coach in the area—hell, nationwide—had the imagination and balls to pull off such a stunt. And that, as he said later that fall, was nothing. Yannessa was already roughing out a scheme for Opening Night 1986.
“I want to get the Indian and the horse to parachute out of a helicopter,” he said. “See if they can land at the fifty-yard line and just gallop away.”
You can’t pinpoint an exact date, because the creating of a cultural icon is usually a matter of accretion, a layering of moments that stack up until, suddenly, everyone understands that the person in question matters far more than he or she should. It wouldn’t be until January 1991, in fact, when Saturday Night Live premiered a sketch called “Bill Swerski’s Superfans,” that Mike Ditka arrived at that point of American fame where hero worship, ubiquity, and ridicule mingle and even the most oblivious get the joke, where he had become not just a football great but a personality, an archetype called “Da Coach”: Eyes popping, mustache bristling, everybody’s half-unhinged uncle wreaking havoc over Sunday dinner.
But by the end of ’85, it had started to build. Since taking over as head coach of the Chicago Bears in January 1982, Ditka had proven himself the perfectly imperfect change-agent for the mustied franchise: hot-tempered, decidedly unslick, all but boiling with the need to win. He promised his players they’d be champions in three years, screamed, threw clipboards and headsets, broke his right hand punching a locker in ’83 (“Go out and win one for Lefty,” he commanded), lost the ’84 NFC title game to the eventual Super Bowl champion 49ers, came back the next season to beat them on the road—and was picked up for drunk driving after celebrating on the team flight home. His players also happened to be catnip for sportswriters, and soon all the Ditka stories that had been told for years in Aliquippa bars, Pitt alumni gatherings, and NFL coaching offices began spilling into the mainstream.
Didn’t you know? Ditka had knocked himself out hitting a steel blocking sled at Pitt, punched out two teammates in a huddle, and in his spare time—playing Pitt basketball—called Kentucky’s legendary coach, Adolph Rupp, “an old goat” during an on-court argument. Ditka joined the Bears out of college, in his first game barked at veteran teammate Ted Karras “to get the lead out of your ass” (Karras took a swing at him), won NFL Rookie of the Year. The guy had pedigree, all of it hard-earned: he rampaged at the knee of legendary Bears founder George Halas, revolutionized the tight end position from blocking lump into offensive weapon, and in 1963 led Chicago to its first championship in seventeen years.
A few years later, after standing up to the old man in a contract dispute (“Halas throws nickels around like manhole covers,” Ditka growled—thus proving himself outspoken and poetic), he got shipped off to the losing hell of Philadelphia. He drank too much there. Revitalized by a move to the Cowboys, Ditka once stood up before a play was called and punched a Vikings linebacker in the face.
In Dallas, Ditka played four years for another legend, Tom Landry. He caught a touchdown pass in the team’s ’72 Super Bowl win over Miami, but within the franchise was known for his frantic clashes with teammate Dan Reeves in racquetball, golf, and any other competition a bunch of overcaffeinated machos could dream up. “And it killed Ditka, because no matter what they played Reeves would win most of it,” said longtime Dallas executive Gil Brandt. “Just absolutely killed him. They used to bounce golf balls: who could catch them between their thumbs, all kinds of stuff; used to play cards all the time, darts. . . .”
And when Ditka lost? “Coach Landry had us rooming together,” Reeves said, recalling Ditka’s first season in 1969. “When we got him, I was a terrible gin player and he was really good, but the cards were just coming my way. He tore that deck in two, took that chair and threw it, and the legs just went into the Sheetrock. I knew then: ‘Holy mackerel, he’s a competitor.’”
That Ditka possessed a rapid-fire intelligence got lost in the carnage, of course; why ruin so wondrously Neanderthal an image? After his playing career ended in 1972, he coached tight ends and special teams for Landry and besides one early, rogue decision to call for an onside—and botched—kick against the Giants (“You ever do that again without telling me,” Landry said out of the side of his mouth, squinting straight ahead, “and you’ll be looking for another job”), proved capable of folding himself within the dictates of one of the more buttoned-down regimes in NFL lore. Ditka even sparked a revival of one wrinkle—the shotgun formation, out of commission for twenty years by then—that remade the modern quarterback position.
“His IQ was off the chart,” Reeves said. “In 1975, we had really struggled on third-down conversion and he was the one who mentioned to Coach Landry: Why don’t we go to the shotgun?”
“Exactly right,” said Roger Staubach, Dallas’s quarterback then. “Ditka was really behind it. He said, ‘Hey, when it’s third-and-three-plus, ninety-nine percent of the time we throw the football, so why not get back there and do something different? It really was creative. Ditka was the one that pushed it. We put it in and everybody thought we were crazy.”
It wasn’t the only thing that worked for the Cowboys that season; the shotgun, after all, was used only on third-down situations or in the final two minutes. But it did prove to be a vital part of the Landry “flex” offense that turned Staubach and the Cowboys loose that year, helping to build its much adored/hated brand as “America’s Team.” Dallas improved from an 8-win club to 10-4 in 1975, made the playoffs, and then became the first wild-card team ever to reach the Super Bowl. That they lost to Ditka’s hometown Steelers in the most exciting title game up to then was, it seems, only appropriate.
“Ditka’s got a subtleness about him,” Staubach said.
“I wish,” Reeves said, “I was that bright.”
But never mind that. Never mind the fact that, in Chicago, Ditka would manage some of the most spectacular egos ever assembled in one locker room and—while feuding with his genius defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan; barely coexisting with his general manager, Mike McCaskey; and holding his nose over the antics of his punk-rock QB, Jim McMahon—led the ’85 Bears to an 18-1 record and a Super Bowl championship. Notwithstanding the passel of Chicago trick plays, Ryan’s delight in questioning Ditka’s coaching acumen made it easier to pigeonhole “Da Coach” as a mere fire-breather. Maybe that’s to the good. Ditka the legend made Ditka the man rich, after all—and, besides, there was almost no way to stop it.
Indeed, you could say that he was the right man at the right time, one of those figures who prompts folks to say, in an echo of Voltaire’s gibe about God, “If Ditka didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him.” He was no slick-haired savant with larger “lessons” to teach. He was a loon, a football animal, and, best of all, someone who smelled like the real deal. That his hulking figure and beaver-pelt hairline made him resemble, yes, a bear, made it easy for writers to classify him as “a throwback,” and most left it at that. How much baggage can one man carry?
But it’s no accident that Ditka’s popular appeal came at the same time as the collapse of American industry and the lower middle class. In his gum-chomping, unapologetic Ditka-ness, “Iron Mike” provided a weekly, televised reminder of the life his dad and so many others had fought and worked for. His was the nasally Slavic voice of those chirping now in unemployment lines, forced to uproot from mill towns and scatter—to piecemeal jobs, to the vague promise of Sun Belt Salvation, to sunny places that had never heard of J&L.
He raged like so many blue-collars raged, and if there was injustice that caused all that growling, you still couldn’t help but laugh sometimes. Why didn’t they change with the times? Couldn’t they see they were only hurting themselves? Ditka was slapstick-funny, but didn’t yet know it: In 1987 he fired a wad of green gum at a fan, leaving the field after a bitter loss to San Francisco, and then flipped her the finger. In 1988, he suffered a heart attack mid-season and promised to come back as “Mellow Mike.” Two weeks later he was back on the sideline, erupting.
“You know, I did calm down for a while,” Ditka said. “But my nature is my nature. I can’t change that. I wish I could.”
Many liked to say that Ditka was the perfect coach for Chicago, but he would’ve been perfect in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland, too, perfect in any city where workers were scrambling and idled and scared. The SNL superfans would dream up absurd competitions—Da Coach versus, say . . . a hurricane!—and all would always agree that Ditka would win. The audience roared; such blind faith was a joke, and even more hilarious because of the sad reality outside. Ditka’s constituency wasn’t winning a thing, and Iron Mike’s force was all but spent. In Chicago he had been king of a one-year dynasty. Fired there in 1992, he came back for an ill-fated three years in New Orleans. He never won another Super Bowl.
But in Aliquippa, his successes had eternal shelf life: His successes were theirs. No place could ask for a better spokesman (as late as 2014, a Canadian reporter asked if the NFL should add more teams to the playoffs and Ditka shot back, “What? Are they gonna be able to get Aliquippa High School?”). People weren’t listening to Henry Mancini much anymore, and every union loss chipped away at the Wagner Act’s legacy, but Ditka provided a safe caricature of the town’s rough virtues. Bears—then Saints—gear invaded Steeler country while he coached, and each visit home to his parents in Linmar—Ya hear? Mike’s in town—was a certifying event, a reminder that Aliquippa product could still stand among the nation’s best.
And he came back every year. In 1986, Ditka initiated a golf tournament to raise money for scholarships for Aliquippa High kids, and over the next two decades pushed the total well over $200,000. By some estimates, Ditka personally donated “in excess of $50,000,” according to the city in 2000, but one of the organizers, his old teammate John Evasovich, said that estimate is low. “I can account for—out of his pocket—at least sixty-five thousand dollars to the Aliquippa football program,” Evasovich said. “And I can account for an excess of three hundred thousand dollars in scholarship money.”
There was, too, some off-the-books action. One year, Aliquippa High graduated covaledictorians; one girl had been awarded $34,000 in scholarships and the other had been given no more than $5,000. When the latter came to his table, Ditka pulled out a rubber-banded wad of paper and bills and one crumpled check—and asked the girl to spell her name. He wrote it down, then wrote “$5,000.00” in the box to the right. “Honey, when you get successful, you do this for somebody else,” Ditka said.
“Do I have the greatest respect for him? Yeah,” Evasovich said. “Do I think he’s a pain in the ass sometimes? Yeah. But is it overweighed by what he does good? Yes.”
Ditka tried for years to get his parents to leave Aliquippa. But where would they go? When they visited their son in his last coaching stop, New Orleans, Big Mike kept complaining that the house was so big that he kept getting lost. So they didn’t move when Big Mike was alive, and for more than a decade after Big Mike died in 1998 Charlotte didn’t move, either. Little Mike tried to keep her comfortable, kept buying her cars, paid for her flights and walking-around money when she felt the itch to go gambling.
But she stayed in the house at Linmar, where the neighbors knew her and the police chief and the postman checked on her near every day. “That’s why I like it here: you’re close,” Charlotte said in 2010. “I could move away, but I just know from my own children; they move into these new places and big homes and you don’t even know your neighbors. Everybody’s got to work to pay for the damn house, and they don’t have time to socialize. So I’ll stay right here.”
For a long time, his mother’s coffee table in the house in Linmar had a small crystal bear on it, inscribed with the words, “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.” Mike had given it to her, long ago. The phrase has been credited to everyone from boxer Jack Johnson to actor Gregory Peck to televangelist Robert Schuller, but Ditka had barked it out so often, and with such conviction, during his most famous years that it became a kind of town motto. In Aliquippa, in fact, you’d be pressed to find anyone who thinks he didn’t invent the very idea.
When Aileen Gilbert, who had fled Aliquippa after working her dad’s old job atop a J&L coke battery, returned from Hartford with her kids in 1982, she intended the move to be temporary. At least, that’s what she told herself—and her miserable oldest daughter. Diana cried at first sight of tiny Aliquippa, but after her tears dried and nothing changed she took to cultivating a classic teenage rage, primed to blow at the slightest provocation. Anyone—especially a gang-seasoned sophomore yanked out of her big-city high school—could see the future turning its back on the damn place.
“There was nothing here,” Aileen Gilbert said. “Stores were closing. There was already a sense of No Jobs. People were leaving, whole families were going, because they needed jobs. I only meant to stay a year—just to reset myself and then move. I didn’t know where, but I knew I didn’t want to stay here. But that didn’t happen. . . .”
So Diana, the oldest of Aileen’s five—followed by Mark, Sean, Tamu, and Jamal, their three fathers scattered while Aileen raised them alone—entered Aliquippa High for the first time in her junior year, the fall of ’82. She made an immediate impression. “She was horrible,” said Zmijanac, chuckling. “She was tough.” There were fights.
Only her mom knew why she was so mad; it was about then that Diana told Aileen that relatives had sexually molested her from the age of six to the time the family left Hartford. “I’m going to write a book and tell about it,” Diana said. “I’m not going to tell you now. I was angry. It’s a good story.
“I never fit in here. A lot of people don’t—didn’t—like me because they didn’t understand me. I did: I knew why I was angry. But when you’re young you feel vulnerable and powerful. That was my way of controlling my atmosphere.”
Diana was also very fast, a sprinter good enough to draw interest from colleges and—much later, when Sean was playing in the NFL—to beat her big-time pro athlete brother in a footrace out in Moon. (“He won’t acknowledge that,” she said. “I’m his big sister; I’m not supposed to be beating him.”) But Diana was also young, hotheaded, and didn’t care: Come senior year, she was kicked off the track team. One career option, perhaps the best, was gone before she even knew it existed.
She left the summer after graduation, in 1984, to live with a cousin and find work in Washington, DC—but Aliquippa had its hooks in. She returned in the fall, just in time for the football team’s first championship run under Yannessa, and soon was seen wearing a letter jacket to games. She and the senior fullback, Darryl Revis, had found each other. On July 14, 1985, she gave birth to their son, Darrelle.
A year later, her little brother Sean announced himself as one of the greatest players ever to walk onto the field at Aschman Stadium. Even as a sophomore defensive tackle, his gifts were clear: 6-foot-5, 270 pounds, able to sprint 40 yards in 4.8 seconds. He had all the agility of his older brother Mark, who earned a basketball scholarship to Duquesne, and just a hint of Diana’s rebelliousness. “I love Sean Gilbert,” Yannessa said. “I used to tell him: ‘I’ve only known two guys in my life that loved to practice: you and Ditka.’ He could’ve went the other way; he had a temperament as a ninth-grader, and a couple times we had to kick him in the ass. But he was smart and he trusted you. Made me a helluva coach.”
The next season, Sean’s junior year, Yannessa stood him up, made him an inside linebacker. The result was a glorious havoc. Gilbert instantly stood out, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Mike White put it, like “a Cadillac in a lot full of Volkswagens.” No one had ever seen such size and speed combined: Sean would’ve run down and crushed the young Ditka. Recruiters began their siege as the Quips went 12-1 and won their third WPIAL title in four years. Yannessa declared that the Chicago Bears would happily draft Sean as a high school senior. It didn’t seem all that far-fetched.
By then, Yannessa’s machine was starting to pick up where the mill left off. Money wasn’t a problem, not with all the boosters; Ditka, after winning his Super Bowl with the ’85 Bears, had even promised to donate $5,000 a year so long as Yannessa kept coaching. On the field the Quips were steamrolling the WPIAL: With Gilbert even better in 1988, his senior year—he had 91 solo tackles, picked up a fumble and ran 70 yards for a score, intercepted a pass and ran 47 yards for another—the Quips won their first fourteen games and found themselves ranked No. 2 in the nation by USA Today. The paper also named Gilbert the republic’s defensive player of the year. The program had never been held in such high regard.
And somewhere, in all that winning, the town’s racial split had quietly faded. Not that there wasn’t plenty of prejudice, or that Western Pennsylvania had become any more enlightened: The Quips’ arrival for games at predominantly white Montour in 1984 and ’86 were greeted by a burning cross behind the end zone. But with Aliquippa’s population now 31 percent black—and its football team’s 70 percent—with the ’70s riots a constant reminder of the alternative, with football emerging as one of the few remaining pipelines out, an us-against-the-world unity seemed the only choice.
“Growing up we watched Pudgy Abercrombie and Darrelle’s dad, Darryl, and we watched them all as one family,” Sean Gilbert said. “You didn’t see racism. You saw your brother next to you, and it didn’t stop there. When the game was over, we were over in their area of town, they were over in ours: it didn’t matter. I spent the night at David Mike’s, our quarterback—go over there after film, go over all night. Milk at Ed Gripper’s house and, after, hang all night, hanging over there the next day. His parents treated me just like I was their son.
“Had Joe Becker, left tackle, hundred seventy pounds soaking wet. Anthony Barnett, Italian guy, hundred sixty pounds soaking wet, but would jack your jaw. And you know what? You weren’t leaving him out there. I get chills telling you this. Because, man, we loved each other.”
Gilbert paused at the thought, a cause for wonder even now. He lives in North Carolina these days, but upon hearing someone describe a recent visit to Aschman Stadium on a fall Friday night, his voice went softer. “Did you get chills?” he said. “What football will do. Football’s a religion sometimes.”
Summer nights, before he went off to play at Pitt, Gilbert would run to the bottom of the hill and back, up the long, high grade to his mother’s thirteen-room house on Seventh Avenue. Aileen had grown up there, her children too, and now her grandchild, Darrelle, three years old and absorbing the chemistry of the town: its always rough honesty, and the changes now making the men weak and desperate. Once, Diana found her son sitting on the front steps, eyes fixed far off.
“I’m waiting for Uncle Sean,” Darrelle said.
“Where’s he at?” Diana replied.
Soon they heard the sound of her brother huffing, saw that steaming hulk looming. He ran up to Darrelle, touched him on the arm, maybe the shoulder or head, and then pivoted and headed back down the hill again.
“Let him stay right here,” Sean said, over his shoulder. “I’m going to keep touching him.”
It has always struck Aileen Gilbert as suspect, how people became nicer once she came home to Aliquippa with two highly athletic sons. After Sean’s talent began to emerge, more than one area school tried to get her to move into their district—to the point, she says, of offering housing and jobs—and she wonders if Salt Smith’s visit to ask her to fill a seat on the Board of Education was a slick way to keep the boy from leaving Aliquippa.
So radical a shift left a sour taste. Her love for the place can modulate by the second. “I do think it’s special,” Aileen said of Aliquippa. “I don’t think it’s that special, though. I think that God has me here. Because I should not be living here under normal circumstances—because I went through so much here.
“When Sean got drafted and I became ‘Ms. Gilbert’ for the first time, it was like, Okay, now I got all these friends, people coming to my house, calling me on the phone? Before it was, I don’t like her—and I did nothing but work and take care of my kids. So I have wanted to move. But every time I would think about it, the thought would just leave. It’s just God. Sean and them have tried to get me to come to North Carolina to stay for, like, three months. I’d say, ‘I’ll come stay a week or two, but I’m coming back home. . . .’ I ain’t going nowhere. I will die here.”
And then, with Yannessa rolling and the stands packed and Gilbert playing like an apotheosis of all the fierce talent that had come before—all the Franks and Suders, Dorsetts and Ditkas, all that speed and power and decades of push, distilled—then, with the team riding as high as it seemingly could, the typhoon hit. Crack cocaine, the pebbled, cheap, highly addictive and smokeable version of the disco-era staple, first hit major urban areas in the mid-eighties. It took a bit longer for the drug to bite down on the small towns, but the damage might’ve been worse there. Because you couldn’t avoid it. There was nowhere to run.
Not that Aliquippa had no experience with getting high. Family stills had long been a basement tradition in the Plans and West Aliquippa, and the children of the wet-your-whistle generation hardly ignored the ’60s drug splurge. Marijuana smoke became a staple during breaks at J&L in the ’70s, and cocaine and hallucinogens were as much a part of the borough’s underbelly as the numbers rackets. “It just wasn’t as noticeable,” Aileen Gilbert said. “I remember years ago—they hadn’t even started making crack yet—it wasn’t just cocaine: there was so much heroin here it was crazy.”
Yet as far as drug markets go, crack had an impact—in sheer speed and force of penetration and all the resulting social costs—like few others. Like the later confluence of Viagra and aging baby boomers, crack was that rare case of chemistry and demography converging at the perfect time. In isolated, single-employer towns like those dotting the Beaver Valley, each mill closure had left behind 20-plus-percent unemployment, broken marriages, a spike in suicides—desperate wounds ripe for infection. Those who could leave did. Those who didn’t were left with few options.
“It snowballed,” said future city councilman Donald Walker. “If people weren’t killing themselves because they lost their jobs, they were turning to drugs and alcohol. At one time in Aliquippa, there was fourteen bars, probably more. Not to mention the privates: my uncle Perry sold alcohol out of his house, a dollar a cup. I witnessed that. That was the times. That’s what you did.”
“That’s when everybody gave up,” said Jamie Brown, eight years old when LTV went down in ’85. “It seemed like everybody gave up for life. A lot of people were involved in drugging, trying to escape reality.”
Ty Law was thirteen in 1987, the year his mother, Diane, became a crack addict. He lived by then with her dad, his grandfather, Ray Law, a millworker who’d put in thirty years and retired and had adopted and raised Ty as his own. Diane came and went at the house on Wykes Street in Plan 11 extension, the declining pocket west of Monaca Road. The boy absorbed Ray’s lessons on the value of hard, often-thankless work, day in and out; he took in the havoc and stink of his mom’s dependency, the clash of old and new. New was winning. And once the epiphany hit, once young Ty figured out why his mom was acting so erratically, he was never the same. He began seeing crackheads everywhere.
In the longest of views, such carnage was generations in the making. “I do think that history leaves its mark on a region,” said Reverend Chris Leighton, who left Aliquippa in 1985 after seven years of ministering downtown. “There was a lot of oppression in Aliquippa, especially in the early days. I know about it; I have an ancestor who led the Western Federation of Miners. The U.S. government shot and killed unarmed people in those days. It’s horrific—and that pain never goes away from the land. People may forget about it, and they come and go. But there is this residual effect.”
In the short term, though, the result may be as simple as the very human impulse to fill a vacuum. It’s as if, without the built-in need to keep a regular schedule or one’s wits in a world of metal and flame, without the social framework of the timecard and the hope of steady daylight, the town had lost the one force big enough to countervail drugs’ seductive call. Little by little, decade by decade, narcotics of varying strengths had worked their way from the fringes—plaything of the rich, tradecraft of the criminal, millstone of the poor—to the national mainstream. Now in its demise, labor itself, dirty and dangerous and boring, stood revealed as the last defense. When the work crumbled, all hell rushed in.
“When that mill went down it took everything down with it,” Ty Law said. “And when the drugs came in, either you were going to be a user—and more people did that—or seller. And if you did try it—which, in a town like that you probably ain’t thinking too much of it, because I know heroin went through Aliquippa before because my dad was on that back in the seventies and early eighties—the crack-cocaine thing was a totally different ball game.
“That hit everybody. Everybody wanted to try it, and they got hooked. And the dealers who knew what it was about? They were getting paid. So they became the new role models—unlike my grandfather and the old-timers who did it the right way: saved up and got a nice car through hard work, went and got it financed, had decent credit. But the new regime came in and it’s drug dealers, and now it ain’t about getting a Buick. It’s a Mercedes. It’s BMW. So now for kids it’s a different perspective: that’s real money.”
The institutions of legitimacy, meanwhile, only continued to crater. In 1985, LTV’s tax assessment was slashed in half—from $19 million to $9.5 million—and the shrinking tax base left the borough, like many steel orphans in Western Pennsylvania, unable to pay its bills; the 1988 budget carried a deficit at $350,000. On December 23, 1987, Aliquippa became the second Pennsylvania town to be “declared distressed” under Governor Bob Casey’s new Financially Distressed Municipalities Act—Act 47—which, while placing a town’s fiscal affairs under state oversight, also allowed it to receive tax money from nonresidents. Going into Act 47, said council president Mary Alviani then, is “the best Christmas present I could have received.” Weeks later, the state granted the borough a no-interest loan of $460,000. Aliquippa, in essence, had gone on welfare.
One of the first signs that things were tipping radically in a new direction—especially in housing projects like Griffith Heights and Linmar—came in February of 1988, when a group of armed men was arrested early one morning after surrounding a Valley Terrace apartment building. All drove rental cars, three possessed semiautomatic weapons, five were carrying guns with obliterated serial numbers, and five gave Detroit as their home address: Outside interests were making their play. A year later, an estimated 80 percent of crime in the borough was drug-related. Aliquippa was fast becoming the drug capital of Beaver County.
Jamie Brown, the oldest son of former Quips and Pitt star Jeff Baldwin, was on the cusp of adolescence then. “You could see everything from Third Avenue, Plan 11, could see the drug dealers with their cars and jewelry,” he said. “All the shiny things. My mother was on welfare, Dad wasn’t ever there: all the stuff a kid wanted, I could see I could get it on the street.” He remembers the first step he took.
“About ’89,” he said. “Crack cocaine had just hit the area. Somebody I knew had it and was hustling it, a little bit older. He got involved and he let me help him. It started on from there. I saw shiny things.”