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It was a landscape-shifting year across America, but no more so than in Syracuse. In addition to monumental social changes, 1968 was also the year little St. John the Evangelist, just beyond Salina Street and the heart of the downtown shopping district, became the very first Parochial League casualty.

It wasn’t that St. John's could no longer afford to operate its own school high school. To the contrary, many parishioners called the Brattle Road section of the city home; a patch of suburban heaven right in the middle of the city, and a neighborhood just off James Street comprised of winding, well-maintained and well-lit streets, all marked by large, leafy lots on which stood a number of giant hardwood trees and homes as proud and as stately as any in Syracuse.

No, it was that the humble and coal-stained little brick building that had long housed St. John’s, one dating to the mid-19^th Century, one that had once welcomed the very first Black player in Parochial League history, and a building that by 1968 was still burning coal for heat, was crumbling beyond any measure of practical repair.

It was also that CBA, the private all-boys high school that had once stood on the other side of Willow Street, had recently, like so many Jewish families in the 15^th Ward, chosen to relocate to Dewitt, just east of town.

And it was that St. Joseph’s, the suddenly booming hospital just behind the school on Prospect Street continued to expand and swallow up real estate.

But mostly, is was about internal politics within the Syracuse diocese and the fact that the venerable Bishop Walter A. Foery, the Parochial League’s staunchest supporter and its longtime guardian angel, was no longer calling the shots. Oh, he was still at the chancery in body and spirit, all right. But mentally, he was elsewhere.  The years had taken their toll on the old man’s cognitive skills and, as a result, some early form of dementia had, at long last, compelled Church leaders to quietly turn over all internal decision-making to David Cunningham, Foery's number two and likely successor.

Cunningham had already shepherded the construction of both Bishop Ludden in the western suburbs and Bishop Grimes to the East, and those two well-appointed high school academies were now siphoning Catholic teens off the Parochial League rolls by the busload.

In fact, the very week the 1966-67 season was ending, a muscular and talented fifteen year-old guard for Cathedral named Jon Button, who in a few days would be named the only freshman on that year’s All-Parochial squad (he’d earn Honorable Mention), decided to transfer to Bishop Grimes where, as a sophomore, he’d blossom and almost single handedly turn his new school into a City League contender.

Evangelist, as stated, was the first Parochial League school to go. Yet Bobby Felasco’s perennial Friday night power would soon be followed out the door by, first, St. Vincent’s and, then, St. Anthony’s, all three the victim of some noxious mix of greener pastures, racial angst and an almost tectonic shift in city demographics. Syracuse’s white flight had found a higher gear and even though the venerable old churches in the three above parishes – one downtown, one east and one south – would soldier on for years, the same could not be said of their once-charming and once-beloved little K-12 neighborhood schools.

Not even proud little St. Patrick’s in colorful Tipp Hill would survive the rush of locals seeking a better life in Syracuse's suburbs, at least not intact. In just a few short years, the diocese would combine St. Pat's with St. Lucy’s from the Lower West End and rechristen their reimagined (yet still mostly Irish) hybrid – a union of two cultures seemingly held together with duct tape and baling wire – “West End Catholic.” Sadly, that administrative sleight-of-hand only delayed the inevitable.  As a result, by the end of the decade both Pat's and Lucy's would be just two more empty buildings that stood abandoned and alone, both of them harboring nothing more than three generation’s worth of echoed voices, glories past and, now, gently fading memories.

Before the Parochial League turned out its lights and closed its doors one last time, a number of things would happen that might have otherwise seemed inconceivable just two or three years prior.

Billy E, for example, would leave Sacred Heart and move to, of all places, Wyoming, because that was where he got transferred by his employer, Allied Chemical.

Bobby Felasco would take his coaching brilliance and up-tempo game and move a few blocks south to Cathedral Academy. He’d bring with him, of course, a few of Evangelist’s best young players (notably Jimmy Benz’ kid brother, Billy) and, for a few seasons anyway, he'd turn Cathedral, a league doormat, into a force not unlike the one he’d built at Evangelist.

Bob Hayes, the hardworking city cop and coach, would close the tap on his remarkable Little Leprechaun program on Saturday mornings in Tipp Hill, put his beloved St. Pat’s team in his rearview mirror and, for one season anyway, coach a group of mostly lace curtain Irish boys at Most Holy Rosary. Hayes’ two sons would leave the Parochial League’s blacktop entirely and, with their dad’s blessing, ride a few miles every morning out to the wide-open fields that wrapped themselves around the now-bustling Bishop Ludden High.

But perhaps most telling, for a neighborhood league that was once so close-knit it was possible for fans, players and coaches to walk to a handful of away games each season, the final two years would find the Parochial League's four remaining soldiers – Sacred Heart, West Side Catholic, Assumption, and St. John the Baptist – compelled to make hours-long bus rides to and from Otselic Valley High once a year for a Friday night game.  Otselic Valley was a public school in a tiny rural crossroads deep in the foothills just southeast of Syracuse, and a village closer to Cooperstown and the National Baseball Hall of Fame than it was to the Salt City and the Old Port, Aunt Josie’s, P-Z-O’s, Webber’s, Enrico's and Danzer’s, home of the best damn corned beef sandwich a man could ever hope to find.

 

 

 

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For the better part of the 1960's, Black culture in America had been doing its best to pass itself off as scrubbed up, buttoned down, and ready for prime time as possible. From Nat “King” Cole and Motown to Sammy Davis, Jr., the Fifth Dimension, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, and a sugar-sweet Diahann Carroll sitcom called Julia, there was seemingly no shortage of Black artists out there – at least prior to 1968 – willing to dress, talk, sound and act as “white” as possible in attempt to appeal to America's largely white core of consumers.

But then came 1968 and so much of that dynamic seemed, almost overnight, to get flipped on its ear. Five hit songs that year, in particular, embodied what was happening in Syracuse and cities like it – especially with respect to Black culture and its deepening influence on American teenagers, if not America itself.

In January, the a group called the Four Tops released their version of a song titled Walk Away Renee. The tune, written and recorded two years earlier by five white kids from New York calling themselves the Left Banke, had been always viewed as a beautiful but ultimately toothless little baroque-sounding ballad. But in the hands of Levi Stubbs – the Tops' lead singer, whose muscular baritone could attach a pair of man-sized testicles to just about any song it tackled – the Left Banke's composition took on a much different hue and tenor. The Four Tops' version of Walk Away Renee dripped with the excruciating pain that only a love that will never return can know. When released on January 18 of 1968, the single, with Stubbs' savagely powerful Black voice, was able to achieve a soul-stirring quality that the original, as interpreted by its young white composers, could never have imagined.

A few months later, another Black musical artist – an unknown left-handed guitar dynamo named Jimi Hendrix – took an otherwise earnest protest song by another white composer, Bob Dylan, cut its head off, and then proceeded to dance around with it on a pole – a virtual lightning rod in a thunderstorm of social upheaval. Hendrix’s transcendent take on Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower – the unlikeliest of singles, and one that, for all its edginess, somehow managed to crack the Top 40 in Syracuse – was yet one more example of the greatness a pop song could attain when placed in the hands of a generational Black talent.

Then, in August of that year, a single was released that would turn out to be, arguably, as culturally impactful as almost any released in the latter half of the 20^th Century. Even in the heart of Syracuse’s Black community, a debate had started to rage over the proper nomenclature for a person of color. In the minds of many older African Americans, men and women who lived through the era of Jim Crow, separate entrances and colored water fountains, the proper word – the proper title – was “Negro.” To many of the younger generation, however, the preferred word was now “Black.”

But that August – the same month that sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos shocked the world with their head-down/fist-raised “Black power” salute during the national anthem and the Mexico City Olympics – James Brown released Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud, a blistering five-and-a-half-minute funkfest split into two sides of the same 45, each full of raw, brassy horns and brawny grunts by a singer known to millions as simply “Soul Brother #1.” And when that happened, and when Say it Loud… began getting airplay on countless urban radio stations and vaulting its way up the R&B charts, all debate ended, like that. No longer were men and women of color to be openly referred to as “Negroes.”  From that point forward, the term of choice was Black.

Perhaps, the most notable shift in Black culture in 1968 took place at venerable Motown Records in Detroit. For the run of the decade, no one had seemed more concerned with whitewashing black artists and their music than the label's founder, Berry Gordy.  An impresario of the highest order, Gordy knew full well that many Top 40 station managers and deejays across the South would refuse even to listen to a record if they knew it was by a Black artist. As a result, for the first two or three years, no Motown album jacket or 45 sleeve released displayed a single photograph of an artist or group. Gordy, in fact, went so far as to insist that every one of his artists attend the charm school he’d created across the street from the studio, in order to teach them the proper way to walk and talk in polite society.

He also made it a point to have printed on virtually all of his very first Motown records the bold and rather ambitious tagline, “The Sound of Young America,” a phrase nearly drowning in its own sense of gee-whiz/Wonder Bread wholesomeness.

But then came 1968, a year that would mark a fundamental sea change for the most successful Black-owned business in the world. Two songs, in particular, led that change. Some seven months earlier, Gladys Knight and the Pips had recorded a version of a song co-written by one of Berry’s recent hires, a young producer named Norman Whitfield.  The song, as recorded by Knight, had a driving beat and was highly “dance-able.” Its lyrics, however, almost seemed an afterthought, especially in light of the song’s up-tempo time signature and its throbbing sense of rhythm.

Seven months later, however, a much slower version of the song was released on a new album by singer Motown artist Marvin Gaye.  That version – the third cut on Side One – was subsequently discovered by deejays coast to coast, a number of whom began placing it into their regular rotation. Gordy, personally, hated Gaye’s take on the song and, for the longest time, resisted releasing it as a single. But once that version began to get strong word-of-mouth, and once it began shooting up the charts based solely on its airplay as an album cut, the Motown founder had no choice but to release it as a 45.

And when Gordy did that, in October of 1968, Marvin Gaye’s Heard it Through the Grapevine became not just a national phenomenon, it became an almost perfect song for its times. In light of the Tet Offensive and the often violent protests over Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the incendiary podium protest in Mexico City, the bloody riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the torching of yet another all-Black ghetto in yet another tinder box of a major city, the song spoke to Black America, if not an entire generation of kids, like few songs ever. It was slow and ominous, to the point of eerie. It reeked of an almost crippling sense of paranoia. And it was passionate, even though the man at the center of all that passion sounded so helpless about his circumstances that, it seemed, all he could do was stand at the microphone and howl.

Less than a month after the release of Gaye’s Heard it Through the Grapevine, however, a second Motown song would go even further.

The Supremes, a trio, had always been Gordy’s darlings – especially lead singer Diana Ross, who’d quickly become Motown’s go-to ingénue and most bankable star (not to mention, Gordy’s lover).  As a result, the Supremes regularly dressed and looked not so much like pop stars, but Vegas headliners. They wore skin-tight sequined dresses, high-heeled pumps, and bouffant wigs of various cuts and styles. What’s more, the three were all told time and again to stay as thin as possible to be able to fit into both their wardrobe and the image that Gordy had carefully crafted for them.

One of the three, however, Florence Ballard, had issues with the last part and in 1967 was fired by Gordy for not just her weight gain, but her drinking problem. Then, just as the group was getting ready to appear on Ed Sullivan the following year – in November of 1968 – to promote their newest single, Gordy suddenly jettisoned a second Supreme, Mary Wilson, leaving Ross as the group’s only original member.

As a result, when the Supremes took the stage on Sunday night in front of a national television audience and tens of millions of Ed Sullivan viewers, there were still three Black girls in the lineup.  Just not the same three that fans had grown to know and love over the years. Not that anyone noticed, however. After all, most watching seemed more focused on the way the Supremes looked and dressed that night, especially Ross. Gone were their elegant, tight-fitting dresses. Gone, too, were their wigs and heels. In fact, they didn’t wear shoes at all. All three were clad in non-matching, everyday clothes and they sang barefoot. And all three wore their hair as they’d never done so, at least in performance: naturally, and in tight, short afros.

What’s more, the set on which they appeared was not some glitzy array of geometric shapes, lights and risers designed to glamorize them. Just the opposite, in fact; Ed Sullivan’s historic stage, at least for the three girls’ performance that night, was transformed into a set designer’s rendering of a real-life “tenement slum” (a phrase that then popped up early in the song Ross introduced to the world).

Make no mistake, despite the look of all three Supremes, it was the ever-elegant Ross who captured almost everyone's attention. Dressed in a simple yellow sweatshirt and a pair of ragged cutoffs, she soon began singing about love, but doing so in a way that shocked millions of Americans.

The Supremes new song might have been about love, but it wasn’t love in the vein of, say, Where Did Our Love Go, or Baby Love, or Stop in the Name of Love. No, it was an entirely different kind of song about an entirely different kind of love. Love Child was an unambiguous urban lament whose lyrics spoke of such heretofore social taboos as teen pregnancy, a poor woman’s chastity under siege, and the daunting prospect of having a child in the ghetto and out of wedlock.

The song's lyrics were challenging for many Ed Sullivan viewers to wrap their brains around, especially the devout Catholics among them.

Started my life in an old, cold, rundown tenement slum.
My father left, he never even married Mom.
I shared the guilt my mama knew,
So afraid that others knew I had no name.

Ah, this love we're contemplating
Is worth the pain of waiting.
We'll only end up hating
The child we may be creating.

Love child, never meant to be
Love child, (scorned by) society
Love child, always second best
Love child, different from the rest.

Gone, suddenly, was so much of what Motown had once tacitly promised its largely white audience. Gone was the almost childlike sweetness of sugar pie, honey bunch, my girl, and come and get these memories. And gone was the irrepressible joy of dancing in the street and going to a go-go to dance Mickey's monkey, not to mention the billowy innocence of such largely innocuous lyrical hooks as “ooh baby, baby,” “shop around,” and “get ready.”

By 1968, Berry Gordy might still have been offering his white record buyers in working class towns like Syracuse a chance to hear, if not celebrate, the “Sound of Young America.”  The difference was, by then – especially in light of Heard it Through the Grapevine and Love Child – two things about Motown’s tagline had shifted radically. Now, not only had the “Sound” of the generation driving pop music's train been blown apart, but so too had the face, if not the very notion, of what constituted "Young America."

 

 

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From a basketball perspective, there was nothing quite like it in Syracuse.

Granted, the annual Boys Club Tourney always managed to draw high-end talent to Central New York from across the county. But perhaps because that round-robin affair was always held indoors in the Spring when the days were getting longer and the sidewalks warmer, or because it was staged in an aging building on the scarred fringes of what had once been the 15^th Ward, it never rose to the point where it became the put-up-or-shut-up tournament in town.

That distinction, at least for much of the 1960's, was always reserved for the "Blessed Sacrament Summer Basketball League," an annual rite-of-passage tournament for any player with ambitions that went beyond his own driveway. That tournament was held every Summer on the rear lot of Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic Church and grammar school on the main drag in Eastwood, Syracuse’s bustling city-within-a-city on its near East Side.

The annual six-week competition, held early each summer, was the brainchild of a young, socially active priest named Ron Buckel, who'd once been a Blessed Sacrament altar boy.  One evening, at Christ the King Seminary on the campus of St. Bonaventure, Buckel had cobbled together an idea he had for a midsummer tourney during a much-needed break from his studies. Originally conceived as a way to keep high school kids off the street, the Blessed Sacrament Tournament was also designed to give boys in his hometown of Syracuse a full-fledged opportunity to gain the kind of bragging rights they’d then be able to carry in their pocket for years.

Like so many things, Buckel's little open competition started out modestly. But soon, as it started getting ink in the local papers and began drawning deeper and better teams, he got the idea to expand it. It wasn’t long before he’d convinced Blessed Sacrament pastor's to add an open division for collegiate players and up. And when that happened, and when word got out, the entire tournament went to a whole new level in terms of press coverage, public awareness and, above all, tavern talk.

Set up as a double-elimination affair (meaning any team losing two games would be eliminated), the annual Blessed Sacrament Tournament was soon like the proverbial slow-moving train – one that, as it got a full head of steam, was soon barreling along as much on its own momentum as it was anything else.

The games, held from early July to early August, kicked off each day in the middle of the afternoon and extended into magic hour, just before nightfall. And while the scholastic contests, those played in the afternoon, featured some of the city’s finest high school players and were fun to watch, it was the open games, the ones played just after dinner, that drew the most eye-popping talent and served as catnip for the city’s most dyed-in-the-wool bird dog scouts and fans.

At nights, the crowds surrounding the courts behind Blessed Sacrament often amounted to hundreds of men, women, and children three and four deep, some sitting in lawn chairs, but the vast majority standing and watching some of the best basketball any of them had seen since the old Nats left town.

Every so often, one of the later games would go into overtime. When that happened, the skies above the court would invariably begin to darken, even as the intensity of the game heightened.  At that point, a handful of fans would go to their respective cars, start them up and drive them onto the blacktop where they’d then form a crudely shaped semi-circle around one side of the action, their headlights providing the necessary illumination to finish out the game.

The eerie stillness of the dying day, the glowing halo of the bank of headlights, and the giant shadows now dancing upon a canvas of red brick – shadows of young men, black and white, taking jump shots and making steals; and shadows of long, lithe bodies blocking shots, whipping crisp passes and knifing through defenses for driving layups – added a surreal and almost mystical quality to a handful of Blessed Sacrament games each summer.

As on so many courts throughout the city for much of that decade, the skin color of any one team was always far less important than whether or not that team could actually play.  There were never any racial confrontations in the early days of Father Buckel’s tournament. There was only great basketball. Powerful Black teams, such as the Grand Street Boys and the Olympians, regularly played, and often won, the tournament, and did so without a whisper of racial tension.

But that was before 1968.  That was before Interstate 81 had left a deep gash through the heart of the city, and before the demolition of the 15^th Ward had fully run its course.  That was before ghettos in cities across the country began going up in flames on a regular basis. Most of all, that was before a lone assassin – a hate-filled drifter – used his map and hunting rifle to track down and kill Dr. Martin Luther King, a national symbol of peace and hope, as he stood among friends on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis.

When that happened, suddenly all bets were off. When that happened, almost overnight in Syracuse, it seemed almost impossible to get a team of white kids on the same basketball court as a team of Black ones without some massive, game-ending brawl erupting at some point or another. It was almost as though some darker power had waved its hand and decreed that any two teams in little Syracuse – any two teams, that is, on opposite sides of the racial divide – were going to fight, no matter how well the players might have known, respected, and in some cases even liked each other.

These types of brawls had actually started with the Bishop Ludden/Central melee in March of 1967, continuing pretty much unabated throughout the 1967-68 City League season. But by the following summer Black vs. white confrontations during games had become frightening in both their intensity and their frequency.

However, the summer immediately following the assassination of Dr. King, would not end up being the most fight-filled and racially charge the Blessed Sacrament Tournament would ever see. That would come the following year; and then again in the year after that.  What was clear, though, as far back as that Summer of 1968, was that unless something was done, and done soon, it would be just a matter of time before someone really got hurt, or worse.

One of the reasons that the Syracuse of 1968 did not explode, at least to the extent that it could have, likely had to do with a handful of adults in town – one white and one Black – both of whom rose to the occasion and, as best they could within their limited spheres of influence, tried to keep Syracuse’s racial violence to a minimum.

One was a school administrator named David Kidd, the longtime principal of the Blackest school in the city, Central Tech, and, as such, boss to both Manny Breland and Bob Capone. Just after sunrise on the morning after King's assassination, he gathered his staff and teachers – whom he’d all called in early – in Lincoln auditorium on the school's first floor. He told them there’d be no classes that day, only a morning assembly. He asked them to get ready, and explained to them that, among the students, almost every human emotion was likely to be on display that day, and that they should plan and respond accordingly.

But more than anything, he told them, let the kids do what they feel is right – especially today. If they want to talk, let them talk. If they want to leave, don't try to stop them. Try to understand what they’re feeling and what they’re going through, and do your best to empathize. As much as anything, though, give them space.

Kidd went on to explain he’d been up all night trying to get his thoughts together, and that he wanted to speak to the full student body immediately after first bell.

As the students shuffled into the building that morning – those who chose to go to school, anyway – the tension was so thick and so palpable it made it difficult for many of the teachers to even breathe.  It almost felt as if one spark and the entire building might explode.

As Kidd got ready to welcome the students and say his piece, one of his vice principals came rushing up to him with some news. There were, apparently, a hundred or so kids from nearby Roosevelt Junior High who’d just entered the school through the front door and who were now shouting back and forth with a growing number of Central kids. They looked like they had trouble in mind, said the vice principal, who asked if he should call the police.

“No,” said Kidd, after a moment.  “Let them in.  And let the kids handle this themselves.”

As the Roosevelt students, virtually all of them Black, made their way into the auditorium, a buzzing started among many of the Central kids as they turned in their seats and realized what as happening. Kidd could feel his lips tingle, his tongue dry, and the knot in his stomach tighten. He immediately welcomed the unannounced visitors, explaining that he and his students were in the middle of an assembly about Dr. King's death, but that they were more than welcome to join them. He cautioned, however, that they were guests at Central and should behave accordingly. If not, they’d be asked to leave.

What only a handful in the hall realized was that, when a single African American guidance counsellor named Frank Anderson had intercepted the Roosevelt kids a few minutes prior, more than a few of them had been carrying bricks. Keeping in mind what his boss had told him, Anderson tried to stay calm, telling the angry youngsters, "You’re more than welcome here, all of you, especially today.  But the bricks and stones have to stay outside.”

Later, another African American member of Kidd's staff, a young educator named Keith Sterling, who Kidd had asked to run the assembly, introduced his boss even as he held one of the confiscated bricks in his right hand. The Central principal rose from the crowd below and walked slowly up and onto the stage. Silhouetted against the now abandoned basketball court that spanned the school's still-magnificent stage, David Kidd stood alone – a white man just hours removed from the brutal and senseless killing of, arguably, the single most iconic and beloved African American in history.  He began speaking softly and compassionately to the young and mostly Black audience gathered in front of him. His words were raw, and honest, and spontaneous – and all of them straight from his heart. By the end of his brief address, the entire room was in silence, save for the sound of a few sniffles.

Afterwards, the students got to their feet en masse – the vast majority still in silence – and made their way out the doors. A number of teachers rushed up to their principal with tears in their eyes. Some shook Kidd’s hand. A few hugged him.  But what every last one of those men and women did was thank the Central principal for what he’d just done in bringing his school together, however tenuously.

Four days later, atop the editorial page of the evening Herald-Journal sat a letter to the editor. It was one that praised Kidd, and not just for his words, but his leadership. That entire opinion page that afternoon was a virtual microcosm of the times, especially locally; a handful of letters about Vietnam, including one calling out New York Senator Bobby Kennedy for having the temerity to suggest that both North and South Vietnam be included in whatever peace negotiations occur; a letter ruing the recent decision to close St. Mary’s, a tiny but much-loved maternity hospital on the city's North Side; an op-ed piece railing about the growing use of marijuana and LSD among America’s youth; a second opinion piece detailing the heightened level of concern over what to do with all the “dead” space that now existed in downtown Syracuse, thanks to Interstate 81; a letter from an anonymous St. John the Evangelist student claiming that, although the diocese might be able to take away his school, it'll never be able to take away his memories.

But it was the letter at the very top of the page that drew the most eyes.  That was letter the Herald’s editors chose to highlight and to which they assigned the somewhat evocative headline, “His Decision Saved the Day.”

It was a letter from a local Catholic priest who’d been asked by Kidd to attend the assembly that morning to offer a prayer for peace before things got underway. Father Joseph Champlin, assistant pastor at the nearby Cathedral, wrote that Kidd’s words to the students were forceful and profound, and that they resonated deeply with everyone on hand. He cited one passage in particular that Kidd delivered, even after a number of the African American kids had already left or been excused to attend various services in honor of Dr. King. Champlin wrote that the principal said to the remaining students and teachers before him, “Today’s generation will either solve this race issue and move the country forward, or it will fail to come to grips with it in their own hearts, and destroy America in the process.”

After praising Kidd and his faculty, along with the Central and Roosevelt students, the vast majority of whom remained respectful throughout, Champlin concluded: “Martin Luther King did not live to see his dream come true. But this experience at Central Tech proves that it is a possibility.”

At least one other adult rose up and tried his best to keep Syracuse’s racial violence from boiling over during the long and uniquely hot summer of 1968.  That was Manny Breland, himself.

Chief O’Connor of the Syracuse Police Department had become aware of Breland for a number of reasons over the course of the prior year. During the confrontation with Central students on Adams Street – despite the heightened racial tension – O’Connor had noted how Breland had been completely honest, straightforward and candid with the kids, winning their respect and cooperation in the process. For that reason, the following summer, as the Syracuse Parks & Recreation Department was launching a new program – something called the “Happenin’ Wagon” – Syracuse’s top cop enlisted Manny’s help directly.

Syracuse’s Happenin’ Wagon (designed to “Keep Things Cool”) was basically a well-appointed recreational vehicle that went from park to park on different nights of the week all summer long to act as something of a mobile command center for a full program of shows, concerts and dance parties, all of them targeting teens and young adults. O’Connor wanted a few older and otherwise respected former 15^th Warders – guys like Manny, Herman Edge and Billy Gilbert – to act as visible (yet inconspicuous) agents of the police department, especially in three of the city’s blackest and most volatile park facilities: Thornden, Wilson and Kirk Park.

For a guy like Manny, a teacher staring at the prospect of no paycheck for almost three months, it was pretty much the perfect summer job. It got him out of the house a few nights a week, allowing him to stay in touch with many of his students and players. It also gave him a chance to listen to music and eat some good food, all while getting paid for the privilege of doing so.

However, since O’Connor did not want a significant or obvious uniformed presence at any Happenin’ Wagon event, the only identification Manny and his fellow “officers” received from him were tee shirts that bore a small logo and some lettering, identifying them as city employees.

Music, food, and supplemental income aside, things were largely uneventful for Manny that Summer of ’68 – that is, until one Sunday night when he got an urgent call from a good friend and fellow teacher named Bill Beard, who, like his wife, Etta, had been a longtime city school teacher. Beard told Breland, simply, but with a clear sense of panic in his voice, “Manny, you need to get down here now. I mean it. We got real trouble.”

By the time Manny arrived at Beard's place on the corner of State and Raynor, just two blocks southwest of Pioneer Homes, Syracuse's now-infamous "Brick City," it was almost like a scene from a low-budget movie about the Apocalypse. Two rows of officers with helmets on and plexiglass shields up were creating a wall between a few hundred shouting African American youths and the handful of shops and homes near the intersection. Other cops on horseback stood by on alert, each of them mounted, armed and ready to fire, if so ordered.

A rock had been thrown through the front window of Rothschild Drugs on State Street, and the store looted. After that, a small corner market and deli just a block away had been set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail through its front window, even as the elderly Jewish shop owner stood behind the counter near the register, ready to die in defense of his livelihood.

Manny quickly learned that a few boys had been playing some street football before the sun had gone down that evening.  Later, as they were hanging around, talking and laughing among themselves, and perhaps drinking, two officers in a squad car drove up and ordered them to disperse. The boys may have been disrespectful. They may not have been. Who can say for sure?  What was true, however, was that the majority of those kids lived right behind the spot they were gathered, in the Bricks of Pioneer Homes.  And, as such, as they snapped to the cops, they had every right to be there.  It was a free country.

One thing led to another and before anyone realized what was happening, the officers, both of them white, had jumped out of their squad car and used their nightsticks to club and then arrest one of the boys (Manny knew him, and also knew he was the quietest kid in the group, the boy least likely to sass a cop or do anything to merit an all-out beatdown with a billy club).

The moment the young man was handcuffed was the moment all hell broke loose. When the rest of the boys moved toward the cops in their friend’s defense is when one of the two officers, the younger of the two, ran to the squad car and radioed for immediate assistance.

Within minutes, the call was answered. Before anyone knew it, two cops turned into almost thirty, and a single squad car morphed into an entire squadron, complete with paddy wagons, mounted officers, riot guns, riot gear and a number of tear gas canisters and launchers.

By the time Manny arrived just a few moments later, it seemed everything was in full-scale meltdown. Three trucks’ worth of Syracuse firefighters had arrived and were attempting to put out the blaze in the corner market before it could spread to the houses on either side of it, while a pair of ambulance attendants worked on its owner, treating the elderly Jewish man for smoke inhalation and, one might assume, emotional trauma. Minutes earlier, he'd been pulled to safety by one of the first patrolmen to answer the call, after he determined that there was at least one person still inside the building that was quickly becoming engulfed in flames.

Meanwhile, cops in full riot gear were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, facing a barrage of bricks, stones and bottles from the angry mob of mostly black young men, while the officer in charge of them issued orders over a bullhorn from behind a wall of plexiglass, demanding the mob to disperse.

The city cops were courageous, to be sure, but they were also badly outnumbered. And it looked for a while as though the whole South Side neighborhood that surrounded them, a collection of a dozen or so blocks of small single and two-family homes on the very fringes of what was left of the Ward, might explode into a sea of violence.

Big “Boobie” Breland was doing his ever-loving best to try to calm the now-roaring crowd, yelling to a few boys he recognized to go home before they got hurt. But it was useless, and he knew it, though that didn’t stop him from trying. At one point, dodging a few bricks and stones, the Central coach ran up to the commanding officer and asked what he might do to help. The officer, looking up at Breland with a mix of impatience and disbelief, barked, “Whoever you are, get the hell outta here and go home.  Now!”

Manny persisted, trying to explain that he worked with Chief O’Connor and that he might be able to help, given his relationship with the neighborhood kids. By that point, though, the cop had lost all patience with the giant Negro standing in front of him, a guy who – at least in his mind – was doing more harm than good.  “Get the fuck outta here, will ya?” he looked up and snapped, now with equal parts rage and fear in his eyes.  “Or I swear to God, I’m gonna arrest your black ass.”

As this exchange was occurring, a second officer, an Officer Galvin, perhaps sensing something was wrong, came up to the two. “What’s going on, cap'n?” the cop asked his superior ever-so cautiously out of respect, while at the same time trying like hell to shield his head with his left hand. When the senior officer spit back an offhand and somewhat mumbled response, the patrolman, a good little ballplayer in his own right back in the day, who recognized Manny from having watched him play at S.U., and who was fully aware he’d recently won a championship at Central, said calmly, “He’s okay, captain. Really. This is Manny Breland. He and I play ball together at Thornden sometimes.  My guess is, that he also coaches at least a few of those kids over there.”

Manny was reluctantly released with both a look and a warning, but things remained just a well-placed brick or, maybe, a quick or itchy trigger finger away from escalating from something ugly to something tragic.

Later, as the still relatively new Central coach moved down State Street, looking to help in any way he could, he saw a rock get thrown from the alley between an apartment building and Rothschild Drugs, a rock that struck one of the riot squad officers flush, bringing him to his knees.  At that point, a second officer had raised his tear gas launcher to almost eye level and was bracing it against his right shoulder, as if he intended to fire.

The problem was, as Manny and others quickly realized, the apartment house off the alley where the cop was aiming was full of children and adults (many of them senior citizens), some of whom were now gathered on the front steps and in the front yard, while others were leaning out open windows above the alley. It was, in other words, a recipe for disaster and a situation that, if not managed immediately – and properly – might trigger even more rage on the part of the mob.

Manny reflexively yelled out to the young officer, “Hey, hey!!! You can’t do that!  Those are innocent people over there…People who had nothing to do with this!”

He then hurriedly made his way back to the man in charge, the cop with the bullhorn who’d just threatened to arrest him. “Please, sir,” said Manny.  “You can’t fire no tear gas. Not yet. You just can’t. Please. That’ll not only hurt innocent people, but it will also take this whole thing and make it even worse than it is.”

The head cop gave Manny a look, as if to say, “Make it worse? Seriously? Are you frickin' kidding me? How in God’s name is that even possible?” Nevertheless, the cop had been around the block more than a few times and knew full well that the big man in front of him was right.  As a result, and without wasting even another second, he looked over and shouted to the officer with the tear gas launcher, as well as those around him, to hold their fire.

That little mini riot eventually dissipated, but not before scarring the city even further and triggering a new wave of white flight to the safer, quieter and more family-friendly suburbs of Syracuse – this particular wave emanating from the roughly twenty or so square blocks that radiated down toward St. Anthony’s, south and west of the corner of State and Raynor.

During that long and particularly nerve-wracking night, Manny Breland eventually happened upon at least one youngster who’d played for him that season, a smart, talented and otherwise disciplined senior guard named Alex Bullock. Manny had spotted Bullock picking up a brick with the clear intention of inflicting damage, either to one of the uniformed officers lined up before him, or maybe to an inviting plate glass widow or windshield in one of the cars parked on the street.

Manny didn’t even have to shout out Bullock’s name or yell over to him. The young man simply caught his coach’s eye from roughly twenty yards away.  Their eyes locked, and did so for a full beat or two. Then Breland said to his championship team’s best shooter in a firm and disciplined coach-like tone, “Put it down, son.  Now. And go home now.”

Years later, Al Bullock – who would eventually start and run a successful business in Atlanta and who, in the process, would turn himself into one of the 15^th Ward’s greatest success stories – recalled how he’d chosen to put that brick down that night, and how doing so had, undoubtedly, altered the course of his life.

But he'd also go on to say there was something that “Mr. Breland” never knew about their chance encounter – when, once again, and if only for a moment, they became coach and player. What Manny Breland didn’t know was that after Bullock tossed aside the brick he'd been holding, and after he smiled meekly at his mentor and turned his back to walk away, the youngster happened to look around at the dark and increasingly troubled inner-city streets of Syracuse, parts of which were still smoldering, and thought to himself, “Go home?  Hell…I am home.”

 

 

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

 

By the home stretch of 1968, it was as though the new Interstate 81, which by then was running – bold and constantly looming – straight through the heart of downtown Syracuse, had become a bitterly ironic symbol for much of what the city had become.

The almost mythically productive little Salt City, which for years had been a model of unity and harmony, was becoming divided in almost every way imaginable: politically, racially, economically, socially, even chronologically. As summer turned to fall that year, the soul of Central New York’s still-proud manufacturing mecca was, sadly, becoming as divided as its aerial map.

But the splintering of Syracuse ran deeper and was far more nuanced than it appeared at first blush. By the second half of 1968, even the city's once-solid African American community had begun to fracture. Unmoored by the loss of its home turf, 15^th Ward, the nearly 20,000 strong community was at odds with itself, becoming almost two distinct and warring sides of the same coin.

On one side of were those Blacks like Manny Breland, who still believed in the American way and playing by the rules; on the other were those now being called “Afro-Americans,” Black men and women (a significant number, like Al Bullock, still in their teens) who increasingly believed in revolution, Black power and pushing back, that the rules of society were established by white men to keep the Black man down, and that the only way for America’s Blacks to get what was rightfully theirs was to take it – and to do so by force, if necessary.

In Syracuse, these two different mindsets were embodied in a thirty-something Southern transplant named Donnie Fielder and a much younger Southern transplant named Bob Harrison, two men who, skin color aside, could not have been more different.  Because while both Fielder and Harrison may have wanted the best for Syracuse’s people of color – especially the youngest ones – their respective paths to getting there were entirely different.

If any man stood as a model of the first, more conciliatory view of Black America, it was Fielder, a graduate of the famed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Fielder was the longtime athletic director of the East Genesee Street Boys Club and was one of those rare individuals who somehow managed to be just as tough as he was gentle.

As the father figure for hundreds of young Black boys in Syracuse, Fielder always tried to be a role model for just about any youngster who ever set foot in the place, from toddlers on up. As an old-school drill-sergeant type, he also strove to be a beacon, however flawed, for all the African American young men who would follow in his footsteps, a leader whose place of birth, era and conscience guided virtually every last thing he ever did or said in the presence of a youngster.

To countless people in the city's Black community, if there was an African American version of the Saint of Syracuse, Father Brady, it was Donnie Fielder.

As a product of both the Jim Crow South and the don’t-rock-the-boat 1950’s, Fielder was well-steeped in two concepts that drove him to operate the way he did; separate-but-equal and using sports to build character in a boy. The born-and-raised Southerner in him accepted the crystal-clear certainty of the former, while the four-sport letterman in him, the onetime multi-sport collegian, saw the latter as a road to achievement, if not personal excellence.

For Fielder, personal excellence was everything. To him, the only way any young Black man was ever going to win a seat at any white table was by being better.  In Fielder’s world, if a young Black boy wanted to be a baseball player in America, he couldn’t be just any player. He had to be Jackie Robinson, or Willie Mays or Hank Aaron. If a young man (or woman) of color wanted to be a singer, that kid couldn’t just be some garden-variety crooner, he or she had to be Ella Fitzgerald, or Lena Horne, or Nat “King” Cole.

To earn your chance as a Black child in 20^th Century America – at least the way Fielder saw it – you couldn’t simply be good enough. Because, by 1968, especially if you were young, Black and full of hope, good-enough was just not going to cut it. You had to be great, and so clearly great that no one of any color would even think to try to deny you a seat at their table.

And yet, while Fielder was unflinching in his steely adherence to society’s norms and a Black man’s place in it, he could also be a man of remarkable understanding and forgiveness. His office walls, for example, were full of photos – from ceiling to floor – of boys who’d meant something to him over the years.  Those shots depicted many of the Boys Club’s biggest stars and its most accomplished athletes. But there were also shots of lesser-known young men; boys full of character and life, boys who had atoned for their mistakes, and boys who would regularly give of themselves. There were shots of boys who, despite the gifts God may or may not have given them, always sought something better for those around them.

In Donnie Fielder’s Boys Club, winning a trophy was great, and winning a championship was greater still. But winning a spot, however small, on his office wall was one of the highest honors a young man who’d spent his life in the loving arms of Syracuse's 15^th Ward could receive.

Fielder and his fellow director, Harold “Tiny” Shure, also took great pains to try to teach all their boys a measure of financial responsibility. To that end, any boy hoping to use the Boys Club had to first fork over a fifty-cent onetime membership fee. And any boy unwilling or unable to pay the nominal four bits was denied access. What’s more, Fielder and Shure then issued all their members a small card with their full name hole-punched into it. And any boy without his membership card, or any boy misbehaving or breaking one of Fielder’s countless rules of good behavior and fair play, was immediately shown the door.

But even though the Boy’s Club was predominantly a gymnasium, game room, wrestling room, weight room and swimming pool, Donnie Fielder used more than sports to plant the seeds of character in a young man. He also tried to teach his kids more practical lessons, as well. One summer, for example, he and Shure (a longtime 15^th Ward Jew, dating back to the days when the Ward was commonly referred to by the Black residents as “Jewtown”) hired a local carpenter to show any young man who wished to learn how to build his own shoeshine box. Not only did the physical act of building such a box prove useful – but having built and stocked his own shoeshine kit, it also gave any enterprising boy a way to put a few nickels in his pocket each week.

Such lessons, at least to Fielder, were far more than practical. In the soon-to-be smoldering ruins of the 15^th Ward, and in a world that expected so little of any boy who’d grown up in them, these lessons would prove to be lifelong, if not life changing.

But by 1968, a growing number of Blacks had started to view Donnie Fielder’s way of preparing inner-city kids to compete as hopelessly out of touch. His way of molding young minds, at least to them, seemed sadly tone deaf, lacking any sense of what was actually happening right outside the club’s doors.

To such people, while, say, greasing the pole in the gym for the club’s annual field days and then placing a brand new pair of Converse sneakers atop it (a prize for the first boy to successfully navigate his way up the pole), or simulating a camping trip by allowing a dozen or so kids to sleep under the stars on the roof of the building, might have been creative and well-intentioned, they were ultimately naïve attempts to try to change the lives of boys who, at that point – more than simple hand-holding – needed a healthy dose of reality, if not a good hard slap in the face.

One such young Black Syracusan who’d received more than his share of face slaps was the Ward’s poster child for that second, alternative school of thought. He was an undersized alpha dog and street-brawler named Arthur “Bobby” Harrison.

Compared to Donnie Fielder, Harrison was a different type of Southern transplant.  As a six year-old schoolboy, he’d watched his grandfather get beaten to within an inch of his life while tending to the illegal still he operated in the woods near his home in Darlington, South Carolina. His grandfather's savage beating came, at least in young Bob’s mind, from a combination of county sheriffs and Ku Klux Klansmen – all of them, presumably, white.

In fairness, were those sheriffs and robed-and-hooded Klansmen actually working in concert, and were they actually there together that Sunday afternoon? Or was that memory just a mash-up of a few others by a scared and scarred little boy?  Whatever the case, it hardly mattered. What mattered was that it was real in young Bob Harrison’s mind, and would remain so for most of the rest of his uniquely hard life.

So, when he and his mother, Ella Mae, moved north to Syracuse’s 15^th Ward in the 1950s, he did so already believing that the game was rigged against people like him and that the other guys – especially the white guys in uniform – were constantly dealing off the bottom of the deck.

In the Ward, young Bobby soon learned to fend for himself.  He was a good student, or at least he was plenty smart, but he didn’t have much use for authority or those in it. Instead, he relied on his razor-sharp instincts and his own inherent and occasionally fluid sense of right and wrong.

For all his instincts and inherent street sense, the two things Bob Harrison had going for him were the fact he was a natural born leader to whom other young men just seemed to gravitate, and that he was, pound for pound, just about the toughest and most fearless son-of-a-bitch anyone in the Ward had ever seen.

Even though he only stood maybe 5’7” or 5’8”, Harrison would fight anyone, anywhere, at the drop of a hat, especially if he felt that person was worthy, or had done something to merit such a beating.  He was the type of fighter you’d better kill because he was never going to give up, whatever the odds against him.

One day, thirteen year-old, Bob was walking past an old junkyard in the Ward, a scrap and salvage facility that sat just behind the Dunbar Center off McBride Street.  There was a big dog curled up behind the chain-link fence and, upon seeing Bob, the dog charged and threw himself savagely against the fence, barking, growling and baring his teeth, drooling madly as he did. The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that.

On the fourth day, Bob decided to make a quick stop at the Loblaws on Adams Street. He walked straight back to the meat department of the grocery store, looked both ways and quietly stuck a small T-bone steak down his pants. He then exited without making eye contact. When he walked by the junkyard, this time Bob Harrison tossed the pilfered steak over the fence.

At first, the dog hardly noticed, so intent was he on throwing himself against the fence.

But the next day, Bob repeated his routine, this time stealing a pair of pork chops.  And the day after that, he stole yet another steak. Then some sausage. And so on, and so on.

This went on for the better part of a month. Each day Harrison would shoplift a nice piece of raw meat, each day he would unwrap it, and each day he would feed it to the savage animal who spent his days dutifully protecting his junkyard domain.

Eventually Bob started feeding the dog by a pushing the stolen meat through the long vertical gap between the fence and its hinged gate, talking softly and reassuringly to the crazed animal as he did.

About four weeks into this ritual, as Harrison approached the junkyard gate, meat in hand, the dog raced up, jumped up on its hind legs and started wagging its tail and trying to lick the hand of the human on the opposite side of the fence. That’s the moment the owner came out and barked at Harrison, “Hey, boy!  Yeah, you!  You know what you done?  Huh? You ruined that damned dog a mine. Just plum ruined him. He ain’t no good for nothin’ now – at least not to me. In fact, you better take that flea-bitten piece of shit outta here.  ‘Cause if you don’t, I swear, I’m gonna take my shotgun and shoot his sorry ass!”

That’s how Bob Harrison acquired his best friend and soon-to-be constant companion; a big, gnarly German Shepherd-mix of a cur that he’d soon name Fellow. And just like his master, Fellow would remain for the longest time mad at the very world that helped create him. Yet, Bob and Fellow quickly became symbols of respect and authority among those of a certain age in the Ward – even though one of the two was still young enough to be riding his bike every day.  Over time they'd slowly teach each other loyalty and respect, while both developed an intuitive and almost freakish sense of people, Fellow as a matter of pure, animal instinct, and Bob simply by watching and learning from his companion.

As Urban Renewal, along with the the relentless encroachment of Interstate 81, not only kicked in, but ramped up – and as the 15^th Ward started to crumble, faster and faster, block by block – chaos and uncertainty soon replaced what had long been the place’s overarching, if not downright tactile sense of neighborhood. And when that happened, Bob Harrison's role in Syracuse’s Black community – at least among many of its youngest members – began to increase, while helping to fill in some of the void being created by his neighborhood's loss of its physical infrastructure. He would, in time, amass a gang of young followers, if not spiritual disciples – many of them high school dropouts – whose rules were not so much the rules of society, but the rules of rubble-strewn streets and the rules of basic survival. Many in the Ward soon started referring to Bob’s de facto gang of believers simply as, “the Fellas.”

To be sure, Bobby Harrison always had a somewhat ambivalent view of the law and authority, and he and his boys did plenty of illegal things in their time, most of them – outside of a few beatings and some physical messages sent to rivals and would-be rivals – non-violent.  Mostly, they simply stole and hawked, stole and gifted, and stole and hustled. Yet, despite his ongoing ambivalence toward one set of rules, Bob also had plenty of unwritten ones that he constantly lived by and tried to impress upon the others.  No older people were to be touched or bothered, nor children either.  And, for the longest time, no one was allowed to own a gun.  Even knives were largely frowned upon.

What's more, in much the way Percy Harris had used large amounts of money to shield the 15^th Ward from racist cops and certain legal zealots, Bob Harrison used his toughness to help protect his little neighborhood. Through the toughness and fear he was able to engender in others, he became something of righteous vigilante, dispensing his own brand of justice and providing many who didn't pass Fellow's sniff test the beating and broken limbs he felt they deserved. When something truly and fundamentally wrong took place in town – such as the shooting death of an unarmed teenager named Jeremiah Mitchell, one of his Central schoolmates and a football teammate by a local cop – Bob was among the first to point out the injustice to the Fellas and, by extension, fuel the rage of Syracuse's Black community.

Of course, being the alpha and leader of a gang of inner-city street toughs put Harrison on many a radar within the city, particularly among law enforcement officials. So, when young Bobby Harrison, now fifteen, was accused one day of viciously beating up a Catholic priest, who he claimed made unwanted sexual advances toward him, the law finally caught up with him. As much he and his mother later protested in court, he soon found himself locked up in juvenile detention on a completely unrelated charge of sex with a minor, despite the fact he himself was a minor. That initial stay in a juvenile detention center, or "juvie," was followed soon thereafter by a second, this time at a juvenile work camp outside of Rochester. Living and working in a series of state and county correctional facilities, Bob became certain that those employed there – particularly the older white men, the guys with the real power – were systematically trying to break his spirit and rob him of his righteous and almost pathologically stubborn sense of self.

He was now, and until further notice, being schooled, incentivized, threatened, terrified, disciplined, cajoled, shaped and molded by bunch of hardened peers and overseers, people who used cruelty as a weapon as often as they used it as a defense.  Little Bobby Harrison was now, like it or not, and for better or for worse, officially part of a dark, parallel universe in American society known with a clinical, if not eerie, sense of detachment simply as, "the system."

The reality of constantly being in and out of detention centers and, in time, full-blown prisons, would conspire to make young Bob Harrison, a handsome but still-menacing individual, even angrier and more defiant than ever.  He would, of course, pass on much of his rage to those young men in the Ward who continued to look up to him and who still wanted to, as much as anything, be like him – and he did so every time he was released from someplace new and every time he'd come home to his, now, ever-dwindling turf, the 15^th Ward.

That’s why Jimmy Pugh in 1968, for example, the youngster who’d been arrested in nearby Fulton that basketball season, and a kid bailed out of jail that same night by his school’s new coach, Manny Breland, had taken to wearing a 45-caliber bullet around his neck. That’s also why Pugh, one night that Spring, in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination, had gone out and, in a case of blind rage, bent down all six rims on the court adjacent to Pioneer Homes, leaving all six completely unusable for basketball. Pugh’s message to his fellow teens in the Bricks, if not every one his black classmates at Central? These are no longer times for fun and games. These are times to rise up, times to take up arms, and times to grab what is rightfully ours.

Pugh, you see – just like Bobby Harrison – was but a reflection of what so many young African Americans were starting to feel down to their marrow. Through righteous anger they were taking ownership of their own blackness in a way that few, if any, previous generations of American “Negroes” ever had before.  As James Brown's anthem that summer put it, these kids were saying it loud, "I'm black and I'm proud."

Much of that pride, at least in Pugh’s case, was fragile, and a good deal of the anger, as in Harrison’s, a touch misdirected. Nevertheless, among thousands of young black men and women in the streets of inner-city Syracuse, that combination of pride and anger was real, and it reverberated across much of Onondaga County as an incendiary year continued to draw down.

Plus, the rage and the boldness of young Black voices like Harrison’s and Pugh’s, even if people didn't know their names, were sending chills down the spines of of many white folks in Syracuse, especially in and around the working class neighborhood of St. Anthony’s, the residents of which, until the explosion of anger following the King assassination, had never even entertained the idea of selling, much less actually moving.

Marty Shiel, for example, lived just a few blocks from St. Anthony’s, where he’d been a big star for the Paduans and made the All-Parochial team following his senior season.  He and his family also lived right next door to a quiet and hard-working Black family named the Thomases. The Shiels and Thomases had been neighbors for years, and pretty good ones at that. In addition, Mr. Shiel and Mr. Thomas both had good-paying, full-time jobs, the former with Allied Chemical, and the latter with Chrysler’s New Process Gear division on Plum Street. Though the two families had never been particularly close, they regularly said hello and occasionally borrowed one another’s garden tools and foodstuffs, or at least when the need arose. There had never been, in other words, even a whiff of racial tension or acknowledgement of the racial differences between the two families.

But then came 1968, when suddenly, it seemed, the most important thing about any man within a stone’s throw of Columbus Circle was not so much how he conducted himself, or how hard he worked, or even how deeply cared for and protected his family. It was the color of his skin.  And that was an issue and attitude that, frankly, cut both ways in the city. White and Black.  And it was doubly true around St. Anthony’s and Syracuse’s near South Side.

Shiel one summer evening two years prior, in fact, had invited one of his buddies to stay over on a Friday night so that they could get up bright and early the next day, down a quick bowl of cereal, and then head over to Kirk Park to play ball. The two, like so many sixteen year-olds in town, had spent the previous evening splitting a six-pack of beer bought using fake ID's and flirting with a few Catholic girls in the neighborhood, while cruising up and down street after street on foot. That ball-playing pal of Shiel’s, a kid named Jimmy Driscoll, whose dad worked as a detective with the Syracuse police, lived a mile or so southwest of the Shiels, just a block or so off Seneca Turnpike. While, by most any measure, such a distance would have been largely inconsequential, in Syracuse, New York during the Summer of 1966 it represented the difference between spending a quiet and uneventful night under the stars sipping cheap beer and spinning tall tales and a night spent in harm’s way.

At about nine o’clock that evening, near the block of Colvin and South Salina, the two boys happened to be hanging out in the parking lot of nearby Brighton School, finishing their final two cans of beers and trying to figure out what the heck they were going to do next. Before either knew what was happening, they heard some yelling and watched in wonder as the nighttime sky a few yards away, almost like a halo around the empty brick school building, assumed a bright and radiant amber glow. Then, almost at once, they saw the reason for that glow. A mob of twenty or so black kids, teens roughly their age and maybe a bit older, had lit a pair of Molotov cocktails and used them to firebomb a small commercial establishment that sat darkened on the east side of Salina Street.

Both boys hit the ground immediately, scared to death of being seen. Neither had ever witnessed anything like it before, especially from close up. Both lay chest-down against the ground for the longest time and stared straight ahead, almost afraid to even take a breath for fear of the sound it might make. Finally, Shiel whispered slowly and softly, “My house is about three blocks that way.  When I count to three, we get up and run like hell and we don’t stop running until we get home.”

He looked over to his buddy and added, “Got it?”

Driscoll nodded, but then thought for a moment and looked over at Shiel and said, “Oh, and Mart?  That invitation to sleep over tonight?  Yeah, well…thanks for nothin’.”

Even though the tale of Marty Shiel and Jimmy Driscoll was but one of many stories of random violence and mayhem during that run of crazy, combustible summers in Syracuse, it illustrates just how and why the city’s white flight – which had begun just a few years prior as something of a trickle – was now starting to flow with great purpose and intensity.

It wasn’t just the nature or the depth of the divides in town that had become apparent, it was the speed at which all that division was taking place.  Consider the schoolboy careers of two of the finest ballplayers in Syracuse history, Roy Neal and his kid brother, Terry – both of whom starred at Central Tech.

Roy and Terry, along with big brother Tom and sister Dorothy, had first moved to Syracuse with their mother a few years prior. They'd come from central Mississippi by way of Detroit. All four of the Neal kids had spent various amounts of time on the family farm, a sprawling, arable swath of red dirt in the heart of Chickasaw County, some thirty miles due south of Tupelo. And while back in the day Roy (along with Tom) would spend hours working for the two dollars a day his grandmother paid him every night before supper to chop cotton, mend fences, tend hogs and milk cows, Terry had been just a touch too young for that kind of manual labor.

His one and only chore as a preschooler – before, that is, heading north – was to empty the slop buckets in the house and keep them clean and covered. It wasn’t always convenient, you see, to make it all the way to the outhouse, especially at night. As a result, and because there was no running water at the time in the Neal farmhouse, the receptacle into which everyone relieved themselves at night was the white porcelain “slop” bucket in his or her room, the one with the thin wire handle that was always kept covered and tucked away in the far corner of the bedroom.

After moving to Syracuse in 1961, and after spending hours playing full and half-court games at nearby Wilson park, the family’s tall and lanky middle son, Roy, came to fall in love with basketball. Not only that, he got pretty good at it. In fact, by the Spring of 1968, Roy Neal had emerged as a full-blown star in the Central New York City League. But despite that, he was – for the most part, anyway – the quietest of the Neal boys and rarely spoke unless spoken to.

But it wasn’t as though Roy Neal didn’t have a lot to say. He just chose not to say it all that often, or at least not in mixed company. His junior year, for instance, when, as the best player in the city, he somehow managed to foul out in a big game against the Gaelic Knights of Bishop Ludden with five minutes still to go in the first half, he did not explode. And he didn’t pop off to either official. He just simply walked to his bench, plopped down at the end of it, lowered his head into a towel and began to quietly seethe, letting others vent the anger he was feeling – people like teammate Frank Broadwater who, later that same game, and tired of all the one-sided calls, grabbed one of the refs by his jersey and pinned him up against the wall. In the course of doing so, he'd find himself banned from playing any high school game in any sport for the rest of his days.

Meanwhile, the youngest Neal, Terry, grew up to be something of a cross between his two old brothers. Overcoming a severe stuttering problem that had plagued him since his days in, first, Mississippi, and then Detroit, he’d managed to grow into an engaging storyteller, much like the Neal's oldest, Tom.

Additionally, like Roy, Terry could simply flat-out play. Though never a great scorer, he'd soon find himself recognized far and wide as one of the finest all-round high school talents in Central New York.

For all their gifts and all their uniquely defined personalities, the three Neal boys – Tom, Roy and little Terry – would prove to be a reminder of just how dramatically and quickly things had been turned on their ear in Syracuse’s black community.

Yet, as the 1960’s continued to careen unchecked, and as the little village in the heart of the city that was the 15^th Ward continued to find itself systematically plowed under in the name of progress, some kids in the Ward were forced to find their role models elsewhere, often in its now hollowed-out and rubble-laden streets. Tom Neal, for example, found himself looking up to and trying to emulate a few people: his uncle, his mother’s new boyfriend, his mentor at Central, Mr. Capone, and even Bob Harrison.

Roy and Terry, on the other hand, found a father figure in the Boys Club's Donnie Fielder, the rec leader who gave them both the kind of tough love that few male adults in the Ward seemed willing to offer. He set boundaries for the two, and punished and rewarded them, depending upon the extent to which they respected the boundaries he'd established. Roy Neal, in fact, would admit years later that it wasn’t until he was nearing his sixtieth birthday that he finally stopped dreaming about his days under Fielder’s careful watch and about the hours on end he had spent trying to do whatever he could to please the Boys Club’s demanding athletic director.

But perhaps the most profound difference taking place in the Ward played itself in the not-so-subtle differences between the schooldays of the two youngest Neal brothers, Roy and Terry.

In the Fall of 1965, when Roy was in his first year at the corner of Warren and Adams, the Central varsity basketball team was mostly black and its uniform colors were scarlet and powder blue. During pre-game warm-ups, the Scarlet Lancers’ captain always had the team’s manager play the iconic, whistled version of Sweet Georgia Brown, the version that had long served as the official warm-up song of the most famous Black team of them all, the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters.

In one sense the Globetrotters had always engendered more than their share of Black pride around the country. After all, they were a team comprised entirely of young Black men (ostensibly from Harlem, the epicenter of black culture) who, time and time again, played (and often humiliated) the very same team of white players.

Yet, by the same token, the Globetrotters were also very much like Motown had once been under Berry Gordy: spit-polished and packaged up specifically for a mainstream audience, and done so in the absolutely whitest way possible. The team’s on-court dialogue, its routines, its entire act, in fact, were intentionally scrubbed clean and declawed for one simple and very practical reason. Management wanted to be able to pack houses and fill arenas everywhere – and not just in the inner city or all-black neighborhoods, but globally and throughout the U.S., especially in the suburbs and such traditionally white bastions as Iowa, Nebraska and Idaho.

For that reason, at least to a number of African Americans, there had always been an uneasy sort of “Uncle Tom”/"Stepin Fetchit" quality to the Globetrotters’ schtick. It might have been harmless comedy designed to do little more than entertain and keep the crowds coming back. But it was a brand of humor built on unflattering stereotypes that many proud men and women of color had spent their lives trying to get past and grow beyond. For many, Sweet Georgia Brown felt like perpetuating a stereotype for the sake of a few extra bucks.

However, just four years after Roy’s sophomore season at Central, came Terry’s junior year. And in those four short trips around the sun, a strong sense of black pride had taken hold of countless Central students. Close-cropped razor cuts had given way to all-natural afros. The powder blue that had long served as one of the two core colors of Central’s uniforms had been replaced by a bold and unambiguous black.  The single satin powder blue warmup jacket had been ditched in favor of a new look entirely: scarlet and white warm-up pants with wide vertical stripes, and flowing white tops, each adorned with black piping and lettering. Both warmup pants and tops were then accented – like a cherry on a sundae – by a scarlet tam, a jaunty, brimless cap made of soft, blood-red felt that each boy wore with attitude and to one side of his head. The result was a sartorial ensemble that made the 1969-70 Scarlet Lancer basketball team look as though it just climbed off the pages of a fashion magazine.

Just as important as the team’s new look was its new theme song. Gone forever was Sweet Georgia Brown. Now the Lancers exploded out of their locker room to the blaring strains of a stirring, brassy and contemporary soul hit by a young singer/songwriter from Chicago named Curtis Mayfield.

Move on Up was a soulful, urban homage to black aspiration, hope and deliverance, as spiritually aligned with Southern Baptist gospel and old Negro work songs as it was to modern day pop music and Top 40 radio.

By the Fall of 1969, for the first time in memory, Central Tech’s games were being attended by African Americans of all ages from points all across the city. They were drawing not just students, or family members and friends, but quite often people who didn’t even follow basketball. People were coming simply because they wanted to be there and feel even a small part of whatever it was that was happening in Syracuse.

For thousands of displaced 15^th Ward residents, Central Tech’s basketball games – especially its home games – had become social events, joyous celebrations of black culture and the rekindled pride so many of those cast-adrift blacks were now feeling about themselves and their boys – a dozen or so young men who, under the guidance of the Ward’s greatest success story ever, the much-loved “Boobie” Breland, had managed to turn themselves into the biggest, baddest basketball show in town.

But, alas, such pride was never too far removed from the deep anger and frustration that a number of these same young men now wore on their sleeves, an anger triggered not only by how things were in Syracuse, but how they’d always been – and likely how they always would be.

That combination of anger and frustration was likely central to the reason the Lancers came to blows with Bishop Ludden in two consecutive games, the second confrontation far more violent than the first, and why the Blessed Sacrament Tournament became, in the mere blink of an eye, less a basketball tournament than a series of bare-knuckled brawls.

And that very same combination of anger and frustration was why Central’s home games – those otherwise raucous celebrations of Black culture – began to take a decidedly ugly turn. Manny Breland had developed a legion of followers during his team’s championship run in 1968, a colorful bunch of middle-aged idlers from the Ward who liked to spend their days drinking cheap wine out of brown paper bags, hanging around the pool hall, and – once or twice a week – betting on Manny’s Lancers to cover whatever spread had been assigned to their game by the local bookies. Manny knew most of them, at least by reputation, and he began to refer to this rather motley crew of Mad Dog-swilling basketball nuts as his “Booster Club.” For the longest time Breland considered those winos colorful, loud and outspoken, but, otherwise, entirely harmless.

Yet, even that changed during the 1969-70 season when one of the the “Boosters” – a guy sufficiently primed by two pint’s worth of Mad Dog, and having taken exception to the calls of one of the referees during a hard-fought loss to Corcoran (a game that, in the process, cost the guy money he could ill-afford to lose) – threw a blatant, cheap-shot roundhouse directly into the face of that same ref as he jogged past on his way to the post-game locker room, opening a deep gash over one eye that required a dozen or so stitches and a trip to the emergency room.

For those reasons and, frankly, far too many others to list, by the time of Terry Neal’s senior year at Central an increasingly frustrated Superintendent Franklyn Barry had decreed that – given the rumbles and fights now regularly occurring in his City League – any and all basketball games involving the four city senior high schools (Central, Corcoran, Nottingham and Henninger) would only be held in the afternoon, just after school, and no longer at night. The school superintendent calculated (and perhaps even hoped) that sunlight would, indeed, be the best disinfectant. Additionally, Barry decreed that all varsity games would take place before the JV contests, rather than the other way around, which had been standard practice ever since high school basketball was first introduced some fifty years prior.

Perhaps, even more revealing about the volume of change in Central during that time was the ugly fact that by then there were now multiple armed officers stationed daily in and around Central Tech, the oldest and most historic public school in the city.  What’s more, their numbers had grown to such an alarming degree that one day Bob Capone went around and counted fourteen patrolmen milling about the surrounding streets, halls and parking lot, each with a night stick, either in his hand or hanging off his belt.

For Capone, the institution of learning that had been such a big part his life for so long – the stately cathedral to education in the heart of the city, with the world class auditorium and killer acoustics, along with the classic statue of Minerva, Greek goddess of wisdom, standing tall and proud in its front foyer – suddenly felt more like a prison than a school.

Truth be told, for many white residents, particularly on the South Side, the only consideration at that point was that things in Syracuse were now heading in a troubling direction and it was time to pull up stakes and get the family the hell out of Dodge.

 

 

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

 

 

Okay, so maybe this book’s original premise was a bit of a misdirection and a little coy. After all, on one level this has been the story of a high school basketball game on a starry March night in 1967. But beyond that, it’s been the cautionary tale of a city and its people during a crazy, troubled time in their shared history.

In that regard, it’s not really been a single story at all, but dozens of smaller ones, all of them carefully researched and knit together in a patchwork quilt of time, place and circumstance. The book you’re finishing has been a jigsaw puzzle of faces, names and events. Hopefully, it's revealed, if only for a moment in time, a snapshot of one small city’s dreams and fears, its joys and heartaches, its warmest memories and deepest bonds – along with a handful of its broken promises, poor choices, and lessons still waiting to be learned.

But it wouldn't be fair to you, the reader, to discuss the emotional, physical and social splintering of the Syracuse New York of the mid-20^th Century, without also sharing the abiding sense of hope that dwelt at the heart of two completely unrelated events near the end of one of the most difficult years in American history. While on one level, those two events, both of which occurred in December of 1968, could not have been more different. Each in their own way, acted as a profound reminder of the verity that all mankind is one, and that all men, regardless of their physical and cultural differences, are united and bound forever in ways that, frankly, they may never fully understand.

The first of the two took place the third day of December. Aired locally on WSYR, Channel 3, the Tuesday evening primetime special was formally listed in TV Guide as, Singer Presents…Elvis. It would in time, however, be known as simply the “Comeback Special.” The one-hour extravaganza, sponsored in part by the iconic sewing machine company, was originally conceived by Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, as a straightforward Christmas special, complete with the singer performing a handful of his old hits and traditional carols, while appearing in a few skits. The hip-shaking icon, to his credit, hated the Colonels’ idea.

But then NBC producer Bob Finkel came on board, and the more Finkel thought about it, the more he began to piece together in his mind a TV special that was something far different than what had been originally pitched to him. Privately, he explained to the “King of Rock ‘n Roll” that while Parker had had him in Hollywood all decade long making a bunch of forgettable and, frankly, bad movies, if only because the money had been so addictive, the music industry he’d helped revolutionize had started to pass him by.  As a result, a whole generation of Americans was in the process of growing up without knowing how truly great he was. He told Elvis, forget Christmas. This show, this hour-long blank canvas, is your opportunity to prove to the world you’re still a musical force and to show everyone, young and old alike, you still have musical greatness in you.

Presley bought in fully to Finkel’s vision for the show and, even though Parker would go on to voice strong protest over its radically new direction, Elvis would ultimately overrule his manager.

Given that freedom, Frankel then quickly chose a director, a guy named Steve Binder, who’d directed the critically acclaimed concert film, the T.A.M.I. Show, and who’d recently come off a run as principal director of Hullaballoo, a weekly prime-time pop music series. Frankel wanted Binder to give Elvis a younger look and sound for the special. For that reason, the director immediately nixed Parker’s idea for the ending, which had Elvis delivering a straightforward version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, followed by a few brief personal comments spoken directly to the audience.

Presley – like millions – had been utterly rocked by the back-to-back assassinations of two of the greatest champions of peace and civil justice of the 20^th Century, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Because of that, he told his manager he wanted to say something to the viewers about the two men and their impact on his life.

Binder, a West Coast studio veteran who could smell a clunker from a mile away, would have none of it. Instead, he told Elvis and Parker, he wanted an entirely new song to close the show, one that would reflect the spirit of the season and, at the same time, offer a message of hope for the troubled times.

That’s when a little-known lyricist Frankel had hired, a guy named Walter Earl Brown, spoke up during a production meeting, explaining he’d written some lyrics and pieced together a placeholder of a melody after Dr. King had been killed, using many of King’s own words. Binder, intrigued, glanced at his musical director, a guy named Billy Goldenberg, and told him to take a look at Brown’s shell of a song and, if it had merit, work it into a possible closing number.

One of the keys to the original recording of If I Can Dream was its timing. Singer presents…Elvis, or more to the point, Brown’s song that would close it, had been recorded on June 29 of that year, just two and a half months after King had been killed and only three weeks after Kennedy.

Singer Presents…Elvis would turn out to be the most watched television show of 1968 and would, at least for one week, topple the powerful Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In from its usual spot atop the weekly Nielsens. What some forty million Americans saw that night, with the spirit of Christmas in the air, was Elvis as they’d never really seen him before.

For many in Syracuse and beyond, the highlight of the show had been its opening when, dressed in black leather and looking trim and exuding a feral energy, Elvis performed with a handful of sidemen on a small stage in the round, and in doing so electrified the small audience who’d been invited to sit in.

But it was the special’s final four minutes that took the entire evening to a new level. With the murders of King and Kennedy still fresh in viewer's minds, Elvis stood alone and without an audience, dressed in a white suit and red tie and situated in front of all-black backdrop, a massive set adorned with only the five letters of his first name in towering red lights. The song began innocently enough. A solitary trumpet.  A soft electric bass. The gentle brush of a cymbal.

Elvis eased into the words as he sang them, as if holding something back for when he might need it.

There must be lights burning brighter somewhere.
Got to be birds flying higher in a sky more blue.
If I can dream of a better land,
where all my brothers walk hand-in-hand,
Tell my why, oh why, oh why can’t my dream come true?

Even to casual viewers, the song had a different tone than they’d heard up to that point, which was Presley breathing new and unexpected life into a bunch of his old #1 hits like Hound Dog, Heartbreak Hotel and All Shook Up.

But this was different, and that was soon apparent. The tip-off might have been the lyrics’ overt spiritual imagery or, maybe, the song’s almost gospel-like tone and arrangement. More likely, however, was the use of the word “dream” in the very first verse.

Since that dark April day in Memphis earlier in the year, it had been almost impossible to even hear the word “dream” and not think of that seminal moment five years prior, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, when King had stood there and uttered that one syllable in a way that no man, black or white, had ever quite done before.

If I Can Dream’s second verse began to build in intensity as Elvis dug in vocally, wrapping his heart and soul around every lyric, almost as though it might be the last he would ever sing.

There must be peace and understanding sometime.
Strong winds of promise that will blow away all the doubt and fear.
If I can dream of a warmer sun, where hope keeps shining on everyone,
Tell me why, oh why, oh why won’t that sun appear?

But it wasn’t until If I Can Dream’s raw and emotional bridge, followed by its third verse, heralded by a thundering, rolling drum fill, that the final song of Elvis’ “comeback special” upped the goose bump factor considerably for everyone in the country fortunate enough to be tuned in.

We’re lost in a cloud with too much rain,
We’re trapped in a world that’s troubled with pain,
But as long as a man has the strength to dream,
He can redeem his soul and fly.

In the final verse, Presley reached a rapturous crescendo. One of his background singers, a young Black girl, was so moved by the song she started to cry, tears streaming down her cheeks, as she watched Elvis and matched him, note for note, with her own vocal power and passion.

As Presley's powerful voice strained, it grew ragged, but it never broke, never quit. You could see the pain in his face, almost feel Elvis scratch and claw to pour his soul into the only moment of songwriting greatness a journeyman tunesmith named Walter Earl Brown would ever know in his life.

Deep in my heart there’s a trembling question,
Still I’m sure that the answer, answer’s gonna come somehow.
Out there in the dark, there’s a beckoning candle, oh yeah.
And while I can think, while I can walk,
While I can stand, while I can talk,
While I can dream, please let my dream,
Come true, oh yeah…right now. 

When it was over, there would be no words from Presley, no thoughts about Dr. King or Senator Kennedy. After all, he’d just said everything he'd ever need to say about the two men. There’d be no applause either, because the song had been performed on an empty soundstage. Instead, Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, just raised his microphone to his mouth one last time, looked into the camera – and, by extension, 40 million living rooms all across America – and said simply, “Thank you. Good night.”

 

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

 

While the Elvis Comeback Special that first week of December drove home its message of hope and harmony in rather literal terms, the second event – which took place on Christmas Eve – offered a far more symbolic message of peace.  On that day, the least know of the Apollo astronauts, a flight engineer and amateur photographer named Bill Anders, was able to capture one of the single most iconic and enduring images of his or any other lifetime.

But let's rewind a bit first. In 1961, John F. Kennedy, the newly-elected president and living, breathing symbol of the country’s youthful promise, announced to the world his goal of sending an American to the moon by the end of the decade.  Outside of science fiction, no one had even considered such a crazy idea, much less figured it could actually be done.  But here it was just seven years later, and the United States was knocking on the door of doing just that.

Apollo 8 would be the first NASA mission to reach the moon and orbit it. The tricky and, frankly, most perilous part, however, would be when the Apollo 8 capsule crossed over to the dark side of the moon and lost radio contact with NASA’s command center in Houston. Each of the planned ten circumnavigations would take the trio of astronauts just north of two hours apiece, meaning that for each of the ten there’d be complete radio silence for just under half that time.

That Christmas Eve, with Captain Frank Borman on the microphone, Apollo 8 entered the moon’s atmosphere and neared its target. Even as Borman was detailing the visuals outside one window of the craft to the room full of scientists and engineers back in Houston, they could already see it for themselves: the vast darkness of space and the dusty, gray emptiness of the crater-filled lunar surface.

As the three pioneers crossed over and entered, for the first time, the invisible halo of the lunar blackout space, the radio in the command center crackled and popped, as did Borman’s voice. Then, after a few spasms of noise and interference, nothing. Nothing at all.  Just…silence.

And even though the dozens of men and handful of women back in Houston had been prepared for this moment, they were all in uncharted waters now, and every one of them knew it. Some did crosswords or doodled on scrap paper; others made small talk; and those assigned to do so, continued to monitor the consoles in front of them. Everyone in the room, however, was on the edge of their seats, many with their hearts racing and a few with their mouths dry and their hands clammy. One mistake, and not only would the lives of three good men be lost, but the entire program would be set back immeasurably.

As the seconds ticked away, the mood only seemed to get tenser and more nerve-wracking. Then, just shy of an hour after Apollo 8’s radio silence commenced, there came a crackle. Once again, Borman’s voice came over the loudspeaker, a little crackly at first, but then pure and clean. The whole control room in Houston erupted in spontaneous applause and pats on each other's backs.

That’s when Anders, who’d been taking black-and-white photographs out of one window, turned to look out the other.  “Oh my God,” he said breathlessly to his crewmates. “Look at that picture over there.”

Anders said to Jim Lovell, “You got a color film, Jim?  Hand me that roll of color…”  Anders quickly threaded the roll of 70mm Kodak film that Lovell had handed him into his camera and focused his lens out the window.

And that was the moment. That was when – just like in Elvis’ third verse earlier that month – for one instant time stood still and magic occurred. In that one heartbeat, all the tumblers of the universe fell into place and what was revealed was a glimpse not only of where mankind might go, but the place from whence we had all come.

Because, there, rising out of the infinite blackness, and over the ashy, lifeless silence of the moon, was a magnificent celestial body, a blue marble of differing hues, shapes and textures. What Anders had seen and just captured was Planet Earth peeking her nose over the lunar horizon, shedding some small measure of light, color and meaning into the darkness that enveloped the tiny floating capsule and its three inhabitants.

A few hours later, on Christmas Eve, NASA produced a live, primetime telecast for all three networks – one shown, as well, across five continents simultaneously. That half-hour special, which began at 9:30 in Syracuse – a time by which many of the city’s youngest had long since gone to bed in anticipation of Santa’s visit – was viewed by an estimated one billion people worldwide, the largest audience to ever watch any program in the history of the medium.

Meanwhile, outside and in the streets of little Syracuse, the first flakes of winter, almost on cue, began falling. It wasn’t much – certainly less than a full-on snowfall, but more than a simple dusting. Yet, what those flakes might have lacked in volume, they more than made up for in timing and beauty. As a blanket of white spread softly over the city and its neighborhoods, it added a sense of peace and divinity that the scientific wonder that was unfolding inside so many snug and warm homes on this holiest of nights that had seen a new kind of miracle.

Nineteen sixty eight had been a horrible year on so many levels for so many good people in the Salt City, and so many images from the past twelve months – some of them nearly a year old – still stood front and center.

There was that deeply disturbing photo dating all the way back to January of a South Vietnamese police captain during the Tet executing a Viet Cong soldier, a searing image captured just as the bullet seemed ready to exit the young man’s skull.

There was the awful image of Dr. King lying on the balcony of his Memphis hotel room in a pool of his own blood, while a handful of colleagues pointed desperately in the direction of the gunshot that had just laid low their moral and spiritual leader.

There was the image of a likewise dying Bobby Kennedy taken just two months prior of him being comforted in his final moments by a young immigrant busboy who cradled his head just inch or so above the hard tile floor of the kitchen of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel.

There was the image of the two medal-winning U.S. Olympic athletes in Mexico City during the playing of the national anthem, both with heads bowed, a single black-gloved fist raised in protest.

Not to mention the countless images from the blood-stained streets of Chicago during that summer’s Democratic Convention, or the comparable number of shots of fiery race riots and angry anti-war protests on various city streets and college campuses all across America.

But it wasn’t just the images that were unsettling to so many in Syracuse.  It was the speed and frequency with which everything around them seemed to be unraveling.

Even inside NASA, the pressure to move forward quickly and at all costs seemed to have created an almost “ready, fire, aim” mentality inside one of the most thorough and exacting branches of the U.S. government.

Yet, as a tribute to the hundreds of dedicated mathematicians, engineers, manufacturers, physicists, biologists and chemists who’d worked day and night, non-stop to try to achieve the unlikeliest of goals, the entire Apollo 8 mission – at least to that point – had gone off with only minor glitches.  Everything else – as scientific and/or as math-based as it might have been – seemed almost touched by the Almighty Himself.

And one supposes there may actually have been something to that whole “touched by God” thing, because never before in history, or so it seemed, had science and religion ever come together quite so magnificently, or in a more timely fashion.  A leader of a generation of troubled Americans a hundred years prior had once waxed about "our better angels."  And the leader decades in the future would soon talk about our striving to "touch the face of God."  This was a moment that a generation of Syracusans – indeed, all Americans – had a chance to, perhaps, catch a fleeting glimpse of those two concepts, and in doing so understand them a little better.

That’s, perhaps, why in the worldwide NASA telecast that night, which opened as Apollo 8 was in its second lunar orbit, the crew of astronauts – on their own – chose to end the show in a way that caught more than a few off-guard. Anders – the only Catholic in the crew – spoke first, and the words to follow were the idea of his wife.  And he spoke, even as video of the image he’d snapped just a few hours earlier – the shimmering blue Earth shining bright and proud in a sea of darkness – aired over the thin, reedy crackle of his voice.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

The Apollo 8 crew, awed by the divinity, if not majesty, of what they were seeing beyond their capsule’s tiny window, chose to end their special thirty-minute Christmas Eve telecast by reading the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis, with all three members taking turns – first Anders, then Lovell, then Borman.

The beauty and serenity of the image, combined with the Biblical words, touched millions across the globe, moving many to tears, even though the vast majority outside the U.S. were watching on tiny black-and-white sets and unable to understand much, if anything, of what Anders, Lovell and Borman were saying. Those at home and those watching in color, however, saw the Earth in all its glory, and more than a few Americans realized just how small, fragile, and touched by the Creator she suddenly appeared.

For a planet, a country, and even a city that at various points throughout that long and grueling year had appeared on the verge of cracking, it was a moment of desperately needed hope. It was a moment of inspiration and affirmation. And it was a moment that was, above all else, and despite the enormity of the human achievement behind it, humbling.

Anders’ photo – soon to be titled “Earthrise” – would not yet appear in print, at least not until the editors of Life burned the midnight oil that week to rush out a special edition, one that hit the newsstands on New Year’s Day. And though Life’s editors devoted the entire center spread to Anders’ stunning photograph, and even commissioned Poet Laureate James Dickey to write a poem to accompany it, it was the words of another poet that seemed to best capture the essence of Earthrise and why people the world over were so moved by it.

In an essay on Christmas Day for the New York Times, Archibald MacLeish, the venerable Librarian of Congress (and a guy who moonlighted as a pretty darn good poet himself), wrote as he watched the Apollo 8 special from home on Christmas Eve, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”

Like Elvis’ stirring rendition of If I Can Dream three weeks prior, not everyone in Syracuse was able to see, much less appreciate, the visual poetry inherent in Earthrise, nor did everyone fully wrap their brains around its almost transcendent message. To them, it was just a photograph – admittedly, a unique one, but a simple, two-dimensional photograph, nevertheless.

But to countless others, the celestial image captured by Bill Anders offered some clarity, insight and maybe even a little bit of meaning to their troubled times. To such people, it wasn’t just the vibrant color of their home planet that touched them. It was its size.

Because to Syracusans who really, really understood the truth that Earthrise laid bare for anyone with the ability to see and feel it, what they understood was this: it wasn’t Mother Earth’s vastness that made her so special. It was her smallness. Sitting at their kitchen tables, or in their La-Z-Boy recliners while staring wide-eyed at that Life center spread, even as the Christmas spirit lingered in the air, many came to realize, as MacLeish had, that they were all riders on the same, damn little planet – brothers and sisters, every one.

In the end, it was, indeed, just a photo, and Syracuse, like the entire country, still had plenty of pain and trouble in store for it. It would not be long, for example, before people all across the Salt City would read in horror about the deaths of four college kids on an otherwise quiet and unassuming campus in northeast Ohio. Those four students, during an otherwise nonviolent protest in the Spring of 1970, would fall victim to rifle fire from a battery of national guardsmen – each of whom, at least in theory, had raised his right hand at some point and sworn to protect and defend the very same kids who now lay bleeding and dying just a few yards from their dorm rooms.

But Earthrise mattered, dammit. And it did so in a way that, especially during such troubled times, touched many men’s hearts, even if they didn’t fully understand why.

It mattered to Kenny Huffman and to Billy E. It mattered to Father Charlie Brady. It mattered to Manny Breland and to Bob Capone.  It mattered to the Reddick clan, as well as to the Harlows, the Schmids, the Dabrowskis, and the Karazubas. It mattered to Paul Seymour and his hard-ass one-time coach, Al Cervi. It mattered to Al and Marshall Nelson and their mayor, Bill Walsh, not to mention his young family up on Tipp Hill. It mattered to Jack Contos, to his mother, Irene, and to Andy, the old Hearts parishioner with the piercing voice and the forever untied Elmer Fudd hat. It mattered to Bobby Felasco and to all those sawed-off and tough-minded little pit bulls he continued to train to run his offense. It mattered to little Danny Van Cott, to big Tommy Sakowski, and to “Pan” Najdul, Sakowski’s Holocaust-surviving and discipline-obsessed mentor. It mattered to Leon Shenandoah, to Oren Lyons, and to countless members of the Onondaga Nation, south of the city. It mattered to Joey Zaganczyk and to his best friend and brother-from-another-mother, Jimmy Przybyl. It mattered to those two proud sons of Poland, Gene and Andrew Fisch, and to the three Neal brothers up from Mississippi, by way of Detroit. And to the guys on both sides of the long, shiny and forever-jam packed bar at the Old Port, to those two magnificently wild Irishmen just a few blocks west, Pete and Danny Coleman, and to the staff and management of the Dunbar Center and Boys Club, both pillars of the 15^th Ward. It mattered to Henry Ponti. It mattered to Dolores Morgan. It mattered to Percy Harris, to Bobby Harrison, and to the Celtic-hating and Nat-loving Strangler. It mattered to Tookie and Ricky Chisholm and to the head leprechaun, Bob Hayes. It mattered to Charlie Fahey, to Tom Costello, and to all the priests living at 672 West Onondaga. It mattered to all those in town still working hard to keep Syracuse proud and strong and to even a few who’d already turned tail and run for the safety and promise of the suburbs. And to the nuns, and priests, and parents of what remained of the venerable old Parochial League. It mattered to the local chancery and to countless generations of Syracuse Catholics and non-Catholics still unborn.

That photo mattered to these people because the truth it laid bare mattered. Because more troubled days lie ahead, and the thing that would keep all good people going, the thing they could hold onto was right there in that photo in front of them, even if they didn't know how to articulate it or put it into words.

Yes, 1968 had been difficult for the Salt City and its residents. And, yes, Syracuse’s unprecedented run of manufacturing dominance had, likely, already crested, and its glory days now mostly just visible in its rearview mirror.

And yet, what most of these Syracusans still didn’t know was that, in a few short years, all the pain and uncertainty they’d just experienced over the course of eighteen months’ worth of social havoc was going to seem like a stroll in the park – especially compared to the economic turmoil now lying in wait for them.

Because for all the strife, all the division, and all the deep and lasting social ills that had managed to take root in Syracuse, there had always been a wonderful counterbalance to mitigate any and all such unwanted invaders: namely, its jobs, the comfort and security of making a good, honest living, knowing that a hard-earned paycheck would be handed to you like clockwork at the end of every workweek, even as all that delectable breaded fish was being dropped into all those popping, hissing fryers all across town.

For well over a century in Syracuse, New York, there had always been a seemingly never-ending supply of factories, machine shops, plants, foundries, and mills. Row upon row of proud, belching smokestacks, eager workers, rush orders, incoming phone calls, jam-packed employee parking lots, humming assembly lines, and bustling neighborhood taverns and family restaurants.

When all those things were in their prime and all were chugging along as the heart and soul of the local economy, they served to cover up almost any crack in town, and mend just about any broken fence.

But in just over two decades' time, it would all be gone, or at mostly gone, and in its place would be endless stretches of shuttered factories, scores of chained and weed-choked parking lots, and too many boarded-up and broken windows to even count. At that point, all Syracuse’s problems would find themselves suddenly amplified by a factor that no one had ever even imagined before. And when that happened, in what felt like a heartbeat, the Salt City’s glorious, booming past crossed over and became its very own cruel and taunting memory.

Which brings us back, one last time, to Earthrise. The photograph’s message was as profound as it was unspoken, and it mattered to so many Syracusans, especially as one troubled year ended and another began. Because as 1968 wound down and 1969 spread its wings, the shimmering beauty of Earthrise was there to remind men and women – and not just in Syracuse, but the world over – of what Archibald MacLeish expressed so eloquently: our planet is a tiny blue marble alone in a cold, dark sea of indifference, and we are all on this wild ride together.

Politically. Socially. Economically. Religiously. Culturally. And, certainly, racially. Whatever our differences, however deep and vast our divides, that one simple photographic image that hit the newsstands in the wee hours of 1969 was evidence of humankind's potential.  But it was more.  It was also an admonition to always keep things in perspective and to never forget that our best hope of overcoming ignorance, hatred and whatever other social ills eventually darken our door, if not our best path to healing, growing and moving forward toward the light of peace and harmony, is by never forgetting that we are all brothers and sisters, all in this together, and, as hard as it may be to embrace at times, all playing on the same team.

 

 

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Billy E got up on Saturday and felt like a king.  With the diocesan playoffs looming, there’d be practice tomorrow morning, of course. And, as usual, it would be right after Sunday mass. But today would be a day of relaxation for Billy and one in which he could bask, if only for twenty-four hours or so, in the glory of the previous night’s win.

Even as he lit the gas burner beneath a small stove-top percolator and shook open his morning Post-Standard to see what Mike Holdridge had to say about the game – including that crazy Dabrowski’s prayer from deep in the near corner – part of him just wanted to kick back and do nothing.

He did get a chuckle, however, as he leafed through the front section as he recalled the previous night’s audience with the Boss, when Monsignor Piejda, sitting regally behind his big oak desk, had his boys line up shoulder-to-shoulder in front of him, then rose and strode over to them, Jack Contos at the head of the line, and going from one to the next, just as he'd always done after a particularly big Hearts win.  He'd look each boy in the eye, shake one hand, while deliberately and somewhat theatrically placing a crisp five-dollar bill in the other. It was gesture of the Boss’ appreciation for all the twelve young man had done to bring honor and glory to his parish.

Of course, likewise, and just as he’d done each and every time – as far back, in fact, as the first season of varsity play at Sacred Heart – when Piejda reached his ever-devilish coach at the end of the line, there’d be no five-dollar bill and no slow, deliberate gesture of gratitude. Instead, just as Billy had done every other time he gone through this orchestrated ritual, (and much to the grinning delight of the twelve kids alongside him), the Hearts head coach merely looked at the priest who, in turn, said without so much as a wink, “There will be no reward for you tonight, Coach.” Then he would add, as if he’d never said it before, “Instead, your reward will come in heaven.”

Then, just as he’d done every year, Billy simply swallowed whatever had happened to catch in his throat, smiled through gently clenched teeth, and offered the priest a mostly earnest, “Thank you, Monsignor.”

And while Billy proceeded to read Holdridge’s game story that Saturday over his cup of morning Joe – just as he would with the afternoon sports pages over a nice pork dinner with a side of beets – it wasn’t what Billy read that was so interesting or noteworthy. It was what he didn’t.

What Billy E had only glanced at (but not read) in that morning’s Post-Standard was a baseball story just two columns to the right of Holdridge’s All City account. It was a 300-word recap of all the previous day’s Spring Training games from Florida, along with a few line scores. In that truncated compilation of game stories was a passing mention of what would prove to be an unprecedented (and even historic) circumstance in an otherwise uneventful Friday afternoon matchup between the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox, namely:

“The game was expected to mark the debut of the double pinch hitter, a plan which Joe Cronin, president of the American League, has endorsed. It allows American League teams playing each other to use the same pinch hitter more than once in a game."

"Bill Skowron was the White Sox’ designated specialist and Tony Horton handled the job for the Red Sox.  But neither team used its option, with Skowron walking in his only at bat and Horton going out in his lone swing.”

Meanwhile, in that evening’s Herald-Journal, adjacent to Adam Gajewski’s All City recap – and next to the photo of Dabrowski being held high and beaming like any kid would under the circumstances – was a basketball story. But it wasn’t just any basketball story. It was an altogether different one.

It was a story that detailed how NBA commissioner Walter Kennedy had just sent a telegram to every player in the league reminding him that if they were to go on strike in advance of the upcoming playoffs, as the players were threatening to do in protest over their pension plan, Kennedy was going to cancel the playoffs entirely and those players would, in turn, forfeit all the postseason money – some $280,000, to be divided among them.

As it currently stood, any player who’d been in the league for ten-plus years received a pension of $200 a month, paid to him from an endowment-type insurance plan that the league had set up on the players’ behalf. (And a plan for which each player was responsible for one-half of his monthly premium of $1,000. The NBA owners then matched that $500 with $500 of their own to make up the difference.)

The AP story also mentioned how certain players were voicing a growing level of concern over something called a “reserve clause” in each of their contracts that bound them to their teams for as long as those teams chose to keep them.

There was, in fact, no players union in the NBA – nor, in fact, was there a union in any pro sports league.  But thanks, mostly, to an uncompromising and tough-minded New Yorker named Marvin Miller, a sawed-off little cur of a labor attorney representing a talented but just-traded veteran outfielder named Curt Flood, there soon would be. And when that happened, when Curt Flood sacrificed his career for a cause bigger than himself, pro sports would never be the same.

On a very basic level the two wire stories that Billy E chose to ignore on that crisp, cool, Saturday morning in the second week of March, 1967 were simply two more sports stories fighting for column inches in an otherwise jam-packed sports page.

But, no one – not Billy or anyone else – could be faulted for failing to realize the kind of impact these small and seemingly innocuous items would have on the world of sports going forward.  With implications that extended far beyond the chalk lines, these two stories were singing canaries in America's increasingly gas-filled coal mine.  Each, in its own way, signaled what, for the foreseeable future, would come to be the single most defining element of the American experience, if not the American way of life:

Change.

But not just any change.  And not just garden-variety change – the kind that most folks had some level of familiarity with, or had seen once or twice along the way.

No.  What was coming, rolling like thunder across the plains, was a radical and even painful sort of change; a change that would turn almost every aspect of life on its ear, especially up and down Main Street in the hundreds of once-stable and once-secure working-class cities and towns that peppered the country’s proud and still-mighty industrial northeast.

Places, in other words, like Syracuse, New York.

 

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The rest of that year would turn out to be memorable for so many reasons.

Muhammad Ali would refuse induction into the U.S. Army and be arrested, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would officially – and boldly – denounce America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Spencer Tracy, John Coltrane, Dorothy Parker and Carl Sandburg would die, Kurt Cobain, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Will Farrell and Gavin Newsom would be born.

Ronald Reagan would be elected to his very first political office, as Governor of California.

The Philadelphia 76ers would win their very first NBA championship since leaving the Salt City behind and changing their name from the Nationals.

Two films that took the thorny issue of race head-on – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night – would be released to great acclaim and even greater commercial success.

Life magazine would feature on one of its covers a full-color photograph of a twelve year-old boy from Newark – Joe Bass, Jr. – lying sprawled and motionless in the street in a pool of his own blood following a night of bloody rioting, looting, and sniper fire.  Inside of that same issue, Life would publish a series of black-and-white images of the final hours of a second young black man from Newark – a guy named Billy Furr – who was shot and killed by the police for looting two cases of beer, but not before telling the reporter, “We ain’t riotin’ agin’ all you whites. We’re riotin’ agin’ police brutality, like that cab driver they beat up the other night. That stuff goes on all the time. When the police treat us like people ‘stead of treatin’ us like animals, then the riots will stop.”

That year the U.S. Supreme Court would rule in Loving v. Virginia that all state laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional, while the very first African American chief justice, Thurgood Marshall, would be elevated to the highest court in the land.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be created by Congress, an entity that would soon give rise to both the PBS television network and the NPR radio network.

The world's first rock musical, Hair, would premiere on Broadway.

The “Summer of Love” and the “Be-In” would both occur to various levels of generational bemusement in the San Francisco Bay Area, as would the Monterey Pop Festival. While the Doors, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground and Creedence Clearwater Revival would all release their very first albums. Meanwhile, a twenty-one year-old Berkeley dropout and free-speech activist named Jann Wenner would distribute the premiere issue of a tabloid-style music rag he called, Rolling Stone.

But despite all that, and despite all the sweeping social change that 1967 represented to so many working men and women in America, much less, Syracuse, the change and tumult of that particular twelve-month period would prove to be a downright whimper compared to the giant, roaring howl that the subsequent twelve month period would soon produce.

 

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It was called the Tet Offensive, named for the fateful day (on the celebration of the Tet, the annual Vietnamese New Year) when some 80,000 Viet Cong guerillas launched a full-out assault on over a hundred cities, villages, and U.S. military installations throughout South Vietnam. The first day of that offensive, which struck like lightning – unexpected, unannounced and deep into the night – was January 30, 1968.

Typical of it was one battle, in particular – a days-long siege in an otherwise quiet and centuries-old little city called Hue, a massive and deadly firefight that virtually leveled the beautiful, ancient and mystical city and killed nearly a thousand of its civilians, along with over over two hundred American fighting men and non-armed personnel.

The battle in historic little Hue was unlike the jungle/guerilla war that comprised most of the Vietnam conflict, but instead was fought in the streets and residential neighborhoods of the city, completely wiping out a number of magnificent and irreplaceable cultural artifacts and structures.

What was critical about the Tet, however, was something that went far beyond death count and the destruction of history, however tragic. Because the Tet became the moment at which, virtually, any American of age and reason, from LBJ on down, began to view the Vietnam War differently than he or she ever had before. And that situation was only amplified by the new-found (and growing) power of the family television set – in particular, the voice of the venerable Walter Cronkite and his nightly CBS Evening News.

Before the Tet, the war had been widely viewed as a regional and eminently winnable border dispute that served as a relatively low-cost safety net against the further spread of Communism.  After it, however – with all the raw footage getting beamed nightly onto television screens from Maine to California – Vietnam began to be seen in vastly different terms by millions across the country, Americans young and old, black and white, and on the political left and right. As a result, that armed conflict in the far-off cradle of Southeast Asia began dividing U.S. citizens along ideological lines in ways they’d not been divided since the Civil War.

On one side were what many in the media began calling “Hawks,” mostly older, mostly white, and mostly conservative flag-waving Americans – many of them some combination of working men and combat veterans – who were deeply offended by the Tet and who felt it was time to ratchet up America’s war effort and wipe those Godless Viet Cong “gooks” off the face of the Earth.

On the other side were the “Doves,” the anti-war half of America’s new and growing divide. Many were college kids of various races and creeds, as well as young men of prime draft age, who saw the Vietnam War as an immoral and illegal act of American imperialism that, perhaps for the first time ever, placed their country on the wrong side of history.

For the Hawks and the Doves, the Tet only served to highlight that huge and growing gulf between America’s right and left.  For Syracuse (or, more to the point, this story), it was critical because it deeply impacted many of LBJ’s “Great Society” programs – especially, Urban Renewal. To finance the dramatic spike in war expenditures triggered by the Tet ambush, Johnson was forced to shuffle money in the budget, much of it pulled from domestic social programs like Urban Renewal that had been in place only a few years.

As a result, even though most, but not all of Syracuse’s 15^th Ward had been leveled, and many, but not all of downtown’s oldest and most magnificent buildings reduced to rubble, any and all such federally mandated tear-downs and construction projects seemed to cease overnight.

Which brings us to a young man named Ed Krukowski.

Eddie Krukowski was a bright, engaging and polite young Polish boy whose parents owned a small market and butcher shop on the corner of Richmond and Liberty Streets, just a stone’s throw from Sacred Heart. Eddie, in fact, had gone to Sacred Heart for grammar school. But when it came time to decide if he wanted to continue his education at his parish's all-new high school, which had just opened, or go elsewhere, he chose the latter. So, rather than walking to and from Sacred Heart every day, just a few blocks from his home on Tipp Hill, he chose to go crosstown to Christian Brothers Academy, the most competitive and prestigious high school in the city, even though it was a full seven miles and two long bus rides away.

But Eddie Krukowski had never been one to settle.  He wanted more out of life and, certainly, expected more of himself than anyone around him. That’s why after graduation, and after finishing near the top of his class, he was accepted into (and with his parents’ blessing, enrolled in) West Point, where he soon became a top-flight Army cadet. He’d go on to graduate with honors, marry his sweetheart, have a son, and, in time, move his young family to Colorado.

But when things in Vietnam began to escalate, Eddie Krukowski didn’t hesitate. Even with an infant son and young wife at home, he immediately volunteered to be one of the few thousand “advisors” that President Kennedy had committed to sending to Southeast Asia. Young Eddie believed, as an Army officer, it was his duty to defend freedom and fight communism, regardless of where that fight might take him.

That innate sense of duty, along with his deep sense of humanity, is also why Eddie Krukowski used to regularly write home and ask his parents to send him toys, that he’d then give to the boys and girls in the little village where he was stationed. That’s also why he would soon begin writing and explaining that he hoped, at least once his tour was over, to adopt one of those orphans he’d gotten to know in the village of Dong Xoai.

First Lieutenant Edward E. Krukowski was nine months into his year-long tour of duty when, on June 10, 1965, in the jungles outside little Dong Xoai, a bullet ripped through his young body, killing him instantly.

Eddie was just 24 years old, the very first boy from Syracuse killed in Vietnam – but, sadly, not the last.

Over the course of the next seven long years, fifty-nine young men who’d grown up playing basketball and throwing snowballs in one of Syracuse’s working class neighborhoods – most all of them teenagers or in their early twenties – would lose their lives a half a world away, many in places that months earlier they didn’t even know existed, and might have had trouble pronouncing, if they did.

As the deaths of those local boys began to mount over the passing weeks, months and years, the list of those sons of Syracuse lost in Vietnam began to take on the almost eerie look and feel of a Friday night Parochial League box score.

There were Italian boys with names like Mercurio, Cutri, Fanella and Sacco, Irish boys with names like Collins, Donovan, Gleason and Flaherty, German boys with names like Benz, Stein and Reichelt, Polish boys with names like Czajak, Dobash, Rybak and Michalski, and African American boys – kids who’d spent their entire lives within the nurturing confines of the Ward – with names like Johnson, Belt, Torrance and Wilson.  There was even a Native American boy from down near the Onondaga Nation whose name was Bigtree.

And each time another young man from Syracuse died and his body was returned to his mother in a flag-covered pine box, another part of his hometown’s sense of certainty died with him. And the more his factory town’s once-unshakeable sense of clarity and conviction eroded, the greater the divide grew between Central New York’s Hawks and its Doves – the anger and rhetoric on one side becoming matched, almost shout for shout, by the other.

History, of course, would eventually determine that America’s long and agonizing time in Vietnam was a colossal mistake – the product of a decade’s worth of miscalculations, flawed objectives, and politically motivated cover-ups. But some good actually came of it, at least in Syracuse. Because at the time of the Tet – a time during which Urban Renewal and its companion wrecking ball were both muscled up and in full swing – there were many buildings in Syracuse marked for demolition that never ended up being razed.

Oh sure, the magnificent brick and stone buildings that once graced the north and south sides of Clinton Square had been demolished, including the historic Jerry Rescue Building that had once served as the site of the trial of twenty-six runaway slaves who’d been captured en masse in Syracuse while traveling north on Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad.

And, yes, the beautifully ornate Yates and Onondaga Hotels had likewise been demolished, along with two irreplaceable Vaudeville-era theaters, R.K.O. Keith’s and the Paramount.

It was true as well that many of the proposed buildings that had been slotted to go into the expanse of urban landscape that had been made possible by the leveling the 15^th Ward, including a sprawling and airy public plaza, never got beyond the planning stages, much less built.

But among the many buildings that would have been destroyed save for 1968’s startling Tet Offensive were a handful of some of the most majestic and beloved structures in the history of downtown Syracuse.

The Gere Bank Building, for example, on Hanover Square was spared, a beautiful stone citadel on the banks of the old Erie Canal that in the 1890s cost its owner some $150,000 to build, a full third of which went to the construction of state-of-the-art, fireproof and below-the-ground steel vaults to protect the bank’s money.

Also spared was the adjacent Gridley Building with one side on Clinton Square, a towering and magnificent structure made completely of indigenous limestone, and one whose lighted clock tower had, at least for the first half of the 20^th Century, served as the city’s unofficial timepiece.

Likewise saved was North Salina Street’s Third National Bank Building – also on Clinton Square and also an Archimedes Russell masterpiece – this one a Queen Anne-style red sandstone structure marked by a multi-gabled roof, carved sunflowers in a Gothic trefoil, and a street-level circular bay-and-window that stood in silent watch over the entire square.

Perhaps, most important of all, the Loew’s State Theater on South Salina was spared. A richly detailed and thoroughly opulent show palace, Loew's was the first “Oriental-style” theater in the country, a live entertainment venue festooned with two sweeping staircases, two huge murals, thousands of plush red-and-black velvet seats, a gilded, hand-painted and vaulted ceiling, and, for a time, a giant Tiffany chandelier made by Louis Tiffany himself for the powerful owner of the New York Central Railroad, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

These timeless and irreplaceable buildings and others, every one a downtown pillar, had all been marked for demolition and slated to fall to Bill Walsh’s wrecking ball at some point in 1968. And they would have too, but for two fateful decisions in the first two months of that year, both of them now forever linked in time; the decision by the Viet Cong to launch a sweeping attack on a night when their enemy had just assumed they’d be off celebrating, and the decision by an American president, as a result, to reallocate his finite resources.

The simple facts say that Eddie Krukowski and those other fifty-eight boys from Syracuse were killed in Vietnam. Many will rightfully contend that every one of them died fighting for their country. But in light of subsequent facts, and in light of how things eventually played out, it’s not unreasonable to claim that, as much as those young men died for their country, those boys – every last one of them – also gave their lives for their city.

Because it’s not a stretch to say that without the many iconic buildings that their deaths, in a small way, helped save from the wrecking ball – those just mentioned and others, buildings that a half century later would still be serving as the architectural and spiritual backbone of the city – there simply would not be a Syracuse.

Or at least, the Syracuse that would have survived would have been a plainer, drabber, and far less substantial place – not to mention a far less beautiful one.

On the day that Eddie Krukowski was laid to rest in a leafy corner of Sacred Heart Cemetery, just on the other side of Tipp Hill, the line of cars from the church to the burial site was, quite possibly, as long as that little cemetery had ever seen.  After all, Eddie was not just a war hero.  In his city and parish, anyway, he was a symbol –  a symbol of all that was good and noble about being Polish in America.

Among the cemetery workers who sat there on the soft grass and watched as Eddie Krukowski’s casket got lowered into the cold ground on an otherwise warm and sunny day was a young man just a week or so into his very first summer job. That hulking fourteen year-old and wanna-be power forward in blue jeans and thick, black glasses, a kid who just that month had graduated from Sacred Heart grammar school, had been hired by the caretaker to spend a few dozen hours each week using one of the facility's three push mowers to keep the grass between the headstones neat and trimmed.

And as young Tom Sakowski sat there and watched a fallen soldier’s casket disappear into the ground before him, more intrigued and respectful than actually moved, his right arm resting on one knee and a blade of grass dangling from his mouth, he did so completely unaware that the only world – the only city – he’d ever known in his life had just taken one more step down an increasingly dark and uncertain path.

 

 

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Manny Breland was, admittedly, not just another guy from the Ward. He’d been a giant star at Central High, especially to those in his neighborhood. He was also a local kid who’d made history by becoming the first African American to ever win a full athletic scholarship to Syracuse University, in the process becoming Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown’s teammate and S.U. basketball legend Vinnie Cohen’s roommate, while lettering in both those sports himself.  And, given his height, skin color and massive physicality, he was a guy whose presence was felt the very moment he entered a room.

But following that 1966-67 school year, Franklyn Barry, Syracuse’s progressive and proactive superintendent of schools, had bigger plans for the guy everyone in the Ward still called “Boobie.” At that point, Breland had been serving as one of Barry’s gym teachers in one of his district’s mostly anonymous and most Black junior high schools.

Barry, an educated and lettered middle-aged white man who’d once lived in the suburbs and who’d come to his job as Superintendent of the Syracuse City Schools following a brief but successful run as head of the largely white North Syracuse District, wanted to know if Breland would be interested in coaching Central’s basketball team the upcoming season. The proposed position, he explained, would also include a place on the Central faculty, a package deal that would end up rankling more than a few white teachers at the school, all of whom were union members who felt such a move was forbidden by the rules of their union.

But Barry was a skilled administrator who always took the long view on any and all decisions. He saw Breland as the one man in his district capable of navigating Syracuse’s growing racial divide. The Black community, even the kids, would respect his size, stature and reputation, while the all-white school administrators would acquire for themselves a powerful ally who’d been taught to compete and succeed within the framework of the system as outlined.  In other words, a Black man who played by the rules.

Barry had first made a name for himself in Syracuse a few years prior by proposing a radical educational concept he soon called his “Campus Plan.” As far back as 1962, Mayor Bill Walsh, spurred by his own sense of conscience and motivated, perhaps, to an even greater degree by a series of rather loud and conspicuous protests by the George Wiley-led local chapter of CORE, had formed a committee to analyze the state of education in his city, with a particular emphasis on the imbalance, if not downright inequality between Syracuse’s mostly black and mostly white public schools.

One school board member, in particular – a gentleman named David Jaquith – had long been dead-set against the very idea that there were any racial inequities in Syracuse’s schools, and at one particular board meeting in the Spring said to those gathered, “I don’t accept the premise that racial imbalance represents any kind of missed opportunity. I don’t think the school should accept responsibility for fixing what is basically a housing problem.”

But even Jaquith, himself, got on board after a test conducted by Walsh’s committee to study the performance of a handful of “Negro” students who’d been taken out of the largely black Madison Junior High and bused two miles east to the virtually all-white Levy.  Jaquith, who had been integration’s biggest foe on the board, suddenly, and almost overnight, became one of its staunchest supporters when it was revealed just how much better each student had performed in the well-appointed, well-equipped and far more-accountable environment at Levy.  As Jaquith told a packed house at a school board one night after the release of the findings of Walsh’s study, with more than a touch of wonder in his voice, “At Madison Junior High School, if you cooperated with the teacher and you did your work, you were a ‘kook.’ At Levy Junior High School if you didn’t cooperate with the teacher and you didn’t do your work, you were a ‘kook.’”

In the immediate aftermath, one of the first things the Syracuse School Board did following integration’s new-found momentum (and its new-found advocates in City Hall, especially the powerful guy behind the biggest and most important desk), was to hire the best superintendent they could find.

Enter Franklyn Barry.

Led by Barry’s vision and bold, progressive ideas, and armed with Walsh’s commitment and outsized political muscle, the integration of Syracuse’s public schools began in earnest in the Fall of 1965.

That’s when, on September 14, and on the front page of that day’s Herald-Journal (and the following day’s Post-Standard), some of the most compelling (what editors call) “art” in city history appeared above the fold. It was a series of Norman Rockwell-like photos of the mayor escorting young black children to school on their first day at Salem-Hyde Elementary – and, in the case of one young African American girl, a photo of the two of them hand-in-hand as they walked. Bill Walsh had gladly grabbed that series of photo ops because that was the day on which school integration had, at long last, become a matter of law in his proud little smokestack town.

But with integration, of course, came school busing and with busing came rancor, especially among thousands of white parents of a certain mindset. Among many such parents, the thinking began to take root that the best way to protect a child from having to go to a public school with “Negroes” was to send him or her to one of Syracuse’s Catholic schools.

That little bit of parental decision-making might have actually worked too, except for one thing; the young resolute man of the cloth who Bishop Foery had recently named superintendent of schools in his diocese, a determined idealist and refreshingly pragmatic young doer named Father Thomas J. Costello – who, beyond his truly brilliant mind, was a highly principled man. Costello also been one of those younger priests who’d lived with Father Brady on West Onondaga Street in his late twenties and early thirties, who’d traveled to Montgomery with him to march alongside Dr. King, and whose worldview had been forever shaped by having learned firsthand at the knee of the Saint of Syracuse himself.

One night in Prescott School, on the city’s North Side, a woman at an increasingly heated public forum on busing and integration rose and, while pointing a finger menacingly, told the panel on stage through clenched teeth, “Before you ever bus my child, I will transfer him into a Catholic school!” At which point, and with no real authority, Costello calmly looked down and responded, “The Catholic schools will not accept transfers from the Syracuse public schools. If there are changes of residence from out of town or something like that, we’d be interested, but won’t – for the present time – be accepting any transfers.”

A couple of days later, Costello, though not necessarily asking for it, received a somewhat cautious nod of approval from his boss, Bishop Foery, for his bold statement and verbal line in the sand.

It was clear, however, that the battle lines in Syracuse were being drawn. Superintendent Barry’s so-called “campus plan” had been a direct response to all that hue and cry over busing – which had emerged as the hot-button issue in the city. Yet, rather than bus a handful of kids each day, Barry at one point reasoned to himself, why not bus them all?

Even before things heated up, Barry had envisioned a series of four educational complexes on all four sides of the city, the first on the West Side, near Burnet Park, which roughly a quarter of Syracuse’s boys and girls would be free to attend, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. He envisioned multiple grammar schools, multiple junior highs and multiple high schools – even a Catholic school tucked in there – with every last one nestled in a green, sprawling and open-air variation of a classic college “campus.”

Try as he might, though, Barry was no miracle worker. His campus plan died a slow and somewhat painful death after three years of spirited, passionate, and often heated debate.

It's death did not happen, however, before the city’s ongoing white flight managed to find an even higher gear. By the Spring of 1967, even though three of the four public high schools in the city – Corcoran, Henninger and Nottingham – still maintained a semblance of racial balance, the fourth – Central Tech – had become the virtual antithesis of such balance.

That’s why one overcast day, and with the specter of 1968 looming on the horizon, the ever-vigilant Barry approached one of his junior high phys-ed teachers, Emmanuel “Boobie” Breland, and asked him to take the reins of the highest profile sports team in the blackest school in his district. Big Boobie, for his part, had never coached anything or anyone in his life. But, perhaps, sensing the importance of what Barry was asking of him, if not the times themselves, he reached out his big right hand and accepted the superintendent’s challenge on the spot.

 

 

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First things first – and let’s get this out of the way now. The following year, Manny Breland’s Scarlet Lancers did, indeed, win the 1968 CNY Cities League basketball championship. Using the core of the team that Jack Johnstone had assembled, nurtured, and coached the first part of the decade, the Lancers – now fully matured – also marched through and won with relative ease the New York State Section Three championship.

As it turns out, however, coaching basketball and outscoring opponents was the easy part of Manny’s new job. The harder part was dealing with Central Tech’s increasingly restless and self-aware body of students; a bunch of senior-high Black kids who, like no generation of African American teenagers before them, had started to raise their fist, spread their wings, and look for new and different ways to be counted.

Manny’s first year on the job, in fact – beginning in the Fall of 1967 – many of the kids at Central, spurred by a heightened awareness of their own Blackness, if not their African roots, started staging a series of planned “walkout” protests. What, specifically, those kids were protesting against and what they actually wanted from the largely white school leadership would remain as much a mystery years later as it was even as they were doing it. Whatever the reason though – call it raging hormones, pent up frustration, a budding social conscience, or maybe a mix of all those things – those kids’ walkouts eventually became something of the order of the day in Manny Breland’s first year.

Yet, despite their regular walkouts and protests, there were at least two staffers who the Central kids always responded to, always admired, and always trusted more than anyone. Manny was one. The other was one of Breland’s fellow staff members, a kind-hearted and soft-spoken Italian teacher-turned-guidance counselor named Bob Capone.

Capone had started out as a math teacher at Madison Junior High. As a white kid raised in the rough-and-tumble “Bricks” of Pioneer Homes, he’d spent the first few of his schoolboy years, those immediately following World War II, not only living in shadow of the Bricks but going to Washington Irving Elementary in the heart of the Ward.

As a freshly minted and still-idealistic young educator, Capone had been an important source of understanding for many of these same Central kids back when they were together at Madison, nurturing them, if only as their math teacher, through any number of traumas, such as drunken and occasionally abusive parents, landlord evictions, chronic poverty, and, as much as anything, the sultry allure of the streets.

The respect he garnered was why, after only a few months on the job at Central, the twenty four-year old Bob Capone was elevated by the principal from teacher to guidance counselor. While Capone and Breland had been on the staff together at Madison, during their first year at Central they became dear friends, while also emerging as beacons of hope for many of their students.

For those reasons and others – not the least of which was the uncommon humanity that bonded them – by the Fall of 1967, both Breland and Capone had earned some major "street cred" from the Central kids – more so than any of the other teachers in the building.

Part of their secret was how attuned both were to their students' moods.  Often, in the teachers’ lounge that first year, Breland and Capone would half-joke with one another how, on certain days, it was actually possible to walk into Central in the morning and know it was going to be a long day. You could feel it in the air and see it in the kids’ eyes – or, at least, in how they avoided making eye contact with anyone in authority.  On one such day, a day on which Breland and Capone could almost smell trouble from the get-go, it began with a student walkout at ten that morning. That was the start, and something of the trigger event, for what was to follow. Because what really changed everything, and the reason years later that both men would talk about that day as if it were yesterday, was what transpired after the walkout.

Upstate Medical Center had just been built in the heart of what had once been the 15^th Ward, or, more specifically, Renwick Place and a section of the Ward once affectionately referred to as “Sugar Hill.”  The now-state-of-the-art hospital was located just down Adams Street at the base of the S.U. campus and a few blocks east of Central’s magnificent main building. As a four-lane, one-way thoroughfare, Adams had grown to become the de facto access road for any and all emergency vehicles headed to Upstate from points north, west and south of the city.

But because there were now a few thousand kids, most of them black, milling about in the middle of the street and preventing emergency vehicles from gaining access to the hospital, it wasn’t long before the police showed up.

Only what showed up at Central that day wasn’t just a couple of patrolmen in a squad car. It was the riot brigade armed with rifles and billy clubs, and accompanied by the so-called “paddy wagon.” Commanding this force of armed-and-shielded riot officers was a tough, grizzled Irishman from New York City named John O’Connor, a veteran lawman who’d moved upstate and had been serving as Syracuse’s police chief for the past five months.

O’Connor had some experience with this kind of "situation" in his newly adopted hometown, having been sworn in the very morning after a violent (and racially fueled) outbreak five months earlier on the 800 block of East Genesee Street.  Some two hundred people that night – most all of them young, displaced 15^th Ward African Americans, had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the window of the Capital Cleaners on Fayette Street, burning the mom-and-pop establishment to the ground in minutes.

That angry crowd had then tossed a brick through the front window of Lund’s Men’s Store on Crouse Ave and looted it of a few thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise.  The rioters also broke windows at the Regent Theater on East Genesee and tossed a second Molotov cocktail through the front window of a residence a few doors down from the theater. All told, there were sixty-four arrests that night, with Mayor Walsh immediately imposing what would turn out to be a three-day curfew.

So, at least when it came to spontaneous and illegal assemblies on the streets of Syracuse, that morning on Adams Street was not, by any means, Chief O’Connor’s first rodeo.

Immediately after pulling up in front of the school, Syracuse’s top cop jumped out of the car, megaphone in hand, and began advising the students – in what one onlooker would later call his best “Bronx brogue” – that this was an illegal assembly and for everyone to disperse. O’Connor didn’t articulate whether those Central kids should go home or return to class. Most of the whites among them, however, took the chief’s instructions literally and simply left the scene before they were told to return to class.

Not so the bulk of Central’s Black students. They, instead, started yelling back at Syracuse’s new chief of police and his well-armed militia, some of them crabbing their crotches or thrusting a middle finger upward violently at O’Connor, gestures of contempt for both him and his words.

That’s when one young student broke away from the crowd and tried to grab the megaphone out of O’Connor’s hand, much to the delight of his schoolmates, a number of whom were egging him on as he beamed with pride over his own rambunctiousness.

However, that’s also when O’Connor yanked the megaphone back, held it high, and gave a slight nod to the uniformed officer closest to him. That cop then, almost as if spring loaded, quickly raised the thick wooden club in his right hand and brought it down hard on the young man’s head.

The sound that nightstick made when it came down square on that poor kid’s coconut conjured up images of how a watermelon might sound if dropped from a first-story window.

All Manny Breland could do was look on with horror as two other cops then picked the Central student up off the ground, one under each arm, and dumped him unceremoniously into the paddy wagon. That’s when a couple of male students raced over to Breland, even as the shouting at O’Connor reached an even more fevered pitch. “Mr. Breland…Mr. Breland!” the boys pleaded above the angry voices of their schoolmates, “They can’t get away with that. They just can’t. You gotta do something!”

Instead of trying to do something he knew he’d be powerless to do, big Manny simply looked down at the boys and said unequivocally, “I don’t understand. Do you think this is a game?  Do you think you can just try to steal the man’s bullhorn and not have to pay for it?” He then looked directly into the students’ eyes, neither of whom he really knew, and added without even a trace of judgement.  “This is real life, boys,” he said, sounding every bit the budding basketball coach he was. “And in life there are consequences.”

Meanwhile, just a few yards away, Breland’s good friend and colleague, Bob Capone, was talking to a small group of young female students, one of whom, with tears welling up in her eyes, asked her vice principal in a slightly dazed and almost confused way, “What do they think they’re doing, Mr. Capone?  It’s…it’s just not right.”

“I’m sorry, Darlene,” said Capone with sympathy and understanding.  “I truly am. But these guys aren’t teachers and they’re not trained like teachers. They’re cops and they’re doing exactly what they’ve been trained to do.” Looking over the tops of the students now gathered around him, he added earnestly, “Please, you girls – everybody – go home before anyone else gets hurt. Please. Just leave. We can all talk about this tomorrow morning. I promise.”

Cleaning up that single Black student protest on that single block of Adams Street near Central Tech High School in the Fall of 1967 took Police Chief John O’Connor and his men all of about forty-five minutes, a bullhorn, and one timely and well-placed blow from a hickory billy club. The long and arduous task of repairing their city’s deepening racial divide in the wake of the 15^th Ward’s demise, however, would prove to be something far more complicated and elusive.

 

 

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Nineteen sixty eight in muscular little Syracuse, as in so many other industrial American cities, big and small, the wheels just seemed to come off the cart.

That was especially true when it came to the white-hot issue of Vietnam and the protests over it. In Syracuse, in that year alone, there were four different stories – and four different events – all of which had at their core a deep disillusionment, if not a full-fledged anger, over America’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia.

The four individuals at the heart of those stories – David Miller, Daniel Berrigan, David Ifshin, and Ronald Brazee – all had strong ties to Syracuse.

David Miller, for one, had always been a good kid. An East Side Catholic, he’d grown up in a small frame house near Schiller Park and graduated from CBA, where he’d played some varsity basketball.  In fact, he’d proven to be such a deadly shooter in high school, that he often came off the bench to provide the Brothers instant offense – so much so, in fact, he became known around the league as something of a Frank Ramsay, who at that point was playing that same "sixth man" role for Red Auerbach’s Celtics of the NBA.

Miller was also a young man who cared deeply about the condition of his fellow man, having learned firsthand at Le Moyne, a tiny Jesuit college, that any man’s world view, if not his life, should always be governed by a steadfast and courageous mix of morality, compassion and intellect.

It’s why, for a few years anyway, David attended mass every Sunday morning at Father Norcott’s St. Joseph’s French Church in the 15^th Ward, and watched with wonder as Father Brady joyously dispensed his unique and selfless brand of love to many of the Ward’s neediest. He also regularly volunteered to help ladle soup and pass out bread to the hungry and homeless in the church’s basement.

That’s why, after Brady had gotten to know David a little, sensing he’d found a kindred spirit in the youngster, he asked him if he’d like to take over the Bible study class that St. Joe’s held for the Ward’s schoolchildren every Saturday.

Charlie Brady was, in fact, at least part of the reason why Miller had been arrested three times already for protesting some perceived injustice or another. His most recent run-in with the law – at least before the one that would ultimately earn him national headlines and get his face plastered on the front pages of newspapers across the country – was for trespassing on Niagara Mohawk property while walking side-by-side with Brady in protest over the regional power company’s discriminatory hiring practices, an arrest that had, ultimately, earned him over twenty days in the city lockup.

David Miller was not, however, a troublemaker. Quite the opposite, in fact. Miller was a loving and gentle pacifist in every sense of the word, and a young man who, over the years, had slowly become more and more committed to social justice. To that end, and while still at Le Moyne, he joined and became an active member of the Catholic Workers Movement, a faith-based network of chapters that stressed peace and passivism, along with the dignity of all men.

At Le Moyne, even as he was playing on the freshman basketball team, being referred to as “Red” by his drinking buddies, wooing his college sweetheart, and winning the intramural touch football championship two out of three years, David was also proving to be the classic idealist coming of age in a classic liberal arts school. The Jesuits at Le Moyne exposed him and his hungry mind not only to the teachings of far left faculty members like Father Daniel Berrigan, a Syracusan who in a few short years would emerge as the country’s leading symbol of faith-based radical politics, but also the musings of another of his instructors, Tony Bouscaren, whose politics and writings were so staunchly (and even proudly) far right wing that he’d eventually be nominated for a high-level post in the Reagan administration.

But with his college days now behind him, everything changed for Miller with one single act of defiance on the morning of October 15, 1965.  That was the day on which, in lower Manhattan, he took part in an act of social protest that, from that point forward, fundamentally altered the very shape, tenor and direction of his life.

On that day, sporting a fresh shave and haircut, along with the new Wells & Coverley suit his mother bought him for graduation, Miller stepped onto the back of a flatbed truck near Battery Park, said a few words, and, after a few failed tries with a match, borrowed a cigarette lighter and lit his draft card on fire, holding it aloft to the cheers of a few hundred fellow protesters who’d assembled there with him.

Young men had been burning their draft cards in America for well over two years. But this was different.  This was the first time a young man had burned his card since doing so had been declared illegal.  A redundant and largely symbolic law had just been passed – almost unanimously, mind you – by Congress that made burning or destroying a valid draft card a Class A felony.  That confluence of fresh law and personal principles put one David Miller, All American boy, in the crosshairs of, among others, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Three days later, following his arrest by some FBI agents at a Catholic Workers event in New Hampshire, Miller’s picture and story became front page news all across the country. To his credit, and knowing his arrest was imminent, he’d chosen to get his hair cut and to don his new suit, tie and a fresh shirt each and every morning. Miller wanted the world to know, and in no uncertain terms, that he was not just some garden variety hippie who’d burned his draft card on a lark. He was a young, devout Catholic and servant of the Lord who stood firmly against any and all wars, but especially this one.

The reason 1968 was so important to David Miller (not to mention his wife, daughter, and those who knew him) was because that was the year during which, the appeal process having run its course, he was sent to federal prison in Pennsylvania for the start of what, at maximum, could have been a five-year stretch.

Before Miller was led off to prison in cuffs, though, while covering his trial for Life magazine, journalist Loudon Wainwright wrote most presciently, “As for David Miller, I wonder about him...I have no argument with his right to express his views, though I would disagree with many of them.”  Wainwright concluded almost wistfully: “I do not question his sincerity, his courage, or his good works, which have been considerable. Yet during the trial I somehow began to worry about his future.”

Dolores Morgan, the mother of ten and former 15^th Ward resident who’d also been the very first African American student of any kind at any Parochial League school, and who continued to support Father Brady on so many of his pro-social initiatives, thought the world of young David Miller.  She’d watched how he had embraced the Ward and its little French church, and watched too, at least through the window, the sincerity he always exuded whenever he was teaching her son and his classmates their Saturday morning Bible studies.

That’s why it broke her heart to see those pictures of David being carted off to prison for doing nothing other than standing up for something he believed. And that’s why it broke her heart even more when a friend who’d run into Miller some three years later, just after he’d been released, told her he'd beheld a changed, if not a broken man.  He said it barely even looked like David. Dolores thought of what a high-security federal prison could do to any man, much less one as young, as innocent, and as fresh-faced as David Miller, who at the time was both a young father and husband. That very thought, in fact, made the mother in Dolores shiver at the possibilities.

As for Miller, he’d soon leave Syracuse altogether and head for points West. He’d eventually practice law for a bit in the Bay Area and have a few more children along the way.  He’d even fight a few more battles on behalf of the kind of social justice that had always moved him. As for keeping up to date on him, the only thing that most in Syracuse knew about him was that he’d apparently crawled inside his new post-prison world and let the door slam behind him. Miller did write a book about, among other things, his anti-war experiences. But beyond that, just about all anyone knew back east was that the young Syracusan who’d once been such a devout Catholic and such a strong believer in the dignity and goodness of all men had traded much of that in to focus on, as he outlined in his book, such curious pursuits as ecofeminism, witchcraft and Mayan ball games.

The aforementioned Berrigan, meanwhile, a longtime Jesuit priest and, likewise, Syracusan, also had himself something of an above-the-fold year in 1968. Having left Le Moyne and his hometown behind for a life of political activism, he and his kid brother, Phil, like Miller, managed to make some national news and draw J. Edgar Hoover’s ire. In their case, it was for a dramatic protest they pulled off in a little Catonsville, Maryland.

On May 17 of that year, the two Berrigans and seven others walked into the selective service office in Catonsville, just south of Baltimore, grabbed 378 draft files, carried them into the parking lot in a basket of wire mesh, doused them with a quantity of homemade napalm they’d been carrying (an incendiary used, symbolically, by soldiers in Vietnam), and set the entire thing afire. They did all that while reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

The Catonsville Nine, as they were soon being called, got arrested on the spot and, while in custody, both humorously and earnestly, sent flowers to the clerk at the selective service office with their apologies for having tied and gagged her during their little escapade. Dan Berrigan and six of the other protesters, rather than showing up for their arraignment, then chose to skip town and head underground, living anonymously for the next few years and constantly moving from location to location to avoid detection.

Unlike David Miller, though, who curried some measure of sympathy from many Syracusans and who was viewed as much a victim and confused kid as he was a law breaker, Berrigan was seen as a professional agitator and troublemaker. He was looked upon in his hometown as a guy who constantly wanted to taunt Hoover and his fellow “establishment” types, regularly showing up on the nightly news from various points around the country, lecturing the FBI director and anyone in power about the error of their ways, it not the immorality of their positions.

Regardless, it seemed to many in conservative little Syracuse that the world outside was going to hell in the proverbial hand basket – so much so that even Catholic priests were starting to behave like spoiled, pampered brats, thumbing their noses at authority and mocking many of the very conventions that helped make America the country it was.

That year, 1968, as it so happened, was also the year that fundamentally changed forever a young man named David Ifshin.

Like All-American Dave Bing a few years prior, Ifshin had come up to Syracuse from the Washington, DC area.  Unlike Bing, however, young David didn't have a near-genius ability to shoot or dribble a basketball. He was just a good Jewish boy from a working-class part of Silver Spring, a young man with a keen mind who read a lot, actively followed current events, and regularly volunteered to help his old man around the small liquor store he owned in a rough-and-tumble section of DC.

Harold and Shirley’s son had grown up at the knees of two longtime Roosevelt Democrats. Harold had even fought proudly in World War II.  Members of the "Greatest Generation," the Ifshins instilled in their boy a deep and abiding sense of patriotism and support for a government that opened pathways to a better life for all its citizens.

Yet, David had begun to question his parent’s perspective in the summer of 1964 after an eye-opening visit to the frontlines of the civil rights struggle. An essay on race relations had won him a place on a Kiwanis Club trip where he visited St. Augustine, Florida, after the so-called “Wade-In” in which segregationists poured acid into public swimming pools.  Ifshin also traveled to Philadelphia, Mississippi just after the disappearance of civil rights volunteers, Michael Goodman, James Chaney, and Andrew Schwerner, all three of whom were subsequently found to have been murdered on a desolate country road by the Ku Klux Klan.

Nevertheless, when eighteen-year-old David arrived in Central New York in the Fall of 1966 as a freshman at Syracuse University, he was still a slightly left-leaning political moderate who, despite increasing unrest among so many his age, still supported LBJ’s best efforts to prevent all those dominos from falling in Southeast Asia. To that end, he soon joined the campus chapter of the Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC), an Army program designed to recruit and train commissioned officers directly off carefully selected college campuses.

But David Ifshin's sense of himself as an informed political moderate suddenly – as if overnight – began to dissipate. That was due, largely, to a single trip he made in the long and particularly hot Summer of 1968 as a newly elected member of the Syracuse University student government, a position that afforded him the opportunity to fly to the nation’s heartland, to Chicago, and that year’s Democratic National Convention.

David Ifshin had always been a believer in nonviolence and the right to non-violent protest, à la Dr. King. Especially given his days at the liquor store, even after what he seen during the summer of 1964, he believed that in a democratic society the police had his back – had, in fact, everyone’s back. But what happened in Chicago that summer opened his eyes in ways they’d never been opened before. He saw peaceful protesters – some of them no more than seventeen or eighteen (and a few, even, with infants in their arms or children by their side) – being savagely beaten with nightsticks by police officers, many of them on horseback or firing teargas canisters. To Ifshin’s impressionable mind, those Chicago cops looked and acted more like a well-trained, military-state army than they did a well-meaning collection of public servants and protectors of the peace.

Inside the Chicago Coliseum on the city's South Side, an arena just a stone’s throw from its storied Union Stockyards, as a few moderate delegates were taking the dais to rip Mayor Daley and his heavy-handed use of “Gestapo tactics” to quell the unrest, on Michigan Ave, just a little uptown of there, youthful blood continued to flow in the streets.

The seeds had been planted on that single trip during that summer like no other. David Ifshin had managed to meet the likes of Yippie leaders Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. He had encountered folk singer, Phil Ochs, who would later become a good friend, and whose I’m Not Marching Anymore and Draft Dodger Blues had both become anti-war anthems for the growing youth culture. When he returned to Syracuse, Ifshin was no longer taking anything for granted, no longer content to just sit on the political sidelines. Instead, he had come to reflexively question authority, and to demand a seat at the table whenever and wherever decisions were being made about university life.

Soon, the brash young activist was elected student body president. He organized sit-ins, student protests and other forms of demonstration. At one point, he even led a non-violent takeover of one of the school's administration buildings. Before long, David Ifshin had grown his hair, begun sporting what would soon become his signature goatee, and was using his burning, laser-focused eyes and a voice that could simultaneously seduce and cut like a straight razor to display a level of intensity and public passion that few on campus had ever seen from him before.

Ifshin also began taking on Syracuse chancellor John Corbally directly, regularly engaging in heated debates with his school’s chief administrator about many aspects of student life, especially its ROTC program. He also spent hours in the school’s quad in the heart of campus discussing, with virtually anyone he happened to encounter, the importance of taking a more active role in the day-to-day operations of the university’s administration, including its campus police.

Ifshin, in fact, soon became so public and such a polarizing figure in his adopted hometown, that he eventually became something of a whipping boy for the editorial staffs of the two local newspapers. Both even went so far as to make him the centerpiece of a pair of full-blown essays featured prominently atop their respective op-ed pages.

Those op-ed pieces (or, frankly, any news stories about him) rarely, if ever, exhibited even a modicum of balance. A few took cruel and incendiary swipes at the S.U. student president, maliciously (and inaccurately) painting Ifshin as something of a Godless, nihilistic, draft-dodging college brat who, like so many “hippies” of the day, wore his hair long, refused to shave or bathe, and who was willing and eager to tear down anything simply because it was there.

The over-the-top reactions and florid language of the editorialists in Syracuse's two major dailies were echoed throughout the country as conservatives – or more broadly, the “older generation” – reacted with rancor to any demands for change by the country’s “younger generation.”  In Syracuse, it was Ifshin’s lot, rightly or wrongly, to bear the consequences of such a vast yet arbitrary cultural and generational divide.

One such opinion piece in the Herald-Journal even claimed that Ifshin was a member of a highly subversive minority of college students who “are more than slightly interested in a full Communist victory in Vietnam and in ‘the death’ of American colleges…and other institutions in the U.S. by whatever means, fair or foul.”

That same editorial concluded: “It’s about time college administrators, trustees, and loyal faculty members began examining what is happening under their noses. And it’s past time that the ‘silent majority’ of students who are in college to get an education awoke to the manner in which they are being taken by their so-called Student Government leaders” (this, despite the fact Ifshin had been elected just that Fall by a clear majority of the S.U. student body).

Yet, it was not until after the above hatchet-job had run that David Ifshin would truly do something that turned him into a national figure and, in some circles, a full-blown social pariah.

In 1970, as part of his duties as the new president of an organization calling itself the National Student Association (NSA), the recent Syracuse University grad and a small contingent of representatives from colleges around the country boarded a plane, flew to Hanoi, and engaged in a series of mock peace negotiations with kids from a handful of comparable schools in North Vietnam.

This was at the height of the Vietnam War, mind you, when tensions between the U.S. and North Vietnam were at their highest level. It was why, the South Vietnamese government, believing the stunt was both treasonous and counterproductive to any real-life peace negotiations, steadfastly denied Ifshin and his contingent access to Saigon.

But, once in Hanoi, Ifshin did something that went far beyond the scope of the trip’s original intent. After being shown graphic photographs, along with given a tour of a local hospital to see first-hand what the American bombing and napalm were doing to so many men, women and children in North Vietnam, he gave an interview on Radio Hanoi in which he railed against America’s involvement in the war.

He even went so far as to urge any U.S. fighting man within the sound of his voice to go AWOL. He told the GI’s they were fighting an immoral war for a country that continued to support an illegal regime in Saigon. He told them the war they were fighting and dying for was not about stopping the spread of Communism. For the U.S., it was about money. For the North Vietnamese, it was about freeing the noble men and women of Vietnam to choose their own destiny and run their own country.

Even as his words hung in the air, Ifshin knew he had crossed a line. He immediately regretted giving the interview, especially after just having seen what he had in those photos and witnessing all the human suffering he’d been forced to observe.

But, it was too late. The damage had been done.

The jaw-dropping public statement by a young man who was serving, ostensibly, as an emissary for his country, shocked people back home, including tens of thousands of his fellow Syracusans. For many, including those on the political left, what young David Ifshin did – two years before Jane Fonda, mind you – was beyond the pale, and certainly beyond any reasonable expectation for the limits of free speech, especially in a time of war.

To so many simple, hard-working and God-fearing men and women back in Central New York, what that punk, that war protester, that long-haired ingrate from S.U., had just done was downright treasonous. And if any act deserved hanging for having given aid and comfort to the enemy, that was it.

Years later, Arizona Senator John McCain, who’d spent five and a half years in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” including two solid years of solitary confinement, being systematically tortured and brainwashed, said Ifshin’s comments, along with other propaganda recordings, had been piped into his cell for hours on end, morning to night. He’d later admit that all that torture and propaganda ultimately broke him – a breaking of his spirit that ultimately compelled him to sign a statement of guilt drawn up for him that denounced the country he loved and for which he’d fought so selflessly and given so much.

Although McCain’s personal understanding of that crazy, ill-conceived jungle war had evolved greatly over time, when he got himself elected to Congress nearly a decade later, one of his very first official duties was to deliver a speech written specifically for him by President Ronald Reagan’s staff, one that denounced Ifshin for what he’d done to harm the country, if not McCain personally, during a time of war.

The idea that McCain and Ifshin would later bury the hatchet and actually become dear friends would have been immaterial to so many in Syracuse, New York in 1970.

Also immaterial would have been the notion that one day relatively early in his career, Ifshin would walk into McCain’s office, reach out his hand, look the first-term Congressman in the eye, and tell him he was sorry, that he’d made a terrible mistake as a young man and would do anything in the world to take back all he’d said and done.

Nor would it have mattered, even one whit, that the two men would eventually grow so close that, following Ifshin’s death from cancer in 1996, McCain would spend the balance of his days referring to him as a “friend and patriot,” and that, at the funeral, McCain would deliver a tearful eulogy in which he spoke about how David Ifshin had become his personal hero and had taught him that there are many ways to love one’s country, and that Ifshin had shown him what it meant to sacrifice everything, even your own name, in defense of the country you loved.

But least in Central New York, none of any of that would have mattered in the Fall of 1970.

Because in that turbulent era, all that mattered was that a twenty-one year old recent S.U. grad named David Ifshin, an English major from the nation's capitol, had taken it upon himself to drive a stake deep into the heart of Syracuse, further dividing an already splintering city and ratcheting up its anger and fear factor to an almost untenable level.

Which leads us to the fourth and final person on the list.

Ronald Brazee was significantly different from the other three Vietnam-era men with whom he shared both a year and a city. First off, he was barely a man at all, even a young one. He was boy, for God’s sake; a junior at Central High in nearby Auburn, and a sixteen year-old teenager who still brought home American History and Trigonometry homework every night. Unlike the others, he was still living under the same roof as his mom and dad.

Ultimately, though, the thing that separated Ronald Brazee from the likes of David Miller, Daniel Berrigan and David Ifshin was the simple fact that he was the only one of the four who did not survive the era – or, sadly, even the decade.

Ronnie Brazee ended up dying a horrific, nearly slow-motion death. It was a death that began on a side street in downtown Syracuse, and though it may not have made the headlines the other three men managed to make, the circumstance of it were all the proof anyone who saw it needed that the world – their world – was spinning madly out of control.

The concept of self-immolation as a form of social protest had never really entered most people's minds before – that is, until the Summer of 1963 when a Buddhist monk, protesting the U.S.-backed Diem regime in South Vietnam, sat down cross-legged in a public square in the heart of Saigon and, without saying a word, doused himself with gasoline, lit a match, and purposefully set himself ablaze, much to the horror of the hundreds who looked on helplessly.

The Buddhist monk’s excruciating yet completely silent suicide in full public view was a searing statement of political and religious resistance. It not only made front-page news the world over, it elevated awareness of the armed conflict in tiny Vietnam to a higher level of awareness than it had ever known before.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, who was there on assignment with the New York Times, later wrote:

Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh. ... Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.

That monk’s solitary and spine-chilling act of self-sacrifice turned out to be the very first of a flurry of eerily similar anti-war displays.  But the one subsequent act of anti-war self-immolation that, for whatever reason, achieved a level of global awareness similar to the monk’s, took place a full two years later and a half a world away. It was a highly public suicide-by-fire that occurred on an otherwise sunny and (until that moment, anyway) uneventful Fall day on the lower East Side of Manhattan.

On that day, a young man from the tiny Finger Lakes community of Geneva, New York named Roger LaPorte walked up to the front door of the Dag Hammarskjold Library in the United Nations Plaza and doused himself with the gallon of gasoline he’d been carrying.  Then, like the monk in Saigon, he began praying even as he lit the match he held in his right hand.

LaPorte – a la David Miller, was a deeply committed member of the Catholic Workers Movement – and he would die twenty-four hours later in Bellevue Hospital without ever having lost consciousness.  The former seminarian, at the time of his death, was but twenty-two years old.

Later, in a eulogy for his fellow Catholic warrior and anti-war crusader, Father Dan Berrigan said of young Roger LaPorte’s supreme act of protest, “This is no suicide…this is a sacrifice so that others may live.”

But back to Ronnie Brazee.

Ronnie had skipped school that warm but unusually breezy day – March 19, 1968 – and had hitchhiked from Auburn to Syracuse, ostensibly to visit his cousin. At some point or another, the young man managed to get his hands on a gas can, walked to a service station, plopped down two dimes and three pennies, and bought himself a full gallon’s worth of gas. He then hopped on a city bus and rode it to Columbus Circle, where he got off quietly and walked up to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, gas can in hand.

Inside that majestic old stone structure, in fact up near its altar, Ronnie apparently next attempted to take one of the already-lit candles for the sick and dying and use it to ignite himself, having already doused himself and ditched the gas can. But as the young man was about to grab one of the lit candles, he heard a faint but hollowed echo near the back of the vaulted and otherwise empty apse. He turned, noticing that an older woman had entered and was now in the act of kneeling down to pray in the very last pew.

For a moment, Ronnie did nothing but stare. Suddenly, he bolted out the side door, the one that opened up directly onto Jefferson Street. There, he came upon a middle-aged banker from Solvay who worked downtown and who happened to be returning from a late lunch. Ron Brazee asked the man for a match and, without saying a word, ripped one off the pack handed to him, struck it twice nervously, and then held the small flame against his gas-soaked shirt and windbreaker.

Instantly, the shirt and windbreaker exploded into flames, shocking the man and leaving poor Ronnie screaming in a mix of fear and agony and running west toward Warren Street – and, one would like to think, back toward his mother’s arms in Auburn.

At that point, Charlie Fahey, another of those young priests who lived under the same roof as Charlie Brady on 672 West Onondaga, was returning to his office at Catholic Charities – an organization that, at the time, was housed in an available space on the second floor of the cathedral rectory.

Even consciously he consciously realized what was happening, Fahey, a tall and rangy one-time defensive-minded forward at CBA, instinctively bolted off in pursuit of the youngster he saw engulfed in flames. As the young priest ran, he began frantically ripping off his black linen sport coat, first one arm, then the other. When he finally reached Ronnie, who continued to stumble forward, even though he knew the young man was in agony, Father Fahey did the only thing he could think to do, tackling the boy and, using a combination of his size 44 sport coat and his own body, feverishly tried to extinguish the flames, even as young Ronnie hugged him and sobbed, while shaking in the throes of unspeakable agony.

Like Roger LaPorte, Ronnie would not die right away.  Unlike LaPorte, however, he’d cling to life for weeks, suffering the whole time with massive third-degree burns over ninety-eight percent of his body. Ronnie even regained consciousness to some degree and was able to speak for a time with his mother, who sat in constant vigil at St. Joseph’s Hospital over her son’s broken body as he tried so hard to hold on. Eventually, however, as with so many burn victims, an infection set in and, almost mercifully, took young Ronnie home to God.

Very little was written about the incident in the Syracuse newspapers, since Ronald Brazee did not make a statement before setting himself ablaze, and didn’t leave so much as a note. To the editors and news directors in town, it was likely viewed as nothing more than just one more suicide – admittedly, an unusually loud and public one; but a suicide, nevertheless.

And while the manner of Ronnie’s death did get significantly more play in the local Auburn papers, with no note and no statement of protest, the boy’s passing – as it was in Syracuse – was considered suicide.

The only question for the Brazees to ponder was, why? Why would Ronnie do such a thing?  There was no note and he never let on to his mother.

Years later, some of his siblings reasoned that their brother may have been mentally imbalanced, maybe clinically depressed, or perhaps even bipolar.

Regardless, in the aftermath, Ronnie’s death rarely got discussed in the Brazee home.  Mr. Brazee, in particular, was almost eerily closed-mouthed about the entire affair. Perhaps it was because his second oldest, Ronnie, was the one who seemed most troubled whenever he voiced one of his largely conservative opinions, especially when the topic turned to Vietnam.

Ronnie was a young buck just coming of age. Ronnie was also a high school kid becoming more aware of the world about him with each passing day. As such, like so many other young men and women, he was starting to view America’s involvement in Southeast Asia as one big quagmire, beginning to question why the hell we were even there.

Though Ronnie never said a word when the old man started talking politics, or badmouthing hippies, long-hairs, or Commies, one got the sense he might have been biting his tongue the whole time, maybe out of respect.

No one knows why sixteen year-old Ronald Brazee skipped school that particular day or why he did what he ultimately did – much less why he chose such a gruesome method for his own demise. But it’s certainly not hard to speculate. After all, all over the world, and all about Ronnie, anti-war protesters were continuing to set themselves ablaze as the ultimate form of sacrifice and plea for peace.

Perhaps, that's why, shortly after Ronnie’s death – and, perhaps, thinking about all those protesters out there who continued to kill themselves the exact same way his big brother had – thirteen year-old Michael Brazee went to the kitchen one day, grabbed a butter knife, and went about the task of slowly scraping the “America…Love It or Leave It” sticker – the one that his old man had plastered up there so proudly – off the front door of his family’s home.

The year was 1968.  And though people on both sides of Syracuse’s growing divide continued to rage and believe those on the other side were doing their best to destroy the country, there was at least one thing on which every last Syracusan, left or right, could agree. Nineteen sixty-eight had become, unquestionably, the most unnerving twelve-month period in the history of their proud and, once, rock-solid little city.

 

 

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By 1968, at least to many in town, Ben Schwartwalder had become a full-blown, larger-than-life Bunyanesque figure. Which is to say, the longtime Syracuse University head football coach had over the years grown into a living, breathing, cussing, snorting, stomping, hard-charging, and flat-top wearing legend.

Long before the phrase got devalued to such a point that it was applied to every Tom, Dick and Harry who happened to button up a uniform each day, Ben had achieved – under deadly fire, and the unlikeliest of circumstances – all the merit badges one would ever need to qualify as an honest-to-goodness All-American hero.

A kid who’d grown up as a dirt-poor urchin on the banks of the Ohio in a tiny river town on the far reaches of West Virginia, Schwartzwalder not only lived through World War I and helped his family survive the Great Depression, but he’d also volunteered for the Army just before D-Day and (in his mid-thirties) served as a paratrooper during World War II, one day jumping out of a plane into the teeth of the heavy anti-aircraft fire that, for hours, pierced the skies over Normandy – winning ribbons, medals and a lifetime’s worth of loyalty in the process.

In his time, he’d also been one of the toughest linemen, pound for pound, in all of college football, having played center for the West Virginia University – at all of a hundred and forty-six pounds.

But that was in the past – or at least a lot of it was, anyway.

Because that year, 1968, Ben Schwartzwalder, local legend and football god, was on the cusp of turning sixty. As such, at least to a budding new generation of Syracusans, he might as well have been about to turn a hundred. Because for so many young rebels, flower children and sons and daughters of Aquarius – both on-campus and in the city itself – that glorious national title and Heisman Trophy that ol’ Ben had helped bring home to Syracuse some ten years prior had already begun to take on the musty aroma of a distant and increasingly irrelevant memory.

At least that’s how, by 1968, so many in town under the age of twenty had begun to view their football coach and his legacy. To everyone else, however, especially the older S.U. alums and locals over forty, Coach Ben Schwartzwalder of good old “Bill Orange” was not only special, he was as iconic and beloved as any man who'd ever called the Salt City home.

But, lo and behold, then came the Fall of 1968 and the opening days of an entirely new and different era for Syracuse University football.

Greg Allen had come to Syracuse in large part because S.U. All American Floyd Little had always been one of his heroes.  A two-sport star from Plainfield, New Jersey and, like Little, a gifted running back, he’d been recruited by Schwartzwalder to Syracuse. He had chosen to enroll, in large part, because on his very first recruiting trip he’d met a fellow African American recruit – a center/linebacker from Connecticut named John Lobon – and the two not only became fast friends, but they made something of a pinkie promise to attend college and play football together.

Al Newton, on the other hand, had already been at Syracuse for a year. Like Allen, he’d also been a star running back in high school, in his case, Rindge Tech in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Newton had also been personally recruited by Little, who by then had become a perennial Heisman Trophy candidate for the Orangemen.

But 1968 was an important year for Newton, because that was the year during which, after having been a dominant force for the Syracuse freshman team the previous season, he was expected to take a giant step and help the varsity reclaim some of its lost glory, filling the role that star fullbacks Jim Nance and Larry Csonka had played during their time on the Syracuse campus.  Big things, in other words, were expected of the young man.

Beyond their football talents, Greg Allen, John Lobon and Al Newton were all intelligent and academically focused young men, especially Allen and Newton.

Allen for example, had come to Syracuse with the intention of possibly becoming a doctor. His first semester, he majored in Biology.  And Lobon, who loved history, enrolled as a history major with the intention of, maybe, becoming a teacher.

But Newton, academically speaking, turned out to be a cut above them both.  At Rindge Tech, he’d not only been a National Honor Society member, but also a finalist for a National Merit Scholarship. His love in high school was mathematics. As a senior, Newton had been accepted at both Harvard and Columbia, but had chosen Syracuse because of something called a 3/2 program, one in which, at a handful of colleges in the country, Syracuse among them, it was possible to earn two bachelor’s degrees in five years. Newton had designs on getting degrees in both math and engineering, with his ultimate goal to someday become a civil engineer and completely reimagine American cities.

The problem for Newton – and it was a problem that both Allen and Lobon would also encounter their first year – was that Coach Schwartzwalder made it clear that no classes, no matter how important to one's major, could interfere with football.  A few African American players were even urged to switch majors before the start of the second semester.  Instead of majoring in, say, biology, or history, or engineering, they were urged to enroll in classes with names like Theory of Basketball and Public Heath, all of them under an umbrella curriculum the university referred to as “General Studies.”

The thinking was, apparently, that the responsibility, time and effort it took to play football would simply not allow certain types of young men to engage in the university’s higher-level academic pursuits.  Football practice took far too much time, particularly when such obligations as practical, three-hour engineering or biology labs were competing for a young player’s time and attention.

While many white S.U. football players were, similarly, urged to pursue less ambitious college degrees, a good number were not. Not so with the Black players. But almost every African American on Coach Schwartzwalder’s team – even one with such demonstrated skills as Al Newton – was either encouraged to switch his major to General Studies, or to drop any courses, especially labs, that created scheduling conflicts with football. The player was then told he could make up any lost hours during the Summer with a handful of less strenuous and stressful “General Studies” courses, such as the aforementioned Theory of Basketball.

This troubling academic situation was then coupled with a somewhat peculiar physical one; a gnawing circumstance that Newton first began to notice his freshman year, but one that soon became apparent to many players in Ben’s program, freshmen and upper classmen alike. The S.U. team doctor at the time – by training, a gynecologist – didn’t seem to want to touch any player, and, in particular, any player of color.  In fact, the doctor rarely, if ever, touched players at all – even while attempting to make a diagnosis of a potentially debilitating injury.  Every injury to virtually an athlete in the Syracuse athletic program – black or white, no matter the sport, and no matter how significant – was treated in much the same way: “Put a little ice on it and give it a couple of days.  You’ll be fine.”

Ben had, of course, been coaching young Black men for over two decades. As a small-town West Virginia boy, though he’d not entirely embraced racial integration on a personal level, he’d managed to come to peace with it as a matter of practice.  After all, as he would soon discover, integrating his team helped him win an awful lot of football games.

To that end, over the years he’d given many young men of color positions of prominence on his teams – something that was almost unheard of in the country, even up north. Bernie Custis, for example, a future Tuskegee Airman, started for Schwartzwalder as quarterback as far back as 1949, and even roomed with a white boy at the time, a young Jewish kid from New York City named Al Davis, who, himself, would grow up to both coach and own the Oakland Raiders.

Ben also coached three of the most storied running backs in the history of the college game – all three of them Black, and all three sporting uniform #44 – Jim Brown, Ernie Davis and Floyd Little. Brown should have been the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player. Davis actually was the first Black to win it. And Little finished in the top five in the Heisman voting two consecutive years.

That’s not to mention some other generational African American players Ben Schwartzwalder recruited and coached at Syracuse, players like ten-year NFL tackle John Brown of the Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers, AFL MVP and rushing leader Jim Nance of the Boston Patriots, and Baltimore Colts Hall of Fame tight end, John Mackey, to name but a few.

Ben had even gone so far, back in the day, as to support his players when, on their own, they drafted and signed a petition refusing to stay at any hotel on the road – especially down South – that did not allow their team’s handful of Black players to stay in the same building as their white teammates. Ben Schwartzwalder was a man of principle, to be sure. Above all, he was a great football coach who believed in not galvanizing concept of team.

But few Black players, even the always-outspoken Brown, had ever challenged Schwartzwalder or questioned his worldview quite the way those kids on his late 60’s teams did.

For years, Ben had tackled race head on by using a locker room technique he’d developed over time, and one that had served him well for the bulk of his career. He’d single out a Black kid – usually the most skilled or respected on his team – and then ask that young man, point-blank, and in front of his teammates, “Floyd Little (or Ernie Davis, or Jim Nance), do we have a racial problem on this team?”  At which point, that young African American player would invariably look into his eyes and say something like, “No, coach. Not at all. No problems on this team.” And that would be the end of any talk about race for the rest of the season.

But all that came to a screeching halt during that 1968 season and the one that followed.  The first year, when Schwartzwalder asked sophomore fullback Al Newton if there were any racial problems on the Syracuse football team, Newton shocked Ben, his coaches, and players by proclaiming, after stumbling a bit to find just the right words, “Well, yeah, coach. I kinda think maybe we do.”

Allen was even more direct the following year, when asked the very same question, and Schwartzwalder called him into his office to discuss it. Behind his small gray metal desk and looking sternly over the top of his eyeglasses, the coach looked at Allen and said, “Look son. I gotta tell ya’. You have a choice, right here, right now. You can either choose to be a football player or a Black man. Your call.” Allen, the sophomore running back, tried to explain his position without endangering his playing time. He said, “Look, coach, in all fairness, I’m going to be a Black man a lot longer than I’m going to be a football player.  I don’t know, but…Why can’t I be both?”

It’s important to note, here, that at the start of the 1968 season, Syracuse University football, which for years had been synonymous with greatness, especially in the backfield, had begun to fall on hard times. A big part of that had less to do with the quality of players that Schwartzwalder continued to recruit and more to do with the style of play to which he more and more fervently embraced.

By the late 1960’s, the college game was going through some critical, even radical changes, not the least of which was the growing understanding that speed, passing and opening the field as much as possible could often trump raw power. The best way to beat the kind of smash-mouth, between-the-hashmarks football that Ben and a handful of other older coaches in the country had come to symbolize was through raw speed and cat-like quickness. And there was, perhaps, no greater example of that than the annual Rose Bowl game on New Year’s Day, in which the smaller but faster Pac 10 schools were starting to dominate, and often humiliate, the bigger and stronger but far more plodding schools of the Big 10 – Rust Belt programs, just like Syracuse, whose run-first offenses and powerful-but-conspicuously-slow defenses had taken their once-greatest assets and turned them, almost overnight, into liabilities.

The pressure on Ben Schwartzwalder, in other words, was tremendous, and growing by the day. It wasn’t just that his country’s young people were becoming so radicalized, what with the Vietnam protests, the hippies, the Yippies, the drugs and the free love. It wasn’t that all those “Negroes” out there were revolting and rioting and burning down their own cities and homes, just to make a point. It wasn’t even that the game was changing, or that the style of football that Ben had played for so long was starting to make him look, more and more, like a dinosaur – it was all those things.

It was that life itself was starting to move too quickly for him and in a direction that, frankly, unnerved him. It was that the country that he loved so deeply, the country for which he’d risked everything a mere two decades prior, now felt alien to him.

So, Ben Schwartzwalder did the only thing he knew how to do. He dug in his heels even harder. Rather than accept the tidal wave of societal change that continued to unfold before his eyes, or modify his approach to coaching young men (especially young men of color), he doubled down and became even more set in his ways.

By 1970, the frustrations of the now eight African American players on the S.U. varsity football team were running so high they felt compelled to present their coach with a formal list of “demands” for improving conditions in and around the football program. Schwartzwalder, however, refused to acknowledge a single one of their demands or budge even an inch.

What’s more, because those players’ grievances were so under-reported and almost criminally misrepresented by the local media – especially by Herald-Journal columnist and sports editor Arnie Burdick, the single most powerful and widely read sportswriter in town – the support for ol’ Ben among Syracuse’s alumni and fans not only rose, it skyrocketed.

No one locally knew how hard the Black kids had worked to fine-tune their list of grievances, and the extent to which they'd tried to make them as race-neutral as possible. Their checklist of four carefully thought-out and well-crafted demands – compiled after countless nights in various dorm rooms, the Martin Luther King Center on campus, and even Ben’s Kitchen, a small, soul food joint in what remained of the 15^th Ward, where Newton worked on weekends to pay for all the chitlins, pork chop sandwiches, collard greens, corn bread and sweet tea that Ben, the owner, would dish up for him on Sundays – dealt with such universal student/athlete issues as stronger academic support for athletes, fair treatment for all players, and improved medical staffing.

There was only one item on the kids’ list of four grievances that was, in fact, based solely on skin color. Unfortunately, that was the one the Syracuse media – particularly Burdick – chose to spotlight and harp on for the loyal fans of old Bill Orange.

That demand, more specifically, was that the university hire at least one Black assistant for its football program.

For years, you see, especially during early-season, two-a-day practices, it was not uncommon for an S.U. assistant to berate a Black player for a mental mistake or missed block by referring to him as “boy” – as in “What the hell you thinkin’ out there, boy?” or “Hey, boy, wake up.  Where you supposed to be on that play?”

Yet, by 1968, and following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, that word – boy – had become as toxic to many Black Americans as any word in the English language – even more so, perhaps, than the dreaded N-word. King, in fact, had been in Memphis earlier that very year, the site of his looming assassination, because of a protracted garbage strike. And countless city sanitation workers on those lines throughout that work stoppage – Black men of all ages who walked shoulder-to-shoulder with King for hours on end – held up picket signs on which four words, and four words only, were printed: “I Am a Man.”

So, the idea that such a demeaning and manipulative word – one that conjured up in many young Black minds images of plantations, cotton picking, and slave trading – was being used openly and with impunity at Syracuse University, an esteemed institute of higher learning, was completely unacceptable to a group of eight young African American males who were, as a unit, coming of age even as the 1970’s beckoned.

Yet, as might be expected, the deck was too greatly stacked against those kids, and the odds against them, still, way too long to accomplish all they hoped to. They were, after all, operating in a northeast, working-class, smokestack city in the heart of the 20^th Century. They were operating in a Syracuse, New York full of hard-working, hard-drinking, and hard-loving men and women who toiled in factories and offices all week long, who danced on Saturday nights and prayed in churches on Sunday mornings, who obeyed the rules, who always did their best, and who believed deeply in the social order into which they’d been born and raised – men and women who continued to view Coach Ben Schwartzwalder as the very epitome of hard-work, discipline, determination and, frankly, all that was good about the country they loved.

So, when these eight African American youngsters had the temerity to turn their back on good ol’ Ben and abandon their teammates in the Spring of 1970, they got utterly savaged in local media. In both newspapers, but especially in Arnie Burdick’s column, the eight players who left in protest soon became the “militant blacks,” or the “militant Negroes.”

And in corner bars and neighborhood taverns all across town, to so many patrons, shift workers, and S.U. football fans, it was even uglier.  They became the “uppity niggers” up on the hill, a bunch of spoiled, lazy punks who conjured up images of overgrown afros and loud, odd-looking clothes, a collection of street thugs who, by all rights, should have been happy just going to college on someone else’s dime in exchange for having to do little more than play a few football games each year.

By then, the sprawling ghettos in any number of mostly Black enclaves like Watts, Detroit and Newark had already been torched during the race riots of the 1960's.  Four years had passed since the militant and heavily armed Black Panthers had been formed in Oakland.  And it was, now, two full years since Tommie Smith's and John Carlos’ black-gloved, Black-power salute of protest during the U.S. national anthem at the Mexico City Olympics.  With so many higher profile national stories involving race – stories that had been told and retold in the media countless times – the Syracuse footballers' single act of on-campus civil disobedience in the Spring of 1970 seemed to many in town to be little more than a Johnny-come-lately, me-too gesture of racial bellyaching.

For the vast majority of white football fans, the walkout at venerable old Archbold Stadium wasn't just a sacrilegious betrayal of their teammates, it was a paper thin and largely toothless demonstration by a bunch of lazy, shiftless ingrates that had little or no substance behind it – beyond, perhaps, the almost childish call for the hiring of a single Black assistant.

To be fair, who could blame many of these longtime Syracuse football fans?  After all, they weren’t being told the truth.  Or, if they were, they were just being told a tiny portion of it.

The reality was far different and infinitely more complex than what had been portrayed to viewers of Syracuse’s six o’clock news or reported by the city’s local sportswriters. But just like with the circuitous yet full-cycle journey of anti-war protester-turned-patriot David Ifshin, what would happen in time, and how things would eventually play themselves out, would be entirely irrelevant to the men and women at the heart of this story – especially in the moment.

To them, it did not matter one iota that the Syracuse 8 (as the media would soon start calling them) – Greg Allen, John Lobon, Clarence “Bucky” McGill, John Godbolt, Dana Harrell, Duane Walker, Richard Bulls and Al Newton (who’d since adopted the Islamic name, Abdullah Alif Muhammad) – would, in time, make amends and attempt to rebuild the very bridge they’d once so famously burned. Nor did it matter at all that, eventually (or at least four decades later), the eight would all be welcomed back into S.U.’s good graces. Along with a ninth black player, Ron Womack, they would all be issued formal apologies by the school. Those who could attend would, in time, be introduced to a cheering crowd in the Carrier Dome and subsequently awarded the varsity jackets they’d been denied for so long. And they would all be presented – two posthumously – with a chancellor’s award, Syracuse University’s highest honor for any alum.

Yet, just as with Ifshin, none of that mattered to local Syracusans in the Spring of 1970.

 

 

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Ben Schwartzwalder was one of two deeply-loved symbols of S.U. football that happened to find themselves in the crosshairs as the decade of the 70’s appeared on the horizon. The second turned out to be something of a cartoon character, but a character to which many Syracuse football fans felt a deep and profound loyalty. They viewed this largely two-dimensional character as being as part of their cultural heritage, if not their birthright as Central New Yorkers. Unfortunately, the much-loved symbol and their own sense of heritage proved to be no match for the symbol and heritage of the actual people upon whose bloody history that symbol was based.

That symbol-in-the-crosshairs was the age-old mascot of Syracuse University men’s sports teams, the Saltine Warrior. To S.U. fans of a certain age, to watch the Warrior – played by a member of one of the school’s most popular fraternities, who each week would dress up in moccasins, leather pants, a leather vest and a headdress, and who'd don what was supposed to be, apparently, war paint, then dance up and down the sidelines, urging the Orangemen to hold that line or make that first down – was as much a part of Fall afternoons in Central New York as brilliantly colored trees, the smell of burning leaves, and the sweet, delicate flavor of fresh-made cider.

Now, there is a story – a cherished and generational legend – that, by all rights, ought to be told to any reader here (and, frankly, told in its entirely). But, given its length, complexity, and the myriad tentacles that invariably spring from it, here’s a simplified version for the purposes of this narrative.

In the Onondaga Nation – and, indeed, the Iroquois Confederacy of six nations – there's a single, yet essential position known to the natives as Tadodaho.  The original Tadodaho (an Onondaga elder who is part of that larger, untold story that encompasses not only the sacred land upon which Syracuse was built, but the onetime massive swamps that for centuries lined Onondaga Lake, and the local native people themselves), had for years been a hate-filled and terrifying tribal leader; a disfigured demon in almost subhuman form who kept his people in line with a vengeful mix of fear, anger, and when needed, death. But through the efforts of another Onondaga elder, a remarkable man named Hiawatha, and an even more remarkable chosen son referred to throughout history as, simply, the Great Peacemaker, Tadodaho was almost magically transformed, becoming a man who, through his new-found light and purity of heart, was able to dedicate his life to the pursuit of peace.

Thereafter, whichever Onondaga elder happened to hold title of Tadodaho became his people's spiritual leader and moral conscience – not just of the Onondaga, but for the entire Iroquois Confederacy.

Enter a quiet and unassuming family man named Leon Shenandoah, who that very same year – 1968 – was chosen by his fellow council chiefs as their newest Tadodaho. A dedicated worker, skilled with his hands and good at fixing broken things, Shenandoah placed a premium on friends and family, treasured the beauty, solitude and spirituality of nature, and took the greatest joy in life’s smallest moments and many of its most underappreciated things.

Beyond that, there really was nothing particularly remarkable about the man – at least not on the surface. But that didn’t stop those chiefs from selecting the fifty-three year-old Shenandoah as the confederacy’s Tadodaho, the spiritual leader of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois being a French word the six nations been forced to wear by the white man) – the Onondaga, the Mohawk, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Oneida, and the Tuscarora.  The tribal chiefs saw in Leon Shenandoah the seeds for the very type of man any great leader would ultimately need to be, especially as times grew more challenging for native people.  They believed Shenandoah, a man of wisdom, patience, strength, moral courage and cast-iron will, had it in him to grow into the position they were now bestowing upon him – which is, of course, exactly what happened, though not before he was tested in a way that, perhaps, only one other 20^th Century Tadodaho had ever been tested before.

First, a bit more background before detailing the circumstances that shone the harsh glare of scrutiny upon a beloved but otherwise inane little college mascot.

Nineteen sixty eight also happened to be the year an activist named Dennis Banks, along with Russell Means, co-founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) out West, an organization set up to protect the rights of Native Americans coast to coast, while shedding a light on the white man’s long and sordid history of broken treaties and false promises.

To that end, Banks soon found himself at the epicenter of a number of high-profile displays of native protest and civil disobedience, including the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco, the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties, a nationwide caravan originating on the west coast and culminating in the nation’s capital, and, most infamously, the 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in which both federal agents and natives lost their lives to gunfire.

But, in reality, Banks had nothing on Leon Shenandoah, at least when it came to waking up thousands, native or otherwise, to the challenges, if not the rapidly fading footprint of all indigenous people on the American landscape. Because even as Banks was drawing his national headlines, Shenandoah was quietly and with little fanfare attempting to instill in the people of the Iroquois Confederacy, especially the younger ones, the understanding that their culture, traditions, language and heritage were all under attack and at risk of being lost forever.

What’s more, thanks to the insights and wisdom of Shenandoah’s own elders – people like Irving Powless, Sr. and others born in the 1800’s – Leon and his fellow council members (some of whom, like Chief Oren Lyons, were actually decorated ex-soldiers) came to view Vietnam in a different light than the vast majority of their old Army buddies.  They soon came to understand that the situation in Southeast Asia was almost identical to the one that had their forefathers hundreds of years prior. Because, just like then, white men from a distant land were using military might and their own sense of imperialism to try to impose their will, their form of government, their language, and their culture on a proud and independent native people.

Meanwhile, between the Native Americans’ never-ending quest for peace and their deep and abiding respect for Mother Earth, it wasn’t long before many in the sixties “counter culture” – the so-called hippies, war protesters, and those seeking to get “back to nature” – discovered they had far more in common with the American “Indian” than they ever realized.

Oren Lyons years later would even recall one Saturday getting a knock on his front door, and opening it to discover a handful of longhaired teens on his doorstep, kids barely old enough to shave, adorned in colorful shirts, jeans and love beads. The teenagers explained they wanted to become Indians and hoped to live on the reservation.  They said they’d be willing to learn and would do whatever it took to become full-blown natives.  They told Lyons they’d walked to the reservation from their homes in Syracuse that morning because they’d grown tired of the white man’s rules and his society.

The chief of the Onondaga Hawk Clan, who himself had played lacrosse alongside All American Jim Brown at Syracuse University, who once served proudly as a member of the storied 82^nd Airborne during the Korean War, and who had done time as a successful commercial artist on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, tried his best to explain that it wasn’t as easy as all that, and that maybe those kids should think about heading back home. Their parents, he tried to explain, were probably starting to worry and would soon be wondering if something bad hadn’t happened to them.

But the simple fact was, by the early (and increasingly youth-obsessed) 1970’s, just as an acute awareness of roots and ancestral heritage had started to take hold in the local African American community, it had similarly taken hold in Syracuse’s native population. So, one day, when a young native named Doug Stone, a Mohawk by birth, asked for a meeting with Shenandoah and his fellow chiefs of the council, Stone explained he’d just transferred to Syracuse University from New Mexico and had been deeply offended by what he’d seen at a recent S.U. football game: a white man dressed as a native warrior, running up and down the sidelines and leading the cheering crowd.

Even though the leadership at Stanford University in California had already voted to switch their school’s nickname from the Stanford Indian to the Stanford Cardinal out of deference to Native Americans, no other school or sports team in the country had yet to follow suit.  That is, until the day Leon Shenandoah, Tadodaho of the Iroquois Confederacy, called and asked for a meeting with Syracuse University chancellor Melvin Eggers.

Now, normally, it wouldn’t have been necessary for Shenandoah to call to set up such a meeting. He could have just as easily knocked on the door and asked the woman behind the desk for a few moments of the chancellor’s time. After all, the Onondaga chief would have been on campus anyway – him being a maintenance man there, and all.

But, instead, Shenandoah called and set up a formal, face-to-face with Eggers and handful of concerned members of his confederacy, among them, Lyons, who twenty years prior had starred in goal for the first undefeated team in the long and storied history of S.U. lacrosse.

At the meeting, and at Shenandoah’s suggestion, it was Lyons who took the lead.  After all, it was Lyons who possessed a measure of standing in the S.U. community. It was Lyons with the ability to best articulate his innermost thoughts. And it was Lyons whose passion continued to burn so intensely that, at times, it could almost seem a force unto itself.

After welcoming the six members of the Iroquois contingent, Eggers asked what he and the handful of trustees who’d joined him could do for them. Looking at the chancellor in the eye, Lyons leaned in slightly and started out by saying something to the effect that, as representatives of the Iroquois, he and his colleagues were there to talk to him about the university’s continued use of the Saltine Warrior as the school’s mascot.

As Lyons put it to the men on the other side of the conference table: “The Army mule is a mascot. The Yale bulldog is a mascot. The Navy goat is a mascot.  A proud people are not a mascot, nor should they be.” He then added, now commanding the chancellor’s gaze, “By continuing to have this man dressed up like a native warrior every Saturday, you are putting our people on the same level as animals.”

Eggers and the trustees who’d gathered all took a moment to let Lyons’ words linger in the air and settle in their minds. Controversy, confrontation and even crisis would prove to be nothing the former economics professor-turned-university-chancellor couldn’t handle, and handle as well, arguably, as any chancellor in Syracuse history. After all, it was Eggers who’d followed John Corbally into the position and who, in doing so, walked into a virtual hornet’s nest of social issues, all of which had seemingly been made even more fractious by his predecessor. It was Eggers who personally and regularly met with a group of angry student leaders, and who, in his very first meeting with them, on his very first day on the job, agreed in writing to resign if and when the student senate asked him to.  And it was Eggers who once diffused a major (and potentially violent) student occupation during the latter stages of the Vietnam War.

On top of all that, in roughly a decade, it would be Melvin Eggers’ firm yet gentle hand that would prove vital in helping the student body heal in the aftermath of the loss of thirty-five Syracuse exchange students in the terrorist bombing of the ill-fated Pan-Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland.

For their part, Shenandoah, Lyons, and the rest of the Iroquois had no idea what to expect that day from the university chancellor.  But they certainly expected at least some measure of resistance. After all, the Saltine Warrior was an institution, if not a signature part of the university’s athletic program – and had been for decades.  What’s more, that human mascot remained beloved by countless S.U. alumni in Central New York and beyond; men and women who represented not only the university’s most fervent and vocal supporters, but the very core of its life-sustaining financial backers.

Instead of resistance, however, and instead of even a whimper of protest, Eggers just sat there for a moment with one elbow on each arm of his chair, his fingers steepled in front of his mouth gently kissing his lips. He then looked around the table and into the eyes of each and every member of the native contingent. As he did that, the chancellor said gently and evenly to those half dozen men and women – but, in particular, to Shenandoah and Lyons – “I agree with you. I mean that. Completely."

He then added, “And, frankly, I’ve been expecting this day for some time now. I am truly, truly sorry for any insensitivity this institution has shown the Iroquois people, and I give you my word, the Saltine Warrior will no longer serve as the mascot of Syracuse University.”

And that was that.  Or so one might have thought.

The problem was, just as with Ben Schwartzwalder and the Syracuse 8, the football fans and good people of Syracuse knew only part of the story because, for the most part, their local media had only fed them part of it.  And those very same men and women based whatever feelings they had about the school’s decision to move on from the Saltine Warrior accordingly.

Because just as in the case of that 1970 protest by those eight uppity young Negroes against their beloved war veteran of a coach, the fans never really understood the deeper context of the issues between the Onondaga people and Syracuse University.

That’s why in the days ahead, on the op-ed page of both newspapers, the letters to the editor in support of the Saltine Warrior ran probably ten to one. Many of the pro-Warrior letters were written with such passion and intensity that one could almost visualize the writer’s white knuckles as he or she held pen in hand and hurriedly scribbled out the words that flowed from within.

Yes, these local Syracusans all understood to some degree that native tribes once roamed North America, and that much of the land they’d once used for sustaining their lives and cultures had been taken forcibly from them by white settlers who often lied, cheated and even killed in the pursuit of it. Yet many felt, in a turn-the-page sort of way, that much of that was now ancient history, water under the proverbial bridge.

But there were a great many things the locals didn’t know about the Onondaga people or the injustices they’d suffered over the years, many of them right there in Central New York.

The locals never understood, for example, that Syracuse University’s signature building, its Hall of Languages, the very first and most storied structure on the entire campus, was built on land given to the school by the Onondagas in the 1800’s in exchange for the right of future generations of Onondaga children to be able to attend the university and earn a college degree at no charge.

They didn’t know that that promise, even if it had been made in good faith, had never been kept by S.U.

They didn’t know, either, that the mighty Onondaga Nation had once measured over a hundred and eighty million acres, from Upstate New York to Canada, and that, in just over a hundred and fifty years, that once-sprawling domain of the Onondaga had been reduced to a mere fifty-nine hundred poverty-stricken acres, just south of the city.

Nor did they know that Onondaga Lake – the lake that the City of Syracuse continued to use as its very own cesspool for tons of its toxic, industrial waste, if not its very own toilet for the raw sewerage it continued to produce – was not only sacred to the Onondaga, but that its banks were the very site where the revolutionary form of democracy that America’s founding fathers would subsequently use as a model for their all-new country was first imagined and brought to life by the leaders of the five nations of the Haudenosaunee (including, of course, Hiawatha, the Peacemaker, and Tadodaho himself).

The only thing most Syracuse sports fans knew was that, now, some four years after the whole Wounded Knee episode – which, if they understood it at all, felt like old news to them – the local natives down near the Salina Drive-In were raising yet another high-profile stink, this time about something as ridiculous as a school mascot.

To many such residents, the removal of the Syracuse University Saltine Warrior was not a matter of principal or even a matter of right and wrong. It was a matter of political correctness gone completely off the rails. It was about university officials kowtowing yet again to yet another petty demand by yet another small but zealous band of left-leaning cranks trying like hell to destroy a great country.  After all, Syracuse’s local pro baseball team was still the Chiefs, and nobody was saying anything about that.  So, what in God’s name was wrong with an Indian in warpaint serving as the official mascot for the S.U. football team?  The university and those college boys who dressed up as the Saltine Warrior on weekends weren’t making fun of Indians at all. To the contrary, as portrayed by those fun-loving frat boys on those crisp Fall Saturday afternoons, S.U.’s mascot was proud and strong, just like the young Onondaga men whose likeness and spirit they tried to capture.

Or so the vast majority of these locals reasoned at the time.

To be fair, there was at least some measure of history on their side. Most of these very same locals remembered the confrontation that Chief Shenandoah, the leaders of the council, and a number of their native brethren had with dozens of armed New York State troopers dressed in full riot gear over the attempted (and, ultimately, failed) construction of a third lane on both sides of Interstate 81, a smooth, still-new stretch of blacktop that ran directly through the eastern portion of the Onondaga’s sovereign land.

Most also remembered how silly that stare-down had seemed at the time, even as it was happening back in 1971. Many of them wanted to know what the big deal was – all the state wanted to do was to add a simple third lane to a simple two-lane highway for a handful of miles, for God’s sake. Who, in their right mind, would have a problem with that little sliver of human progress?

For the better part of a week though, thousands of Syracusans had watched the city's crazy Indians on Fred Hillegas’ six o’clock news show – natives male and female, young and old – squat down and sit cross-legged in front of those earth movers all lined up on the side of the road, refusing to budge even an inch.

They'd watched former Beatle John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, come to town that very same week for the opening of an exhibit of Yoko’s art at the all-new Everson Museum in the heart of what used to be the 15^th Ward.  And they’d seen in both papers how Lennon had reached out to Shenandoah after seeing a report about the armed standoff on the local Syracuse news.  They’d also seen and read how the ex-Beatle had then invited him and a few tribal elders to his suite at the Hotel Syracuse, had listened to their side of the story, and had agreed on the spot to support them, and even participate in their protest against the state.

It all seemed so silly and so trivial to so many.  Much ado about a whole lot of nothing.

But just as with their perception of those eight young Black football players who’d walked out on Ben Schwartzwalder a short time prior, those good men and women of Syracuse – men and women who continued to watch Fred Hillegas every night and read the Post-Standard every morning – had no idea what it meant to stand in the shoes of Chief Leon Shenandoah of the Onondaga Nation, or be Tadodaho, the spiritual leader of the once-mighty but now marginalized Iroquois.

They had no clue what it felt like to watch your beloved culture and your sacred land continue to be slowly consumed by an ever-rising tide of white greed, entitlement and environmental carnage. Or to behold, as the moral flame of both your forefathers and your people, a hundred and eighty million rich, bountiful acres got turned in the relative blink of an eye into a fifty-nine hundred acre tract of rocky and barely arable land, only to then have New York State come along a short time later and say to what’s left of your people, and without asking permission, “Well, we’re going to take just a few acres more.”

It might just have been the loss of a simple and almost cartoonish team mascot, but to many longtime residents of the area, the demise of the Syracuse University Saltine Warrior meant so much more. It was yet another example of how so much of what they continued to hold dear, and so much of what defined them as proud and loyal Central New Yorkers, was being tossed overboard by their leaders in a desperate attempt to keep their now-leaky ship afloat.

All those good Syracusans saw was more, greater, and even faster change.  And all they sensed was the passing of one more thing that they held dear, and one more thing that they'd never see again.

 

 

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Ken Huffman, just as he’d promised himself, had been staying out of his kids’ way, content to let them play the up-tempo game they’d been fine-tuning all season long.  And to that point, anyway, doing so had worked out okay. But as he looked as his starters in the huddle during the previous time out – kids who’d played every minute of the game so far for him – he sensed their collective energy was, at least to some degree, starting to flag.

He’d had an idea in the back of his mind long before that All City game started, and now he found the slightly crazy notion moving front and center in his brain. It was not yet time, he reasoned, but that time was, indeed, drawing near.

In the other huddle, Billy E’s demeanor belied how concerned he’d grown over the course of the previous eight minutes. In that third period alone he’d managed to lose his hardest working player and enforcer. And his lead guard and quarterback had continued to, somehow, try to sneak by with four fouls, a nagging situation that had largely neutralized his strongest on-court asset; namely, his aggressiveness.

What’s more, Billy’s club, as strong and skilled as it might have been, had been exposed that quarter as lacking the quickness necessary to compete on such a sprawling court against a team led by a couple of jackrabbits. Coach Huffman’s boys were, literally, beating his to each and every loose ball and long rebound. In the process, they were making his kids’ legs seem heavy and slow, especially as the game continued and the fatigue factor started to set in.

Only sophomore Rich Dabrowski and junior Paul Stepien, the two Chinese Bandits he’d just called upon for relief, along with, maybe, Jack Contos, seemed capable of running with the Cougars, or at least doing so without appearing overmatched, speed-wise.

Billy had an uneasy feeling as he watched his five kids head out for the final period.  This was his third All City game on the Sacred Heart bench.  And the Hearts had come up short in both previous attempts; the first after being manhandled by a taller, deeper and more athletic Central squad, despite the presence of the magnificent Gene Fisch, and the second after dropping an overtime heartbreaker to another City League power, this time CBA, a club led by two sharpshooters, Kevin Harrigan and Bob Bregard, both of whom, ironically, had gone to Parochial League grammar schools.

The main difference was that during those first two games Billy had been an assistant under Adam Markowski.  This was the first All City game with him holding the team’s reins and in full control of the team. It wasn’t much, he figured, but it was what he chose to hold onto as he watched his boys go, even as he glanced up at the scoreboard and felt yet another twinge at the hard truth it offered him.

Back at the Sacred Heart convent, two of the older nuns seated around their big old AM/FM console had now gotten down on their knees in prayer, as had the young nun up in her bedroom, the one who had been sitting on the edge of her bed, with her reel-to-reel machine continuing to whir as it captured the drama being brought to life so vividly by Jack Morse.

At the same time, back in the stands at the War Memorial, Irene Contos, at one time the finest schoolgirl player in the city, and her fellow Hearts crazies stood whistling and applauding for their boys as they came back out for the final eight minutes. Much like Billy, their attitude was, now, less about confidence than it was raw and unmitigated hope. Irene and her fellow Hearts fans desperately hoped – and maybe even desperately needed to believe – that Jack and his teammates had it in them to come from behind, even as they recalled the harsh reality of the just-ended period and how much quicker and more athletic the Cougars appeared to be.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the War Memorial sat Sug Reddick, Pop Harlow and their wives – along with, of course, a few thousand other former residents of the city’s late, lamented 15^th Ward, the vast majority of them African Americans for whom that game meant so much more than just another Friday night out. Because that matchup against that team of Catholic boys from an all-white Catholic school in a virtually all-white neighborhood on the West Side was inextricably wrapped up in matters of racial and neighborhood pride.

Eight more minutes, many of them thought. Just eight more minutes of good, solid team ball and so much of the hurt, anger, and helplessness they felt as they watched their beloved Ward fall prey to that damn Bill Walsh and his damn wrecking ball would be eased, if only by degree, and if only for a few hours.

Even Paul Seymour – the veritable godfather of the Parochial League’s hustling, breakneck style of play, a onetime mentor to Jimmy Collins, Reddick and Harlow who'd resigned as coach of the NBA’s Baltimore Bullets prior to that ’66-’67 season – sat and watched from the Corcoran side.  Seymour, who’d walked to the game after leaving his liquor store in the hands of one of his clerks, wasn’t so much rooting for either club as he was simply basking in the glow of his hometown’s biggest annual basketball spectacle – especially now that his beloved Nats had unceremoniously pulled up stakes, left for the City of Brotherly Love, and rechristened themselves as the (gulp) “76ers.”

As the game’s fourth and final quarter got underway, right off the bat Reddick made a nifty move and barreled down the lane before muscling up a layup from the left side, the ball caroming off glass and going straight through, giving his Cougars, yet again, a relatively comfortable five-point edge.

Schmid answered for the Hearts on the next possession. When the Cougars got the ball back and following an entry pass from Harlow to Williams on the lower block, this one against Dabrowski, the Corcoran senior faked, spun, and attempted to lay the ball up softly off the glass.  Schmid rose from near the middle of the key and, with his right arm outstretched and straining, made contact with Williams’ shot enough to redirect it out of bounds, much to the delight of the Hearts’ side of the building.

Unfortunately for those Hearts loyalists, ref Ray Wojcik, a fellow Pole who Billy had known since high school, immediately blew his whistle and dutifully skipped toward the scorer’s table, his right arm extended and his wrist and index finger flicking downward. The call was goaltending, meaning Williams’ shot was good and that the scorekeeper was compelled to add two more points to the Corcoran side of the ledger.

Corcoran 57, Sacred Heart 52.

On the Hearts’ next possession, with things now edging toward full-on panic-mode for their faithful, Williams banged into Dabrowski as the kid cut through the lane.  That foul put the Cougars into the penalty, meaning there’d be a one-and-one attempt on tap for the young benchwarmer.

Dabrowski had been in the game long enough to run up and down the court a few times and work up a sweat.  He was, similarly, no longer awestruck by the circumstances, arena, or the size of the crowd.  The Hearts sophomore was living in the moment now and as focused as he’d been at any point that season.

And while he'd missed his most recent free throw – the second half of a two-shot foul near the end of the third quarter – he’d also hit a nice ten-footer just before that, one he’d taken from the left side just seconds after having entered the game.  As he stood at the foul line, Rich Dabrowski felt good, confident and completely warm, spinning the ball lightly with both hands.

From the Hearts bench, Billy watched his young, gangly Bandit and shouted his support. “C’mon, Richie,” the Hearts’ coach chirped from the sidelines, clapping his hands emphatically at chest level.  As Dabrowski turned and looked his way, Billy added supportively and, again, almost fatherly, “Focus now.  We need these.”

That may have been Billy’s mistake. Because Dabrowski’s free throw – the front end of a one-and-one (meaning if he didn't convert the first there’d be no second try) – didn’t merely miss.  It missed so badly it barely touched the side of the rim before being snatched out of the air by Reeder, the Cougars’ relentless defender and ballhawk.

Billy just shook his head and gave a glance toward his bench full of Bandits as he returned to his seat and they, in turn, sat and watched. Maybe, he thought, he should replace Dabrowski with Gozdac, or some other upperclassman.  After all, these next few minutes were for all the marbles and the Hearts could ill-afford to squander any more scoring opportunities, not with it being as late as it was and with the Cougars playing as tough as they were.

Fortunately for Billy, he had Pete Schmid on his team.  And Schmid, the powerful forward, was just not going to be denied. On the next trip, following a Karazuba miss from fifteen, he was fouled in the act and calmly hit both free throws, the second of which barely made a sound as it went through. On the subsequent possession, after yet-another Karazuba miss, Schmid banked home a somewhat mechanical twelve-foot fall-away.

Just like that, the Hearts were once again back to within a point. The Poles on the western half of the arena roared, while back in the convent, one of the older nuns gathered around the convent's console suddenly, and certainly completely unexpectedly, began to giggle with joy.  Then, almost as if the elder nun's giggle had been contagious, a few others gathered soon joined her.

There were now just under four and a half minutes remaining.

Coach Huffman had seen more than enough. His team, as athletic as they were, suddenly seemed to have no answers for Schmid, who was having his way with them, a man against boys. He signaled for a timeout, then turned and beckoned down his bench to Ben Frazier as calmly as he could, telling the baseball-loving 15^th Warder to report in.

With a little over four minutes to go, Hoffman, the onetime country boy, who now doubled as a Corcoran coach and teacher, had, at long last, made his first substitution of the game.  And it was to get more quickness and ball handling onto the floor.

In the huddle, he told his kids the idea he’d had percolating in his mind for a while. It was time, he told them, to make the Hearts pay for not being as quick as they were.

Like he’d done against a bigger and stronger Cortland team earlier that season, Huffman told his young Cougars he wanted them to go into that special, two-man offense he’d taught them – the one they’d worked on throughout the year and the one they’d used just a few weeks prior to neutralize a slower but more powerful Cortland club.  It was the offense in which Joe and Howie would stay out near the top handling the ball between the mid-court stripe and the top of the key – while the other three kept their spacing and stayed far enough from one another so that no defender could guard two men at the same time.

The Cougars margin for error had now been reduced to a single point, 57-56, and Huffman had decided this was the best way to hang on to what remained of his team's lead.

Moments after play resumed, just twenty or so seconds after Kenny Huffman’s daring strategy kicked off in earnest, what those Cougars – or at least two of them – were attempting to do became apparent to everyone.

First Harlow and then Reddick would dribble the ball in and around the Hearts defenders, dribbling it often inches from the ground, yet always keeping it a good distance from their goal. The two would take turns dribbling back and forth, and often in circles, knifing through the slower defenders, seemingly daring them to try and steal it.  Whichever Cougar star was dribbling would then, at some point, pull up and pass off to the other, who for the next twenty or so seconds would do the same thing – all the while milking precious time off the clock and keeping the ball out of the hands of the Heartsmen.

At one point, almost a full minute into the Cougar “freeze,” Reddick dribbled through his legs once, twice, and then a third time, all in rapid fire, while at the same time almost appearing to taunt his outmanned opponents.  The magically talented Cougar then brought the ball behind his back and broke, yet again, for a patch of daylight on the floor and another soft spot in Billy E’s otherwise suffocating defense.

The Corcoran crowd exploded with delight and, from the scorer’s table, young Jack Morse’s voice broke from the sheer excitement bubbling up inside him as he tried to capture the kinetic feeling inside the building for all his listeners out there in radioland.

The Corcoran freeze did more than just take time off the clock. It turned half the building into something of a sixth man for Corcoran, inspiring the vast majority of those two thousand or so 15^th Warders to rise to their feet and cheer loudly for the unlikely (and thoroughly unexpected) exhibition of basketball derring-do now playing out on the floor beneath them.

Finally, Rich Dabrowski – or “Dick” as he was being called by Morse – in a feverish mix of desperation and zeal, reached in and slapped Reddick across the forearm in an attempt to steal the ball. Billy popped up and stared out at his sophomore. It was his second foul of the game, to go along with two costly turnovers and a pair of botched free throws, one of which – critically – had been the front end of a one-and-one.

But past mistakes aside, the kid had also just put one of the best shooters in the city on the line with a chance at two easy and uncontested points.  All this with, now, just under two minutes remaining and the Hearts still trailing by one.

Exasperated, Billy signaled for his next-to-last timeout and momentarily lowered his head in frustration. Then, catching Dabrowski’s eyes, he held them as the young man neared the bench.  “Hey!,” the coach’s stern look seemed to be saying to his youngest and most undisciplined Bandit, “Relax out there and focus, will ya?  Or, I swear to God – I swear it – I’ll pull ya so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

The Corcoran freeze had done one other important thing to Billy and his boys – and this one far more practical and measurable. Just a minute or so prior, it had taken yet one more Sacred Heart starter out of the game.

Just seconds into Reddick and Harlow’s bold Globetrotter-style exhibition, Danny Van Cott, Billy E’s tough-minded little Irish floor general who’d been playing the entire half with four fouls, had committed yet another one on Steve Williams. It was his fifth, which, like Sakowski, sent him to the bench for the rest of the game. It also put Williams on the line for a single free throw, which the lanky lefty, once again, drained clean and with little effort.

As Williams had been setting up for that free throw attempt, Billy had jumped up, placed both hands together, fingers to palm, and snapped out an abrupt, “Time out” to Mike Stark, the ref closest to him. He’d then looked down his bench and decided to replace the now-disqualified Van Cott with Stepien, which seemed like both a fair trade and a fairly obvious move.

Turned out, it was a good thing Billy made that trade.  Because though Stepien was not nearly the floor leader Van Cott was (at least not in his coach’s eyes), he was slightly quicker and more athletic.  And that fact was now working in Billy’s favor as he stood before his team and contemplated what to do about the two-man stall by those quick-as-hell little bastards, Reddick and Harlow, an offense he’d never really seen used before, much less taught his boys to defend.

Still, Billy believed in his team and believed, as well, in his own ability to adapt to just about any situation. “Rich, I want you to dog Harlow,” he said with purpose, looking once more into Dabrowski’s wide eyes.  “And I mean all over the place. He’s going to want to dribble, then pass it off to Reddick, just like he’s been doing. Keep the pressure on him and let him do that.  But…and I mean this…after he passes it, deny him the ball. You got that? Seriously, son. Do you understand what I’m telling you?  I mean, do not let that son of a bitch touch that damn thing once he passes it.  Take him out of the play and guard him like you’re a defensive back and he’s a damn wide receiver. You got that?”

Dabrowski nodded and stared into his coach’s eyes, almost as though he and Billy were suddenly the only two people left on the face of the earth.

Billy then turned to Stepien and said pretty much the same thing, only with Reddick as the object of his instructions.

Finally, he turned back and said in even voice to his whole team, but especially to the five kids he now had on the floor.  “We don’t need to foul just yet, men. Believe me. There’s still plenty of time.  We still have almost two minutes left.  Just play good, solid defense and deny the ball. You hear me?  Use your feet. And I’m telling you. Deny the damn ball!”

In the other huddle, Ken Huffman tried to remain calm. His boys, after all, were in control. It was up to the Hearts to try to catch them. Nevertheless, the Corcoran coach’s stomach continued to churn, and the teeth continued to gnash behind what were now pursed lips.

When play resumed, after a Schmid misfire from about twelve feet, Williams grabbed the rebound and, looking up, found Harlow all alone on the other side of half-court. Harlow might have even had a layup, had he wanted to risk it. But, instead, the Corcoran floor general eschewed any attempt at another possible two and simply dribbled back out and around, content to take more time off the clock.

Even as Harlow did that, Billy E found himself shaking his head and thanking his lucky stars.  Outside of Schmid, his boys hadn't shot well all game long. As late as it was getting, having to score even two more points in such a game might just have been a bridge too far.

With just one minute and fifty eight seconds remaining, the fans on both sides of the War Memorial had risen and ratcheted their cheering up to almost ear-splitting levels.  The building, quite literally, shook.

Back at the convent, all the nuns had likewise risen from their seats. In the living room, those around the radio had gotten up and then eased themselves back down on two knees to start, yet again, one more rosary. Those who’d been up in their bedrooms for much of the first three quarters, had come racing downstairs to join their sisters for the final two minutes of regulation.  Those nuns joined in the house’s group prayer as well, the one that raged with religious fervor in a growing semicircle in front of that big old Philco of theirs.

The only nun who hadn’t come running down, in fact, was the young one who remained upstairs taping the broadcast, the one with, now, the crackle, pop and hum of a low-powered nighttime AM signal washing over her like the gently lapping waves of nearby Onondaga Lake.

Sometime prior, she'd switched off the overhead light and stretched out, face down, on the floor, leaving her tiny living quarters illuminated by little more than the amber glow bleeding through the rear panel of her clock radio. She continued to pray as devoutly as she knew how, and did so with, pretty much, every fiber of her being. But she was now no longer on her bed or even on her knees.  Instead, she was lying fully prone on the small braided rug in the center of her room, looking for all the world like Supergirl keeping watch over the many fine citizens of Metropolis as she soared above them.

The young nun’s intent, apparently, was to spend the rest of the game in that prone position making various deals with her God Lord Almighty regarding any and all future behavior on her part – in exchange, of course, for His granting her beloved boys the biggest win of their young lives.

On her feet now, as well, and back at the War Memorial (along with her fellow Corcoran fans), was Lillian Huffman, Ken’s wife, who held both hands to her mouth, almost in her own form of silent prayer. Lillian might have been the only person in the entire arena who truly understood the depth of her husband’s pain after the previous year's All City loss or knew how badly he wanted to win that night – despite his protests to the contrary – and not so much for his own sake, but for his kids,’ a few of whom had been forced to live through the previous year’s lightning bolt of pain.

“C’mon, Kenny,” Lillian whispered to herself, looking down at her husband with tenderness, even as the rhythmic pounding continued to rain down upon her and vibrate beneath her.

Sug Reddick stood and watched as well, though Joe’s father did not cheer or even move a muscle in his mouth. He just continued to stare down at the court and, in particular, his son.  The only sign of tension he betrayed were the two balled fists that hung beside him, one at each side, both pumping up and down slightly, and both as thick, as tight, and as black as cannonballs.  It was as if Reddick was extolling his boy – willing him, really – to find a way to hold on and win this one for his people, many of whom were still in the process of having their homes and lives ripped out from beneath them.

When all was said and done, on that particularly starry March night, over 4,000 Syracusans rose as a single unit – a single living, breathing basketball-loving organism, if you will – while twice that many, and perhaps more, listened to Jack Morse with bated breath on thousands of bedroom, kitchen, family room and car radios up and down the peaks-and-valleys south of the city, and the flatlands north of it.  That’s not to mention, of course, all those inner city radios, all those spread across all those mostly Catholic neighborhoods, and all the ones now glowing in the still snow-covered and sparsely populated farmland that cradled the geographic heart of New York State, every last one chirping away under the cold, crisp cover of a starry and brilliantly clear late winter’s night.

The 1967 All City Championship had come down to, now, just one minute and fifty eight seconds' worth of game time.  And its outcome rode squarely on the determined talents of the ten youngsters on the floor – along with the two unassuming yet remarkable men who coached them.

Billy chose to put his boys in an all-out full-court press – a somewhat complicated matchup zone he’d first taught them back in December – one that had them scrambling from the far baseline to the mid-court stripe in pursuit of the ball, trapping it inside one of four quadrants whenever they could. Despite their lack of team speed, the Hearts’ coach felt he had no real choice.

And sure enough, just a few seconds into that pressing, full-court defense, Richie Dabrowski, chasing madly after a dancing and dribbling Howie Harlow, himself darting in and out like a bat at twilight, reached out and slapped the wrist of the Corcoran guard as he was doing, yet again, his best Globetrotter imitation, a la Curly Neal.  The young Cougar stepped to the line and coolly sank both attempts to give his team a, now, four-point cushion.

The foul, meanwhile, was young Dabrowski’s third (and second in less than two minutes' time).

The two scoreboards overhead told their tale, even through the dull haze of a full night’s worth of smoke, sweat, and stale air.  The numbers read 60-56, Corcoran, with just a minute-twenty one remaining.

Billy’s boys were not about to lay down for anyone, however.  They’d come too far and worked too damn hard for that. On their next possession, Schmid was fouled after a right-wing entry pass and then rattled home the free throw he was awarded, after what seemed like an interminable number of bounces. Schmidt’s free throw may not have been pretty, but it was huge in righting the Hearts’ listing ship.

 That single marker was, then, followed by two more just eighteen seconds later when, aided by an uncharacteristic Corcoran turnover, Zaganczyk worked himself free and was able to find enough daylight to bank home an eight-foot leaner from a near-impossible angle, just a few feet inside the right baseline.

The Hearts faithful erupted as Zaganczyk’s prayer somehow found itself answered, while the young nun upstairs and back in the convent, the one stretched out like Supergirl, suddenly began to sob very real and very salty tears of joy, every last one rolling down her cheeks before disappearing into the braided rug now just inches from her nose.

Meanwhile, on the first floor, her fellow nuns howled with delight as Morse barked out the joyous news of Zaganczyk’s bank shot, some springing up off their knees to dance a little impromptu jig, rosary beads jangling.  One of them, an otherwise quiet one, simply fell on the floor face-first, as if overcome with rapture or, maybe, a heart attack.

And just like that – as if by Divine intervention – the Hearts had shaved Corcoran’s once-daunting five-point lead, yet again, to a single possession. There was now just a minute-ten left and the outcome, remarkably, remained every bit the tossup that it had been at the outset.

Both clubs were also now in the penalty which meant any fouls going forward would result in one-and-one chances for both of them, even if the team being fouled had no intention of trying to score.

This time it was Kenny Huffman who wanted time out. He called his Cougars over, mostly to let them catch their breath and regain some measure of composure.  But he also wanted to remind them that this was still their game. That it was the Hearts who were chasing them. It was the Hearts who were pressing.  And it was the Hearts who remained, at that point, very much on the defensive.

Despite the closeness of the game – or maybe because of it – Huffman chose to keep his boys in their freeze and keep the ball squarely in the hands of his two all-world guards, believing his team could score all it would need in the game’s final minute on a combination of foul shots and the kind of easy hoops that would result from the breakdowns that occur when the trailing team is forced to press.

That, at least deep down inside, was what Ken Huffman hoped.

Yet, just a few moments after play resumed, as Reddick was fouled by Zaganczyk as he dribbled in circles, just inches off the ground – much to the continued delight of the Cougar faithful – Huffman’s plan took the first of three very unexpected turns.

Reddick, who’d led the City League in scoring and who remained among the finest shooters anywhere, stood over the ball confidently as he prepared for the front end of a critical one-and-one.  If he made the shot, he not only would give his team a two-point edge with just a minute to play, but he'd earn himself a second shot and the opportunity to pad the lead to an even more comfortable three.

As he released the ball, Reddick felt good. The shot was on a perfect line and had the unmistakable arc and backspin that only the finest shooters seem to be able to achieve on each and every try.

But a funny thing happened as that ball arced toward the basket. Reddick's picture perfect-looking free throw attempt hit back iron and did so square, caroming off the front of the rim and into the outstretched and waiting hands of Contos.

The gasp on the Corcoran side was not only audible, it was almost as loud as the cheers on the Hearts’ side. In the stands, Paul Seymour simply raised an eyebrow and shook his head twice, while a few sections to his right the elder Reddick closed both eyes and held one palm against his forehead, a gesture that signified both disbelief and fatherly concern for his boy.

Yet, as was written, there were not one, or even two cruel twists of fate awaiting Ken Huffman and his young Cougars. There were three. And the final two were still out there, lurking.

On the very next possession, following a Schmid miss and a subsequent Williams thwack of a rebound, Corcoran started once again passing the ball around teasingly, and once again Reddick and Harlow began dribbling precious seconds off the clock, with the Hearts in hot pursuit the entire time.

This time the Cougars’ floor spacing was much improved and exposed even wider and more vulnerable gaps in Billy E’s full court press. As a result, even as he was dribbling in and out, and as Dabrowski, Zaganczyk and Stepien kept trying to somehow catch or cut him off, Reddick looked up and spotted Ben Frazier, the sub his coach had just inserted into the game for his quickness and ball handling. Frazier had managed to, somehow, get behind the Hearts defenders and was now in position for a virtually uncontested breakaway.

Without even a whisper of wasted movement, Reddick flicked both wrists and sent an arcing but otherwise bullet crosscourt pass diagonally over three defenders and into the waiting arms of a wide-open and wide-eyed Frazier. With just forty-five seconds left on the clock and Corcoran clinging to the narrowest of all possible leads, Benny Frazier took off in a full gallop toward his own basket, pushing the ball ahead as he did.

Just a few feet behind and coming from the opposite side was the Hearts’ muscular jumping jack, the 6’3” weightlifting, rock ‘n roll-loving, fish-catching car nut, Jack Contos. Contos had seen Reddick’s pass to Frazier coming almost before he’d thrown it and had instinctively turned up-court in anticipation.

So there the two young men came, Frazier from one side and a few steps ahead, and Contos from the opposite, his eyes fixed like a falcon on a field mouse, his muscles and heart pumping for all they were worth, and his focus squarely on the bouncing ball now sitting dead in his crosshairs.

From her location in the lower level, Irene Contos hunched over slightly while she stood next to the Sacred Heart parishioner who lived to trumpet the coming of the Hearts, as if doing so was his bread of life – the crusty old coot with the shrill, high-pitched voice and the Elmer Fudd hat – and she did so transfixed, almost as though she was, somehow, trying to almost will her boy to not merely catch the Cougar, but to soar high and far enough to block his shot. Irene was now frozen in anticipation, watching things unfold, all the while with both fists balled up tight, knuckles pressed against either side of her chin.

Years later, Ben Frazier would contend he’d pulled a muscle earlier that week playing a little early-season baseball, as he and a few buddies were trying to get a jump start on that Spring's tryouts.  He’d contend as well that he never told anyone about his leg, especially Coach Huffman, for fear Old Stoneface might not play him in the All City game.

That may or may not have been the case. Regardless, the fact remains that on that particular Friday the young Cougar backup was sporting a large Ace bandage on his thigh as he drove toward the otherwise unguarded rim and the likely two points that his team so desperately needed to stop the bleeding and, just maybe, put the game on ice.

As Frazier planted his left leg to take off, and as the 15^th Ward faithful roared with anticipation, the youngster could feel the looming presence of Contos over his back-left shoulder. He’d seen and played against the Hearts star forward enough to know that, especially for a white boy, he could soar like few others. So, rather than taking an extra step and using the backboard on the right side of the rim, as many might have chosen to do, Ben Frazier instead opted to take the ball directly to the rim, to the very front of it, while contorting his body to try to shield Contos, who by then was airborne and stretching up and out in a ferocious attempt to swat away the ball that was, just now, about to leave Frazier’s hand.

Catapulting off his bad leg, the one whose upper reaches remained swaddled in a big, thick bandage, Frazier felt his thigh tighten and felt, too, its discernable lack of spring. His feeble attempt at a breakaway layup – basketball’s easiest of all shots – barely made it over the front of the rim, before sliding from left to right, doing almost a full three-sixty, and then rolling off harmlessly to one side.

The second bit of cruel fate had just bitten Kenny Huffman and his Cougars.

Two down, one to go.

As the loose ball bounced toward the corner, Morse was bellowing to his listeners, “WIDE OPEN AND HE MISSED IT!!!...” without mentioning poor Ben Frazier by name.  Frazier felt his heart in his throat as he craned his neck from beneath the basket and watched his botched shot roll harmlessly away.

Huffman, meanwhile, just lowered his head on the Corcoran bench as if, yet again, the dark hand of fate had decided to come knocking. The Cougars head man felt as though, truly, someone had just sucker-punched him in the gut – and done so for the second All City game in as many years.

Up in the stands, amid the cascade of boos aimed at Frazier, which rained down upon her as well, Lillian Huffman held the fingers of her right hand over her lips and eyed her husband as he stared into the grain of the hardwood beneath him. She imagined his thoughts, tried to feel his emotions, her heart aching, wishing she could do something, anything, to comfort the man – the good man – she loved so deeply.

Billy E, on the other hand, was in an entirely different place. Having just been handed a second (and, yet again, thoroughly unexpected) gift from those crazy basketball gods – and having had both drop into his lap in the space of no more than twenty seconds – he suddenly felt a rush of adrenaline surge through his body.

Fortunately for Huffman and the Cougars, Reddick – the finest all-round athlete on the court – never stopped hustling on the play, even as his teammate appeared destined to put an easy two points on the board.  Trailing the play from deep at the other end, and hustling the entire way, Reddick’s raw speed allowed him to run Frazier’s errant shot down in the corner before Contos, and even Frazier himself, could extract themselves from the mass of fans around the basket support and scramble after it.

It was a stunning exhibition of athleticism by Reddick, and it so caught the Hearts by surprise, that Zaganczyk seemed to foul the Cougar star reflexively once he grabbed the ball, perhaps fearing that Reddick might just dribble the rest of the game away with his team in pursuit and powerless to stop him.

There were now just twenty-eight seconds left and the Corcoran side of the building was going what might best be described as street-rat crazy.

The problem for Billy and the Heartsmen was simple. Corcoran was in the bonus, which meant that Zaganczyk’s instinctive foul on Reddick gave the latter yet one more one-and-one opportunity and one more chance – as Huffman had hoped when he first called for the freeze – to win the game from the free throw line.

As he stood over the ball handed to him by Wojcik, the referee, and spun it in his hands twice, few players in the city could have done so with any more faith in his own ability than Joe Reddick. Sure, he’d missed that other one-and-one moments ago, but that was a one-off, he thought.  Everyone, even Dave Bing, Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, misses now and then.

But that faith aside, there was something about Reddick’s mindset that, even then, set him apart from most other high school athletes who, in their one little corner of the world, ooze self-confidence.  Joe Reddick never saw, or even considered, anything on a basketball court that he felt he couldn’t do, and do better than the next guy.

He shot often and did so with boundless confidence.  Yet, he didn’t shoot so often or so indiscriminately that anyone – teammate or opponent, alike – would ever consider him a “gunner” or someone who wouldn’t willfully pass up an open shot for a teammate be more open than he.

Joe Reddick was handsome. Joe Reddick was polite.  And, above all, Joe Reddick could play – just flat-out play the game of basketball, and do so better than, virtually, any schoolboy who ever picked up a ball in Syracuse.  That’s why over the course of his three-year high school career at VO and Corcoran he’d become something of a cult figure, and not just within the streets of the 15^th Ward, but in the many white homes, schools and playgrounds that peppered Onondaga County.

Mark Bowka, for example, was a 7^th grader at St. Ann’s, a grammar school on the city’s southwest side.  He was also the single best 13-year old player in Syracuse, and a kid every coach in town would have loved to have had in his starting lineup in two seasons' time.

What’s more, the very next season Bowka’s team would win the overall Diocesan grammar school championship over Assumption, based almost exclusively on his strength, leaping ability and almost machine-like precision as a shooter.

Yet, as great as Mark Bowka was, and as much as other kids his age and younger looked up to him and wanted to play like he did, Bowka, himself, had a basketball hero. And that hero was Joe Reddick. Bowka loved Reddick’s combination of power and grace.  He loved his style and attitude.  And he loved the way the ball, especially late in a close game, always seemed to find its way into his hands.

That’s why Mark Bowka wore number twenty-two for the Eagles of St. Ann’s – because that was Joe Reddick’s number.

Chris Grover too, whose dad, George, had bought that color TV set from Olum’s appliance store following his wife’s death so that he and his boys could bond while watching that fall’s Notre Dame/Michigan State football game, was a huge Reddick fan. In fact, Grover – an aspiring basketball player in his own right, as well as a fledgling writer and poet, even as a fourteen-year old eighth grader at St. Charles Borromeo – used to craft poems and weave together long lyrical essays about the greatness of Joe Reddick, often using little more than his own imagination, a box score, and one or two paragraphs’ worth of game story in the morning paper.

And while young Mark Bowka was actually in the War Memorial that very night, a guest of Billy E, who’d already been recruiting him for Sacred Heart, young Chris Grover was at home in Westvale, sitting at his desk in his tiny bedroom, pencil in hand and staring at his clock radio as Jack Morse’s words and descriptions continued to crackle and pop just inches away, all the while bringing the exploits of his basketball hero to life in his young mind's eye.

So, as Joe Reddick stood over the ball at his own foul line, no one in all of Syracuse and Onondaga County – either at the War Memorial or listening on the radio – expected anything less than two quick flicks of his wrist, two perfect swishes, and a three-point Cougar lead.

Except for one thing: those pesky gods of basketball.

Clank.

Even as the two teams battled for the rebound of Reddick’s unexpected, if not stunning miss – his second failed one-and-one in the past thirty seconds – Ken Huffman could do little more than just sit and stare out onto the court without speaking or even moving.

Those devilish gods of basketball – if anyone still had any doubt – had just spoken.  And they’d done so, now, for the third time in less than two minutes.

As Contos snatched the loose ball out of the air, Billy E, his eyes now flush with new-found life, shot up from his backside and signaled madly for another time out.  It would be his last, but damned if he cared. Suddenly he and his Hearts were playing with more house money than he’d ever seen in his life.

As the Hearts’ coach hitched up his trousers and gave his already crooked tie yet another yank – making it, now, even more crooked – he felt for all the world like the wind was finally, at long last, at his back in a way that, frankly, it hadn’t been all half.

“Bring it in, men,” the bespectacled thirty-something husband and father barked above the roar, clapping his hands as the cheerleaders bounced and gyrated deliriously to his left.  With his entire ballclub now huddled around him, Billy surprised them all, at least to a degree.  He told them he did not want to play for the last shot.

Instead, he said, he wanted them to look for their first good shot and then follow it for all they were worth.  “There’s a chance we can get an easy put-back because they’ll be so focused on stopping our shot,” he urged his boys. “Just attack the rim and don’t stop attacking it. Believe me. You do that, and this game’s ours.”

Billy then ordered the five-man rotation that he’d cobbled together (following the Sakowski and Van Cott disqualifications) to work the ball down low to Schmid and let him force Corcoran to either double team him and create openings elsewhere, or to try to stop him one-on-one – a difficult task under the best of circumstances.

“You feelin’ it?” he asked his players, now grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat as he straightened, pumped his left fist almost imperceptibly and broke the huddle. In that same moment, he glanced up at one of the scoreboards overhead and pushed his glasses, yet again, up his nose. Billy E’s question to his kids was, of course, rhetorical.  And it was asked more as a way of reminding them that the momentum had suddenly swung in their favor than as an attempt to actually determine whether or not they felt it.

Regardless, he wanted to keep his young charges loose and prevent them from thinking too much about the do-or-die nature of the circumstances about them. And while that somewhat impish grin of his seemed at least a touch out of place, given his club's dire straits, it helped Schmid, Contos and their three teammates assume a mantel of calm when everything around them dictated pretty much the opposite.

Meanwhile, in the other huddle, Ken Huffman told his boys he wanted them in their collapsing man-to-man defense.  Such a defense would allow his Cougars to continue to take advantage of their superior quickness on the perimeter. But it would also give them the option of double and triple-teaming Schmid – especially if, as expected, the Hearts tried to force it into their 6’5” star, either down low or up top.

“Watch out for Schmid,” Huffman cautioned his five iron-men starters above the noise of the frothy crowd, as they in turn stared back in silence. “Whatever you do – whatever you do – I mean it. Put a body on that guy and do not let him beat us. You got that?”

Even though they could barely hear over the noise, all five Cougar starters, perhaps lip-reading Huffman’s final three words of advice, nodded emphatically once or twice, as did a few of the kids otherwise glued to his bench.

When play resumed, the whole arena rose yet again as what was left of Billy E's starting unit brought the ball up against the now hunched, focused and more-ready-than-ever Cougar iron men – one of whom (Harlow) had also managed to ring up his fourth foul and who was now, likewise, out there on borrowed time.

It was Zaganczyk and Stepien in the backcourt for Billy, with Contos and Schmid down low, and Dabrowski acting as something of a swingman on the weak side.  There were now just twenty-one seconds left and counting.

For Huffman, as always, it was Reddick and Harlow in the backcourt, with Williams and Reeder up front, and Karazuba alternating back and forth between the two spots.

The energy was beyond electric, the crowd deafening, as fans on both sides stomped, clapped, and pleaded with their boys, loosing throaty exhortations in an attempt to, somehow, make basketball magic happen.  One half of the War Memorial beseeched the kids in maroon – the ones with the ball – to try to make it dance for them, while the other cried out to those in white, the ones trying like hell and willing to do anything they could to stop it from going through the basket.

Billy E and Kenny Huffman sat and stared intently as senior Joe Zaganczyk advanced the ball to half court and beyond, both men covered with the unmistakable sheen of late-game coach-sweat.  The two also appeared to be mumbling to themselves under their breaths, even as they sat restlessly, shifting and contorting their bodies while watching the action unfold before them.

Zaganczyk manned the point position for the Hearts. To his right, on one wing, was the now laser-focused Stepien, Billy’s most trusted Chinese Bandit, and further still in the right corner was Contos.  In the low post and with his back to the hoop was Schmid, while on the opposite side stood the kid with the big eyes and bigger ears, Dabrowski, a good twenty feet or so from the basket.

The ball moved from one player to the next on the right-hand side. For a few seconds anyway, Contos held it high over his head as Karazuba fronted him, both arms held high and one hand directly in Contos' face. Contos faked an entry pass to Schmid in the post, but instead quickly wheeled the ball back out to Stepien who, in turn, whipped it across to Zaganczyk, who was still being hounded up top by Reddick.

There were now just fifteen seconds left and the electricity crackled through the crowd like an exposed nerve.

Coming to meet Stepien’s snap pass, the Hearts senior guard grabbed it with two hands, even as Reddick grunted and lunged past him in a vain attempt to make a steal and, just maybe, turn it into the breakaway layup that would, finally and at long last, ice the game for the City League champs.

As Reddick scrambled to get back into position, Zaganczyk faked a bounce pass into the middle, but instead lofted a delicate lob there.

At the sane instant, Schmid, who’d been stationed low, and on the right side of the key, took two giant strides toward Zaganczyk’s arcing lob, meeting the ball near the free throw line, just as it began to arc downward. Catching it with both hands as Harlow, Karazuba and Reeder swarmed him, just as their coach had instructed them, Schmid didn't even think about looking for his shot.

Sensing the multiple openings created by Corcoran’s decision to double and triple team him, Schmid did what only the most court-savvy players are able to do when both time and circumstance call for it: he intuitively sensed, and found, the open man.

Almost without looking, he whipped the ball with a quick flick of his right wrist not just to an open man, but the most open man on the entire court: young Richie Dabrowski, the sophomore Chinese Bandit in the far left corner, the kid whose game that season – at least to that point, anyway – had been marked more by passion and potential than any actual production.

There were now just eleven ticks left.

Dabrowski’s eyes widened as the ball flew toward him. His fingers were splayed and his knees bent ever-so slightly.  Behind him, on the bench, his fellow Bandits watched as, in what almost appeared to be slow motion, Schmid’s quick flick of a touch-pass came directly toward them. They saw its spin and felt as almost palpable sense of anticipation as it neared the waiting hands of their youngest and, to be fair, most untethered benchmate.

Dabrowski caught the softly worn leather, lowered the ball just so and gave it a quick and almost imperceptible half-spin, looking up and taking dead aim on the rim, now some twenty-two feet away. Billy E, who rarely popped out of his seat at all – except, maybe, to call a timeout or bark out some instructions to someone, somewhere on the court – did just that. It was all he could do, in fact, not to run directly on the court and let out a blood-curdling, “No!” directly into Dabrowski’s big right ear as he set himself and got ready to release his slightly awkward-looking push shot from the corner, just to the left of his own bench.

But the bespectacled Sacred Heart coach did not run onto the court.  He just stood there in a silent mix of hope and prayer, leaning forward slightly as he did, the out-of-bounds line running just beneath the tips of his brand-new Thom McAns.

Billy had told his boys he wanted them to take their first good shot. And technically, he supposed, this was that.  But still, he heard a voice inside him say as he stood there a solitary figure in a sea of fanatics, his stomach roiling…Dabrowski?

Still, even before the ball had fully left the young benchwarmer’s fingertips, Billy heard another, more calming voice saying, “Hey, if nothing else, that kid’s got a set of balls on him. Ya gotta give him that much.”

Young Richard Dabrowski did, indeed, possess a man-sized set of testicles.

In fact, three years later, while playing on the freshman team at Niagara in nearby Buffalo, Dabrowski would end up defending a teammate named John Barsanti by going toe-to-toe with the great Calvin Murphy – a Niagara All American and a generational talent who, years later, would still be regarded by many observers as the toughest man, pound for pound, to ever play in the NBA – after Murphy began ripping Barsanti in the locker room for having the temerity to steal the ball from him during an exhibition game in front of, pretty much, the entire Niagara student body.

So as young Rich Dabrowski’s unlikely and not-particularly attractive push shot from the far corner of the War Memorial’s hardwood made its way toward the basket on the night of March 10, 1967, as it arced up and then spun down, and as the crowd watching in the arena and listening at home or in their car held its collective breath one more time, there was, perhaps, only one person within the sound of Jack Morse’s voice who knew that long-range bomb was spot-on and knew it was destined to find nothing but the bottom of the net: namely, the gangly, first-generation Polish immigrant who’d actually let it fly.

The reactions to Dabrowski’s dramatic go-ahead field goal with, now, just nine seconds left, were as varied as the people who’d been waiting in breathless anticipation of its verdict.

From his vantage point in front of his bench, even as the fans behind him thundered wave after wave of approval, Billy E simply closed his eyes, stuck his hands in his pockets, and tilted his head back a touch, the faintest of smiles cracking the two sides of his otherwise still closed-and-taut lips.

Irene Contos and the crusty old parishioner in the Elmer Fudd hat with the dangling straps hugged like two long-lost war buddies, bouncing up and down as the cheers rained down upon them both.

The older nuns back at Sacred Heart, the ones who’d been huddled downstairs around their Philco, danced for joy, all of them shouting and whooping, a few even lifting the hems of their habits so as not to trip, while every last one of them at some point looked up at the ceiling, as if to heaven, and as if to acknowledge the Good Lord’s role in the miracle they’d all just heard that nice young man on the radio describe to them in such glorious and wonderful detail.

Meanwhile, the youngest of them all, the nun upstairs alone, and the one with all those tears of joy still streaming down her peach-perfect and cream-colored cheeks, simply bounded up from her small, braided rug, flung her bedroom door wide open, pumped two fists, and with her eyes closed tight screamed to her fellow nuns a floor below in a high-pitched voice reminiscent of a schoolgirl at a Beatles concert.

Around the bar at the Old Port, every last regular in the place raised a fist in celebration when the kid’s shot ripped through. Many of them rose from their seats, cheering in the direction of the tiny GE radio that Mo Pichura had set up next to the cash register – cheers so loud, so full of Polish pride, and reverberating so loudly that they physically shook the Old Port’s large front window overlooking the frozen neon of Genesee Street.

Pichura’s little brown radio – that little plastic-covered mass of tubes, wires, solder and a large circular dial – had just told every last one of those leathery old Poles the unlikely tale of a most unlikely player, a true son of the Motherland, who’d, quite possibly and most remarkably, just turned himself into a folk hero by hitting the winning shot in the biggest game in the history of their proud little parish.

As all that was happening, Pichura’s partner behind the bar, Rudy, dutifully went from man-to-man down the entire run of the well-waxed hardwood and set up a shot glass for each, a thick jigger that would soon be filled to the brim with a golden elixir from the Seagram’s bottle he now held high in one hand, a smile beaming from his usually world-weary mug.

“Get your Irish asses ready,” old Cuz thought to himself as he poured yet another shot for yet another regular, calling to mind with the wryest of smiles his long-standing bet with those two damn Coleman brothers over on Tipp Hill.

It wasn’t that the Hearts had won, mind you. After all, there were still a full nine seconds left. It was that, dammit, after so many minutes of being on the short end of the score that second half – not to mention so many empty possessions, so many missed free throws, and so many agonizing fits and starts – the Heartsmen had finally, and at long last, taken the lead.

Back at the War Memorial, Seymour, the ex-Nat and NBA coach, didn’t cheer, at least not aloud and not for anyone to hear. But he stood, straight and tall, and did so with his winter jacket draped over one arm. He grinned and applauded. But above all – maybe, most of all – he beamed. Because if anyone in the entire city of Syracuse could recognize when a hustling, hardworking, and otherwise unassuming young man had taken it upon himself to defy the odds, overcome his own shortcomings, and rise to the occasion for his teammates, it was Paul Seymour.

Meanwhile, a few sections to his right, the two fathers, Reddick and Harlow, both now feeling like they’d just been kicked in the head by a mule, nevertheless stood resolute and leaned in toward the court below them where their boys were now scurrying to try to get off one last shot and, just maybe, recapture the lead.

In reality, though, that swift mule kick of Dabrowski’s had just cast a deep and decided pall over the two, if not the entire Corcoran side of the building. Suddenly, as if out of the blue, so many Corcoran fans in that 12-year old Art Deco sports palace couldn’t help but feel it was 1966, Jimmy Collins and Hank Ponti all over again.

Once again, Syracuse’s powerful all-white establishment was about to break the hearts of so many Syracusans whose roots traced back to that colorful and one-of-a-kind little patch of ground that for generations in town had been known – both lovingly and disdainfully – as the 15^th Ward.

Once again, all those Black folks from that selfsame Ward – men, women and even small children, whose beloved neighborhood had been coldly labeled a “slum” by their own mayor, then plowed under heartlessly, if not callously, in sacrifice to the gods of “progress” – were going to, for the second time in just two years, end up holding the shitty end of very shitty stick.

As a result, many of those same fans now despaired, and did so openly, even as senior Howie Harlow hurriedly inbounded the ball to his longtime friend Joe Reddick, who, in turn, immediately flicked it up ahead to classmate, Steve Williams.

And many of those same fans thought, if not felt deep down, why even fight it? Why even bother? And why even hope for, much less expect, something different?

Something…better?

That, as much as anything, was the reason why, following Rich Dabrowski’s dagger from the far left corner, many on the Corcoran side didn’t boo, or moan, or even react. In fact, most barely even cheered as their boys hurriedly got the ball in and raced it up-court, the seconds methodically disappearing, not unlike the final few grains of sand in an hourglass.

Most of these Syracusans of color just grew eerily still and seemed to almost willfully drape themselves in a blanket of half-quiet – even as they stood, even as they watched, even as they tried to exhort their boys to match the Hearts’ miracle with one of their own.

After not trailing the entire half, it was almost as though the harsh, cruel and maybe even predetermined nature of their fate – basketball and otherwise – had just been made clear to those now-adrift 15^th Warders.

This, even though there were still nine seconds on the clock and Corcoran had the ball with a good chance to win.

As that array of human emotion, reactions, and permeations – along with so many others – continued to play out in real-life terms in locations across the city, Ken Huffman stood up from his bench and took one giant step forward. But then, the gentleman coach from the farm country to the south did little more than stand in front of his kids and watch the events before him unfold.

(Or, more to the point, he stood in front of little Benny Frazier, the hard-working but lightly-used backup who he liked so much and respected so deeply, the kid from little Sodus Bay, and the kid with the big heart and the bum leg who’d just clanked the wide-open breakaway that might have otherwise sealed the deal for his team and who, now, simply sat with his face in his hands trying to cope with the distinct and ever-growing possibility that he just might throw up at any moment).

As he stood there, Huffman’s rational brain told him he should raise both hands and signal for his last time out to set up one final play. But his gut told him otherwise. His gut told him that, given the speed and the talent of his once-in-a-lifetime backcourt, combined with the fact that the Hearts might just be celebrating (even a touch) and, therefore, less-than-prepared for a good, old-fashioned rush up the court in the waning seconds, it was time to keep his mouth shut and his hands by his side.

It told him, in other words, to let his kids try to win that crazy mythical title that he so loathed – and win it outright, right there and then.

Huffman trusted his young Cougars. He’d trusted them all season, and probably always would. They were all, at least for the most part, good kids. He loved most of them. They'd worked their asses off for him – and, in the case of a few of the seniors, had done so for three years.  Now was the time (or at least that’s what the Zen-like coach and teacher inside kept whispering) to let go of the leash and give his five kids a chance to determine their own fate.

Which is exactly what Ken Huffman did.

Unfortunately, Steve Williams, for all he could go get the ball, and for as jackrabbit-fast as he might have been, especially when in a full stride, was simply not a kid with good hands. He bobbled Reddick’s pass to him was slightly as he tried to catch it while racing headlong toward his own goal, the clock winding down and Schmid barreling down on him hard and from an angle opposite the basket.

As a result, Corcoran’s five starters never did get that last second shot at redemption that Kenny Huffman had been dreaming about for a full year.

There may have been only nine seconds left on the clock when Rich Dabrowski's shot ripped through the nylon, but within those final nine ticks, fans would see, in order: a loose ball, a mad scramble, a tie-up between Williams and Schmid, a variation on the Hearts opening tip play in which Schmid tipped it directly to Contos, a pass by Contos to Dabrowski on the wing, a fifth foul by Harlow, another disqualification (followed by another young guard trudging to the bench exhausted), yet another missed one-and-one by the game’s ultimate hero, Dabrowski, and yet another rebound by Williams, who, even as the clock ran out, tried in vain to fire the ball the length of the court – a desperation heave for a desperate young man in pursuit of a miracle that, alas, was never going to happen.

As the Hearts kids, including every last one of Billy’s Chinese Bandits, raced screaming out to center court to celebrate, and as hundreds of fans on the west side of the War Memorial poured out of their seats to join in as well, most of the Corcoran kids – just as they’d done after last year’s heartbreaker – fell to the ground and hung their heads in a cruel combination of shame and exhaustion.

The powerful Corcoran Cougars would go on to win the Section III championship that year.  And they and their coach would be feted for doing so and written about at length in the sports pages for days to come.  But that win, even years later, would not feel as good as this loss would feel bad.

Reddick and Frazier, in particular, were both in tears, one still seated alone on the bench and the other out near his own foul line.

As Billy E met Kenny Huffman in front of the scorer’s table, he shook his hand and offered his condolences. Huffman responded in kind with his congratulations.

What struck Billy most about that moment was the warm smile that Huffman offered him as he took his hand.  Billy knew that smile of Huffman’s must have been a façade.  He knew that the nagging pain of such a tough loss was in there somewhere, obviously, a pain made all the more acute by the fact that this was the guy’s second heartbreaker in the past two All City games.

But, try as he might, he simply couldn't detect anything that gave it away. All Billy E saw in Ken Huffman’s eyes were warmth, humanity, and what looked, for the world, like genuine happiness at his own success. In fact, even as he raced out to center court to join his team in celebration, the Hearts coach found himself unable to shake the image of his opposite number's warm and genuine smile.

 

 

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As Billy was out a center court, surrounded by a bunch of his players and fans, a very large black gentleman approached him quickly and in earnest, his eyes fixed on the Hearts' coach.  From nearby, Jim Corbett, one of the kids buried deep on Billy’s bench, felt alarm bells go off.  Something of a street-smart Irish kid from Tipp Hill, it crossed his mind, if only for a moment, that he may just have to intervene.  The guy appeared, at least to Corbett, to be someone who might just have trouble in mind.

But, instead of attacking Billy, that towering man – whose name was Manny Breland, and who, as a kid, used to shine shoes to pay for his own haircuts at Grant Malone's, whose mother once shopped at the Dirty Store to stretch a dime, and who had spent his entire life in streets, classrooms, churches and modest homes of the Ward – not only didn’t attack Billy E, he stuck out a big paw, smiled broadly, and said, “Congratulations, coach!  That was one of the greatest games I’ve ever seen in my life!”

Afterward, in the Hearts locker room, there was still plenty of hugging and back-slapping going on – along with, of course, all the requisite whooping and hollering.  Almost immediately, the Heartsmen, their coach and team manager were joined in that dingy little cinderblock nook in the War Memorial, one teeming with joyous noise, by a pair of high school beat reporters – Mike Holdridge of the Post-Standard and Adam Gajewski of the Herald-Journal, along with a staff photographer from the Herald.

Following a harmless string of standard post-game softballs from the two reporters, Billy offered a series of his finest and most practiced clichés – mechanical, by-the-book answers to game-day questions in which he complimented the opposing coach, called the vanquished Cougars the “toughest team we’ve faced all year,” mentioned how hard his kids had worked all game long, and called the victory in the All City game “a total team effort.”

Billy made no mention, however, of young Rich Dabrowski, the sophomore Chinese Bandit who continued to bounce around just a few feet behind him, shaking hands, hugging teammates, getting his hair tousled, and perhaps as much as anything, waiting for one of those reporters to ask him about his game-winning shot – a question that, just like Williams’ longed-for miracle at the end of the game, would never come.

If it had, Richie would have told that reporter that he made the shot, not just for Sacred Heart, but for his entire league – the Parochial League. He had made it, he would tell the guy, for every kid on every team he played against that year. He was proud to be a Parochial Leaguer and that he liked to think every one of his teammates felt the same way.

But while that question never did come his way, the Herald-Journal photographer did, at one point, tell the Heartsmen to get together against the far wall.  He said he wanted to take a photo for the next day’s paper.  That was the moment at which, as if guided by a force beyond their control, Jim Corbett, Leo Najdul and Wally Kicak – hard-working Chinese Bandits, every one of them – came up behind Dabrowski, picked him up abruptly and hoisted him toward the ceiling, holding him there as best they could, one under each of Dabrowski’s thighs, the third boy using both hands to try to support his backside.

The other eight Heartsmen, Billy E, and Shoff, the manager, then joyously circled around the game’s unlikely hero now being held in the air like an oversized and slightly bony ragdoll, a toothy smile beaming from his ragamuffin face, his hair now a tousled mess, and his big ears still doing that open car-door thing they did so well; this while everyone smiled for the camera, pumped a fist in the air, and screamed in celebration of what would turn out to be, arguably, the last great moment in Parochial League history – not knowing, of course, that in less than a year’s time that very same beloved league of theirs would take the very next step on what would prove to be its very own death march.

Over in the City League locker room, things were much different.  The only sounds at all happened to be the occasional sniffle, some random shuffling of bare feet on the hard, concrete floor, the showers being run at full blast, and the dutiful stripping down and tossing aside of every last implement of Friday night warfare, everything from white Converse sneakers to athletic tape, sweat socks and jock straps.

Precious little talk, however.

Kenny Huffman had already done his duty and gathered his team together to remind them that, while this one might hurt, they had to put it behind them, and do so right away.  The Section Three tournament was just days away and, as a team, they still had plenty of work to do.

Huffman knew, though, that, at least for two of his kids, all that “keep your eye on the ball and your focus on the task ahead” talk was simply not going to cut it. These two needed more, he understood. They needed something personal, something one-on-one, and something deeply human, almost to the point of spiritual.

The coach and father in Kenny Huffman knew that, and knew it all too well.

He first went up to little Ben Frazier, as the young man sat silently in front of his locker next to the door that led to the outside. Without saying a word, he sat down next to Frazier and looked straight ahead as his young backup guard stared down at the floor without saying a word.

It was a good five seconds before Ken Huffman spoke. He’d always been a man of few words, but this was different. He wanted to think of just the right thing to say. Huffman had heard a few of his players mumbling to one another about Frazier’s wide-open botched layup.  He figured the kid had probably heard it as well.

He just wanted Frazier to know he was there for him if he wanted to get anything off his chest.  “Benny,” Huffman finally said softly but evenly, still staring straight ahead, “Don’t take anything you may have heard to heart. Really. Believe me, we would have never made it this far without you.”

After another pregnant silence, he continued, “You’re a terrific player. You need to know that. And Joe and Howie are both better players as well for having had to face you every day in practice, the way they did. Just understand, Benny, I’m really proud of you, and I couldn’t be any more so if you were my own son.”

Huffman then added as a button to his little chin-up moment with his favorite sub, slapping him on the knee as he did, “You hang in there, okay?  And I’ll see you at practice Monday afternoon.  I promise you, we’re gonna make people pay for tonight and we’re gonna win the Sectionals this year.  Count on it.”

It was all Ben Frazier could do not to break down in tears. He felt so empty and alone, even with his teammates and coach in the room with him. He also felt he’d let them all down.  Yet, as alone and despondent as he felt, he really appreciated what Coach Huffman had just said.

Sure, he had a father in his life, even though he didn't live with him and his mother anymore.  He had a stepfather, too, who was good to him and his mom. But in that raw and unscripted moment just now, right there in that dingy, smelly locker room – with those few well-chosen words of empathy and compassion – no adult male, Black or white, had ever made a bigger impression or been more of a father to him than Coach Huffman.

Frazier then silently watched as Huffman got up and went over to his teammate, Corcoran’s star player, Reddick, who sat on the other side of the room, a white towel draped over his head, covering his face.  Reddick remained fully dressed in his uniform and with his canvas sneakers still tied tight, even though his sweat had long-since dried and his tired muscles were now slowly starting to stiffen.

Huffman sat down again, only this time he didn’t wait to speak.  “Joe,” Huffman chirped.

“Joe!” the Corcoran coach immediately repeated, this time louder.

Reddick slowly pulled the towel off his head and turned toward his coach, his eyes still red with the last few remnants of freshly cried tears.

Staring into Reddick’s disconsolate face, Ken Huffman said simply, and, once again, in a soothing, non-coach sort of way, “You’re one of the best I’ve ever seen, Joe.  Anywhere. I want you to know that.”

Reddick just stared back at his coach without saying a word, a puzzled look slowly appearing from a place deep behind his eyes.  That’s when Huffman added before his star guard even had a chance to respond, “And I’m so proud to have you on my team."

Huffman then reached out his hand for Reddick to shake, while adding man-to-man, almost as though the two were, somehow, not coach and player anymore, but peers, “Thanks for everything you’ve given me these past three years. I really mean that.”

He then shifted his tone entirely and added quickly, “Practice Monday, okay?  Rest up.  And I’ll see you then.”

With that, Old Stoneface got up, grabbed his coat, and left to go find Lillian. He needed a beer and figured she might too. Maybe even a mile high Danzer’s corned beef sandwich on rye for the two of them, while they were at it.

Reddick, meanwhile, just watched his coach go, the door closing slowly behind him. His tears had dried.  As he sat there, Joe Reddick bent over and began to unlace his sneakers, the sound of the locker room showers cleansing and comforting his young brain like the gentle wash of a soft, summer rain.

 

 

 

 

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As the Heartsmen were combing their hair, tying their shoes, and packing their sweaty gear into smelly gym bags, and just moments after Billy had held up his hand and made an announcement that the Boss – Monsignor Piejda – wanted to see them all back at the rectory right away, two uniformed Syracuse policemen with stern faces and billy clubs by their side, came into the room.  After conferring with Billy E, the older of the two began instructing everyone to follow them once they were fully packed and ready to go.

Save Billy, no one was quite sure why, or what was going on.

What was going on was yet another of Father Sammons’ race-based, ham-fisted attempts at security. The previous year, following Corcoran’s loss to Evangelist, a number of Black youths who’d been in the War Memorial and pulling for the Cougars apparently started picking fights with a number of white kids in the streets outside. In their rage and frustration, they'd also broken a couple of store windows, slashed a few tires, and turned over some garbage cans as they worked their way back home to the South Side.

Meanwhile, a few white students that very same day – among them, young J.J. Harrison, a terrific shooter and soon-to-be all-Parochial League star for St. Pat’s, along with some buddies, who’d, likewise, been at the game – were hidden in a building foyer by a cop who recognized them, knew they were at risk, and feared for their safety. The same cop later put the three boys into a nearby squad car and had them driven home to Tipp Hill.

The ruckus in the streets created by those few Black kids that day hadn’t boiled over into a full-blown “riot,” but, in the opinion of a few Parochial League players and families who’d been there, and who watched those kids’ anger take shape and gain traction, it was close.

That fact and others led Sammons to reach out to the Syracuse chief of police in the days leading up to the ‘67 All City game and ask him to make provisions for the protection of the Hearts players (along with their coach, staff and family members) – especially, of course, if they happened to win.  The city’s top cop took that to mean protect them from the moment they left their locker room to whenever they got into whatever vehicle happened to be driving them home.

That’s why the two cops had come into the Sacred Heart locker room soon after the game had ended and why they almost immediately began marshaling everyone into a single group and ordering them to stay close as they walked.

That’s also why, rather than exiting through the main auditorium, where all their family, friends and fans were supposedly waiting to congratulate them, the boys were paraded through the bowels of the War Memorial and up a dark and seldom used stairwell that led to street level at the far northwest corner of the building.

There, they were instructed to wait while the first of the officers slowly opened the door and peered out, surveying the nighttime street.

Rich Dabrowski, the night’s unlikely hero, happened to be one of the first Hearts players to reach the door. When it opened, what the young sophomore saw were two things that surprised him and made him do something of a double-take.

The first was a queue of, maybe, seven or eight cars along the side street, lined up like taxi cabs, all of them with their lights on, all of them idling, and all of them with a Sacred Hearts parent at the wheel. The second was a row of cops leading from that side door of the War Memorial to the very first of those cars.

It was full-on police protection for a bunch of kids, their coach and manager – all of whom had been guilty of nothing more than winning a basketball game.

Race may not have been a part of those kids’ everyday vocabulary, much less their everyday lives. And even though every last one of them, like so many others in town, might have been largely ignorant of civil rights –  at least as a social a moral issue – race had already started to make an impact, if only by the tiniest of degrees, on their lives, the place they called home, and the times in which they lived.

And that impact would only deepen and grow more profound in a few months time as 1968, Vietnam, and two especially shocking assassinations would rock the country, and bustling little Syracuse’s onetime gentle past would find itself standing on the precipice, poised and ready to become its soon-to-be far less-certain future.

 

 

 

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They were billed as “The Gauchos…Freddy and his bold partner, Francy,” a husband-and-wife trick shot team from Massapequa, on the south shore of Long Island, near Oyster Bay.

The Great North-Eastern Sports Show, an outdoor extravaganza celebrating its 11^th year and featuring many of the latest advances in hunting, fishing and camping gear, was slated for March 1^st through the 5^th, Wednesday through Sunday, at the Onondaga County War Memorial. Headlining were some of the biggest names in field and stream; in particular, Roscoe Vernon “Gadabout” Gaddis, the world-famous “Flying Fisherman” and host of a popular syndicated TV show of the same name.

Jack Contos loved that show. He loved its host, too. That’s why the Hearts’ senior rarely missed the folksy and homespun pilot’s weekly excursion to yet another exotic fishing locale; a half-hour escape presented in full “living” color, one that ran just about each and every Saturday on channel 3.

In truth, Contos loved fishing for bass, walleye, perch and bluegill almost as much as he loved lifting weights, playing basketball, listening to rock and roll, and talking to pretty young girls, though necessarily in that order. So, one day that week while downing his customary two baloney sandwiches in the cafeteria over a second-hand copy of the Post-Standard he came upon an ad on in the sports section for the annual Great North-Eastern Sports Show. That’s when he decided he’d stop by Uncle Andy’s after school to ask his fishing buddy if he’d like to join him for a chance to meet the great Gadabout. The Flying Fisherman, as Jack read in the ad, was giving a free clinic on Saturday afternoon.

As luck would have it, that was the day between the Friday's Parochial League semifinals and its championship game on Sunday. And, as Jack knew, it was just six days before the much-ballyhooed All City Championship at that same War Memorial.

He and Uncle Andy, in other words, would not be attending the Sports Show on opening night, Wednesday, the night on which the Gauchos would be taking the stage for the first time.

(Also, truth be told, much like almost everyone else, Jack would never have gone just to see some husband-and-wife trick shot team. But, by the same token – and, again, like so many others – he’d find it near-impossible to turn away in those final few hushed moments before Freddy took aim and pulled the trigger on yet another one of Francy and his death-defying trick shots.)

“Freddy Gaucho” was, in reality, Fred Gray, a 58-year old carny who’d spent over forty-four years as a trick shot artist. “Francy Gaucho,” in turn, was Elaine Gray, a raven-haired 31-year old mother of one; a small and slightly plump downstate girl with thick, shoulder-length hair and an even thicker Long Island accent, who’d been performing with Gray since the day twelve years earlier that he got down on bended knee and asked her, at nineteen, to become his wife.

If the crowd was sparse that first night, it was mainly because most knew that the first night of any trade show was always something of a shakedown cruise for the vendors. Many would still be hanging signs and tweaking booths, hoping the weekend would bring them overflow crowds.

Even with those modest expectations, attendance that first night was disappointing, the crowd, in fact, amounting to probably no more than 600 Central New Yorkers who'd braved both the rain and chill.  Yet the show, as has been said, must go on.

In the opening moments of the Gauchos first set, Freddy, using a handheld mic wired to a nearby speaker, announced to the gathering that his lovely partner – Francy – would place a coffee cup on her head and that, blindfolded, seated, and with his back to her, he’d shoot the cup from atop her head.

Most in the hall paid him little or no mind and simply went about their business, many at the sprawling freshwater fish tank on the left side of the floor, others moseying from booth to booth, asking questions, looking at displays, and, whenever possible, pocketing an outdoor calendar or ballpoint pen – whatever tchotchkes they could get their hands on.

Relatively few were actually paying attention to the rifle-toting “Gaucho” and his pretty little assistant; that is, until the first shot rang out and echoed through the rafters.  That’s when virtually everyone in the place turned and began noticing what was happening under the Deco-style proscenium and the faded, smoke-stained American flag that hung beneath it.

Freddy’s first shot had missed high, maybe on purpose, maybe not. Who knew? Regardless, suddenly, a few hundred Central New Yorkers were turned toward the southern end of the hall, watching and listening, their interest now piqued.

What they next heard was Francy’s pixie-like voice and nasally accent coaching her partner where to aim the well-oiled .22 rifle balanced on his shoulder, while he sat facing the crowd and with his back to her.

“Up a bit…”

Or…“Down a skooch…”

Or…“Just a little to your right…”

As little Francy continued aligning Freddy, many of the men couldn’t help but be drawn to her, or at least her attire. She wore a skin-tight, sequenced bathing suit-style getup in jet black and ruby red and featuring a handful of well-located tassels.  She also sported black high heels and a pair of fishnet stockings that had, alas, seen better days.

But what most eyes were drawn to – men and women alike – was not Francy’s Vegas-style getup, it was the odd-looking gizmo around her neck. The apparatus, constructed of wooden dowels extending out to a pair of angled elbows secured by a thick leather collar, was apparently designed to support the small porcelain cup perched atop a seven-inch high pedestal, keeping it fixed on Francy’s head and preventing it from falling.

Freddy, for his part, wore a blue-and-black Western-style shirt made of satin and trimmed with thin, white piping. It featured a dozen or so hand-sewn white-and-yellow daisies along the lapels and cuffs. Though Freddy didn’t wear a cowboy hat, he did sport a pair of fresh-pressed Levis, a studded belt, and a newish-looking pair of two-tone, black-and-white cowboy boots. He also wore a silk bandana in sunflower yellow around his neck. In keeping with the rest of his drugstore cowboy getup, the blindfold he wore was shiny black satin and wrapped dramatically over both eyes.

By the time Freddy was ready to pull the trigger on his second shot, the cavernous room had quieted considerably, everyone in full-hush mode, less out of morbid curiosity than a real and, perhaps, growing, sense of intrigue.

Certainly, some of those on hand believed Freddy was using blanks, and that the whole thing was just a big hoax designed to lure them in before letting them off the same hook the two carnies had used to lure them in in the first place.

The true outdoorsmen in front of the stage, however – most of them gun owners, themselves – knew full well the sound of live ammunition. And when they heard Freddy’s first shot crack and echo throughout the largely empty hall and heard, too, the faint thud on the pock-marked wall behind the young lady in the skimpy outfit, they knew it was a real .22 caliber rifle the guy was firing and that the bullets were the real deal as well.

Freddy’s second shot, however, like his first, missed its mark and embedded itself into the small, portable wall that Francy and her eight-year old daughter had, together, wheeled out and set in place that very afternoon.

With that second miss, however, there were now a few groans and a growing sense of impatience starting to rise from a crowd expecting that the white porcelain cup on the young lady’s head would explode into a jillion pieces at the next crack of her partner’s .22.

Undeterred, Francy dug in and began the aiming process for a third time. Her husband, meanwhile, smiled sheepishly and humorously apologized for missing yet again. He even chuckled and said not to worry, three had always been his lucky number.

Who knows if there’d been any traces of flop sweat forming on the guy’s aged brow – or if his first two misses were just part of some well-rehearsed shtick? In the end, it didn’t really matter. Those two conspicuously loud misses upped the ante in the hall considerably. Now most everyone's attention was focused squarely on the stage – or, more to the point, on the 58-year old Long Island guy who sat perched upon it.

Gray had performed the trick maybe a thousand times, if not more. It was a shot he could pull off, virtually, in his sleep.  Sitting there, her legs still crossed and her smile still bright, little Francy told her husband to relax and take a breath. Then she coached him through the process, yet again, of taking aim.

“Another skooch to the left,” she offered coquettishly in her somewhat baby-doll accent. “There! That’s good. Now,” she paused, looking intently at her husband and the rifle suspended on his shoulder, “Up just a bit. A little more. Nope. Nope…too far. Down. Down. Stop!!! Right there! That’s it.  Now you got it.”

As a few hundred hunters, fishermen and gawkers on the floor below waited, Freddy’s .22 caliber long-arm cracked for a third time, echoing, once again, under the rafters and up and down the largely empty hall.

The time, that small white cup at which Fred Gray had been aiming did, indeed, break into a cloud of fragments. But not because the small .22 caliber lead projectile that he'd fired from his rifle, blindfolded and backward, had somehow pulverized it into thousand pieces of particles and dust.

No, it shattered because of the impact of little Francy’s head hitting the stage, while both the cup and the contraption that held it crashed violently against the floor.

The people watching directly in front stood stunned and silent, if only for an instant. For the tiniest fraction of a second, none of them seemed to realize what had just occurred, or how to process the fact that the pretty young lady a few feet from them, the one with the pixie-like voice, had just been shot in the face right before their eyes.

What finally shook those Central New Yorkers out of their stunned silence was the God-forsaken sound that followed: Francy, face down, twitching and bleeding, emitting a scream so chilling and so full of pain and disbelief, that no one there that night would ever forget it for as long as they lived.

Bolting out of his chair, Fred Gray ripped off his blindfold and raced to his wife’s side, falling to his knees beside her.  He was soon joined by his daughter, Lisa, who’d run onstage from one of the wings and was now kneeling beside her mother, screaming and sobbing uncontrollably.

When Freddy turned Francy over, where had been a right eye was now little more than a black hole of jagged flesh and oozing body fluids.  The sight made both father and daughter gasp, the woman they loved stretched out before them, her life seeping from the wound inflicted upon her by her husband and partner.

Within moments, Francy had all but stopped moving and making sounds.  She simply lay there in a quiet, eerie stillness – her good eye now closed, her left hand reflexively twitching, and her breathing growing shallower and fainter with each passing moment.

Fred Gray was quickly helped to his feet and led away, sobbing loudly, by two off-duty cops who’d been hired as security guards. An elderly family doctor, who'd been in the watching crowd below, continued to do his best to treat Francy and keep her breathing. Meanwhile, her daughter, Lisa, simply knelt by her mother’s side, held Francy's hand and rocked back and forth, now sobbing quietly as she did.

“What have I done?” wailed Gray to the two off-duty cops who’d ushered him away, gasping audibly as both hands ran through the two sides of his Vitalis-laden and jet-black dyed hair.  “My God…My GOD!!!…What have I done???”

He then turned to one of the officers, the one who’d placed a hand on his back as a small gesture of empathy.  “Kill me,” he pleaded, shaking his head, the tears streaming down his cheeks. “For God’s sake, please…PLEASE!  Kill me!!!” When they didn't respond, he burst out, “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR???”

By the time the paramedics arrived, Franny, under the direction of the doctor, had been carried to the basement in a woolen army blanked via the freight elevator. She was then gently loaded into the back of a large red-and-white modified station wagon with the words “Eastern Ambulance” stenciled across each side door.

The now-dozens of the volunteers who’d hurried into the basement to lend a hand, one of them still holding Francy’s bloody woolen blanket, watched as the ambulance, with its rooftop gumball pulsing ominously, pulled off into the darkness.

But when the driver got maybe a third of the way up the ramp to Montgomery Street his vehicle slowed to a stop, even as his tires continued to spin faster and faster. The rains had fallen so suddenly and with such ferocity that when the large overhead door was opened to let the ambulance out, a gush of water began poured down the oil-stained concrete ramp, making traction all-but impossible.

Even as the ambulance's two rear tires continued to whine and spin, one of the volunteers bolted off into the darkness toward its glowing taillights, followed by another, and another still. Before long, there were five, maybe six Central New York men of various ages and sizes pushing for all they were worth, with others soon rushing to join them.  With little Elaine Gray in the rear of that red-and-white ambulance, still bleeding and fighting to stay alive, twenty men and a few teenage boys, shoulder-to-shoulder and three deep, pushed that ambulance up toward the neon lights and cold damp air, moaning and straining, inch by inch, until they got it to the top of the steep slick driveway.

Elaine Gray would end up holding on for almost two full days. She’d continue to cling to life, even as the doctors and nurses who treated her remained keenly aware that the end was near.

And, of course, they were right.

In the end, “bold” little Francy Gray never regained consciousness.  Before she died, however, the doctors not only ended up removing what remained of her eye, they also made the difficult decision to leave the bullet where it was, for fear of causing even further damage to the poor girl.

Fred Gray would spend three days in Crouse Hospital, as well, not as a visitor or a man on a vigil at his wife’s bedside, but for treatment for a case of shock his doctors termed, “severe.”

Meanwhile, a 39-year old reporter writing under the byline, Peter B. Volmes, covering what most of his colleagues had simply assumed would be just another trade show at the War Memorial, wound up offering readers three days’ worth of detail-rich accounts of one of the most unspeakable human tragedies to ever play itself out in Syracuse. The very first of those found itself splashed all over the front page in the following morning’s Post-Standard – complete with photos and a screaming, above-the-fold headline. Indeed, the old newspaper adage, “If it bleeds, it leads,” had never been so true in the Salt City.

It wasn’t just that by the first day of March 1967 – the week before the last All City game the town would ever know – Syracuse’s 15^th Ward had all but fallen to the wrecking ball.

And it wasn’t just that a colorful and vibrant neighborhood, if not an entire way of life and/or sense of community, had been erased from the face of the city forever.

Likewise, it wasn’t just that that pesky little conflict in Southeast Asia, a half a world away, was now spinning so out of control it was costing even a few local boys some combination of life and limb.

No, it was that there was – embodied by the gruesome death of little Francy Gray – something else entirely afoot. It was a something few could explain, or even name. It was, however, something just as real as it was present. And it was something that had at its very core, violence.

But not just any violence.  And not just the kind of violence that, in years past, had always been reserved for the usual suspects; the gang members, the hooligans, the criminals and the political lightning rods and trouble makers.

To the contrary. It was a violence that invaded and tore at the core of so many who viewed themselves as the heart and soul of working-class America.  It was violence that regularly spilled large quantities of blood onto countless, unsuspecting middle-class lives, the vast majority of which were white.  And it was violence that was bold, ugly, and cruelly random; a violence that was mad as hell and viewed the world with its fists and teeth clenched; a violence that, in the end, showed little or no regard for such basic human concepts as boundaries, propriety, decency or, above all, innocence.

Indeed, by the second week of March of 1967, the week of the All City game, the violent and turbulent Sixties had, at long last, come to Syracuse.

 

 

 

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For Kenny Huffman, the first week of March always felt like the best of times and worst of times. Corcoran’s head man loved the early days of Spring and the long-awaited drying of the city’s maze of concrete sidewalks. He loved the Section Three Playoffs as well, a single-elimination tourney that pitted the best schoolboy teams in Central New York against one another: it was a game that, for a few years, anyway, his squads had gone into as favorites, if not won outright.

On the other hand, since there were no City League playoffs each season (while the Parochial League spent the weekend between the end of its regular season and the All City game staging a two-round playoff featuring its four top teams), Huffman’s boys had more than a few extra days to catch their breath, relax, and give their tired muscles a rest; in fact, they had almost two full weeks without a single game.

For the coach of the City League champion, with all that time off, along with the growing daylight and ever-looming threat of (for lack of a better word) senioritis – keeping his kids razor sharp was no small task.

Beyond that, though, Ken Huffman was no fan of Syracuse’s All City game. To him, it was just a big dog-and-pony show, a hardwood carnival conceived and staged by a few insiders for bragging rights and a few moments of tavern-based chest-beating.

To his thinking, the All City game, for all its hype, did not, in any way, shape or form, constitute a meaningful postseason achievement for any team fortunate enough to actually win it.  He had firsthand knowledge, after all. He’d won the thing more than any other coach in the city.

What’s more, the All City game was becoming a contest in which the larger City League schools were, more and more, finding themselves in a no-win situation. Because whenever a City League school happened to win, many in town, sports reporters on down, would diminish its significance by implying or even saying aloud that, once again, strength, numbers and sheer schoolboy “athleticism” had somehow triumphed over good old-fashioned Parochial League grit, hustle and determination.

As such, by 1967, any City League victory short of a blowout, increasingly anyway, was started to be almost looked on at as a loss.

Yet, as the 1967 game neared, things seemed different.

For one thing, as even-tempered and mild-mannered as Huffman could be (his players, after all, didn’t call him “Old Stoneface” for nothing), and despite his general distaste for the game, this was one he truly wanted. The previous season’s gut-wrenching loss at the hands of Evangelist, in a game marked by ref Hank Ponti’s controversial (and still widely debated) call on Jimmy Collins continued to invade his thoughts regularly.

Still, that was only part of it.

The ‘67 game also seemed different to Huffman because even though Corcoran had well over two hundred boys try out for that year’s team, he'd ended up with a final roster that – skin color and hair texture notwithstanding – had the physical size, stature and makeup of a classic Parochial League team.

What that meant was that his Cougars, despite having been handpicked from a pool of talent, perhaps, six, seven, or even eight times deeper than the one in which Billy E found himself wading, were, nevertheless, shockingly slender and almost comically undersized.

As a result, Huffman wound up playing just five kids in a number of games that year – and rarely more than six or seven. A big reason for that was that, even though his two most capable reserves were good kids and, certainly, fine young men, in the end they were flawed basketball players.

Ben Frazier, for example, was a good ball handler and quick as a mouse, but as much as Huffman loved the young man he called “Benny,” he had to admit the kid just didn’t, at least at that point, have a great feel for the game and was only a so-so shooter. He might have been a terrific little athlete and may have worked as hard as anyone on the team, but he was simply not the kind of player who was going to steal much time from any one of his five starters, particularly the two thoroughbreds he had manning the backcourt.

And Wally Mirgorod, for all his ability to kick a ball powerfully and with uncanny accuracy, both on the soccer pitch and the football field (and for all he loved to play basketball and worked tirelessly at it), was virtually tone deaf about the game’s more nuanced elements; things like floor spacing, ball movement, and looking to make that one extra pass to break down a defense. The kid’s instincts were just too raw and unrefined to trust in a tight contest, believed Huffman, and that was likely due to the fact he’d picked up the game so relatively late in life.

On top of that – or, maybe, because of it – young Migorod’s hands were, at that point anyway, almost as undercooked as his instincts.

So, Coach Huffman rode his five starters – and only his five starters – night after night, game after game, and quarter after quarter, rode them for all they were worth.

In fact, had the Vegas oddsmakers been handicapping that 1967 All City game at Syracuse’s War Memorial, it’s fair to say Ken Huffman’s Corcoran Cougars – despite the huge edge they held in overall student population and the size of the pool from which they got to build their roster – might not have even been favored.

Yes, they were quicker.  Yes, they possessed a generational, perhaps historically great backcourt.  And, yes, every last one of their five starters, seemingly, could run until the cows came home.

But Sacred Heart was not only significantly bigger and stronger, in a couple of years four of the five starters would prove to be so good they’d be playing college ball.

Pete Schmid, for example, would win a full scholarship to Boston College, where he’d go on to star under NBA Hall of Famer and Celtic legend, Bob Cousy.

Tom Sakowski would take his muscle, determination and coachability and suit up for the Lakers of Oswego State.

And both Joe Zaganczyk and Jack Contos would play in Canada, at Loyola of Montreal, where the latter would emerge one of the most exciting players in the entire country, mostly because of his strength, leaping ability, and the powerful, almost jaw-dropping way he could soar to the hoop to snatch rebounds, follow errant shots, and swat away opponents’ field goal attempts like so many pesky flies.

Put another way, the student population numbers may have favored Corcoran, but other numbers were not nearly so kind to them. The Cougars’ front line, for example, measured just 6’1,” 6’1” and 6’0,” whereas Billy E’s measured a broad and oh-so brawny 6’6,” 6’5” and 6’3.”

What’s more, while Huffman may have only gone five or six deep that season, Billy E had at his disposal as many as nine kids who could, and often did, play important minutes for him, depending upon the situation.

So Sacred Heart was not only bigger and stronger. They were just silly-deep, at least by high school standards. Plus, as Billy remained all-too aware, his kids had come this close to running the table and coming into that All City Championship with a perfect 18-0 record, compiled against some pretty tough Parochial League competition.

Therefore – on paper, anyway – despite public opinion to the contrary and what continued to be bandied about in many taverns in town, coming into the contest it was not unrealistic for any knowledgeable fan to envision an All City that game quickly devolved into a blowout, with the taller, more powerful and deeper Heartsmen putting the hammer down on the less physically imposing Cougars.

That might have been the way the game unfolded too, except for one small but critical factor that has long been sports’ tried-and-true equalizer.

Speed.

Kenny Huffman’s Cougars not only had it, they had it in spades.  Huffman’s boys could flat-out fly, especially three of the young colts he started.

As for Billy E and his Heartsmen, unlike Hoffman’s Cougars, he and his boys hadn't had a full two weeks to rest before their first postseason game. They had just four days, in fact, before the Parochial League playoffs.

For once, Billy relished having little time to prepare.  He thought not having time to think too much could work for his boys despite how physically drained they were. After all, Hearts had barely squeaked by Evangelist’s and Lucy’s to close out the regular season, and had then been chewed up and spit out in their 18^th and final game by Baptist's.

To Billy, what they needed most was to get back on the horse. They needed to regroup and, somehow, regain the mojo that had slowly but surely slipped away from them over the course of the past two weeks.  For him, that year’s playoffs represented a perfect opportunity for his club to fix what ailed it in advance of the All City game and Diocesan tournament, both of which now hovered over his head like a guillotine.

Lack of rest aside, there was one other postseason quirk of the already quirky Parochial League at play: at the end of every regular season, the team finishing first didn’t necessarily have to play the fourth-place club in the opening round. Per league rules, that team could choose to play either the second or third place club, if they so chose.

It was a wrinkle that created more than a few intriguing considerations for a coach. A personal grudge, perhaps?  Maybe, a favorable matchup or injury to a star player on the other team?  Or, simply the best matchup?

Following the Hearts’ humiliation in their regular season finale, Billy E opted to take on the Vees of St. Vincent’s in the first round, the #4 seed, even though Vincent’s had taken the Hearts to overtime before finally succumbing in December, the first of two times they'd met in the regular season.

Vincent’s was a mostly Italian school from the city’s East Side. Not only were they the lowest ranked of Billy’s possible opponents, but the other two were the league’s rugged St. John’s clubs: Evangelist and Baptist. And while the former had twice given Billy’s boys all they could handle, the latter – revenge factor notwithstanding – was a team he wanted no part of, given the thrashing he’d just taken at their hands.

The problem for the Heartsmen, at least on the opening night of the playoffs, was that, once again, the other team failed to get the memo.  The Vincent’s kids – just as they’d done the first time the two met – played Billy’s with a confidence and fire completely unbefitting a team that came in as the lowest seed in the tournament.  They picked, passed, and shot well enough to stay close to the heavily favored Heartsmen the whole game through, from the opening tip to the final buzzer.  And, while Billy E’s team ultimately won – and a win, as most any coach will tell you, is a win – the Hearts’ head honcho sure as hell didn’t feel great about it.

His team, still, wasn't playing well.  Billy E would have found that disturbing at any time of year, but it was downright scary now, in crunch time.

That’s what made his club’s subsequent victory two days later against Felasco’s Eagles so sweet, coming against a well-coached and tough-as-nails unit led by a man who, by any measure, was the finest coach in the city.

And not only did it come in the very building – the War Memorial – that less than a week later would host the biggest and most eagerly anticipated game of the year: the All City Championship.

But, what made Hearts’ win in the finals especially sweet was the fact that Billy’s boys had played magnificently the entire game. Brilliantly, in fact. They defended well. They ran the court well. They moved the ball well.  And, of course, they shot the hell out of the thing.

What’s more, they did those things for the first time in what, at least to Billy, seemed like ages.

The Heartsmen’s finals performance that third day of March wasn’t necessarily a clinic, much less a case of one team finally asserting its dominance. But it was a game that spoke loudly and clearly to everyone who mattered – particularly Billy E, himself.  The Hearts’ machine-like win in the finals of the ‘67 Parochial League playoffs – their third in three tries against a sneaky-tough bunch of boys and their take-no-prisoners coach – reminded everyone that Sacred Heart was still a special team full of special kids who, on any given night, were capable of special things.

 

 

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

 

As with so many family vacations, the anticipation is often better than the trip itself.  Such may or may not have been the case with that year’s eagerly anticipated All City Championship.  Either way, the lead-up to the All City game – like all that fried fish on Friday – carried with it the delectable aroma of anticipation.  Many Sacred Heart parishioners acted accordingly.

Cuz Rudy, the veteran barkeep at the Old Port, for example, made his usual bet with Pete and Danny Coleman, the two Irish brothers, night owls, and unapologetic wild men who owned Coleman’s Tavern, a corner Irish bar just down the street from Cuz’s small upstairs apartment in Tipp Hill – with the usual stakes in play. As always, if Corcoran prevailed, Cuz would stop on his way to work the following Monday for his morning bracer, climb atop Coleman’s pool table, drop his trousers, lean over and, while doing a shot of Irish whiskey, have his ass painted shamrock green by the Brothers Coleman.

If the Hearts won, on the other hand, the derriere-painting chores would instead fall to Rudy and his cousin-in-cocktails, Moe Pichura, while Pete and Danny would do shots of imported Polish vodka and have their Irish asses painted, not shamrock green, but a red as bright and as proud as the Polish flag itself.

In a similar vein, on the Tuesday prior to the game, the owner of the small, three-chair barber shop just a stone’s throw from the school posted a sign in his front window offering half-price “All City Haircuts” all week long to anyone hoping to look good for the game.

Olum’s, meanwhile, the family-run electronics store, offered free deliveries of any appliances, TV sets or radio consoles purchased in the days leading up to Friday big game.

Before the All City game, the nuns of Sacred Heart – who never, ever missed a home game (but who, for reasons never fully understood by anyone, did not travel to away ones), spent the entire All-City week saying seven days’ worth of a nine-day novena for their boys.  This was done solely in the confines of the convent since none of those nuns would be at the War Memorial in person to beseech the Lord and ask Him to bestow His good graces on the twelve sons of Poland.  (Well, okay.  Nine sons of Poland, one Czech, one German and one Irishman, but who’s counting?)

One of those nuns, in fact, the youngest in the entire convent, went to her closet that Tuesday, just after evening prayer, and pulled out the small reel-to-reel tape recorder that her parents had sent her the previous Christmas.  She placed it on the nightstand next to her bed and fed the end of the brown recording tape into the appropriate slot in the pickup reel, before clicking the machine on for a second or two to let it wrap itself around the spool for two or three turns.

She'd read in the Post-Standard that the game was going to be aired live on WHEN radio and that a station announcer named Jack Morse, whose primary job was reading scores on WHEN-TV’s six and eleven o’clock news, would be handling play-by-play duties.

Even though that twenty-something, creamy skinned Catholic nun would not be at the game herself, she wanted to record it from her clock radio, the one that woke her every day at 5:00 AM for morning prayer so she could relive the excitement (and, hopefully, her boys’ victory) whenever she chose.

Of course, late that Friday afternoon, the parish “Boss” – Monsignor Piejda – pulled three of his finest, Jack Contos, Pete Schmid and Joey Zaganczyk, out of class and did what he always did before a big game.  He gave the three a variation of what, over the years, had become something of his signature pep talk.

At a handful of points during any one season, Piejda would stop by one or two of the classrooms, stick his head in, take a varsity player or two out of class, and then lead them down the hall, out the front door, and over to the rectory.  There, he’d close his office door, ask them to take a seat, and offer up some variation on his tried-and-true formula for ensuring peak performance.

“How are the legs today, men?” he’d ask. “Feeling strong?”

“Yes, monsignor,” each would invariably reply, with the faintest trace of an eye-roll in his voice, and body language to match.

“And the arms, shoulders and backs?”

“Good, monsignor.  Feelin’ really…really good.”

“Well, boys, that’s the Lord inside you. Remember that. He – or should I say His Sacred Heart – is giving you that strength.  He’s the One making everything you have, everything you are, and everything you do, possible.  Never forget that and never lose sight of what that means in terms of tonight’s game.”

That was the point at which Piejda’s pep talk would invariably start to riff on what had since become a common and recurring theme for him. He’d slowly start to mold his talk around the relative merits of the patron saint of that night’s opponent.

“Tonight we’re playing Assumption, correct?” the elderly pastor would ask. “Now, as you know, the Blessed Virgin is the Holy Mother of God. But even though, as you also know, through the miracle of the Immaculate Conception, she brought our Lord into this world, nursed Him, and mothered Him to adulthood, there is simply no way – no way – a team representing the Assumption of Mary could ever possibly beat a team playing for the glory and honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”  The priest gave a palms-up gesture, a forced half-smile, and a slight cock of the head to support this fairly obvious contention.

Now, to be fair – at least when it came to that one particular game; a matchup between Sacred Heart and the North Side academy named in honor of the "assumption" of Mary, body and soul, into the kingdom of heaven – one might suppose that, given our Lord’s well-chronicled deference, if not all-out devotion, to His Blessed Mother, a case could be made that such a game could actually turn out to be pretty close.

However, no such ecclesiastical case could ever be made for any team whose sweaty and moth-eaten uniforms bore the name of such dust-to-dust mortals and mid-level servants of the Lord as St. Patrick, St. Anthony, St. Lucy or, heaven forbid, St. Vincent.

So on the particular All City Friday in 1967, when Piejda gathered Schmid, Contos and Zaganczyk in his office – Billy E’s single finest player and his two most experienced seniors – he simply could not rely on his go-to pep talk. After all, for the first time since His Excellency, Bishop Foery, had named him pastor, his boys were going to be playing in a high-profile, must-win game, not against a Catholic school with its own patron saint, but a huge public institution, one open to students of all religions, beliefs and backgrounds, and one funded by taxpayers from all across the city.

What’s more, it was a high school with hundreds of boys.  Not a few dozen, like his – or, for that matter, any of the ten Parochial League schools.

As a result, the Boss reached into his bag of greatest hits and pulled out the one Biblical tale that always seemed appropriate when someone (or something) found himself facing the prospects of going up against someone (or something) much bigger or stronger than he.

That old trusty and well-worn parable, otherwise known as the story of David-versus-Goliath.

Unfortunately for the players he pulled out of class that day, all three were fully aware that the David vs. Goliath thing was patently ridiculous, especially when attempting to contrast their basketball team to Corcoran’s. After all, they were taller, bigger and more physically imposing. They were the ones capable of almost blocking out the sun.  And they were the ones who could use their superior size and muscle to overwhelm just about any opponent in Syracuse, much less an opponent as height-challenged as Corcoran.

They were, in other words, not the David in the Boss’ Biblical parable.  They were the Goliath.  And they had the size, strength and muscles to prove it.

Plus, even as they sat there, they knew something that perhaps even the good Monsignor did not.  The three players sat there fully aware that they’d already faced Corcoran that season.

Twice, as a matter of fact.

Prior to the start of the regular season, Billy E and Ken Huffman – two lifelong basketball nuts whose mutual respect knew no bounds, and who saw the other guy’s club as a great yardstick against which to measure his own – had arranged for a pair of home-and-home practice games, both on Sunday morning and both right after mass; the first at Sacred Heart, and the second a week later at Corcoran.

After a full eight quarters of play in those two scrimmages – during which both a scoreboard and clock were used to simulate real-life and real-game situations (along with at least an hour’s worth of additional untimed play at the conclusion of each, during which the pride factor ran so high that players on both sides felt compelled, even with the scoreboard off, to keep running tallies in their heads) – Sacred Heart and Corcoran wound up dead even. Two plus games, in other words, played on two different days and two different courts, and no team held a lead of more than four points, and when it was all over both teams had scored the exact same number of points!

So, to the three Hearts players seated in front of Piejda, it was laughable that the undersized Cougars of Coach Huffman, however quick they might have been, and however large their school's student body was, were being billed as the mighty Goliath and that they – the hulking team from the otherwise puny little Catholic academy on the West Side, whose frontcourt was tall enough, strong enough, and broad-shouldered enough, to grab every rebound – were, somehow, being cast as little David.

No, the reality was, the two contenders for Syracuse’s mythical city basketball title in March of 1967, Corcoran High and Sacred Heart Academy, despite their vastly different styles and obvious physical differences – everything from size and brawn to skin color – were, in reality (and contrary to the Monsignor’s best efforts), as even and as well-matched as two teams who’d ever squared off for All City glory.

 

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

 

Ken Huffman was taking no chances.  He was not a superstitious man at all.  But that year, anyway, he decided to change things up just a bit. The previous season, Corcoran’s first as a certified public school, he’d simply let his kids make their own way to the All City game. Most of them were from the inner city anyway, and most lived just a few blocks or so from the War Memorial, the deco-styled arena that had once been home to the mighty Syracuse’s Nationals of NBA fame.

For that reason, Jimmy Collins had taken his gym bag, put on his pack boots, and walked to the game. Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow had done the same.  Harold Broadwater had walked from his place in what was left of the 15^th Ward.  And some Cougars, like junior Frank Karazuba, had paid his 25 cents and taken a city bus; in Karazuba’s case, up Salina Street from his home down near the Valley.

But the previous year had left a bitter taste in Ken Huffman’s mouth.  Even though he didn’t care for the All City game, the high-profile loss the previous March to St. John the Evangelist had stung him in a way he simply could not shake.

So, as a result, Kenny Huffman decided to change things up that year. He made arrangements with the school principal for a city school bus to take his club from the all-new Corcoran campus, down the hill toward South Ave and then east to downtown, via West Onondaga and the home of Father Brady.

Of Huffman’s roster, only his starting backcourt was allowed to walk instead of joining their teammates on the bus. Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow not only lived a short walk from the War Memorial, but they’d once explained to their coach after practice how they liked to walk to games side-by-side to discuss the upcoming opponent, hash out a little strategy between them and, in general, psych each other up.

Billy E, of course, had no such luxury.  Sacred Heart was far west of downtown and he had no team bus, or even a city school one at his disposal.  Just a few willing and available adults with dependable cars; people like himself, JV coach, Paul Januszka, the stern-but-loyal Mr. Schmid, Father O, and the always accommodating Mr. and Mrs. Pryzbyl.  That’s how the Heartsmen found themselves compelled to travel to the War Memorial that particular Friday, March 10, 1967.

Of all the rides available to all those Hearts kids, however, as always, the liveliest and most adrenaline-charged was the one that Jack Contos, Rich Dabrowski and Leo Najdul got to take with Father O; a ride in his killer GTO, the all-new, jet-black rag top with the sporty wheels, the space-age dash and the powerful, 8-track player.  As always, the young Sacred Heart AD had his Searchers Greatest Hits tape blasting the whole way downtown, even though his convertible’s top and windows remained rolled up and sealed tight to keep out the March dampness and what remained of Syracuse’s vaunted winter chill.

Contos sat there next to the priest, riding shotgun and tapping his foot to the music as Father O tooled down Genesee, even as the last remnants of day kissed the just-washed car and bathed it in a pastel glow. The senior forward cracked the faintest of smiles as Father O motored past the Art Deco chrome and the white glazed brick of the Coca-Cola bottling plant, and he peered briefly into its large front window and the endless stream of green-tinted 7 oz. bottles full of Coke that marched along like soldiers on parade.

All was right in Jack Contos’ world. He not only loved Friday night moments like this.  He lived for them.

Meanwhile, two of Billy’s quickest and most intense Bandits – Dabrowski, the still-raw sophomore, and Najdul, the rail-thin, fearless junior – while, deep down, not expecting to play that much, if at all, nevertheless listened to the driving beat as they drove east, each boy peering off into the gloaming and mentally steeling himself on the off-chance that at some point in the next two and a half hours his bespectacled Russian Orthodox coach might look down the bench, point a crooked finger, and call out his name.

As with last year’s All City game, Father Sammons had opted, as a means of crowd control, to execute his divide-and-conquer strategy.  A few days earlier he’d called and asked the Post-Standard and Herald-Journal sports editors to “suggest” that fans of the two teams sit on opposite (and designated) sides of the War Memorial.

Also, as was the case the previous year, that request was only partly fueled by rooting interest. Mostly, it was fueled by the priest’s deep-seated fear that public health, if not actual lives, hung in the balance. Mostly, it was an attempt by that same well-intentioned man of God to try to minimize the chances that Syracuse’s mythical basketball championship might somehow devolve into a race riot, one pitting thousands of parents, fans, players, and even cheerleaders against one another.

Catholic vs. Protestant.

Black vs. white.

In the Corcoran locker room before the game, even as the scoreboard clock methodically ticked its way down to the opening tipoff, Kenny Huffman went from boy to boy to wish him luck and remind him of how hard they’d all worked to get there.  As he did, he began to notice how eerily quiet the room had grown, given the howls and cheers that, more and more, were filling the air on the other side of the door.

His young Cougars wordlessly tugging at sweat socks, adjusted jock straps, and tied and re-tied sweat-stained canvas high tops. The five starters all seemed to instinctively understand the gravity attached to the game – even though, to a man, they’d later admit they had no idea how much that avenging the previous year’s loss had meant to their soft-spoken coach.

Ken Huffman did, indeed, want that night’s All City Championship – badly.  He wanted it in a way that, frankly, made the teacher in him feel almost guilty. He knew, after all, it was just a game.  And he knew, too, he that shouldn’t want anything that much – least of a basketball game that was, basically, an exhibition. But here it was almost twelve months to the day that a Hank Ponti call from half-court took the game out of his boys’ hands and placed it squarely in the hands of its eventual victor – and, somehow, the bitterness he tasted then still lingered, the injustice continuing to sit in his stomach, unreconciled, like a big, thick fist.

In the other locker room, things were different, at least by degree. Billy E was busy being, well, Billy E.  Sure, the Hearts coach cared.  And, sure, he wanted to win that night. But Billy’s default mode, even in the most stressful of times, had always been levity.  And his defense against thinking too much or, heaven forbid, worrying too much was to simply laugh, tell a joke or two, and offer a little good-natured ribbing to anyone within earshot.

So, while Ken Huffman may have been going boy to boy in his pregame locker room and touching each with his singular brand of humanity, Billy E just sat there straddling a turned-around folding chair, pulling on a cigarette, chewing on a fresh stick of gum, and ping-ponging verbal jabs with the likes of Paul Januszka, the young athletic director, Father O, and a handful of his most spirited, vocal and thick-skinned upperclassmen.

There wasn’t much to tell his boys.  They’d been through the drill far too many times.  They’d also just won the Parochial League playoffs by playing one of their finest games of the season; a machine-like dispatching of longtime rival, St. John the Evangelist.

The only thing Billy reminded them of was their money-in-the-bank opening tip play and the fact that Corcoran, as Coach Huffman’s team had proven time and time again in their two preseason scrimmages, was cat-quick and loved to run. "So, get back on defense. Quickly. And I mean every time, without fail. You got that?"  He looked directly into the eyes of his two senior guards, Danny Van Cott and Joey Zaganczyk.

“Okay, bring it in,” he said rising, shoving his chair to the side, and holding one hand out, palm down.  “Father?”

With that, each Hearts boy rose from his seat, took a step or two toward Billy, lowered his head slightly, and reached his arm into the circle of bodies that had quickly formed around the Hearts’ head coach.

The raven-haired Father O, from a few feet away, then led the Heartsmen in low murmured recitations of, in order, the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be, followed by an equally murmured and ad-libbed coda in which he asked God to grant the players His blessings and bestow upon them the strength they’d need to honor Sacred Heart and take home the All City trophy.

As for everything else, including trying to put a clamp on Corcoran’s relentless running game – even as they stood there with their eyes closed and their heads bowed – the Hearts boys were all keenly aware that going to be up to them.

 

 

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

 

Billy E should have figured the game was going to be anything but typical. It wasn’t just that two clubs’ preseason games had been so ridiculously tight, so hard-fought, and so hotly contested. It was that, on the opening tip, even though Schmid managed to control it over a vaulting Steve Williams, and still tip the ball toward a waiting Contos, something entirely unexpected happened. The ball never quite made it to its intended target.

Howie Harlow, the Cougar’s resident ballhawk who could out-run and out-quick just about any boy in the city, lunged in front of Contos, reached high and tipped the ball, deflecting it beyond the muscular Hearts forward's reach and into his own backcourt. It bounded away toward the far key where it was scooped up by his lifelong friend, Reddick, who’d by then had gained a full stride advantage over the hustling Van Cott.

That opening tip play had been one of the many things Reddick and Harlow discussed as they walked together to the War Memorial an hour or so earlier. It was also one of the first things they’d noticed when they traveled to Bishop Ludden on that final Parochial League Sunday to scout the team they simply assumed they’d be playing in tonight's game.

Even though the Hearts would eventually get demolished by Baptist that Sunday, and even though Reddick and Harlow would later confide to St. John’s Paul Padden they were glad they didn’t have to play his team in the All City game, Sacred Heart’s opening tip play – Schmid-to-Contos-Zaganczyk for an easy two – had stood out as something they definitely needed to watch out for. As a result, the two devised a plan to defend the play as they strode shoulder-to-shoulder and stride-for-stride down Midland Ave through the twilight of evening and on towards Mecca; the lights, glow and shimmering energy of a still-bustling late Friday afternoon, downtown Syracuse-style.

Billy E’s Heartsmen not only didn’t score on the opening tip of that ‘67 All City Championship. They didn’t even get the ball. Billy just shook his head, thinking, “Here we go,” as he rubbed his already sweaty brow, exhaling loudly enough to catch the ear of his JV coach, Januszka. “No freebies tonight," he added to no one in particular, the words echoing down the halls of his own uncertain but at-least-now singularly focused mind.

Corcoran, on their first possession, worked the ball around half-court slowly and deliberately, not so much to try to get the best shot, but to give each Cougar a chance to touch the ball.  It was not anything Ken Huffman ever stressed upon his starters in practice or asked them to do in games because, more than anything, he loved it when his kids ran early and often. Corcoran was one of the fastest and quickest teams in all of Central New York, if not the state, and it was to their advantage to exploit that edge whenever and wherever possible. But given that Huffman relied so heavily on his five starters, and given that those kids had developed such a great chemistry over the course of eighteen games, they eventually took it upon themselves at the beginning of each contest to make sure everyone got to touch the ball at least once; to feel it in their hands, to catch it, to pass it, and, if possible, to dribble it.

And that’s exactly what those five Cougars did until, nearly forty seconds into that first possession, Harlow stutter-stepped left, exploded right, and went up for a picture-perfect eighteen-footer from the right wing that caught in the bottom of the net before falling through.

Half the crowd of over 4,000 fanatics shouted in exaltation while the other half moaned.

And with that, Syracuse’s 1967 All City game – despite what the clock might have said – was officially underway.

Back in the convent, a handful of Sacred Heart nuns gathered in their sparse living room around their well-worn but trusty Philco, the floor model that a well-to-do parish family had donated to them a few years back.  Two of the nuns holding rosary beads, closed their eyes and prayed in complete silence, mouthing the words as they did. The rest leaned in toward the large, walnut-grained console and perched on the edge of their seats, eyes wide and hands folded in delicate anticipation.

Other nuns were upstairs in their bedrooms, like the young first-generation Polish sister with the creamy skin. She sat alone atop her bed, taping the game from her clock radio, even as she listened intently to each and every word of Jack Morse’s broadcast.

Morse, a young man from Whitney Point on the Southern Tier, was calling the action for 620, WHEN, a radio station on the far-left side of the radio dial. While he may have lacked the polish, timing and, perhaps, accuracy of many more seasoned pros, the kind of play-by-play announcers who’d cut their teeth calling hundreds of games over many years in multiple sports, the young man with the folksy delivery and smile in his voice more than made up for whatever shortcomings he might have had with an almost bottomless well of enthusiasm and love for the game of basketball.

Morse, in other words, was the perfect announcer for that nearly perfect place and time in local history; the guy charged with using words and inflections to paint mental pictures for thousands of fellow Central New Yorkers, many of whom would be sitting glued to every last syllable – every last sound – that came out of his mouth.

As the game’s first quarter gained momentum, Billy assumed his place on the bench, as did Huffman. The two, for all their many differences, were similar in at least one important way.  They both trusted their kids, especially their seniors, and neither could ever be accused of over-coaching. That’s why both spent the bulk of any one game in their seats – not running up and down the sidelines like wild dogs, or screaming at players and refs – but simply sitting, observing and reacting to events as they unfolded.

As that first quarter neared its conclusion – a quarter that, just as in the pair of scrimmages the two teams had played earlier in the season, was a back-and-forth battle of will, in which overwhelming power found itself pitted against dazzling speed, and the largest lead never grew to more than three points – the crowd’s energy never flagged, and, in fact, somehow kept ascending. As a result, the noise, which had been ear-splitting at the start, actually seemed to increase as the clock ticked closer and closer to zero.

With just three seconds left and the score tied, Zaganczyk, Billy E’s best shooter and a young man who’d rediscovered his touch in the Hearts’ two playoff wins, missed from the right wing, the ball hitting square off the far iron and arcing out toward the center of the key. Even as Irene Contos and her fellow Hearts loyalists were wincing at the near-miss, big Pete Schmid rose above a sea of arms and would-be rebounders.

Despite being sealed off by Corcoran’s powerful defensive stopper, Len Reeder, the German’s massive right hand stretched as high and as far as it could go. But, rather than bring the ball down, given what precious little time remained, Schmid instead tipped it blindly in the direction of the rim.  The leather orb hit once, twice, and a third time, before falling through softly and as though guided by the angels themselves.

Half the War Memorial jumped out of their skin, raised their palms skyward like a gospel choir, toward the Lord Almighty, and loosed a chorus of rapturous delight that filled the arena. Billy pumped his left fist once while using his right forefinger to shove his glasses back up his nose.

Ken Huffman simply closed his eyes and exhaled.  He then slowly rose to greet his starters as they headed back toward their bench.  The first quarter of Syracuse’s last-ever All City game had just passed not-so-quietly into history.

Sacred Heart 17, Corcoran 15.

To virtually no one’s surprise, the second quarter turned out to be lot more of the same. Two talented schoolboy powerhouses trading haymakers at center ring, swinging away with all they had on the off-chance one of them might actually find a knockout punch somewhere in his arsenal.

More and more, though, Dan Van Cott, the headstrong and chin-out floor general of the Hearts – the gutty, hard-nosed kid from Tipp Hill – found himself in an increasingly untenable situation. Not only were Reddick or Harlow much quicker, especially one-on-one, but he also had to contend with the fact that the War Memorial’s court was so much longer and wider than any in the Parochial League. Reddick and Harlow, in other words, had even more room to maneuver and even greater opportunities to exploit their speed and quickness.

That’s why, when Van Cott picked up his third foul midway through the second quarter, Billy jumped off the bench and quickly held his hands together for a time out.  His first impulse was to pull Van Cott entirely. But as he looked down his bench – at his collection of Chinese Bandits, a handful of wide-eyed youngsters who would run through walls for him – something inside him made him think twice. It was a pressure cooker out there, after all, and as much as he loved, say, Tommy Godzac’s shooting stroke, Leo Nadjul’s determination, or young Rich Dabrowski’s energy and passion, he just couldn’t bring himself to go to his bench – not yet.

Besides, Van Cott had been a binding element for his club all season. He wasn’t the most talented kid Billy had ever coached, but his starting unit just seemed to play better when he was out there distributing the ball.  So, Billy chose to roll the dice and let him stay in the game.

At the same time, however, he decided to switch things up, if only as a matter of caution. Plan B for Billy, at least at that point, was to switch from his swarming, deny-the-ball man-to-man to a tight-and-towering, two-one-two zone, a defensive scheme he’d once in a while employ, if only as a change of pace.

Playing zone was a considerable gamble. Billy knew it might result in fewer fouls on his defense – which was the whole idea – but, given the Cougars’ love of pushing the ball up at a dizzying pace, a zone could also be easily exploited. If the young Cougars consistently beat his kids up the floor and got into their offense before the Hearts had a chance to set themselves defensively, the results would be disastrous.

But, given the dire nature of the situation, Billy figured it was a chance worth taking.

The problem was – and, again, this lightning bolt of a momentum-shifter took place in the final seconds of the second period, just as Schmid’s tip-in had in the first – only three minutes after picking up his third, Van Cott lunged out toward Reddick going up for a jumper on the right wing with eight seconds left, and fouled the Corcoran star as he let the shot go.

The ill-advised infraction by the hustling but step-too-slow Van Cott turned out to be a two-shot foul that allowed Reddick – one of the deadliest shooters in the city – to put two more points on the board before halftime.  Worse, it sent Van Cott to the locker room shackled with four fouls, one away from disqualification.

After one half of basketball – sixteen minutes of game time – the score of Syracuse’s All City death match reflected not only the relative strengths of its two combatants, but just how paper-thin the differences were between them.  After four months’ worth of practices, pep rallies and Friday night hand-to-hand combat, the scoreboard read:

Sacred Heart 29, Corcoran 29.

In the locker room, Billy calmly and almost mechanically opened a new stick of Juicy Fruit and popped it in his mouth, while his team manager, a giant of a kid named Pete Shoff, dutifully passed out oranges and plastic water bottles to anyone who wanted one.  After a moment, the Hearts coach told his boys they were playing well, but they needed to get back better on defense.

Then, with the flavor of the fresh sick of Juicy Fruit still dancing on his tongue, he looked in the direction of Stepien, the most game-ready of his Bandits, and arguably the most reliable ball-handler and defender among them. “Paul, I’m going to start you this half for Dan,” he said without a trace of emotion. “You know what to do. Watch for Pete flashing up from the low post, keep your passes crisp and, for God’s sake, don’t telegraph them. Look for the open man, and – whatever you do – use your body when you’re bringing it up against those sons of bitches. Just like they showed us back in November, they’re both quick as hell and love – and I mean love – to take chances defensively.”

“And, Danny, you stay ready. You got that?” he added, turning in the direction of his foul-laden senior. Van Cott’s head hung low, a plump bead of sweat poised to drip off the tip of his nose.  The youngster looked up, but only barely, an elbow resting on each knee and the small orange he’d been given sitting unpeeled in his left hand.  “I’ll get you back in there when the time comes,” said Billy.  “You know that. But first we need to run a little clock. You know what I mean?  Shorten the game.”

At that point, Billy asked to see the scorebook that Shoff, the manager, regularly kept on the bench.  Something Billy used as a way, more than anything, of keeping a running tally of how many personal fouls each kid had – and not just the Heartsmen, but both teams.

He stopped, however, just a second or two into his downward scroll.  “Sakowski,” Billy said looking up to his left, alarm in his voice, as though he’d just learned something disturbing.  “What the hell?  You’ve got three? Jesus, be careful out there, huh?  Play defense with your feet, will you? Like I taught you? And, my God, son. No stupid fouls. None. You got that?  I..do...not...want…any…stupid…fouls.”

 Sakowski just looked at his coach and nodded like a child being scolded by his mother.

Meanwhile, in the Cougar locker room down the hall, Ken Huffman, at least on the surface, appeared calmer and even cooler than Billy. Inside, however, his stomach continued to roil. Up to that point, Huffman hadn't made even a single in-game substitution. Until further notice, he didn’t really plan to.

Huffman’s five starters were all young, all deceptively strong and all battle tested. They could all sprint up and down a court for as long and as hard as they had to. What's more, his starting backcourt could handle the ball like magicians.

All of which led the unassuming teacher/coach from the rolling hills south of the city to believe that, for the time being anyway, the best thing he could do is to just get out the way and let his boys play.

In fact, Ken Huffman had so much confidence in his starting quintet he spent a good part of the fifteen minutes allotted to him talking, not so much to his five regulars, but to the seven kids who made up his bench. He told them, as a group, he needed them all to stay ready and that he might call on any one of them at any moment to give him a few minutes of quality play in the next half, so that one or more of the starters could catch a breath.  He wasn’t kidding. At any moment he might actually need one or two of those kids to step up for him, if only for a possession or two.

At the scorer’s table, Morse – who, like just virtually every other basketball play-by-play man of the day, was calling the game without a partner – snapped out for his thousands of listeners some of the more pertinent first-half numbers, such as points per player and, of course, the number of fouls each boy had accumulated.

In the background, those listening to Morse’s voice at home or in the car radio could hear the faint echoes of the Hearts cheerleaders, all ten of whom were now at center court performing one of their well-practiced routines, their white sweaters and maroon-and-white pom-poms shimmering against a dark sea of wool and drab winter hues.

Meanwhile, back at Sacred Heart, almost all the nuns in the convent, or at least the older ones, had made a quick beeline for one of the two bathrooms in the house. Given the closeness of the game, it would take a full-on act of God to tear even one of them away in the minutes ahead, especially as the game drew closer to the fourth quarter.  Better to take care of matters while each team was still tucked away in the safety of its locker room.

The young nun upstairs taping the WHEN broadcast did not move from the side of her single bed, however. At one point she had rolled up her sleeves and was now leaning in toward Morse’s voice, her eyes wide and her now-exposed elbows resting, like Van Cott’s, atop her knees.  She also had her hands folded in a silent but wringing mix of prayer, hope and dread.

As the game’s second half got under way, Schmid and Contos, unlike they’d done in the first, controlled the tip. However, given the latter’s concern over Harlow, rather than trying to tip the leather Wilson over his head to a streaking Zaganczyk or Stepien, Contos simply grabbed it with both hands and leaned over to protect it. Forget the two points, he reasoned. Let’s just get control of the damn ball and see where that takes us.

That third quarter, much like the first two, was a bruising affair, with both teams still going toe-to-toe and throwing haymakers. Halfway through the period, Sakowski trying for a rebound went up and over the back of Williams, the Cougar’s quickest and most tenacious rebounder. The whistle blew, and when it did the big, bespectacled Pole found himself alongside Van Cott as, now, one of two Heartsmen with four personals.

Billy decided to gamble and ride it out.  This was the team that got me where I am, he thought, and I’m going to live and die with who I’ve got out there.

But then, less than two minutes later, with both Sakowski and Van Cott nursing those four fouls, Billy E’s worst-case scenario unfolded.  With 2:23 still remaining in the third, an offensive rebound that seemed all-but-destined to end up in Sakowski’s hands, somehow managed to end up in Williams’. The rail-thin Cougar, whose vertical leap could at times seem an optical illusion, exploded up and grabbed the ball just before it reached Sakowski.  The lumbering Pole, however, banged into the Corcoran leaper and, in doing so, caused both refs, Ray Wojcik and Mike Stark, to blow their whistles and raise their fists while they ran in the direction of the now crestfallen mountain of a youngster.

The guy who’d been Billy E’s enforcer all season long, a young man who lived to do the kind of dirty work that many starters for many other teams would feel beneath them, had just picked up his fifth foul.  He was gone, relegated to the bench for the rest of the game.

Billy E just lowered his head, exhaled, and thought for a moment.  Then he rubbed his brow again and thought for a few moments more.

Finally, the Hearts’ head man popped up and made his way down the row of players alongside him. The eyes of a few of them were fixed on Billy. Most, however, were focused elsewhere, staring off at some point in the distance. It was almost as though a number didn’t want their name called and operated on the belief that not making eye contact with their coach might somehow be of assistance in that regard.

One of the new notable exceptions was Rich Dabrowski, the 16-year old sophomore swingman and still-unbroken colt who’d slowly but surely been maturing that season, his skills slowly rounding into shape and his annoying tendency to play “ready, fire, aim” ball diminishing in Billy's eyes.  The young Polish immigrant, by way of England, was on the edge of his seat, poised, eyes focused on his coach like a birddog waiting for his master’s approval or, better yet, his next command.

“Rich…” Billy E tried to get out. However, before he even finished speaking, Dabrowski was on his feet and bounding toward his coach. Toe-to-toe with Billy, eyes wide, he waited for his coach to continue.

“Get in there for Sakowski,” was all Billy E could bring himself to say.

With that, young Richie Dombrowski turned and sprinted onto the court, still sporting his cotton maroon warm-up jacket with the fancy white piping.

“Richie!!!” Billy yelled before Dabrowski could take more than a few steps in the direction of the far hoop, an infraction that would have resulted in a technical foul.

“Report in first, huh?” the Hearts coach said to his Bandit, pointing to the scorer’s table and adding in a fatherly and considerably less urgent tone, “And, son…take pff your warm-up, OK?”

To replace Sakowski, Billy E could have easily gone back to his trusty Bandit, Stepien, as a sub. After all, Stepien had started the half and acquitted himself well. But he opted, instead, to go with the only sophomore on the team. He did this for three reasons for this, all of which he’d been mulling over during the pregnant moment he'd sat there rubbing his brow.

First, with his uncharacteristically long arms, quickness and length, Dabrowski could guard just about any Cougar on the court and not be limited, as Stepien might, to covering the guards, Reddick or Harlow.

Second, Dabrowski, despite his penchant for ill-advised shots and his moments of untethered and almost comically misdirected passion to do something special, was conspicuously more athletic than Stepien, which Billy figured could be the difference over the course of the next ten minutes.

And finally, Billy E sensed that of all the kids on his club, none – and that included every one of his starters – possessed more self-confidence than his youngest and most undercooked Bandit, the part-timer with the goofy smile and the ears like a cab with its doors flung open. Given the crowd, the intensity and, especially, how much was now riding on the remaining ten minutes, Billy thought Richie Dabrowski's self-confidence might just be what the doctor ordered.

When play resumed, Williams, an elbows-out lefty shooter, hit the free throw he’d been awarded after Sakowski’s fifth.  And that single foul shot was quickly followed by two more by Harlow, after he got hacked going in for a driving layup along the right baseline.

With under a minute to play in the third period, Corcoran had somehow managed to open up the largest lead either team had enjoyed at any point that season in their games against each other, including their two scrimmages – a whopping five points.

Yet, just as he’d done to close out the first period, Schmid, the powerful German kid from just west of town – the verdant little working-class suburb called Fairmount – rose to the occasion with the game clock running down, yet again, to zero.

Calling for the ball and taking it with his back to the basket, now some eight feet out and on the left side of the key, Schmid felt the thick, muscular presence of Reeder behind him. He could hear the low growl of his breathing and even feel the warmth of his breath. While holding the ball tightly in two hands, Schmid faked right once, then left. He then took one slow and almost cartoonishly deliberate dribble to his right, almost backward, in a way that took him even further from the rim. It was a setup move, though, and one done to make it appear as though he was trying to get off a last second jumper, perhaps a fall away, from the left side. It was also a move designed to look as though he was using the act of stepping backward, away from the goal, as a means of creating additional distance between the defender and himself.

But the moment Reeder bit on the move, and the moment he raised even one foot to take a step, Schmid lowered his head, and using his off-hand and near shoulder to protect the ball, bolted by the brawny Cougar on the left baseline and then, leaping straight upward, laid the ball softly but forcefully over the rim with both hands, even as Williams rose from the weak side to try to help.

A mere eleven seconds remained as the Hearts crazies exploded yet again into another ear-splitting roar, the sudden and daunting five-point deficit shaved, in a finger-snap – thanks to a brilliant move by their brilliant All Star forward – down to a more manageable (and far less emotionally draining) three.

As the seconds ticked away, a hurried, desperation attempt by the Cougars sailed far and wide, and the buzzer sounded, ending the third quarter.

With just eight minutes to go in the final All City game that the Salt City would ever see, the red bulbs on the War Memorial three scoreboards, high above the court and burning through a thick haze of cigarette smoke, glared their hard truth and the net result of 24 minutes’ worth of back-and-forth drama in a winner-take-all battle between the two finest schoolboy teams their little factory town had to offer.

Corcoran 47, Sacred Heart 44.

As the two coaches gathered their kids for the start of the fourth and final period, starters and subs alike, both realized this was it. There would be a tomorrow, of course – for them and their teams.  And both men would continue to coach their boys as they continued their respective sojourns through the postseason.  But this one game, this one great test of wills – a game that now meant so much to both, and for different reasons – had come down to a single quarter, eight measly minutes of basketball, to determine which of them would be remembered, then and evermore, as the finest team in Syracuse in 1967.

 

 

 

*          *          *          *          *

One of the harshest yet least spoken truths about the lightning-fast demise of Syracuse's 15^th Ward was the fact that, in reality, it had already been falling apart well in advance of any systematic and government-sanctioned razing; worn thin by years of termites, vermin, brutal weather and shoddy maintenance by scores of absentee landlords. What's more, by the dawn of the decade as many as a third of its housing units still lacked many basic necessities of modern life – including, in a number of cases, running water. 

Yet, the cracks that had already been threatening to lay to waste Syracuse’s poverty-stricken and all-but-orphaned Ward ran deeper than simple matters of physical wear-and-tear. They were far more corrosive and troublesome. The Ward's cracks were cultural and spiritual.  They were intellectual, social, and even, for lack of a better word, aspirational. 

But above all, they were generational.

If you were a young African American in the middle of the 20^th Century, and you called the Salt City home, it didn’t matter what hopes, dreams, and ambitions you might have harbored. Your fate was sealed and you were pretty much consigned to being lumped in with a bunch of people with whom, perhaps, the only two things that you shared were the color of your skin and the section of the city you called home.

And while that had proven to be less of a problem in the first half of the century, by the 1960’s it had started to become a very big problem. 

By then, singular voices with in-your-face and chin-out attitudes belonging to such compelling artists, thinkers and provocateurs as Richard Pryor, Nina Simone, Dick Gregory, Gordon Parks, Lorraine Hansberry, Melvin Van Peebles, Cassius Clay, James Baldwin, Curtis Mayfield, H. Rap Brown, James Brown, and even the Ward’s own John Williams – began speaking out and demanding more out of life, including the right to stand up and be counted.

As a result, the deep-rooted sense of acceptance, a resigned and passive sense that had long-gripped many older folks in hundreds of African American communities from coast to coast, began teetering on the edge of what would prove to be a very steep and jagged cliff.

Because for every powerful, angry, and strident voice in Black America, even in Syracuse, there were perhaps dozens, if not hundreds, of men and women of color who wanted that voice to simply hush up and be still.  To not rock the boat, to mind its manners, and to fall back in line and remember its place.

What’s more, by the midway point of the century there were also hundreds of young men and women in places just like the Ward who started to want more than their parents had ever had, and who began dreaming of their own little piece of that American dream they’d always heard about, including a house to call their own, maybe a family, and perhaps even a white picket fence in some leafy little suburb somewhere. 

For that, such dreamers and seekers would have to get out of the Ward and, indeed, wanted to get out.

Of course, not every 15^th Ward resident felt like that. That’s why fundamental cracks began to form in its longstanding sense of community, even if those cracks weren’t always visible to those on the outside.

When left-wing activists like Saul Alinsky and George Wiley came to Syracuse spinning their radical ideas and daring notions into rich tapestries of protest and revolution, for every local kid with a mind and dream of his (or her) own, like Dolores Morgan, who dared to join in and dared to raise his or her voice, there were ten times that many older “Negroes” in town, if not more, who simply went about their business and tried to keep their noses to the ground.

Syracuse’s 15^th Ward had been a house divided for years and now, in the early days of the 1960’s, was one primed for a fall.

That’s why, in 1964, as plans for picket lines were being developed to protest the proposed Greyhound terminal the company hoped to build in the middle of a residential block of Harrison Street, in the heart of the Ward, it was not Ward residents who comprised the bulk of protesters and sign-carriers, it was S.U. and Le Moyne College professors and their students, along with various friends and family members. It was, likewise, CORE leaders and volunteers, many of whom were from out-of-state. And it was residents from across the area, city and suburbs alike, many of them white, who simply empathized and wanted to show some support for the cause.

The vast majority of those who actually lived in the Ward, however, simply chose to sit the protest out and not make waves. They chose, in other words, to avoid a public squabble that might get them arrested or, worse, jeopardize their chance of getting that subsidized apartment they’d been waiting so damn long for.

Even the Niagara Mohawk protests of 1965, for all their moral certainty, brought a fundamental level of division within a number of groups in the city. Because for all their intent to improve the job prospects of many in the Ward, the protests against the city’s power company in that magnificent art deco building west of downtown were fueled in large part by CORE and George Wiley, the Syracuse University professor who was something of a carpetbagger and a guy from a place other than Syracuse. 

Most in the Ward, even though they stood to benefit, invested not a minute’s worth of shoe leather on the Niagara Mohawk picket lines in protest over the company’s decades-old (and mostly all-white) hiring practices.

Who knows?  Maybe a number of those who kept their heads low, and who chose to avoid the line of fire, felt it would have been too “uppity” to walk a picket line or challenge their city’s longstanding, widely embraced, and largely all-white status quo. 

It was the early 1960’s, after all, and picket lines were anything but common sights in America. The buttoned-up Fifties, those dark and intemperate days of Joe McCarthy, Red baiting and the HUAC hearings, had only just ended – but not before fueling a long, deep and, some might contend, creepy obsession with Soviet infiltration and the crazy notion that there might just be a spy lurking behind every tree.

As a result, many in Republican and conservative-leaning Syracuse – Black and white alike – believed in their heart that to protest anything was un-American. To such people, any group marching in a circle and holding signs of any kind carried the almost unmistakable whiff of Communism.

And, yes, Charlie Brady took up Wiley’s cause wholeheartedly and spent hours on the lines, himself.  And, yes, he was frequently joined by more than a few African Americans from his beloved Ward, in part because they were members of his Catholic Interracial Council (which, as much as any group in town, rolled up its sleeves and did what it could); people like the aforementioned Dolores Morgan and the onetime hustling and barrier-breaking guard for Bobby Felasco's St. John the Evangelist squad, Marshall Nelson.

Yet, at least when it came to that one issue, the line drawn in the sand in front of Niagara Mohawk building proved to be so divisive that even Brady often found himself on the lonely side of it, a line that many of those nearest and dearest to him simply refused to cross. 

Tom Costello, for example, the young cleric whose life and calling had been changed forever by Brady, who loved the man dearly, and who’d marched side-by-side with him in Alabama in support of Civil Rights and Dr. King, chose not to participate in the protests against the local power company – as did Brady’s other housemates, including Charlie Fahey, Ed Hayes and John McGraw.

Those priests were, after all, relatively young men early in their careers in service to the Lord. As such, they all had other mountains to climb, other dragons to slay, and, certainly, other factors to consider. As Costello would later say, “It was one thing to protest in Selma. It was something else entirely to do it in your own hometown.”

The simple fact was that the 15^th Ward was splintering long before Interstate 81 and Urban Renewal came to town. And when a decidedly radical element was added to the mix, things only became that much more volatile.

To understand the impact that the out-of-town activists were having on the fabric of Syracuse’s troubled and vulnerable Ward, one needed look no further than the curious case of young Willis Jones, a broad-shouldered, powerfully built, and perhaps slightly shady kid from the Ward, one who always seemed to carry with him just a touch of menace, if not a threat of violence. Jones, who knew plenty of folks in the Ward, had become more and more political over the course of the decade, especially once Alinsky came to town and started singing his siren song of organization, revolution, and the rights of the downtrodden.

Central to Alinsky’s message to the city’s neediest, especially its Blacks, was that they were all being oppressed by the white man – but not just the whites who openly hated them and fought to deny them their rights.  They were also, he told them, being oppressed by whites who constantly offered them charity and, in the process, softened their will and weakened their collective resolve. 

The most insidious and sickening form of white oppression, at least for Alinsky, was charity, which he told anyone who'd listen was patronizing, quietly controlling, and wrapped in an insidious cloak of sanctimony and piety.

That’s why, one day, the young and somewhat troubled Jones took dead aim on the most unlikely target of all, the Saint of Syracuse, Father Charles Brady, who'd become legendary for driving around the streets of his "parish" and offering food donated by local merchants to all in the Ward who needed it, a process he later refined by handing out printed "chits" that were then redeemable at various stores and food markets in the neighborhood.  After needy folks redeemed their chits, Brady’s Foery Foundation would, in turn, give that merchant a fair price for whatever food had been "purchased." It was an honor system at its purest and most innocent, yet an honor system that worked, and did so beautifully.

However, Willis Jones bought into Alinsky’s radical ideas about the inherent evils of charity, and in an attempt to punish Brady for what he viewed as the priest’s ongoing oppression of his people, Jones broke into his desk in the foundation office one evening and stole his entire stock of chits. He then went out and gave every one of them away, including many to his friends, and did so all at once, in essence flooding the market. 

The subsequent wave of redeemed chits, quite literally, broke Father Brady. It broke his bank and limited budget, to be sure. But, more than that, it broke his heart. To think that anyone would do such a thing to him, much less one of his own, was devastating and, indeed, put Brady into a deep depression.

Nevertheless, it soon became clear there was now something of a circular firing squad at work in the 15^th Ward.  Even the purest and most well-intentioned, in other words, like Brady, were being demonized and subverted by a bunch of outsiders – political, social and moral ideologues – who, it seemed, would rather be right than do right.

Ironically, it took another outsider to recognize that circular firing squad and call it out for exactly what it was. 

In March of 1967, a brash young Jamaican-born civil rights leader named Stokely Carmichael, a charismatic and fiery orator, came to town at the invitation of the Syracuse University student union to speak at Hendricks Chapel in the center of campus.  Just twenty five years of age, Carmichael had already made quite a name for himself. He’d recently popularized the term Black Power and would soon conceive and unleash a phrase on America’s youth that would emerge as its signature anti-war chant during the latter stages of Vietnam, “Hell no, we won’t go!” Carmichael had also recently been identified by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as the man most likely to replace the now-assassinated Malcolm X as the country’s next “Black messiah.”

To the students’ credit, and in the interest of presenting a broad array of viewpoints, Carmichael’s appearance at Hendricks Chapel came not long after a similar appearance by Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor.  Bull Connor was the infamous Birmingham, Alabama police chief who'd four years prior, following the cold-blooded murder of four Black girls on his watch as they prayed in church on Sunday morning, cemented for himself a dark and ugly place in American history by setting his city’s police dogs and fire hoses on hundreds of black protesters as the cameras rolled and a stunned nation watched.

Carmichael may have been the polar opposite of Connor. But the two men did have at least one thing in common. They were both fed up with white liberal intellectuals in schools just like Syracuse; men and women who, for all their high-minded ideals and lofty rhetoric, regularly talked one game and lived another. 

The difference was, while Connor came in as the virtual poster boy for all the bottled up anger that many around the country felt for the kind of runaway white liberalism taking root in America, Carmichael was critical of those there that night not so much for their aims, but for their hypocrisy.  Like almost anyone who’d been paying even half-attention to the events unfolding in town, Stokely Carmichael knew exactly what was going on in the streets of Syracuse, where thousands of families were being thrown out of their homes, and those homes subsequently leveled. He also knew that many whites in the area, including many there that evening, continued to spend their days voicing outrage and wringing their hands over the situation, before heading home to cozy, comfortable, safe lives, all of them secure in the self-satisfied knowledge that their hearts had been in the right place.

"I’m sure you think you’re all doing a great job fighting for social justice and racial equality," Carmichael told the jam-packed audience, many of them long-haired, mustachioed and wire-rimmed professors and would-be members of the counterculture. "But I have to be honest," he said, "I’m not buying it. Sweet Jesus, you ask me…Hell, I look around and I see more black faces on the campus at Oxford, Mississippi than I do outside those damn doors there.  And I’m not talking about students," Carmichael sneered as he pointed toward the thick oak doors standing between his audience and the world outside them. "I’m talking about staff and faculty." 

The young, take-no-prisoners civil rights leader pulled no punches on the campus of Syracuse University that crisp night in March. Clearly, he'd spent more than a few hours with Wiley that afternoon, the founder and head of the local CORE chapter, and one of only two or three African Americans employed by S.U as a full time professor, because his words were oddly similar to many of those that had been voiced by Wiley in the days leading up to that evening.

Among those gathered to hear Carmichael deliver his scathing gut-punch to the liberals was Dolores Morgan, the first African American child in all of Syracuse to attend a Parochial League school. Unfortunately, in Dolores’ case, her stab at a Catholic education didn’t quite take. Many in Cathedral Academy, where she’d enrolled as a fourth grader in the late 1940’s, shunned her socially and tried to convince her she’d be better off with her own kind – including, sadly, the majority of the school’s nuns and its mother superior. 

Dolores did eventually transfer out of Cathedral, and did, indeed, start going to school with her own kind. Her mother one day simply decided her baby had cried herself to sleep one too many times. But little Dolores remained a devoted Catholic through it all and, despite the racial backlash she continued to endure, continued to absorb, question and probe any and all new ideas that happened to present themselves during the course of her journey. 

Over the years, Dolores would become even more spiritual and more enamored of Charlie Brady and his singular mission of love. Just like the young priests that Brady lived with over on West Onondaga, she tried to be more like him – her very own hand-picked role model, from her earliest days as a schoolgirl to her time as a struggling and sleep-deprived young mother.

As Dolores started her own family, and as that family expanded to include, not just a husband, but ten young and hungry mouths to feed, she continued to work with Brady's Catholic Interracial Council and continued to try – just like her role model – to put Jesus’ words into action every day of her life, without exception.

But it grew increasingly hard as the neighborhood of her youth, the place she’d grown to know and love like no other, continued to disappear underfoot.

There was a day in 1967, in fact, when walking home from the bus, Dolores stopped and looked around, trying to fathom what had become of her neighborhood.  She and her husband had only recently bought a house on Cedar Street in the Ward, one of the few black families in Syracuse who actually owned their own home, but what she saw that day, literally, brought her to tears. Because what she looked over that overcast day was not her beloved Ward, but the broad swath of nothingness that had replaced it, a barren and hollowed-out landscape, save for the faint sound of a few earth movers and dump trucks, along with a rising, eerie sort of dusty swirl that seemed made up of little more than dried gravel and what remained of a community’s worth of pulverized homes and shops. It was, Dolores imagined, what the surface of the moon might look like. 

The only thing new on the entire vista spread out before her was a large strip of elevated and ominous-looking highway, rising above the dust and snaking its way along the skyline to the west of her. The all-new and soon-to-be-completed Interstate 81 – like some gigantic boa constrictor – was slowly and painfully squeezing the life out of the most vibrant and colorful city Dolores could ever imagine.

More than a third of Pioneer Homes, for example – the sprawling and once state-of-the-art public housing complex that Eleanor Roosevelt had come to town to dedicate – had already been reduced to rubble to make room for the highway. Many of its signature red bricks had been used as hard fill to support its massive weight.  

What’s more, despite all the smaller access roads that continued to exist between the two worlds, the all-new highway was creating for the very first time both a real and symbolic barrier between Syracuse University, high on its haughty hill, and the proud little city that stretched out beneath it – a blue-collar town full of hard-working men and women who supported the university, loved it, and gave it a home. For the first time in history, the distance between “town and gown” in Syracuse had become clear and present, because for the first time ever there was now a concrete symbol of the growing distance between the university and its host city; one the locals could see, touch and even hear.

Just as onetime urban planner and city engineer Nelson Pitts had predicted almost two decades prior – a prediction that ultimately cost him his job – an elevated highway directly through the heart of Syracuse was killing off miles and miles of once-thriving urban landscape, making it no longer good for anything but transportation. There’d be no homes. There’d be no stores. There’d be no churches or schools. There’d be no greenery and, ultimately, no life.  There’d only be access and speed; a gateway portal to the wide open spaces of suburbia and the facility to get to and from them as quickly and painlessly as possible.

It was clear that the writing was on the wall – and there would. be no stopping it. And so, as the day of the 1967 All City Championship drew near, most, if not all of the radical organizers had already cut their losses, declared victory, and left the Salt City for greener, riper pastures.

Oh, a few of their protests had worked, to be sure.  And they had, indeed, accomplished some measure of good.

Greyhound, for example, scrapped its plans for a new terminal in the heart of a residential block in the Ward where dozens of young boys and girls lived and used the streets for touch football and skipping rope.  Ultimately, the company chose to build elsewhere. 

But even that victory would prove to be painfully short-lived as less than a year later, the same block of aging wooden frame homes that had been in Greyhound’s crosshairs would be claimed under the sweeping power of eminent domain, leveled, wiped away like so much chalk on a blackboard, and then used as the site of the all-new MONY Tower. 

That shiny new building would, in turn, serve as the base of a new white-collar employer in town, a sixteen-story study in modern, steel-and-glass design that would be able to tell anyone in Syracuse – just by looking up – what the temperature was and, perhaps more important, which way the wind was blowing.

Likewise, those endless Niagara Mohawk protests in the Spring of 1965 also made a difference. Led by a unique (and thoroughly unlikely) coalition that included both the flamboyant and verbose George Wiley and the meek and humble Charlie Brady, the protests, along with the news coverage they triggered – statewide, mind you – caused the company to rethink its hiring practices and make provisions to try bring the percentage of “Negroes” on its payrolls to levels more reflective of the various communities they served.

That’s why, when the company created an all-new Director of Diversity position and filled it with someone to serve as Niagara Mohawk's conscience in all matters race, it chose none other than Marshall Nelson, the young man and former altar boy from the Ward who’d once helped break the Parochial League color line and who that Spring had marched side-by-side with Brady, his mentor and role model.

It's also why Niagara Mohawk would end up eventually swinging its doors wide open and hiring hundreds of new linemen, office workers and laborers, among them big Dave Sims, the brawny African American from out of state who’d been so instrumental in helping toughen up Tookie Chisholm of St. Lucy's. 

And why, that very same year, the company would hire former Corcoran star Jimmy Collins and his New Mexico State teammate, Sam Lacey, a 6’10” monster of a rebounding machine from rural Mississippi, two African American boys home from college who, for three months one summer, would work for the power company in what both would later concur was the single hardest job they'd ever had in their lives.

Mostly though, when all those radicals left Syracuse in pursuit of new battles to fight, strewn among the wreckage of what had once been the city’s 15^th Ward, were now simply broad chasms of division, a whole lot of festering anger, and a ton of bitterness.

Those carpetbagging organizers had come to Syracuse to make a point, if not a difference.  The problem was, somewhere in the process of trying to make that difference, the point they’d been trying to make wound up buried beneath mountains of their own rhetoric, bombast, and unfilled promises. 

As a result, on the eve of the 1967 All City Basketball Championship, a bloodied and bowed Syracuse was left with the responsibility of not only cleaning up its own streets, but, somehow, trying to suture its own deep and gaping wounds.

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

Whatever factors that were in play – Urban Renewal and the sweeping Interstate Highway Act, chief among them – what might have been the trigger mechanism that ultimately led to the full blown eradication of the 15^th Ward was the front-page arrest, a few years prior, of Percy Harris, the colorful bon vivant and head of the city’s booming numbers racket. 

Harris had long served as the Ward’s Robin Hood and self-appointed guardian angel; a flamboyant and ambitious racketeer who made hundreds of thousands annually off that poverty stricken part of town, even as he was using a healthy portion of his proceeds to grease the right palms and support the right candidates – all in the interest, of course, of shielding his little Ward from harm, while also protecting his booming street-level lottery.

Which is why, to understand the importance of the 1967 All City Championship to Syracuse’s African American community, it’s necessary to explore the events leading up to the previous year’s game.  That was the game during which many in town felt Kenny Huffman and his Corcoran Cougars had been given a raw deal and were on the receiving end of a horrifically bad call – a call that, at least to many in the Ward, seemed to be based as much on skin color as it was basketball. 

For purposes of this story, the first important date to keep in mind is Friday, May 13, 1960.  That was the day the dominos started to fall, because that was the day – or the early evening of that day, to be precise – on which a team of New York State Troopers, armed with guns, dogs and a search warrant, charged into Percy and Alice Harris’ apartment on Harrison Street and uncovered tens of thousands of dollars in small, neatly stacked bills, all of them tucked away; some in a wooden whiskey crate, but the bulk of them beneath a loose floorboard in the far corner of a rear bedroom. 

What the troopers didn’t find, at least initially, were the tens of thousands that Harris’ frantic yet ever-resourceful wife, Alice, had unceremoniously tossed out the window of another rear bedroom, just as the troopers were beginning their search. 

Below that particular window on that late afternoon were a bunch of teenagers, including Ricky Chisholm, who liked to spend his days, not playing basketball from sunup to sundown, like his kid brother Tookie, but singing and playing music with his buddies. Ricky and his friends had started out performing a cappella do-wop songs on the Ward’s street corners some time prior, but were now – as a new era of music was taking shape – starting to add instrumentation to their sound, including drumming on whatever hard or hollow surface they could get their hands on.

As the boys were midway through their rendition of yet another contemporary hit, amid the soft pastel glow of magic hour, they stopped cold at the hollow sound and muted thud they heard just a dozen or so feet behind them. Turning, they saw a large weathered carpetbag with brown handles and a leather strap, at the end of which was a small hasp that sealed it shut.  The boys looked at each other for the briefest of moments before bolting in the direction of the bag, their minds racing with possibilities. 

What they found went far beyond any possibilities their young minds could have entertained. What the five boys found staring up at them from that old bag were piles upon piles of U.S. paper currency; ones, fives, tens and twenties, all grouped, all neatly stacked, and all bound with cheap, brown twine. It was more money than they’d ever seen in their lives and, in some cases, ever would see.

Before they could respond or offer up a single whoop of celebration, a tall, imposing presence appeared, one that loomed over them like a ten-foot giant; a towering, uniformed figure casting an equally towering shadow. Hovering over those five street corner musicians was a New York State Trooper, part of the team participating in the raid on the Harris home. The guy simply reached down, closed the hasp, grabbed the bag in his thick, powerful fist, and said, “Thank you, boys.  I’ll take that.” 

The surprise raid, you see, was not the product of the local Syracuse police or any of the higher-ups who, for years, had been so handsomely and regularly compensated by Percy Harris to look the other way.

To the contrary, it was one of the earliest examples of a promise made (and kept) by the new Attorney General of the State of New York, a promise to clean up corruption, especially at the local level. Those in power in Syracuse, as a result, had no idea the raid on Harris’ apartment was planned until the morning it actually occurred.

There were plenty of red faces afterward, too, but none any redder than that of Anthony Henninger, Syracuse's mayor, a good, decent and honest public servant, who was livid and held his chief of police, a former Irish beat cop named Harold F. Kelly, personally responsible for giving a numbers operation like Harris' such a free rein.  In fact, as soon as the following morning, Henninger made it clear there was a good chance he was going to give that same top cop, the now humiliated Kelly, the boot. 

The mayor, a lifelong Republican, never did fire Kelly. But the embarrassment was real and it mattered deeply, especially since the raid caught everyone in City Hall with their pants down and occurred smack dab in the middle of the one of the most bitterly fought presidential campaigns in modern history, the knock-down, drag-out affair between Vice President Richard Nixon and the dashing young senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Central New York had been a longtime Republican stronghold, but the charming and youthful JFK, who was not just a decorated war hero, but a ruggedly handsome, telegenic guy with a razor sharp wit, continued to chip away at Nixon’s once-formidable lead.

And the realization of the breadth and scope of Harris’ numbers operation carried broad and deep implications because it absolutely reeked of Republican corruption or ineptitude – neither of which was a particularly good option for the party desperately seeking to hold on to the White House.

Yet, the raid on Percy and Alice Harris' tiny apartment was merely the first shoe to drop.

Because, while the money seized that day, along with the unmasking of one of the worst kept secrets in Syracuse, may have been important, what was crucial, if not ultimately fatal to the Ward was something small and seemingly innocuous that the troopers also stumbled upon amid all those neatly piled stacks of money. 

What they discovered and learned was this: Alice Harris was not just another shapely looker or fine-and-tall drink of American womanhood. And she was not, in addition, just one more overlooked and underestimated American housewife. She was, as they’d soon discover, a woman with the mind of a chief executive, one with an incredible eye for detail, with both the ability and the inclination to capture and record even the smallest business transaction.

For that reason, Percy Harris’ wife not only kept meticulous records of all her husband’s street-level affairs, she also kept copious notes and paid careful attention to every one of his powerful and politically connected clients. To that end, Alice Harris maintained an accurate and up-to-date ledger, a leather-bound record of numbers, clients and transactions that stretched back years, and one, following her arrest – like a gift from the gods – became a virtual road map for those hoping to unlock and bring to its knees the rampant racketeering going on in the Salt City, a malfeasance that may have started in the streets of the Ward but ran all the way up to the fanciest offices in town.

Four months later, on the night of Wednesday, September 28^th, a state trooper (again, not a local cop) pulled up behind a late model Studebaker parked at an angle in the lot of a rundown motel on Seventh North Street, a lot directly on the proposed site of the all-new Interstate 81. Suspicious of the vehicle because of its odd angle, the trooper flashed his lights into its steamed-up windows.

Moments later, a pasty-faced and doughy man named George L. Traister, along with his female paramour, a twenty-something pro from the North Side with the given name of Mary Neil, were being handcuffed and carted off to the city lockup; her on various charges, including prostitution; him on multiple counts of illegal and deviant sexual behavior, including the granddaddy of them all, sodomy.

The problem was, George Traister wasn’t just a garden-variety, working-class stiff in a stale marriage or some middle-aged John Q. Nobody possessing multiple chins and the gnawing desire to get a little something-something on the side.  

No, George Traister was the duly elected Treasurer of Onondaga County. More important, he was the sitting chairman of the Onondaga County Republican Party. 

And, that Wednesday, September 28^th, was a mere forty days before Election Day, and just twenty-four hours before the most powerful Democrat in America – the surging John F. Kennedy – would be coming to Syracuse on a full-blown campaign stop. 

From a political perspective, Syracuse had suddenly become a key city in a suddenly crucial state. And Kennedy’s handlers, well aware of that, had shuffled things around so that their candidate could speak to well-wishers in Clinton Square, followed by a major fund-raising luncheon at the Hotel Syracuse, a rubber-chicken stumper that would be carried live, via closed circuit, and broadcast on a massive screen erected just outside the hotel. 

Syracuse’s two local newspapers, as a result, would both have themselves a pair of killer stories battling for readers’ attention on the front page, both of them on the same day, both of them sitting side-by-side, and both perched prominently and proudly above the fold. 

One would be the story of the massive throng of adoring Kennedy voters, supporters and onlookers, many of them young women, who’d come out en masse, like screaming schoolgirls at an Elvis show.

The other would be the Day Two story of the head of the local Republican Party and that poor sap’s sloppy, late-night arrest for getting caught red-handed with a low-end call-girl in the parking lot of a flea-bag motel.

The fallout from Traister’s arrest was as swift as it was absolute. The night following his arrest and subsequent perp walk with his disheveled and lipstick-smeared girlfriend du jour, the secretary of the local Republican Party, Richard Aronson, with his publicity chair, Elmer Bogardus, rapped unannounced on the door of the Traister home in the Village of Liverpool.

There, at the family dinner table, with Traister’s wife looking on worriedly, wringing her hands, Aronson handed the glum and soon-to-be ex-Republican chair a terse letter of resignation that Bogardus had taken the liberty to compose and type up on his behalf.

Aronson then pulled out a PaperMate from his inside pocket, clicked it, and set it on the letter in front of Traister, unemotionally instructing him to sign it. It wasn’t one of those Don Corleone “your signature or your brains” moments, but it was darn close. The radioactive Traister was done in politics. 

As the two no-nonsense Republicans made their way to the front door of the Traister home, one thanked the Mrs. for her instant coffee and sugar cookies, as they both donned the soft felt fedoras they’d been carrying.  Then, with all the passion of a guy telling his cleaner how he likes his shirts done, Aronson informed the woman’s ashen and slump-shouldered husband that come tomorrow he was also going to walk into the county office building and resign from his $9,300 a year job as Treasurer.  Also, he suggested, it would probably be prudent if he were to do that at some point early in the morning, rather than waiting until after, say, he got back from lunch, because they had already scheduled a noon meeting at the Yates Hotel to introduce State Senator John Hughes as the new Onondaga County party chair. Hughes, in turn, would tell all those worried men seated around him that none of them should leave with their head down. The Republican Party is, was, and would always remain, bigger than any one person.

As always in such situations, neutralizing the problem was only part of the solution. Until the blame had been properly assigned elsewhere, and the necessary steps taken to ensure that no such future incident would ever occur, the matter would not be settled.

Enter the 15^th Ward, a place that, from that moment on, and from that point forward, would no longer be viewed by anyone in town who mattered as just some benign repository for fourteen or so thousand of the city’s “Negroes.” Instead, the Ward would be cast forevermore as a festering, open wound on Syracuse’s proud, but now battered and bruised face; a place that would no longer be just another slum but, now, a damn incubator for the exact kind of vice that had, somehow, and in some way, managed to ensnare their hard-working little town in its cold and vile clutches.

That’s why just a few weeks later, on Tuesday, October 18, George Traister would find himself indicted on sodomy charges. News of that would be sprawled across the front pages of both papers under screaming headlines – and, if that weren't bad enough, according to one of the stories, the former chairman of the Republican Party would be committed to a sanitarium and placed on a 24-hour watch for his own benefit.

Within those newspaper accounts would be five additional indictments that actually led those front-page stories and made most everyone reading them want to keep reading, even to the jump page. Indicted as well were a number of high-ranking public officials, every one of them for having played a role in Percy Harris’ well-oiled and insanely profitable numbers racket. 

Among the four officials (along with a local smoke shop owner) paraded into court in handcuffs were Herbert Johnson, the Syracuse Police Court Clerk, and Francis Garn, a detective and 31-year veteran of the force.  In fact, it was Garn’s photo that graced the front page of the following day’s Post-Standard, just below the Post’s blaring headline. The photo showed the disgraced 56-year old cop attempting to hide his handcuffs under his trench coat as he was led away.

Indicted as well were various members of Percy Harris’ “management” team, including his right hand man, Gerald “Buster” Mordecai, his wife Alice, and, of course, Harris himself.

Trying their best to mitigate the political humiliation that this confluence of events continued to inflict on Nixon’s now-bleeding campaign in Central New York, the Republicans countered quickly. They immediately dispatched vice presidential candidate Henry Cabot Lodge to Syracuse the same day the indictments were slated to come down. There, in Syracuse, Mr. Lodge promised that if Richard Nixon were elected president next month, he'd likely name the first Negro in history to one of his cabinet positions.  

He announced as well that Nixon, at Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s urging, would soon be returning to Syracuse to address them all; either October 31^st, November 1^st, or November 2^nd – literally, just hours before Election Day.

The story of Lodge’s speech, his bold prediction of Nixon picking a “Negro” cabinet head, and his announcement that his running mate would soon be returning to Syracuse, made the Post-Standard’s front page, right next to the Garn photo and its corresponding story.

To many in and around Syracuse, however, it felt like a case of too-little-too-late. What was done was done, after all, and no magic wand or political sleight-of-hand was going to change what had happened.  Yet, as a result of all that transpired on that Tuesday, without Percy Harris and his mountains of money to stop them – without the firewall he created with so many greased palms – the barriers to the sweeping changes in the offing started to fall with almost frightening speed.

Less than two years later, Bill Walsh would become mayor and make a decision on where to carve a path for Interstate 81.  A short time after that, the wrecking ball would begin to swing in earnest; swiftly, surely, and with deadly accuracy and an almost chilling level of dispassion. 

When that began to happen, hundreds of African American homes and dozens of African American and Jewish businesses started getting laid to waste, and the neighborhood that housed them all soon found itself relegated to that shady, gray area that can often exist between one man’s warm memories and another’s footnote to history.

For many in the Ward, it wasn’t the tearing down of their homes that gnawed at them or burned so deep in their souls. It was the cold and systematic demolition of all those public gathering places that had long united them and for so long had bound them as family; the barber shops and beauty salons, the diners, the saloons, the jazz joints, the churches, the schools, and the social clubs. 

Most of those folks rented, anyway. Their dwellings were, as a result, of secondary concern. But having ripped from their loving arms all those special places that, over the years, they’d built into what they’d become, and that now defined how so many of them viewed themselves, that was the thing that, in the end, broke their spirit. It shattered what was left of their little neighborhood’s cast-iron will and once-indomitable sense of itself.

One by one, they lost them. Among the first gone was Grant Malone’s Barber Shop, the Ward’s social crossroads and mostly-male beehive, where anyone who was anyone regularly went to talk, laugh and discuss the Orangemen or the sordid details of Emo Henderson’s latest column; then went Norm’s Chili Bowl, the dirty store, the ragman’s cart, Slim’s Pool Hall and Aunt Edith’s Kitchen, the cozy little place where the coffee was always hot, the pies always fresh, the conversation always spirited.

After that, Fineberg’s Butcher Shop, Chocolate’s Smoke Shop, Meltzer’s Deli, Sable’s, Herbson’s, Volinsky’s and Miller’s Jewelers, many of them Jewish-owned emporiums whose histories stretched well back to the days before the Ward had transformed itself into a mostly black neighborhood.

Gone too would be the Embassy, the Penguin and the Clover Club, among so many others hopping jazz joints, where all the biggest entertainers in Black America, whenever they came to town, would flock like swallows to Capistrano.

Also leveled would be the two beautiful synagogues where the few remaining Jews in the Ward still went to worship every Sabbath and holy day.

And Washington Irving School, where it seemed almost every child in the Ward took his or her first wobbly steps down a path that would lead at least a few to college and beyond, but far more simply to adulthood, in whatever humble shape or form.

Gone as well would be certain streets which would disappear from the city map entirely, never to be seen again; small, little two-and-three block byways with gentle sounding names like Grape Street, Orange Street and, of course, Renwick Place.

Gone would be Father Brady’s remarkable Foery Foundation in that sturdy but withered old brick building on Foreman Ave, where the Saint of Syracuse not only lived in a tiny apartment with little more than a pair of shoes, a few spare toiletries, and two or three pieces of furniture, but where he breathed life into the Word of God every day by putting that very same Word into action for an entire city to see.

Lost would be the building that housed the original Dunbar Center, where learning how to play and compete, and how to stand on principle and fight for one’s rightful share, were just a few of the things that countless boys and girls would learn firsthand.

Gone as well would be the Huntington Club, or at least the Huntington Club in its original incarnation, a place that years prior had been established to support single women who, during World War I, moved to the city in search of a job, a room of their own, and a safe place to lay their head.  In the years hence, it would reinvent itself as a family center for teaching essential life and job skills, while providing comfort, support, and even food to the neediest of God’s children.

No more would people be able to find succor in the humble little St. Joseph’s French Church on Genesee Street, once one of the spiritual pillars of the Ward but now merely one more vacant, doomed building whose usefulness had, sadly, passed. 

And gone, as well, would be all but small traces of the one-of-a-kind inner-city neighborhood that had once welcomed the gracious, gentle giant, Earl Lloyd, with open arms and heart, welcomed him like one of its own even as he was trying to cope with all the racism and hatred in all those angry NBA towns – while at the same time quietly and with almost regal dignity helping to break the league’s color line with the old Syracuse Nats.  Years later Lloyd would call the neighborhood “my salvation” because in it he’d found a mostly-Black world in which he and his adopted family could bond in what he, for the rest of his life, would refer to as the “brotherhood of the briar patch.”

The point is that there was much more riding on the outcome of the 1967 All City game than simple bragging rights and a shiny trophy. 

What was at stake, at least for Corcoran – or, more to the point, for those of the 15^th Ward – was something that went to the very essence of what it meant to be a Black man in Syracuse during the Spring of 1967.  It was a chance to strike back and be heard, if only briefly and if only in a small way. It was a moment to try to win back a sliver of what had been ripped away from you so heartlessly. And it was an opportunity to channel all that bottled up hurt and frustration into something that, in the end, wouldn’t hurt a soul. 

It was, after all, just a silly little basketball game – although winning it would sure feel damn good.

More than anything, though, the 1967 Syracuse All City Championship was a chance to showcase Black pride in what would turn out to be the final such championship the proud and booming factory town would ever experience. 

And if folks didn't know they were about to witness the last All City game ever, could you really fault them? Because even with all the telltale signs around the city, if not the country as a whole, it was still impossible for most to wrap their brains around the fact that the Syracuse they’d known for so long – just like the Ward they’d so loved and the neighborhood they’d been so proud to call their own – was about to disappear in what would seem like a flash, right before their eyes.

 

*          *          *          *          *

For Billy E, the anticipation of a Friday night Parochial League game was, in many ways, almost better than the game itself.  Because every Friday morning, each game was still perfect and each boy’s shot still true. There were yet to be any bad turnovers or crazy, ill-advised passes. There’d yet to be even a single dumb foul or a single clanked free throw. There was only one thing: the chance, if not very real hope, for something oddly resembling perfection, schoolboy basketball style.

Unlike so many Parochial League coaches, players and fans, however, Billy didn’t necessarily follow a set routine on game day, as if not doing so might prove, somehow, harmful to his team's chances that night. He just didn’t possess that gene, or worry about such trivial things. He didn’t eat the same food in the same eatery or wear the same game-day tie every week. He didn’t necessarily drive the same route to and from Allied Chemical or, as a matter of superstition, tie his shoes, wind his watch, or open his Post-Standard the same way every Friday morning.

To the contrary, he just sort of let things happen in advance of that night's game and played things entirely by ear all day long.  That was just who Billy E was.

The only constant was that each and every Friday Billy would always allow himself to be slowly consumed by thoughts of the game on tap, especially as the day wore on, the minutes ticked away, and the opening tip drew closer. On his way to the game, whether home or away, he’d also take one last opportunity to rehearse in his mind's ear what he was going to tell his boys in the locker room.

That same sense of heightened anticipation, however, was conspicuously absent from any and all Sunday games. There were very few games on Sunday, anyway. Sometimes they were a byproduct of snow days, other times the result of some scheduling conflicts that simply couldn’t be avoided.  Or every so often, it was because someone in Father Sammons’ CYO office – most likely, the good Father himself – had deemed a Sunday afternoon game appropriate for reasons that were, and would forever remain, a mystery.

Sundays never really felt quite right for Billy; not for a regular season game, anyway. Sundays were for morning worship, for Pete’s sake, and then a good hard practice followed by a nice hot shower and a dive into the Sunday Herald-American. Sundays were for hot coffee, funny pages in color, and sweet pastries from the Harrison Bakery.

Each week at Sacred Heart, there’d always be a high mass at ten o’clock, a Sunday morning celebration of the Last Supper with all the pomp and circumstance the Catholic Church could muster.  That was the mass Billy and Bernice Ewaniszyk, along with a number of his players, would attend week after week, followed by a nice and efficient two-hour practice; often a scrimmage that Billy would have asked the school’s young athletic director, Father Olszewski – known to most of the kids as simply “Father O” – to arrange with one of the stronger City or County League clubs.

Billy, who was a second generation Russian Orthodox, had transitioned over to traditional Roman Catholicism in the Fall of 1951. From that point on, he and Bernice rarely missed Sunday mass at their new church. High mass at ten was their particular favorite because it was the one during which all the candles on Sacred Heart's altar got lit and all the delicate clinks and aromas of Catholicism were in full bloom, including the sweet smell of all that incense being offered up to God as a companion to all those hypnotic Latin chants being sent His way. 

High mass was also the one – at least at Sacred Heart – often said in his native tongue by Casimir Piejda, the proud immigrant Pole and parish pastor.  At high mass at Sacred Heart during basketball season, Monsignor Piejda always made it a point to strongly suggest that all his players and cheerleaders – varsity, JV and grammar school – sit front and center, almost as symbols of Mother Poland’s promise of sustained greatness.

Not all Billy’s players would be there, of course, because not all of them regularly attended Sacred Heart. Jack Contos, for example, went to a different house of worship, St. Stephen’s, a nearby Slovak church on Geddes Street, because his father was an usher there.  And Pete Schmid, who lived way out in Fairmount, always went to Holy Family, the relatively new church just down Onondaga Road from his family home.

But many of the other players went to ten o’clock mass every week and did, indeed, sit in the first row or two, just as Piejda suggested. There’d be the kids from Tipp Hill; Tommy Sakowski, Rich Dabrowski, Walt Kicak, Tommy Godzak, Jim Corbett, and even Danny Van Cott, the young Dutch/Irish youngster who lived with his family above Nibsy’s Saloon and who, as a headstrong eighth grader, promised Piejda that if he let him transfer from St. Pat’s, and let him play his high school ball for the Hearts, he’d attend mass at Sacred Heart every Sunday without fail. Those Tipp Hill Hearts kids generally walked to church as a unit, assembling one-by-one as they neared the tracks, much like they often did for school on weekdays, or at least from the early Fall to the late Spring.

Sitting up there as well would be Joey Zaganczyk, the handsome young shooter and sometime pop star. His brother-from-a-different-mother, Jimmy Pryzbyl, however, one of the scrawniest but hardest working of the “Chinese Bandits,” would not be there – at least not there sitting with his teammates. Instead, Pryzbyl, perhaps the most devout Catholic on the team, would be serving as an altar boy, something he'd been doing at ten o'clock mass since he first became a teenager, and something he'd do until the very week he left for basic training not long after his 20th birthday. Zaganczyk would have come to mass, as he often did, with the entire Pryzbyl family because, as on so many Saturday nights, he’d spent it at their home, watching TV, playing games, eating popcorn, drinking grape Kool Aid, and, eventually, sleeping in the spare bed in his best friend's room.

As well, there’d be any number of JV and grammar school players and cheerleaders on hand – all of them interspersed with the upper class players and cheerleaders to pray, draw closer to God, and, ultimately, be showcased by Piejda, the proudest and most stubbornly defiant Pole just about anyone had ever met.

Billy never sat with his team on Sundays. He and Bernice sat where they always sat; on the far right hand side of the pews, third row from the rear, directly on the aisle. That was not a matter of superstition. That’s just where they liked to sit.

But that particular Sunday was just a bit different. Because on that day, Monsignor Piejda took a moment before ending mass with his trademark blessing and sign of the cross to wish the varsity and JV kids the best of luck in that afternoon’s game, the one being held at Bishop Ludden to accommodate the Knights of Columbus fundraiser scheduled later that day in the school gymnasium.

Should they win, Piejda explained, they’d finish the season undefeated. He then blessed the players and told them that God and the Sacred Heart of Jesus would be with them in their quest for perfection. 

No one dared applaud. It was, after all, February of 1967.  And in 1967, even with the new relaxed rules in effect thanks to Vatican II, no Catholic ever dared clap in God's house, even to celebrate the union of two souls or acknowledge the strong possibility of an undefeated season by a team of boys playing their hearts out for the glory and honor of Jesus.

That’s not to say, however, that the congregation didn’t respond to Piejda’s well-wishes. And when he offered them, a low murmur began spreading through the assemblage as the realization dawned on those there that in less than three hours the solid young men in the front two rows would be trying to carve out a small piece of history – and not just for themselves but, in a very real way, for Polish-Americans throughout Central New York.

Billy E didn’t say a thing.  He just sat there and smiled as the pastor gave his blessing. And his smile only brightened when Bernice patted him on his knee and looked into his eyes with pride.

That’s when the butterflies started. Those damn, stupid, pain-in-the-ass butterflies.  The same ones that Billy had been feeling two nights prior, just before the Lucy’s game. And it was little wonder when you thought about it. Because when a man wanted something as badly as Billy wanted an undefeated season, it can often make him worry to the point of distraction and make him suddenly terrified that, somehow, he wasn't going to get the very thing he wants most.  

The difference now was that he could finally admit to himself that he wanted it, and wanted it badly –and that, for the first time ever, it was so close he could almost touch it.

 

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

 

The game, of course, shouldn’t have been played at Ludden, at all. Billy E knew that better than anyone. But fate had intervened and, alas, nothing could be done.  It was the 75^th anniversary of Sacred Heart and, because of that, certain parish activities had been on the docket for months, including the Knights of Columbus fundraiser the Boss had mentioned in his sermon, the one slated for the school gym later that day. 

Someone in the K of C leadership must have just assumed the gym was going to be available that particular Sunday, given that the vast majority of varsity and JV basketball games were held on Friday nights. How was that person to know that someone in Father Sammons’ office – again, perhaps even the old man himself – had decided to schedule the final game of the 1966-67 season, not on a Friday night, as was normally the case, but on a Sunday afternoon?

As a result, Father O, the new Hearts athletic director, had been forced to scramble and make provisions for his team’s eighteenth and final game to be relocated two and a half miles west, to Bishop Ludden High in verdant little Westvale, just a stone’s throw or so beyond the city limits sign.

That should have been Billy’s first clue that this was not going to be a typical Sunday, or a typical final game, for that matter – and the atypical nature of those two things would extend far beyond the fact that his team had chance to do what only three teams had ever done in history: finish a Parochial League regular season without a loss. 

The day was beautiful, with a robin’s egg-blue sky awash with the kind of warming sunshine that could dry a sidewalk in minutes. Plus, the temperatures kept climbing as the sun crept higher in the sky, reaching as high as the low 60’s by noon, almost unheard of in Syracuse at that time of year.

The second reason that Sunday would be atypical was due to the game itself.  But more on that in a moment.

On tap that brilliant and unseasonably warm day was a season-ending match with St. John the Baptist, a good but certainly not great team from the North Side. After all, Billy and his boys had traveled to Court Street a few weeks earlier and demolished Baptists, beating Coach Frank Satalin’s team by a whopping twenty-one points – on their court, no less. 

It was yet another of those lopsided games, in fact, in which the Hearts starters knew they’d have to try to get their points, however many there’d be, in the first three quarters, and maybe the first half.  Because they knew they weren’t likely to play much, if at all, in the game’s latter stages. Billy’s modus operandi had always been to use blowouts as a way of rewarding his Chinese Bandits with a little extra playing time.

Back in those days, there was one parishioner and supporter of the Hearts in particular who remained near and dear to Billy. The guy’s name was John Wysocki, a proud Pole who possessed a deep and abiding love for God, his family, his Church, his heritage, and the game of basketball, in approximately that order. Wysocki, a successful businessman, owned not only a highly successful tavern and restaurant, but also the area’s leading Polish funeral home. As such, he was constantly asking Billy what he might be able to do to help his boys out financially. 

Billy would always respond the this question the same way: “New uniforms.”  It's one reason why, in a league known for its well-worn and often shabby team uniforms, the Heartsmen were standard bearers – the Parochial League’s Beau Brummels, so to speak – with the brightest, whitest and least-frayed uniforms and warm-ups in town.

In retrospect, what Billy would later say he should have asked Wysocki for was a team bus. Sacred Heart didn't own its own bus; nor, for that matter, did any Parochial League team. Owning a bus of any vintage or condition, frankly, would have been a luxury that none of the league’s ten parishes had, and a luxury that none of them would have ever dreamt of.  And without a bus, transporting a group of growing, teenage boys from place to place to play a basketball game in 1967 could, at times, turn into a logistical jigsaw puzzle for any head coach, especially in the middle of the work day or the heart of the work week. 

That had long been one of the hidden benefits of Foery’s quaint-and-unique little parish-based league. For years, it had been possible for Parochial Leaguers – players, fans and coaches alike – to actually walk, not just to and from home games, but, often, to and from away ones as well. 

But with the ongoing flight to Syracuse's suburbs and the dismantling of its 15^th Ward, the city's high school population was becoming far more dispersed by the Spring of '67 and the concept of transporting students a far more critical consideration for school administrators everywhere.

That’s one of the many reasons why Billy E  was such a big fan of Pete Schmid’s dad, a guy he’d gotten to know and like over the course of Pete’s three years. The elder Schmid, long before there was such a thing as a “helicopter parent,” had shown himself to be a second-generation immigrant who was deeply, deeply invested in his son's career. He went to every one of Pete’s games and a few of his practices as well, driving to all of them, often with Pete riding shotgun beside him, eyes fixed and trusty gym bag by his side. 

That made Old Man Schmid something of a constant in Billy’s life, if not a good friend – because the senior Schmid was a licensed driver with a dependable and roomy car. As a consequence, the guy might be asked to squeeze as many as three or four long-legged teens into his sedan at a moment's notice, which he always did gladly. 

Mobility was also likely one of the main reasons why Father O, the recently ordained priest from New York’s Southern Tier, had been named his new school's athletic director by the Boss, Monsignor Piejda.  It wasn’t just that, like so many AD's in the Parochial League, Father O was young and energetic and loved basketball, or that he occasionally played pick-up games with the boys in the gym after school.  It was primarily because he owned his own car, an ordination gift from his father, a brand-new, fully loaded, 1967 Pontiac GTO – in shiny jet black, no less, with customized hubcaps and a motorized convertible top. 

In fact, that late-model ragtop of Father O’s was so nice, and so hot – at least “hot” in a teenage boy sort-of-way – that of all the pregame rituals practiced so faithfully by so many of that year’s Hearts kids, one of the most rock-solid certain was this: at some point every morning of every away game, senior Jack Contos would invariably knock on Father O’s door, ask him if he were going to the game that evening, and, if so, would he mind if he rode along?

Riding to away games with Father Olszewski was how Jack Contos learned to love a group called the Searchers, a Beatles-lite British Invasion band featuring a folky, harmonic sound and some truly soaring melodies. Father O loved to blast his new 8-track as he sped through town, top down, sunglasses on, the wind flying through his thick, dark hair.  A song called Needles and Pins was the Searchers tune that Jack embraced most. It became, in fact, something of a game-day anthem for him.

Prior to that, Jack's game-day music-of-choice had always been the Beach Boys.  Part of his game day ritual had always been to go home after school on the day of a game, lie on the sofa for a good hour or so, close his eyes, and crank up the Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits to a volume on the RCA console that drove his mother just about as crazy as it got his juices flowing. 

But that little ritual had been supplanted by the wrinkle that Father O's killer car and 8-track player had presented to him that very year – a breakthrough in audio mobility and sound clarity that, frankly, neither Jack nor the good Father had ever experienced before.

For Billy Ewaniszyk, part of the problem of a Sunday game was not being able to build up any anticipation for it, the way he could on Fridays at Allied, when he could allow the excitement to build slowly, hour-by-hour, then quicker and quicker as the hands on the clock crept closer to straight-up five and that glorious wail of the five o’clock whistle.

But Sunday’s, Billy had no pie waiting for him in a string-tied cardboard box like he did on Fridays during basketball season; a fresh-baked pie placed on his top step by the owner of Ma Tuttle’s, the wholesale pie manufacturer at the base of Tipp Hill. Dropping fresh pies off to key members of the Hearts family was something that the guy had been doing since the birth of the varsity program a decade prior and the glory days of Gene Fisch. That was when, while doing his deliveries, he began dropping off still-warm apple, cherry or pecan pies on the stoops of a dozen or so front doors in and around the parish – accompanied, in Gene’s case, by a $5 bill taped inside the cover as a gesture of his appreciation for all that Fisch, a first-generation immigrant and Nazi survivor, had done to do to bring glory to the Motherland and honor to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

On Sunday’s, Billy always found himself driving to games by himself. It was the weekend, after all, and almost every kid on his team could catch a ride from the old man, since odds were the guy wasn’t going to be at the factory or shop that day. 

There was, as a result, no real sense of team on Sundays, no kinship, and no bonding moments – not at least until Billy E and his boys found themselves together in the locker room just a few moments before tip-off.

Notwithstanding, Billy wasn't ready at all for what he encountered that warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in Westvale. Because when he walked into that brand, spanking new Bishop Ludden gym well in advance of the JV game, and in search of the home locker room (the game, after all, was a home affair for the Hearts, despite their never having set foot in the place), what he encountered, quite literally, hurt his eyes. 

Billy had never seen a brighter or more brilliant gym in all his life; one so awash with raw and radiant sunshine that the rays streaming through the squeaky-clean panes on both sides of the building looked as though they might have been delicate beams of powder, all a wispy mix of silver, yellow and white, and all those colors at the same time.

It was a gym that was a perfect metaphor for its city; a city that was constantly making new and shiny things better than any city in America, and then sending them out into the world; a forward-looking beacon of manufacturing might-and-muscle whose future, seemingly anyway, was as solid and bright as the glistening things it produced.

And all that brightness that washed over Billy that afternoon was only exacerbated by the reflection of all that sunlight off the all the frosted snow in all the open fields just outside the gym; off the highly waxed stacks of new and recently polished bleachers; and off the two opposing and still-new glass boards that hung suspended, as if dropped there by the angels above, on either end of the court. 

It was so bright, in fact, it was all the Hearts coach could do to see ten feet or so ahead of him without having to shield his eyes. He actually, at one point, felt his coat pocket for his clip-on's, thinking he might want to attach his shades to his glasses to keep from getting a headache.

That’s when Billy heard a voice. He turned and saw who he assumed to be Father Charles Eckermann, the vice-principal of Ludden, striding toward him with purpose.  Eckermann, a thick, squat man with dark, slick hair, and equally thick and dark-rimmed glasses, was heading his way, head raised and one hand out.  If he was nothing else, the Bishop Ludden vice-principal was one politically savvy and well-practiced son of a gun, or so Billy told himself.  He shook Eckermann’s slightly clammy outstretched paw and offered him a smile-free and workman-like, “Hello, Father.” 

“Coach,” said Eckermann, “Welcome to Bishop Ludden!  Pretty amazing, isn’t it?,” he added, glancing up and around.  The stocky, barrel chested priest wasted no time, even as he continued to beam over the wonder of his new school's basketball facility, in getting down to business. “Look, I’m sure Father Olszewski, briefed you on our agreement,” he said, his voice growing markedly less chatty.  “We’ll split the gate evenly and I’ll find you immediately after to give you your half of the proceeds. Sound good?”  

It wasn’t a question, as much as it was a statement.

Eckermann didn’t say what the capacity of that new gym of his was, but Billy looked around and quickly figured it to be somewhere in the vicinity of, maybe, seven hundred people, perhaps as many as nine, if they squeezed in enough students and factored in the standing room area in front of the stage and over near the front doors. 

“How much will you be charging, Father?” asked Billy in a tone that matched the priest’s, his left brain ready to do some quick calculations to get a rough idea of what the Hearts’ take might be. 

“Father Olszewski and I agreed we’d charge a dollar for adults and fifty cents for students,” answered Eckermann.

The priest then cleared his throat, forced a smile, and once again stuck out a small, clammy hand to the Hearts coach, which Billy E once again accepted with muted excitement. “Well, Coach, I know you’ve got to get ready and you must have things to do,” said the roundish little school administrator, punctuating his best wishes with a cartoonish smile so forced it seemed almost pinned to his face. “That’s your locker room, through those doors just to the right of the stage. Good luck.  And I’ll see you afterward.”

When he left, Billy just stood there for a moment, looked around, and drank in the dimensions and feel of the spotless and sprawling room in which he stood, a cavernous piece of real estate that would, in just a few hours, play host to his team’s final regular season game – the one for the Hearts’ shot at a little slice of Parochial League immortality. 

There were only a handful of people in the gym at the time because, unlike almost every game to that point, Billy E had decided to get to the gym extra early; a full hour or so, in fact, before the start of the JV game.

As he looked up and around, Billy E realized that, as relatively new as the Hearts’ gym might have been, this place was newer. A lot newer. And the gym had a size to it that, while similar to his own, just felt bigger and less forgiving, not to mention less – and he struggled for the right words – broken-in.

There was, indeed, a sharpness to the edges of Ludden’s gym, as well as an almost antiseptic freshness to it – two hard-to-define qualities – that gave Billy E more than a moment’s pause.  The gym was, in other words, almost the exact opposite of so many of the tiny, well-worn and wonderfully musty gyms into which his boys regularly ventured on Friday nights to wage battle and defend their school’s colors.

“Why do we have to play here?” Billy thought as he looked up at the immaculate new rafters and let his gaze linger, the afternoon sunlight washing over him and reflecting off his glasses. At that moment he also couldn't help but contemplate one final time the stubborn and unshakable fact that he and his boys had yet to lose.

 

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

 

He wasn’t eighty-one, or seventy-one, or even sixty-one. He was fifty-one. Yet Frank Satalin was considered the old man of the Parochial League. Not in a dismissive or over-the-hill sort of way, but rather, in a deferential and even cherished sort of way. 

Satalin, who by 1967 was coaching his third different parish-based team in three decades, had emerged as the unofficial “Dean of Parochial League Coaches.” He’d won titles and dominated at both St. Pat’s and St. Lucy’s, playing two fundamentally dissimilar styles of ball in each.  And he’d won a couple of titles, as well, at his current school, St. John the Baptist, along with one All City Championship. 

But, even then, the respect that Frank Satalin was afforded by anyone who ever knew him, especially his peers, was not really based on basketball at all. It was based on his fundamental decency as a man.

Because Frank Satalin was one of the most genuine, principled and dignified men many in town had ever known. There was an inherent kindness to him that radiated from deep within, a kindness that, when mixed with his depth of character and his unyielding respect for his fellow man, made all those around him aspire to be on their best behavior, so as to not to disappoint the guy.

One of former players, in fact, a young man who’d been a nice little guard during his days at Baptist, once had to spend almost a full day with Satalin without smoking a cigarette in front of him, something that just about killed him. But he did it because he would have rather died than disappoint his former high school coach.

You see, Frank Panto had recently returned stateside from a year-long tour in Vietnam, which he'd done at a time when that ill-fated conflict had started to escalate into something far uglier than anyone could have ever imagined. A non-smoker when drafted, Panto returned to Syracuse with a nearly three-pack-a-day habit.

Chain smoking had become Frank Panto’s escape in the jungles of Southeast Asia, his way of steadying his ever-fraying nerves while trying to stay alive and, at the same time, deal with the constant suffering and death that continued to pile up all about him.

So when Panto returned home after his stint in-country and found himself trapped in a car for a ten-hour sojourn to and from Madison Square Garden with his ex-coach and a few ex-teammates to see the coach’s two sons play a big game for St. Bonaventure, he nearly lost his mind looking out the window of the backseat.

How does a young man who smokes roughly five cigarettes every waking hour of every day go a full ten hours, plus another two for basketball, and not smoke even one (except during a handful of infrequent yet extended bathroom breaks), and do it cold-turkey and at the drop of a hat?

By summoning up all the discipline that same high school coach taught him as a teenager  back in the day, and because of his own powerful desire to simply never disappoint the man. 

That’s how much respect Frank Satalin was afforded in his prime. And that’s why, to all but a handful of those closest to him, he was never “Frank.”  He was, and would always remain, simply as a matter of principle and deference, “Mr. Satalin.”

Not bad for a guy who delivered mail for a living.

Yet, one thing had grown increasingly clear as the years continued tick by. Even though his dignity remained intact, and would do so throughout his life, and even though his lessons of love, character and discipline would remain timeless and resonate for whatever young man had been lucky enough to have played for him, by February of 1967 – even as the Summer of Love beckoned – the game itself, at least in the opinion of more than a few in town, had passed Frank Satalin by. 

His was a philosophy born in an era during which basketball was still viewed as a competition consisting of two halves, and not just on the clock, but on the court as well; the half on which a team played defense and the half on which it ran its offense. That’s why, regularly during Satalin’s practices, those practices became half-court clinics and teaching opportunities, and why he regularly worked with his boys first on offense, and then later on defense, treating those two parts of the same game as two separate and distinct disciplines.

Bob Felasco, on the other hand, was one of the first of a new breed of coaches who saw the two as inextricably linked, and who believed that a team’s best scoring chances often arose from their having gotten the ball back by playing aggressive, suffocating defense and then immediately sprinting upcourt with it. 

Satalin, on the other hand, continued to run three and five-man half-court weaves and stressed controlled and highly practiced patterns in half court sets. Felasco and his ilk, by contrast, liked to run hard and often, and liked to get their shots off before the other team had an opportunity to fall back and set its defense. 

But there were two things about this Frank Satalin-coached team that were working against Billy E that afternoon at Bishop Ludden High School.

First was the fact that his 1966-67 Baptist squad was far from a typical one for the mailman-turned-coach.  Some of the kids on that particular team were monstrous physical specimens. One in particular, Greg Duda, a muscular junior from East Syracuse who stood a full 6’4”, and maybe 6’5,” in his stocking feet, had great hand-eye coordination and was a solid shooter from inside fifteen feet. Strong as an ox, he was a kid, physically anyway, on par with even the mighty Pete Schmid. 

But there were two other oak trees on that year’s Baptist team as well, a fact that helped distinguish it as the tallest and brawniest in Frank Satalin’s thirty five years of coaching.

And in Paul Padden and Dave Cusano, the Dean of Parochial League Coaches had a couple of game-smart, heads-up guards who, while they may not have been the fastest kids on the block, had good lateral movement, deceptively quick feet, and an ability to run their team's offense as well as any of the league’s best playmakers.

The second thing Billy and his Hearts had working against them was less tangible and far more difficult to pinpoint. It was this: Frank Satalin, even as he was growing gently out of touch with the modern and ever-evolving game of basketball, still managed to, somehow, coach his boys to one major Parochial League upset each year.  Ominously for Billy and his Heartsmen, such an upset had yet to occur that season – with, now, just one game left.

In addition, for all that Satalin loved his discipline and his set-in-stone offensive patterns, he was also unafraid to make bold moves when and if they were called for. 

That’s why, during his very first year as coach at his alma mater, St. Lucy’s, despite everything he’d ever learned about how a team should always have a set offensive scheme and should then run its well-rehearsed patterns off that scheme, he did exactly the opposite. He took one good hard look at the group of colts they’d placed under him that first year, five young African American kids with strong legs, quick reflexes, and big hands – 15^th Ward schoolboys all ready to take the world by storm with their joyous, breakneck style of play – and thought just how much those kids would upset the apple cart in a league so addicted, as was he, to staid, half-court sets, well-practiced patterns, and a decades-long tradition of walking the ball upcourt. 

That’s when Frank Satalin decided to go against everything he ever believed and loosen the reins on his kids – especially the magical Ormie Spencer – letting those gifted sons of the Ward do exactly what God seemingly put them on this Earth to do; run.

That, as much as any reason, was why those Lucians that very first year under their new mailman/coach became the first-ever Parochial League team to go through an entire season undefeated. Frank Satalin knew his basketball and knew full well that every so often it was necessary to do exactly what the other guy least expected.

And, as it so happened, a short time prior he’d recently gotten a gentle nudge in that direction by a former player of his, a onetime Baptist guard named John Riley, who’d graduated five years earlier and who’d gone on to play at St. Bonaventure, Mayor Walsh’s alma mater.

Riley was classic gym rat, a slightly undersized ball-handler, passer and shooter who lived and died basketball. He was also handsome, charming and smart as a whip, and, for those reasons and others, he always ended up being the quarterback or on-court leader on whatever team he played on. 

Much like his coach, he was a kid who didn’t so much command respect, he just got it. No parent, priest or teacher could dislike John Riley, and no young lady in the neighborhood near his humble frame home on Loma Ave could say she hadn't at some point dreamed of dating him, or maybe going to the prom with him. It was also safe to say that not one of his peers hadn't wondered, even in passing, what it might be like to actually be as handsome, as talented, and as well-liked as John Riley.

In fact, if there had been a Frank Satalin of Parochial League players, a guy respected and admired by almost anyone and everyone who ever met him, it was young John Riley.

One weekend, this same John Riley – who, after graduation, left Olean for a teaching job at Gates-Chili Junior High, near Rochester – came home for a visit. On his first night back, Riley happened to catch the first of the two Baptist/Hearts matchups; the Massacre on Court Street. He'd sat in the packed, wall-to-wall St. John’s gym and watched in horror as his beloved alma mater, under the watchful eye of his beloved high school coach, got manhandled by the Hearts – especially by Pete Schmid, the most powerful and talented Heartsman of all.

As Riley was leaving that night, chatting with some friends and former teachers, he made a mental note to go see Mr. Satalin before he returned to Rochester on Sunday.  Two days later after mass, that’s exactly what he did.  At the Satalin kitchen table, Riley sat drank cup after cup of percolator-brewed coffee, ate two man-sized slabs of coffee cake, and told his former coach and mentor that watching the game on Friday had been a bitter pill to swallow. 

“Hearts is a good team,” Riley told Mr. Satalin.  “And they’ll be tough to beat. But I really think it can be done. If anyone’s going to do it, though, it’ll be because they press ‘em all over the court, from end to end, and then run like heck on offense, and don’t stop fast breaking, even for a minute.” 

He added, “I’ve watched ‘em. I just don’t think they’re quick enough, or handle the ball well enough, to deal with that sort of non-stop pressure.”

John Riley might have made a heck of a coach, if he’d ever gotten the chance. Because his onetime high school coach, who respected his former guard as much as any kid who ever played for him – a roster of luminaries that included not only the great Ormie Spencer, but his own two basketball-loving sons, Franny and Jimmy – took the young man’s words to heart.

As a result, that final week of February, given that his team had just had their clocks cleaned by these very same Heartsmen just weeks prior, Satalin decided to take his former player’s advice and work all week on the exact opposite of what he’d been trying to do last time he went up against Billy E, which was to sit on the ball for long, stretches to try to take as much time off the clock as possible.  He’d also told his twin floor generals, Padden and Cusano, to walk it up slowly to try to mute the pace-of-play. And the last time he’d packed his zone even tighter than normal, to try to neutralize the Hearts down low and minimize their ability to score easy baskets from around the hoop.

But the only thing that such safe, careful, and oh-so predictable thinking got him was a twenty-one point humiliation.

This time, the gentle and mild-mannered coach had a little surprise in store for Billy Ewaniszyk and his West Side kids.

Sure enough, right off the bat, and the first time St. John’s scored a bucket that Sunday, Joe Zaganczyk grabbed the ball as it went through, turned to inbound it, and immediately froze at what he saw staring back at him, even through the glare of the midday sun: two long outstretched arms waving frantically not ten feet ahead of him, with another St. John’s defender on either side, both crouched in a defensive posture and both with arms wide and waving like hell. 

St. John the Baptist’s starters, playing on the biggest court they would all season, and against a team that had just thoroughly thrashed them, were in a full-court press and dogging the physically superior Heartsmen from baseline to baseline, all before the game was even a minute old.

And because Zaganczyk naturally assumed he’d just casually in-bound the ball to teammate, Dan Van Cott, and then jog up-court alongside him, he almost reflexively allowed his internal momentum to carry his entire body forward ever so slightly, even while still out of bounds.  The young Polish sharpshooter even raised his right foot a few inches off the ground, based on that assumption.

But when he turned and found himself face-to-face with three arm-waving and pressing defenders, before his young brain could register “full court press,” and before he realized he couldn’t just casually flip the ball inbounds, Joe Zaganczyk did what most kids would do. He double clutched for a half a second, he reflexively grabbed the ball just a bit tighter, and he let his slightly elevated right foot return from whence it came, if only to try to catch his balance. But as he did that, and as his inner momentum carried him forward, his white canvas sneaker hit the ground.  That’s when he heard a ref’s whistle bleat and heard half the gym’s population explode. Zaganczyk looked down and realized his once-elevated Chuck Taylor had come down a good two inches across the end-line; a violation that gave the ball back to the Baptists. 

As Zaganczyk hung his head in embarrassment, the Baptist partisans roared their delight.  Meanwhile, Billy E immediately jumped from his seat, mostly out of habit, but partly because something inside him compelled him to. But the Hearts head coach didn’t say a word. Didn’t scream at the refs, or Zaganczyk, or even the rafters above. Nothing. He just stood there and stared at no one particular for a beat or two, before sitting back down and glancing over at his assistant, Paul Januszka, with an uneasy look that said without a word passing from his lips, “I got a bad feeling about this.”

Sure enough, things for Billy and his Heartsmen only managed to get worse as the first half unfolded – and did so in a way that, virtually, no one who’d been there for that game on Court Street five weeks earlier, and who’d witnessed that night’s unsightly pounding of Frank Satalin’s team by the Heartsmen, had a right to expect. 

After leaving St. Bonaventure, John Riley had learned (and had, apparently, been experimenting with) what he called a 3-1-1 full-court trap, a full court press in which three men are positioned almost arm-to-arm about ten feet from the opponent’s baseline, followed by a stack of two roving defenders, one near the top of the key and the other out near the mid-court stripe, or as far upcourt as the deepest opponent.  That Sunday morning over coffee and Sara Lee pastry in Coach Satalin's kitchen, Riley sketched the specifics of the 3-1-1 trap press on a piece of legal paper for his mentor, including all five player responsibilities and all five player movements, depending upon where the ball was, and how it got there. 

Riley had learned the “3-1-1 trap,” along with its sister fast break, in part by watching the powerful UCLA Bruins of John Wooden win an unexpected national title in 1965, and in part from a high school coach he’d recently gotten to know in Rochester. Using a combination of those two strategies, one defensive and one offensive, and both in harmony, Riley had witnessed a few clubs on different levels win games that, physically anyway, they had no right winning. 

The reality was, few teams at any level, even the strongest, were truly ready for such a non-traditional defense, especially when played fiercely, nonstop, and from one end of the court to the other.

That’s why so few at Ludden that Sunday, including Billy E himself, could have envisioned, or were prepared for what was about to take place.

When combined with the blinding glare, the tightness of the rims, and the cold, unforgiving nature of the surroundings, the first half that brilliant Sunday afternoon would turn into the worst half of basketball that any Bill Ewaniszyk-coached team had ever played – and, perhaps, ever would play.

None of the Heartsmen’s shots were falling.  And often – unlike in most Parochial League gyms, where a misdirected shot might land on a spongy rim, deaden, and then fall to one side or another just a few inches away – the misses that day were springing a full four-to-six feet to either side of the rim, or straight back, often arcing high above all those young bodies jockeying, just as they’d been taught, for rebounding position under the basket. 

Even the Heartsmen’s foul shots had to be spot-on perfect that day or they’d rattle around like marbles in bathtub before bouncing out, almost as though flung by some unseen catapult.  And every time another shot would rattle in and out for Billy E’s boys, they’d get disproportionally tighter about letting the next one fly, even from up close. 

It wasn’t just the Hearts’ outside shooters who were having fits. Schmid and Jack Contos, two powerful kids who scored a bulk of their points from down low, often on tries only a few feet from the basket, also got caught in the sway. 

One time, late in the second period, from the second position on the right hand side of the lane, Schmid went up and timed his leap perfectly following a teammate’s missed free throw, grabbing Sakowski’s failed attempt and flicking it back goal-ward, just inches above a sea of stretching, straining, would-be rebounders. Unfortunately, Schmid’s soft put-back, which looked true from the moment it left his hand, hit back iron and ricocheted straight back from where it came, almost as though some sort of invisible seal had been placed over the goal.  Only, by then, Schmid had returned to Earth and could only look up in disbelief that his cupcake of a follow-up, one that looked so spot-on perfect when he launched it, had somehow failed to find its mark.

Another time, just a moment later and with halftime drawing near, Contos made a steal and sprinted ahead of the pack. As the muscular young Slovak exploded upward, it almost looked like he might want to dunk the ball, since he’d elevated so high. Instead, Contos laid the ball softly over the front of the rim. And, just like Schmid’s try, the perfectly normal looking shot clanked off the back iron and immediately bounced straight back like a compressed rubber ball. 

Only this time, unlike the previous miss, Contos’ errant shot resulted in a four-point swing. Because trailing the play, Cusano quickly ran down the ball, grabbed it, spun, and fired it up ahead to Tom “Tick” Taylor, a brawny teammate who, alone under his own basket, turned Contos’ gimme into an uncontested two-points the other way.

As the Baptist faithful raised their hands in joyous exaltation and roared in a rapture of delighted disbelief, the Hearts followers simply sat stunned on their side of the gym, although a handful, including two of the Sacred Heart cheerleaders, buried their faces in their hands, as though they couldn’t bear to watch anymore.

Only one of the Hearts fans remained loud, her exhortations uttered with the piercing clarity of a church bell.  That was Irene Contos, the former star baseball and basketball player, and the mother of Jack. 

After her son’s missed layup, a frowning Mrs. Contos stood up from her vantage point on the west side of the gym, arched her back, cupped her hands, and spit out in a loud yell at the top of her lungs, “Dupa Jas!!!” It was a Polish phrase directed at her oldest child.  It was a phrase she’d begun using years before, back in Jack's little league days, as a play on his name, a phrase she always uttered in her native tongue and one she reserved only for those occasions on which, because of something the idiot boy had done, seemed more than appropriate.

In Irene Contos’ version of Polish, “Dupa Jas” translated, roughly anyway, to “Jack Ass.”

As the halftime buzzer mercifully sounded for Billy E, the two new scoreboards at the opposite ends of the gym read in glowing, 40-watt certainty, “Home 27, Visitors 35.”  It wasn’t so much that the Hearts were down at the half, or how much they were down, it was how they were down. They weren’t just losing. They were being outplayed, out-quicked, out-shot, out-rebounded and out-hustled.  Most of all, though, they were being out-coached. St. John the Baptist, the team they’d just slaughtered weeks prior, was sticking it to them.

In the locker room at half, as upset as he might have been, Billy had no intention of launching into another tirade. He’d done that less than 48 hours earlier on Gifford Street, and once before that to a slightly lesser extent. And while it had worked against Bobby Felasco’s club in January and later against an inspired group of Lucy’s kids, this time it would have felt forced and even a bit practiced.

Besides, every boy looking up at him knew exactly what the score was – literally and figuratively.  So, instead, Billy E approached his team like he had all year, as a teacher and strategist, one whose role was more to guide and inspire, than to scare.

He and Paulie Januszka had been talking on the way to the locker room prior to halftime and both agreed in those few moments that to beat the crazy press Baptist was throwing at them it was important to get the ball over the top of it (or, maybe, through it). And to do that, Januszka suggested, it was going to require getting it to Schmid flashing up from half court to some place near the top of the key, probably to one side of it or the other. Schmid was a fine ball-handler, especially for a big man, and he was quicker than either of the two kids rotating in the two rear positions of the 3-1-1 trap.

That was all Billy needed. He nodded to Januszka as they walked and took it from there. A slight wrinkle on that agreement was exactly the message Billy delivered to his undefeated yet now visibly dazed boys when he reached the locker room. After all, he still believed in his kids. Hell, he’d been through too much with them not to.

Sure enough, even though Baptist scored the first three points of the second half to stretch its lead to eleven, the Hearts came roaring back, based in large part on the strategy Billy E and his JV coach had devised on their way to the locker room, a strategy Billy had subsequently sketched out for his team on a yellow note pad that he’d dug out of the bottom drawer of the desk in the coach’s office.

With Zaganczyk finally finding the range from the outside and Schmid – as Billy outlined – flashing up from half court to meet the ball and then either passing to a streaking teammate on either wing or faking a pass and beating the trap with a hard, quick dribble across the ten-second line, the Hearts finally found a rhythm. Within minutes, Baptist’s surprising eleven point lead had been whittled to two.

And when Contos corralled an errant Hearts jumper and scored on put-back from just inside the left baseline, their eleven point lead had disappeared altogether. 

The Hearts side exploded – people standing, screaming, pounding their feet–making that shiny new gym in the suburbs sound almost like a tiny, dog-eared Parochial League one, somewhere deep in the heart of the city.

With just four minutes gone in the second half, the undefeated Heartsmen suddenly had Baptist dazed and in a chokehold. What’s more, they looked poised and ready to squeeze the life out of those brash, overachieving North Siders.

From the Hearts side of the gym, the old guy with the Elmer Fudd hat, the guy whose signature call – “Here come the Hearts!” – had been known to shatter glass and send cats scurrying, jumped from his seat, pumped his fist, and yelled at the top of his lungs, “That’s my boy, Jack!”  To which, Irene Contos, standing, howling and stomping herself just a few rows in front of him, turned, looked up and beamed in a voice that likewise pierced the throbbing roar, “No, sir. That my boy, Jack.”

As many Hearts fans around the two laughed, they did so in part because the exchange was amusing, but mostly because they felt such collective relief over the fact their boys had finally answered the bell and were now playing like the team they’d grown to know and love all year.

From his seat on the bench, Frank Satalin signaled for a time out. He wanted his kids to take a moment and catch their breaths. He also wanted to tell them that the game was only tied; they weren't losing.  Beyond that, he wanted to remind them of how they'd built their lead in the first place. What they needed to do now was make some adjustments, just as the Hearts had done. 

It was one of those times, however, when who Frank Satalin was as a man was far more critical than anything he might have been saying to his team. If nothing else, the full-time mailman and part-time coach from the simple frame house on little Willumea Drive was a role model for every last one of those boys of his. He never panicked. He never shouted or yelled. In fact, he rarely complained at all about even the worst in-game calls.  That’s why he'd never received even a single technical foul in all his decades of coaching high school.  He chased nothing on a basketball court that wasn’t worth chasing. He simply let the game and its many fates come to him.

Screaming was beneath Frank Satalin, as was berating any fellow human being, especially a referee, for simply trying to do his job the best he could.  To his thinking, if a ref wasn’t good at his job, it wasn’t his fault.  It was the fault of the guy who gave him the job in the first place.

The old man’s sense of serenity and inner peace was not lost on his boys, especially at ear-splitting moments like now.

As his kids gathered round him, and with crowd frothing and howling above, Satalin leaned in and calmly told his boys to watch Schmid coming up for the ball from center court and to try to take away his lanes – both the dribbling and passing ones – once he got it.  He also took a moment to reassure them and tell them all how well they were playing.

Lastly, he reminded them that the Hearts just exerted a ton of energy trying to get back in the game. Because of that, he explained, they were now vulnerable.  In other words, now was not the time to retreat.  Now was the time to make them pay for burning up so much energy just trying to catch up.

With just eleven minutes to play in the 1966-67 Parochial League regular season, the only thing standing between Billy E’s Heartsmen and a piece of history was a brawny collection of North Siders and their gentlemanly coach. The Hearts' path remained clear, and their goal was now so close they could all taste it – especially, following the resumption of play, when Baptist’s best player and their leading scorer, Greg Duda, picked up his fourth foul and was compelled to take a seat.

Yet Frank Satalin would soon be proven right. Sacred Heart had, indeed, fought so hard to come back that they’d drained all but a precious few drops of gas from the tank. As a result, they were a team that had little or nothing left, despite their unblemished record, a haughty distinction that now began to hang over their heads like the Sword of Damocles. 

In fact, when Duda went to the bench with his fourth foul, it only helped to highlight what the Baptist head man had try to explain to his young charges about making them pay. Rather than replace his offensive bedrock with a kid of comparable size and stature, Satalin did the exact opposite. He went small. He swapped out the massive, hulking Duda for a quicker, smaller ball-handler with fresh legs – a fired-up boy who, like his teammates, could smell upset. It was in the air, hovering up there somewhere above them all, amid the glare, the sunshine, and all that squeaky newness.

It was ironic that the final few minutes of the final game of an historic Parochial League season would boil down to a single matchup between Sacred Heart and St. John the Baptist. In many ways, those two schools, just a few miles from each other in the city, had been linked for as long as the former had been a part of the league.

And that link between the two, a faint thread that stretched as far back as the early 1950’s and all the way down to little Olean and the campus of St. Bonaventure (again, the alma mater of Mayor Bill Walsh), was visible for anyone who knew what to look for. 

It all started with a forty-something gym rat originally from New Jersey, a dark-haired Irishman named Eddie Donovan, a former Bonnies great who'd taken over the reins of his alma mater and served as its head coach from 1953 to 1961.  He’d also coached the NBA’s New York Knicks for a few seasons immediately thereafter. Yet Eddie Donovan’s strength would turn out to be less about his ability to coach young men and more about his ability to bird-dog and flush out under-appreciated talent from a vantage point somewhere in the stands. 

By that 1966-67 season he’d already started to piece together what would emerge as, arguably, the single most selfless, Zen-like and storied roster in basketball history.  As the new general manager of the perennial saddest of sacks, the woeful Knicks of the NBA, he’d personally scouted and drafted, among others, Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, Cazzie Russell, Dick Van Arsdale, Dave Stallworth and Phil Jackson.  He’d also traded for Dick Barnett, one of the smartest players he’d ever watched play.  

What’s more, in few short months, he’d go on to hire as coach a Brooklyn Jew from the streets of New York, a former Rookie of the Year for the old Rochester Royals named Red Holzman, after which he'd then soon trade for strong but largely ignored former player/coach from the Detroit Pistons named Dave DeBusschere. 

So when it came to basketball, it was hardly a stretch to say Eddie Donovan knew a thing or two about bird-dogging and corralling under-appreciated talent.

As coach of the Bonnies, therefore, he was as much as about flushing out overlooked high school talent as he was about winning games – because, for him, the former always led to the latter.  So, when he took the reins of the St. Bonaventure program, two of the first kids he ever recruited were two Upstate New Yorkers who he’d seen and fallen in love with, Larry Weise from East Rochester and John Connors from Syracuse.  The two became not only teammates and roommates, but good friends.

Flash forward to the Spring of 1961. Weise, who’d been a great star in Olean, was named – shockingly, some would say – to replace Donovan as head man of the Bonnies.  After all, he’d only been coaching the JV team at East Rochester High and, when named, was just 23 years old.

Being so young and inexperienced, without a scouting crew already in place, or a well-known brand name to use as a recruiting chit, Weise instead relied on friends and former teammates throughout the state for lines on kids who might be flying under the radar and who might, therefore, be gettable. One such friend was his old roommate, John Connors, who after graduation had moved home to Syracuse.

Connors told him about a whirling dervish of a kid named Gene Fisch, who he’d seen play a few times, a kid who’d been tearing it up for a small Catholic school on the West Side of the city called Sacred Heart.  He told Weise that the Parochial League playoffs were starting in a few days and that he should drive to Syracuse to take a look at the kid for himself.

Weise, however, said he was busy that weekend, scouting kids in nearby Buffalo. So, instead, he dispatched his freshman coach and assistant, a guy named Fred Handler, to Syracuse to check out Fisch.

The star of the playoff game that Handler saw that night at the War Memorial, however – and the best kid on the court all evening – was not Gene Fisch. It was a second sawed-off little sparkplug who happened to catch his eye, a kid playing for the other club and one who gave the lightning quick Fisch fits all game long, from start to finish.

What’s more, that kid was the clear leader of his team, St. John the Baptist, who'd swept the floor with Fisch's bigger and stronger Sacred Heart club.

The kid who'd caught Handler’s eye was named John Riley, that's what Weise told Connors over the phone the following week.  Said Riley was tough as nails, could shoot a bit, and had an incredible court sense. That was the kid he wanted for the Bonnies, Weise told Connors, not Fisch.

He added that Handler also came back singing the praises of two other St. John’s kids; a junior ball handler and heads-up ball hawk named Fran Satalin and a lanky, sophomore swingman, Satalin’s little brother, Jimmy. 

That’s how, in three successive seasons three consecutive St. John the Baptist players – John Riley in 1962, Fran Satalin in 1963 and Jimmy Satalin in 1964 – ended up going to St. Bonaventure and ended up playing varsity basketball for the good old Brown Indians of Olean. 

And it all started because of an impromptu scouting trip to see a young first-generation Pole named Gene Fisch playing for a tiny, mostly Polish Catholic Academy named Sacred Heart.

So here it was a full five years later almost to the day of that life-changing scouting trip. And, once again, here were Sacred Heart and St. John the Baptist squaring off with something on the line that ran a whole lot deeper than the simple outcome of a single Parochial League game. 

For Billy E and his Heartsman it was a chance to grab a piece of local basketball immortality. 

And for Frank Satalin it was about school and personal pride, to be sure. But more than that, it was about the thoughts and prayers of father/coach for his son and former player, even in the heat of his most anticipated game of the year.  

Just three weeks earlier, you see, Jimmy Satalin had undergone brain surgery for a life-threatening aneurysm that had forced him to leave his fellow St. Bonnies starters – including All American center, Bob Lanier – and sit on the sidelines for the full five months of the season.  He watched helplessly as his teammates continued to defy the odds and battle game after game against bigger, deeper, and far more moneyed programs to try to bring home a little glory, if not a national title, to their tiny campus in the sleepy little town nestled deep within that wooded and far-off stretch of New York State’s fabled Route 17.

So if Frank Satalin’s thoughts had occasionally drifted beyond the four walls of that sun-drenched gym that Sunday afternoon, he could be forgiven. 

Nevertheless, the Dean of Parochial League coaches continued to lead his boys as if they were playing for first place, and continued to be the aggressor against a vastly superior Sacred Heart team in ways that, frankly, few in the stands had ever really seen from him before.

As for Billy, he simply hitched up his pants, pushed his glasses back up his nose and went back to work.  His kids had pulled even and now it was almost as though the scoreboard had been reset to zero and the clock reduced to just ten minutes of game time.  Whoever won the next ten minutes, in other words, would win the game. 

Billy E, admittedly, was surprised when Satalin chose to replace Duda with a small, quick guard rather than one of his two remaining oak trees. Just as he was a little surprised that he continued to have his now significantly shorter team press the Heartsmen all over and have his boys still sprinting upcourt each and every time they got the ball.  Yet he told his players, especially Schmid, to keep doing what they were doing.  It was working, dammit. 

Problem was, Billy E had no fuel gauge on hand and no way of knowing just how close to empty his starters’ gas tanks had grown, worn down by a long season, the weight of so many expectations, their inability to get any shots to fall with any consistency, and all the extra work they were being forced to do just to get the ball upcourt.  These things had all conspired to sap Billy's boys of what, in horse racing terms, might have been called their finishing kick.  They were running on fumes. But their coach had yet to recognize it.

As play resumed, once again Schmid flashed up toward the ball. Once again, he received it.  And once again he lowered his head and dribbled hard to the right to get across the timeline. However, after having done that same move so many times that quarter, Paul Padden had anticipated what Schmid was going to try to do.  He jumped directly in the big man’s path as he neared mid-court and planted both feet in a way that would have made even Bob Felasco proud. 

Schmid barreled into Padden who, in turn, went sprawling toward his own bench. From his backside and at ground level, the young St. John’s guard looked up just as the ref standing above him blew his whistle and slapped an open palm against the back of his neck, indicating an offensive foul on the Sacred Heart big man. 

Padden jumped up screaming and clenched his fist in celebration.  Like every one of those Baptist kids, he wanted to win that game as much as he’d ever wanted to win any game he'd ever played.  But as he was celebrating, and as the crowd was roaring it mix of delight and disbelief, he caught his coach’s eye and, in a flash, amid all the pride that his coach was feeling for his heads-up play, Padden also saw an ever slight hint of disappointment for how he reacted to having made it. 

Screaming and pumping one’s fist was not a dignified, Frank Satalin sort-of-behavior in any walk of life, much less on a basketball court, and Padden knew it.  His coach had taught him by example, time and time again, over the years. Padden quickly caught himself, cleared his head, and popped over to the sideline to inbound the ball, his game face now, once again, squarely back in place.

That’s what made the second charging call he drew on Schmid just a moment later all the sweeter. The ball still went over to his team. Pete Schmid still picked up a key foul.  And the Hearts were denied yet another scoring opportunity by their gutty, outmanned opponents from the North Side. 

But this time there was no celebrating on Paul Padden’s part. There was no scream nor was there even a single fist pump. There was only a workmanlike focus on the task at hand.  That’s why, when Padden popped up and caught Frank Satalin’s eye this time, he saw all the pride, and even the faint trace of a smile, but none of the disappointment. 

Meanwhile, as the thundering cheers continued to flood down from the Baptist side of the gym, on the Hearts side there was only a slightly mumbled, slightly grumbled and very real sense of frustration as two cold, hard truths began to sink in. Just as quickly as they’d lost it, St. John the Baptist had somehow managed to rebuild its lead back up to a full seven points. And on top of that, the Hearts’ best player, Pete Schmid, was now headed to the bench – like Baptist’s best – with four fouls.

When all was said and done, and when the bleeding finally stopped for the Hearts, Frank Satalin’s St. John the Baptist boys had managed to rip off twelve consecutive points from the middle of the third period to the early moments of the fourth. In the process, they’d somehow, and to many fans' disbelief, turned a 40-40 tie into a 52-40 lead with just under four minutes to play – against the mighty Hearts, no less.

Those Baptist kids had looked the dragon straight in the eye, even as it was coming at them with full-throated fury, all claws bared and snorting fire, and they'd not even flinched.

John Riley’s suggested 3-1-1 press (and his frenetic, if not relentless, fast break) had not only worked, it had managed to do what many Parochial League observers had considered almost impossible. It had so unnerved Billy E’s powerful and undefeated Heartsmen, and so knocked them off their game, that by the end of the contest, they were team chasing the ball around like headless chickens and eliciting a touch of Catholic-school sympathy from many in the stands, just as Baptist had done a few weeks prior.

Ironically, once again Billy found himself in a position to give his Chinese Bandits some minutes in a blowout.  The irony, however, was the fact that this time it was not Sacred Heart on the giving end of that blowout. It was them on the receiving end. 

To his credit, Billy E never stopped coaching.  He kept yelling at his kids, and kept trying to lead them, as if he and the Hearts were playing with the sense they could still somehow win, even as their most talented players sat there on the bench, a dazed look in their eyes, and a few – like Zaganczyk – with their heads hung low in abject shame. 

The knot in Billy’s stomach may have been as big and as tight as an ironworker’s fist, but he didn’t let it show. He couldn’t. Just like the whole Friday/good-luck/weekly routine thing that he eschewed as a matter of principle, showing such emotion – such disappointment – was simply not part of his makeup.  He was a glass half-filled guy and would remain so until the Good Lord called him home.

Meanwhile, in the stands the Hearts fans were torn. Many wanted to simply leave and go home, if only to spare themselves the ignominy of having to watch any more of the carnage. But far more felt compelled to stay, perhaps out of appreciation for all the things those twelve kids had done for them all year long.  After all, they were twelve young men who for four straight months had stoked their Polish pride, filled their Polish hearts with joy, and given their Polish spirits one thrilling moment after another. 

There was one thing, at least, on which almost everyone on the Hearts side of the building could agree: it was no longer time to cheer or even feign excitement. For practical purposes, the game was over. For that reason, the vast majority of those Poles and Hearts fans simply sat there and watched in some degree of silence, their hands and voices stilled, perhaps looking ahead, instead, to the upcoming Parochial League playoffs, that remained on tap for the coming Friday night.

The only voice that could still be heard distinctly was that of Irene Contos who, despite the score, simply couldn’t bring herself to give up.  Maybe it was the competitive athlete she’d once been and that still dwelt deep inside her, the one whose heart still beat with the fire of a lioness protecting her cubs. 

At one point, as the Hearts were working it around, down fifteen and with the second hand of the clock continuing to spin unabated, the ball found its way into the waiting hands of Jimmy Pryzbyl, one of the most intense but offensively challenged of Billy’s Bandits. Like so many average and below average players up and down Parochial League rosters, Pryzbyl had a gnawing habit always taking one dribble before letting a shot fly; perhaps using that little quirk as a psychological crutch or, maybe, a trigger mechanism. 

Regardless, when the ball came his way and found him wide open in the right corner, Irene Contos watched the wiry, rail-thin Polish boy look up and take aim. Then, just before he pulled the trigger, the senior stringbean lowered his head and Irene, still entirely into the game, instinctively bolted up from her seat and screamed out in a voice that rose above the relative quiet like a cawing raven taking flight. 

“NO!!! DON’T DRIBB…!”  

Before Irene could even get the word “dribble” out, once again Jimmy Pryzbyl's quirky little pre-shot routine got the better of him and one of the Baptist subs, a barrel-chested kid with long arms, had time to take two giant steps toward Pryzbyl, stretch his right hand high and swat the ball onto the Ludden stage, where it caught in one of the two, large curtains draped on either side and fell back to earth.

Irene just stood there for a moment, crestfallen, with the same look she might have worn had Pryzbyl’s shot attempt been for all the marbles instead of just another lost moment in an entirely forgettable game. Contos exhaled loudly, shook her head from side to side, then plopped down on her dupa without even looking, a disgusted expression on her face.

Turning to the guy next to her, a stranger to whom she’d yet to speak even a single word, Irene offered through another exhale and still-furled brow: “That boy and his one extra dribble…Ugh.”  She balled her fists tightly and shook them as he spoke, as a sign of her frustration. The first lady of the Contos household then, almost to herself, added, “What can I say? He’s a good kid, but let’s face it.  He’s One-Dribble Pryzbyl.”

As the game was winding down, it had become such a laugher that, frankly, both men on both benches stopped coaching, at least to some degree. 

In Frank Satalin’s case – even as the Baptist fans were cheering for what would soon prove to be one of the wildest upsets and most unlikely games in Parochial League history, and even as many of them were pinching themselves, trying to come to grips with the notion they were about to beat the most powerful team in the city, the mighty Heartsmen of Sacred Heart – his mind once again drifted elsewhere.  He thought of Jimmy laying in his hospital bed down in New York City, still reeling from his brain surgery, his bandages still wrapped snugly about his shaved, sliced and stitched-up again noggin.

He looked around, too, and took in the gym that he knew in ways that, frankly, his opposite number, Billy E, simply did not. After all, he had a relationship with that wonderful new facility that stretched back to the summer of the previous year.

That summer, Satalin and fellow mailman, Don Blaich, had co-sponsored and run a week-long basketball camp at Bishop Ludden for grammar school boys. The latter was, of course, the longtime ref who’d been working with Henry Ponti that fateful day when Ponti made that hotly debated call in the previous year’s All City game that had disqualified the great Jimmy Collins of Corcoran and turned the tide for the eventual victor, St. John the Evangelist.

But as he looked around the gym, the thoughts triggered were not of Don Blaich, or basketball, or even the boys he so loved to teach how to play the game the right way.  No, the thoughts that came over him were of his pretty wife from Tipp Hill, Virginia Ryan, who had supported him in just about every way a woman could support a man. That included getting up every day that summer before the sun to make, cut and wrap some eight or nine dozen bologna, roast beef, chicken, egg salad, tuna fish and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for dozens of young boys whose parents had forked over $20 each so that their son might be able to attend her husband’s weeklong clinic and learn basketball from one of the city’s best coaches.

That’s who Frank Satalin thought of as he slowly looked around the gym that sunny day at Bishop Ludden: of his devoted wife who loved him, and of his sick son who needed him. 

Then he did what any good Catholic father would do when confronted with such a moment of humbling and divine realization. He said a silent prayer and thanked God for all He’d given him, including His most recent and unlikeliest gift of all, that day’s win over Sacred Heart.

As for Billy E, the grim realization of the dream being over had long since sunk in and he was surprisingly okay with it. It hurt, to be sure. But it was, after all, just one game. His boys had still won the Parochial League regular season title and would be favorites to win the playoffs as well, which were now just a few days away. That’s what Billy chose to focus on as he sat there and waited for the clock to run down to zero. That’s what, Billy reminded himself, really mattered in the larger scheme of things.  Not the loss.

Yet, make no mistake, part of him was so mad for all that had just slipped through his fingers that he wanted to punch something, and punch it hard.  And that little kernel of truth did not bode well for at least a few in town, but in particular, Charles Eckermann, the somewhat boxy, doughy and smarmy Ludden assistant principal who, before Billy could leave, and before he could get himself a cold beer to wash away the bitter taste, he had to see about settling up their account and getting Sacred Heart’s half of the gate. 

After Billy told his boys how proud of them he was, and that they shouldn't hang their heads because they still had plenty of work to do, what with a playoff game against St. Vincent’s just around the corner, he left the locker room, slipping one arm into one sleeve of his overcoat as he did. He made a beeline for a hallway down which, he sensed, he might find the assistant principal’s office. No sense waiting for Eckermann, thought Billy.  I want out of here, and I want out of here now.

A few straggling Hearts fans milling about offered their coach some pithy bromides about getting ‘em next time and shaking it off, but he only half listened and only half acknowledged them. The only thing he could think about was getting out of that place with all its new-school look and new-school smell.

He ran into Eckermann down the hall. The priest was all set to greet him with one of his automated, plastic smiles, but then remembering that Billy’s team had just lost, instead offered him a lukewarm, “Sorry about the game, Coach.” 

Billy E shrugged and then, not wanting to be rude, quickly added, “I appreciate your concern Father. I really do.  And thanks. But I really need to be on my way.” 

Even as he was saying that, Eckermann reached into his inside pocket and took out a folded and worn letter-sized envelope containing what was clearly a stack of bills. He handed the envelope to Billy with another one of those plastic smiles of his, a smile for which Billy, frankly, had lost all patience. 

Without saying a word and without even looking at the priest, Billy opened the envelope and began counting. It didn’t take long. There was just $117.25.  

 Billy E made no effort to hide his disgust.“What’s this?”

“Your cut,” replied Eckermann, his smile becoming more plastic and more forced with each passing moment.

“Gimme a break,” shot back Billy.  “There were at least 600 people in there today, probably closer to 700.”

“Well, yes,” said the priest.  “But, you see, I had to deduct for the janitor and, of course, the lights and water. Certainly, you can understand that.”

Billy looked at him hard. “That wasn’t the deal,” he snapped.  “Our deal was we split the gate 50/50.  You take whatever it is you have to take to cover your expenses out of your half. You got that? The other half’s ours. That was the deal. There was no damn janitor in the deal!” 

Billy E was steamed now. For the most part, he’d been able to swallow his anger, having just lost the biggest game of his life.  But now that anger was boiling so hard he felt it might choke him.

“Gimme my money,” he raged, his eyes growing wide and his pointed finger now just inches from the priest’s nose.  Eckermann’s back was flush against one of the grey lockers in the hall, his spine completely erect and immobile. But for an old high school friend of Billy’s from VO, a guy named Tony De Rose, intervening, things might have turned ugly – at least uglier – especially considering the fact that a Russian Orthodox layman was now seconds away from laying out a Catholic priest – in his new fancy, schmancy school, no less. 

De Rose, a West Ender who’d bought a house in Westvale a few years back, had been at the game simply because his old high school buddy was coaching it. But quickly surmising what was happening, he raced up to Billy, grabbed his friend and pulled him away, creating a few feet of breathing room between him and the priest, who then called Billy an "asshole."

“Give…me…my…money,” repeated the seething coach directly into Eckermann’s face, even as De Rose held his arm in a good, old-fashioned Lower West End vice grip.

His pasted-on smile now but a memory, Charlie Eckermann, without even making eye contact with the coach or his buddy (whose two sons, ironically, were both students at Ludden), quickly turned and announced meekly over one shoulder, “Wait here.” He then walked quickly toward his office with a new-found sense of purpose and more than a touch of relief.

None of Billy’s kids, of course, took the loss well either.  But none was any more deeply impacted than Joe Zaganczyk, the young man for whom this weekend was supposed to be a triple header of teenage possibility. The Lucy’s game on Friday was great, of course, because his team had won a thriller and he’d scored more points than he ever had in his life.  And the S.U. frat party on Saturday night had been equally fabulous, because his band had the entire house rocking and because he’d had more than a few moments with a handful of pretty college girls. 

But this destroyed everything and made it seem, at least to Joe, as though those two other things never really happened, or maybe happened to some other lucky schoolboy. 

What’s more, Zaganczyk blamed himself entirely for the loss, believing that if he’d been better, or shot better, Sacred Heart might have been able to pull out a win.  Joey Zaganczyk, in fact, would end up feeling so ashamed by his play in the seventeen-point loss that he'd pretend to be sick the following morning so that his mother would let him stay home.  That way he wouldn’t have to face his friends and schoolmates, every one of whom he felt he’d let down with what he’d consider to be, even decades later, the single most God-awful performance of his basketball life.

That’s also why, even though he’d gone to ten o’clock mass that morning with the Pryzbyl family and then ridden to the game with them, he told Mr. and Mrs. Pryzbyl afterward to take Jimmy and go on without him.  He said he wanted to walk home alone because he needed some time.

And that’s exactly what Joe Zaganczyk did. He walked the three miles from Westvale to his house in the West End by himself, even as a number of those from the parish – people who’d been at the game and who’d seen him play – pulled over on Fay Road or elsewhere and asked the young shooter and wanna-be pop star if he needed a lift. 

On that brilliant, sunny and unseasonably warm afternoon, one of the most magnificent in anyone's memory, even though no one on Sacred Heart could find the range at any point, much less find it for an extended period of time, Joe Zaganczyk scored 20 of his team’s 53 points, the highest total on either side of the ledger.

Pete Schmid chipped in with 14, though those 14 points represented a season-low and one of his most paltry totals since moving into Billy E’s starting lineup midway through his sophomore season.

No other Hearts boy that day managed to score even double figures. 

 

*          *          *          *          *

As the Parochial League season headed into March, even the most casual fan in town knew that Billy E and his boys hadn't lost a game. Not once. What’s more, with the exception of Bobby Felasco’s Evangelist club, the current incarnation of which had given the Heartsmen all they could handle in January, they’d not even been pushed that hard. 

It's true that by 1967, the Parochial League was not nearly as deep as it had been prior to Syracuse’s suburban exodus, which had begun in earnest a few years earlier when the 15^th Ward first began to fall. But that exodus was now accelerating and sapping the city’s most vibrant neighborhoods of much of their local color and flavor – not to mention basketball talent. 

Be that as it may, Sacred Heart was the most physically imposing team in the Parochial League, and that might have held true even if the Heartsmen had been competing in the City or County League.

But, despite the league'e overall dilution of schoolboy talent, the fact that the Hearts were unbeaten in Parochial League play was still significant, especially to Billy E. The Hearts basketball program had only managed to pull off one undefeated season in its brief existence, and that was late in the previous decade when Gene Fisch and Richie Pospiech were lighting up the scoreboard and the humorless taskmaster, Adam Markowski, was the coach. 

Billy had been an assistant on that team, and to many Polish old-timers on the West Side he would always live in Markowski’s shadow, and remain inferior to him, both as a strategist and a role model. Markowski, in their eyes, had been a dignified, disciplined, and even slightly feared leader. Billy, on the other hand, at least to a certain type of parishioner, was an imp, a jokester.

But the deeper he and his team got into the season, and the closer the Hearts came to finishing with an unblemished record, the more Billy E found himself fighting the urge to consider the broader implications of what an undefeated season might mean to his reputation, including what it might do to finally shut up shut up all those hard-liners and doubters.

Just as any good coach, Billy’s goal at any point that season was pretty simple: to prepare his team to win the next game on the schedule. It was never to run the table or, heaven forbid, finish the season undefeated. Those things would simply come in time if they handled their business. 

Yet, Billy E was human. He had a normal, healthy ego, along with a full understanding of what a few people in the parish continued to say about him. Given that, the Hearts’ head man couldn’t help but want to bring home a big, fat 18-0 record to hang on the wall for all those Markowski-loving Poles to look at year after year, long after he’d gone.

There was another factor too: Billy E had a not-so-dirty little secret, and that was the fact he wasn’t even Polish. Billy was Russian. His parents’ people had emigrated from tsarist Russia two generations prior and he’d been raised in Syracuse’s Lower West Side in a working class and devout Russian Orthodox household. He’d also attended public schools his whole life, not Catholic ones, including Vocational High, which would eventually, of course, become Corcoran.

Billy’s family’s original church of choice was St. John the Baptist on Wilbur Ave. But St. John’s eventually became Ukrainian, so the Ewaniszyks migrated to a smaller and humbler Russian Orthodox church in town.  He later began attending a tiny Polish National church, Holy Cross, in nearby Lakeland.  There he met, fell in love with, and eventually married a warm-hearted Polish beauty named Bernice.

In time, Billy converted to Catholicism and he and Bernice began attending Sacred Heart every Sunday at 10 a.m., a weekly ritual that led most in their new parish to simply assume – incorrectly – that their new assistant coach was, like them, a Pole.

But back to basketball.

As the Parochial League season careened toward its conclusion, it became abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that three teams had proven a cut above the rest; Billy’s Heartsmen, Felasco’s Eagles, and the team from St. John the Baptist, a collection of North Side German, Italian and Irish kids coached by Frank Satalin, the soft-spoken and almost regally dignified mailman from Tipp Hill.  Satalin had been the guy who, two decades prior, had come in, harnessed the exquisite talents of four African American kids from the 15^th Ward, among them Ormie Spencer and Milt Fields, and, in the process, turned St. Lucy’s into an early ‘50’s superpower in Syracuse high school basketball.

With a handful of games yet to play, the Hearts stood at 13-0, Evangelist at 12-1, and Satalin’s Baptist squad at 9-4. Yet one particular Friday during that season’s stretch run would end up being about something more than just another night of Parochial League play.  It would serve as a harbinger of a fundamental shift in the city, though few saw it as such at the time. 

Because on Friday evening, February 10, 1967, two of the five Parochial League affairs – a doubleheader pitting Evangelists vs. St. Lucy’s in the opener and St. Vincent’s vs. Cathedral in the nightcap – would be held, not at one or two dimly lit and tiny parish-based gyms, as had always been the case, or even the stately War Memorial; instead, the four teams would meet in a shiny all-new City League gym, the well-lit and well-appointed facility at the just-completed Bishop Grimes, a regional Catholic high school in East Syracuse. 

Acting head of the diocese, David Cunningham, Syracuse’s de facto bishop during Bishop Foery’s protracted decline in health, had doubled down in the two years since breaking ground for Bishop Ludden, choosing to build a second regional senior high school for the diocese – a bookend mate to Ludden, so to speak – this one serving kids in the city’s East Side neighborhoods and suburbs.   

Bishop Grimes was, in fact, so new and so far off the beaten path, in a semi-rural section of Kirkville on the eastern edge of the county, that the following paragraph had to be inserted by the Post-Standard into that Friday’s story listing the Parochial League games on tap for the evening: 

For those unfamiliar with the new Bishop Grimes High School, it’s suggested to travel James St. to Thompson Rd. and turn left. Then a right at the light at Exeter St.  Continue to bear right onto the Kirkville road.  The school is located on the left side of the Kirkville road.

The Diocese of Syracuse now had two brand-new and ultra-modern, regional Catholic high schools – one on its East Side, the other on the West – both shiny and bright, and both siphoning students from the ten Parochial League schools at an accelerating rate, luring kids and their families to still-underdeveloped areas beyond the city limits that carried the implied promise of a safer, more verdant, and less congested life than the one to which so many of them had grown accustomed, if not worn down by.

A new day had dawned, a day that, alas, had little regard for such quaint concepts as a league of parish-based, K-12 schoolhouses, the wheezing relic that, for all its legend and lore, now sat perched precariously on the increasingly frail shoulders of an aging, insular, and ever-dwindling army of overworked and underpaid nuns.

But enough of that. Once again, back to basketball.

In its final four games, Billy E’s club was set to play, in order, St. John the Evangelist, Assumption, St. Lucy’s and St. John the Baptist. It should come as no surprise that in the very first of those – a rematch against Bob Felasco’s eternally scrappy Eagles; this time at the gym of another all-new school, Henninger High – the Evangelist kids once again came out with fire in their eyes and a sense of purpose. And, once again, they gave the taller and brawnier Heartsmen all they could handle before finally succumbing.

Fortunately for Billy E, just as in the first matchup, the one on Hearts’ court, once again Felasco and his Eagles had no answer for the guy so many kids in school called “Igor” – big Tom Sakowski – who somehow managed to play yet another “game of his life” to once again lead his Hearts to a hard-fought eight-point victory. The rematch, like the January affair, was far closer than the final tally might have indicated.  

With, now, just two games remaining, Billy E was so close to an undefeated season he could taste it. A truly perfect team, he knew, would be quicker than his and armed with better ball-handlers and, perhaps, a more offensive-minded 6^th man. Still, given where the Parochial League was after an almost magical four-decade run that now seemed to be nearing its end, Billy had a hard time imagining anything more perfect or fitting. 

Also, one more win and his boys would clinch the Parochial League’s regular season title after finishing runner up the year prior to Felasco’s Evangelist club, a Parochial League team for the ages. What would await for them after that would be the league and diocesan playoffs, sandwiched around, of course, the All City Game.

But before all that postseason drama and uncertainty could play itself out, there was the little matter of the perfect season, about which no Hearts kid dared even speak, for fear of jinxing it.

The final two regular season games came down to an away contest for a share of the title against St. Lucy’s, a top-heavy club with a top-heavy roster from, arguably, the most cash-strapped parish in the city, and a home game against St. John the Baptist, currently the league’s third place team. St. Lucy's, based on talent and history alone, figured to be a breeze for Billy E's boys. But Baptist's, assuming the Heartsmen dispatched of Lucy's as expected, would spell the difference between an 18-0 mark and immortality and a 17-1 mark and being remembered in so many bars and taverns in town as just one more of the Parochial League's dozens of great teams over the years.

But Lucy’s came first. Billy E knew it would be a fool’s errand to overlook that ragtag collection of Lower West End kids.  In their first meeting on in January, a game played on the Hearts home court, Billy’s boys had won by thirteen, in large measure because they pulled away at the end, when what was basically a three-man St. Lucy’s squad simply ran out of gas. But Billy had seen something in Lucy’s that night. No team in the league – beyond Evangelist, of course – had been so stubborn or played his team as tough in the face of such long odds.  

One of the three Lucian cornerstones, an Irish kid named Mike Higgins, was a shooter with an elegant and deadly jumper and an uncanny nose for the ball. Billy E and Higgins went as far back as Little League, and for a while the young man’s parents had been talking to Billy  about sending their boy to Sacred Heart so he could play for him. Higgins’ specialty was picking up the kind of “garbage” points that had recently become synonymous with the Celtics’ Bailey Howell, a talented NBA swingman from Mississippi State who regularly seemed to score a dozen points simply by grabbing offensive rebounds and/or picking up loose balls near his basket and converting them.

Another Lucian that year who could go toe-to-toe with just about anyone in the league – or at least would go toe-to-toe – was a youngster named Paul Maroney.  “Red” Maroney was an Irish bulldog; a stocky, blocky, fireplug who simply did not back down from anyone, anywhere, regardless of size and stature, and a bright-eyed kid who, for all he lacked in talent, more than made up for it in toughness.  Maroney wasn’t a great shooter, but he was a clutch shooter. If Lucy’s coach Bob Banack needed someone to hit a shot at any point in a game, there was a good chance that’s exactly who would take it upon himself to step up. 

What’s more, Maroney always seemed to get the ball into the right teammate’s hands at just the right moment – which, for a team given to long stretches of disjointed and, at times, me-first play, served as a breath of fresh air, especially early in the season. 

In the two teams’ first matchup, in fact, it was Red Maroney who carried the Lucians until his teammates woke up and realized they were in the middle of a game against the league’s first-place club, one that had the talent and depth to turn them into roadkill.

In that first go-round, amid the partisan roar of the Hearts crazies, Maroney had quieted them considerably by hitting all five of his first quarter shots, scoring all but one of his team’s points, a perfect shooting performance that allowed his undermanned Lucians to trail by just a single point as the first quarter buzzer sounded.

By far, the Lucians’ best player that season, however – and, possibly, the most sublimely talented player the league had seen in years – was a junior southpaw named Lloyd “Tookie” Chisholm, a soft-spoken, humble kid who'd led the Parochial League in scoring his sophomore year and was now doing the same his junior year, ranking just ahead of the Schmid in the league’s scoring race.

The 6'3" Chisholm had been one of five African Americans on the previous year’s Lucy’s squad, a team that placed third in the Parochial League, trailing only Felasco’s Eagles and Billy E’s Heartsmen. Of the five Black youngsters who’d worn the scarlet-and-white that season, only Chisholm remained. 

One of them, a talented and slightly undersized freshman guard named Craig Caldwell with a childlike countenance, an impeccable court sense and some great ball handling skills had transferred to Central.  A rail-thin jumping-jack with bad hands and a good heart named Lou Moore, whose jaw-dropping vertical leap allowed the young man to, literally, touch the top of the backboard, had been graduated.  And Len Reeder, the junior forward with the cast-iron will and the heart of a lion, had taken his steely determination and transferred to Corcoran to play for Ken Huffman. 

Tookie Chisholm was, therefore, the only Black kid remaining on a team with a long and glorious history in the Parochial League, dating back to the days of African American stars like Norman Reaves, Ormie Spencer, Milt Fields, Malchester Reeves and Carl Foy.

For many white kids in Syracuse, Tookie Chisholm – one of only four or five Black players in the entire Parochial League in 1967 – developed something of his very own mythology largely based on stereotypes, half-baked perceptions and, to be fair, ignorance.

Tookie was so much better than anyone else in the Parochial League, or so went the mythology, because he was taller and his arms longer.  He was better because he was older; as old, perhaps, as nineteen, or twenty, or maybe even twenty-one.  And though he may have been talented, was the thinking among many in Syracuse's all-white parishes, he was lazy. Not only that, but he wasn’t smart and never bothered to go to class.  Didn't have to, was the word. Oh yeah, he also may have had two or three kids already, and by different women.  Heck, the guy might have even once killed a man.

The reality was, the 17-year old Tookie Chisholm, while long and angular, was still only 6’3” in his stocking feet, the same height as Jack Contos.  And he was a good deal shorter and thinner than both Contos’ frontcourt mates, Tom Sakowski and Pete Schmid, along with at least a half dozen or so other forwards and centers in the Parochial League. 

Also, he was anything but lazy or evil.  Tookie was a good kid who loved basketball, lived to play it sunup to sundown, and regularly did so against the very best the city had to offer, including the S.U. stars-of-the-day, guys with names like Dave Bing, Jim Boeheim, Sam Penceal and Vaughn Harper. 

Tookie’s mother had been a terrific ballplayer in her time, too; unlike his father, who was neither rangy, nor athletic, nor, as it turned out, given to sticking around all that much. As a lithe, former athlete, and one who still loved the game she grew up playing, and who longed to be in the company of those who loved it too, Onetha Chisholm, now a hairdresser and mother of four, befriended and hung out with many like-minded jazz-and-basketball loving cats from the 15^th Ward. 

She eventually became good friends with Al Nelson, the brawny 15^th Warder who once made local history by breaking the Parochial League’s color barrier when, in 1948, he and his little brother enrolled at St. John the Evangelist and began lacing them up for Bobby Felasco. 

For a while, Onetha even dated the gentlemanly Earl Lloyd, the first black man to ever play in the NBA, a prodigal, soft-spoken giant from Virginia who, alone for the first time in his life, found a home-away-from-home in Syracuse's 15^th Ward. It was Lloyd who gave little Tookie his very first basketball and who helped him fall in love with the game that he, himself, played for money.  And it was Lloyd who regularly left tickets for Onetha and her kids, so that they all might come to watch him and his Nats mates play such NBA rivals as the Celtics, Knicks and Pistons.

Nelson, in fact, was how Tookie eventually ended up at St. Lucy’s, even though he lived on the other side of town and had already enrolled at H.W. Smith, a public junior high just a two-block walk from his home. Onetha, her parents and kids had once lived on Renwick Place in the heart of the Ward, that tiny patch of Black heaven where Jackie Robinson had once stayed when he was a Montreal Royal and that Manny Breland and others continued to refer to as “Sugar Hill” for all it meant in terms of standing and status in Syracuse’s Black community. 

But that was all before Urban Renewal and Interstate 81 began gobbling up block after block of the Ward, including, alas, Sugar Hill. Once that tiny symbol of African American achievement fell prey to Mayor Walsh’s wrecking ball and erased from the face of the city as though it never existed, Onetha and her family found themselves with no alternative but to pull up stakes and move to East Fayette Street, a mile or so east of the now-empty lot where their cozy little family home had once stood so proudly. 

The elder Nelson, who’d recently taken the job as Lucy’s head coach, had watched Onetha’s baby boy develop over the years and watched the ease and skill with which the still-skinny beanpole handled and shot the ball.  He convinced his friend to send her son to Lucy’s, where Nelson promised he’d mentor him and toughen him up a bit, making him a better all-round player in the process. 

That's how a skinny, 110-pound 9^th grader named Lloyd “Tookie” Chisholm began what would become his own personal, four-year/five-day-a-week sojourn from one side of Syracuse to the other. Each school day began with an hour-long hike from 1408 East Fayette Street, through the heart of downtown, and on to St. Lucy’s Academy on Gifford Street. Rain or shine, he'd walk those two-plus miles by himself, and march them even in the dead of winter, many times before the sun came up and, often, well after dark. Once in a while, he'd grab the Fayette Street bus and transfer to the Gifford Street one, but only if it was pouring and he had a spare quarter – which, of course, meant Tookie rarely rode to or from school, unless his coach happened to offer him a ride home after practice on a particularly miserable night.

To be fair, while much of the mythology surrounding Tookie was empty noise and the product of so many half-truths and fabrications, there was a meaningful part of it that was, indeed, based in fact. For one example, Tookie Chisholm once did the unthinkable. He hit a nun. Smashed her good, in fact. And while he did it impulsively, and perhaps – perhaps – understandably, it was something that, not surprisingly, got him immediately kicked out of school.

The way it happened was that Tookie, in a pickup a game at Thornden Park, had taken a shot in the mouth from Dave Bing, the S.U. All American, who at the time was, possibly, the best college player in the country. Bing’s elbow not only loosened two of the kid’s front teeth, it put a gash into his upper gum that in less than 48 hours got infected.

So, on Thursday of the following week, when Tookie showed up late for school yet again, a stocky and preternaturally nasty nun named Sister Maria Jose, the school’s principal and resident hard-ass, took umbrage over the star player's chronic tardiness. She called Tookie into her office and began yelling at him.  At one point, as her face grew redder and her blood reached near-boil, she opened her meaty right paw and slapped the youngster hard across his swollen mouth, sending a bolt of pain through him that began in those two loose front teeth of his and quickly radiated up and down his spine. 

Instinctively, Tookie retaliated. His mouth tasting of blood and his eyes blurry with tears, he swung wildly at the nun, catching Sister Maria Jose flush on the right side of her face sending her sprawling backward onto her desk, the rosary beads about her waist coiling for a moment above her like a charmed cobra.

Stunned for second, then terrified by what he’d done, Tookie slowly backed up and then, in a panic, quickly bolted out of the office, scurrying off in the direction of the parish rectory, where he started banging on the thick oak door of the priests' house until a somewhat put-off Father Nichols opened it in a huff.

“What’s the problem here, young man?” snorted Nichols, clearly miffed by the boy’s non-stop, machine-gun rapping. 

“I did something real bad, Father,” said Tookie, tears now steaming down his face.  “Real, real bad. I just hit Sister Maria Jose.”

The priest looked at the youngster for the briefest of moments before his eyes darkened and a scowl crossed his face. Without saying word, Nichols shoved past Tookie and strode off toward his parish’s red brick schoolhouse, Onetha’s baby boy behind him every step of the way.

As one might expect, the incident triggered an immediate meeting of the parish brain trust, one in which 15-year old Lloyd "Tookie" Chisholm tried his best to plead his case to the Lucy's hierarchy: the school’s pastor, its athletic director, Father Nichols, and Sister Maria Jose, its principal and the ostensible victim. 

The long and the short of the unseemly incident was that, following Tookie doing all he could to throw himself on the mercy of the "court," he was suspended for one day. The reason he wasn’t suspended longer or booted from school altogether was that it came out during the impromptu hearing that Tookie's action had been precipitated by the hard slap across his face by Sister Maria Jose, something that in the priests’ mind was an overzealous display of corporeal punishment, one that went beyond the traditional whack across the knuckles or the boxing of an unruly student’s ears – particularly in light of the young man's swollen and abscessed mouth.

Initially, the nun tried to deny slapping Tookie at all – much less doing so with force.  But her roundhouse slap had caused the abscess in his upper gum-line to burst open, and, as he pleaded his case, the gruesome swirl of blood and puss that dribbled from his mouth and down his chin offered far more persuasive evidence than his words ever could.

With Sister Maria Jose suddenly on the defensive, the two priests began to view the boy’s actions in a softer and far more forgiving light. Even so, he had hit a nun, and he had sent her flying across a desk, so instead of letting him off scot-free, they imposed a nominal one-day suspension on him.

In a way, as word of the incident got around, it only added to the exaggerations and controversy that attached themselves to Tookie's life and story. One more interesting bit of negativity circulating among his detractors held that Tookie Chisholm was showing up at practice with beer on his breath.  Not all the time, but on more than one occasion.

One other piece of information turned more than a few fans off to him, as well. Despite the fact that Syracuse was a hard-drinking town, even by Central New York lofty standards, and despite the fact that working class Catholics were, perhaps, its hardest drinkers of all, word soon spread that Chisholm was showing up at practice with beer on his breath. Not all the time, mind you, but on more than one occasion.

In fact, like so many other Parochial Leaguers, the young man did drink more than his fair share of beer. He and his buddies discovered they could buy three quarts of Topper, a low-end regional lager, for one dollar at the little market on Gifford Street; not enough to get them drunk, but certainly enough to take the edge off.

Regardless of the fact that drinking cheap beer had long been something of a rite of passage in the Parochial League, the fact that Tookie Chisholm was doing it proved to be one more piece of ammunition for those who wanted to demonize him.

The fact that Tookie wasn’t Catholic didn’t help matters either.  Unlike a number of the other young black kids from the Ward who’d gone to Parochial League schools and/or grown to know Father Brady – young men like Al and Marshall Nelson, Ormie Spencer and Milt Fields, and even some who didn’t go to a Catholic high school, like Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow – Tookie never converted to Catholicism, even after enrolling at Lucy’s and becoming a Parochial Leaguer. 

Instead, for a few months anyway, even though officially enrolled at St. Lucy’s, Tookie Chisholm continued to attend Sunday services each and every week at People’s AME Zion, near his former home. There he’d sit, pray, sing and listen to Reverend Emery Proctor preach his steely brand of spiritual brimstone and moral fortitude: at least he did until Mayor Walsh and his Urban Renewal boys opted to tear down every building on the block except People’s AME Zion. That simple pen-stroke of an executive order from City Hall may have physically saved the humble and unassuming little church from the wrecking ball, but in every other way it killed it. Because it killed everything living and good around it, including the homes of all the families who congregated there at least twice a week, and often more so.

And when everything around AME Zion fell – especially the houses and apartment buildings – despite protests from a broad coalition that included everyone from CORE and the NAACP to dozens of S.U. students and professors, along with thousands of Ward residents (including Tookie and Onetha), it made getting to the little church a bridge-too-far, especially since so many if them didn’t own cars and were forced to walk.

Before long, AME Zion, like so many businesses and institutions before it, was compelled to pull up stakes and move out of the Ward. In the church’s case, it was a move to a largely commercial block of South Salina Street, a relocation that fundamentally changed, not just the church, but its relationship with those who loved it. Because when People’s AME Zion left its home in the 15^th Ward, it tore out the very heart of Syracuse’s proud and close-knit family of church-going, hand-clapping and Jesus-praising African Americans.  

One of whom was Tookie Chisholm, the non-Catholic, beer-drinking high school baller with the oh-so feathery touch.

Even the young man’s nickname contributed to his complicated and near mythical status among many white basketball fans in town. He may have been “Lloyd” to sportswriters at the Post-Standard and Herald-Journal, but rarely did anyone who knew him, or knew of him, refer to him by his Christian name.

Instead, the lanky frontcourt star was simply, “Tookie,” the whimsical, almost childlike-sounding name that had been bestowed upon him by his mother’s mother when he was still laying on his back, chirping away and cooing in his crib. 

Even that little kernel of background information about Chisholm, however, would turn out to be at least a touch confusing. Because, over the course of her life, every time his grandmother was asked how in the world she came up with “Tookie," she’d always say that even as a toddler “that boy was Tweety Bird.” 

During his career at St. Lucy’s, Sacred Heart was, without a doubt, the one team against whom Tookie Chisholm loved to play. Which is something of a paradox because the young man hated to lose. And his Lucy's teams always lost to Billy E’s Heartsmen.  Always.

But Tookie loved to play the Hearts because they were the one Parochial League team that consistently brought out his best, compelling him to push himself to his outer limits of his abilities each and every time he took the court against them.

In an odd sort of way, Tookie was jealous of those Heartsmen, of how sound they were fundamentally – how well-coached they were, and how things such as back screens, boxing out, extra passes, and backdoor cuts became almost second nature to them. Tookie knew the game. Knew how it should be played. It was how Sacred Heart played it. Not the way St. Lucy’s did.

Tookie had seen so many kids – kids with real skills – come to Lucy's and, despite their great talents, ultimately leave as less-than-great players. They didn’t understand the game or what it took to win consistently on Friday nights. Tookie did. People like Earl Lloyd taught him, as had people like Dave Bing and Jim Boeheim, among others. What he learned from those great players is that it wasn't so much talent, as it was teamwork that won the day.

Tookie also regularly studied strategies and on-court movement, almost as a coach might, especially on the pro games televised on ABC on Sunday afternoons. He never missed one of those weekly black-and-white broadcasts, often a knock-down/drag-out affair pitting Bill Russell’s Celtics, the league’s gold standard, against Wilt Chamberlain’s 76ers, a franchise just a few years removed from its glory days in Syracuse.  Watching those NBA games, week after week, Tookie learned not to just follow the ball, but to follow how the best players – guy like John Havlicek – moved when they didn’t have it, paying careful attention to all the things they did to try to create openings for themselves and their teammates.

That kind of smart, technical basketball might have been a part of St. Lucy’s program years ago, but by 1967 it had given way to a more selfish brand of play, one that relied as much on raw talent and streaky shooting as it did training, teamwork and discipline.

In Tookie Chisholm’s mind, one such Lucy’s player who embodied that kind of “shoot first/ask questions later” mentality was a tall, handsome white boy from the Lower West End named Bob Bregard – “Gepper” to his friends and family – who was not just the cockiest kid that Tookie played with at St. Lucy’s, but, without question, the most stone-cold gunner he'd ever seen. 

Gepper Bregard never met a shot he didn’t like and would take any shot from any spot and at any moment, regardless of how many teammates were open and what the situation warranted.  Even years later, Chisholm would remember being a freshman at Lucy’s and screaming out to Bregard, a senior, for the ball because Bregard was being double teamed twenty or so feet away while he was virtually alone and unguarded under his own basket.

Even though Bob Bregard’s “let it fly” brand of ball had slowly infected the style (and quality) of play at St. Lucy’s, that season’s starting five under new coach Bob Banack had developed a strong rapport and played almost every opponent tough – or at least they did until crunch time in the final quarter when the thinness of their bench would betray them and, time and again, they’d run out of gas a few strides shy of the finish line.

That season, however, Lucy's young coach found an ingenious way to up the level of competition for his boys in practice. In doing so, Banack helped his team improve greatly, while mitigating much of the competitive edge that Billy E’s “Chinese Bandits” had long afforded him.

Banack worked at Niagara Mohawk, the local power company whose race-based and discriminatory hiring practices had been boycotted two years prior and turned into a burning issue lby, among others, Father Brady, CORE and hundreds of 15^th Ward residents. One day, Banack recruited one of Niagara Mohawk's very first full-time African American hirees following Brady's successful boycott to scrimmage his boys. Dave Sims was a young and bull-strong 6’5” lineman from California who could play a little bit, and Sims subsequently offered to bring along a few of his work buddies.  In return, Banack promised Simms he and his friends would end up getting some regular exercise, while helping his boys improve by the simple fact they'd now be facing grown men, rather than a bunch of physically overmatched teenagers, none of whom was good enough to start.

What’s more, like Sims – “Sweaty” Dave, to his fellow linemen – those four or five guys he started regularly bringing to practice with him were all twenty or thirty-something former high school or college players who were fast, strong and knew damn well how to play the game.

Suddenly, what had long been one of St. Lucy’s biggest weaknesses – the absurd thinness of its bench and lack of anyone to push its starters – became one of its greatest strengths. In the process, kids like Tookie Chisholm, Red Maroney and Mike Higgins became not just better individual players, they slowly began to evolve into a stronger and more cohesive unit. 

The Lucians’ record against that year’s best teams didn’t necessarily reflect it, but by mid-February Coach Banack’s boys were, all of a sudden, no longer a group to be trifled with – especially as the march toward the playoffs intensified.

It was one of the many things that made Billy E uneasy as the final Friday of the regular season neared; along with, of course, the suddenly heightened focus that many in town – even a few of his own – were starting to place on his team’s gaudy 16-0 record.  An undefeated team in the glare of the spotlight, one sporting a big, fat target on its back, was getting ready to do battle with an improving team led by a special player, and a team that at that point in the season found itself with, quite literally, nothing to lose. 

In Billy's mind, the game had all the makings of a disaster.

Sure enough, from the moment the Hearts left the visitors locker room that Friday night, you could feel it in the air, almost as though it had a taste and texture.  The atmosphere in that dog-eared Gifford Street gym even made the hairs on more than a few of those Hearts kids’ necks rise and stand at attention as they left their locker room. The setting may have been underwhelming – it was, after all, just little old St. Lucy’s, a ratty relic of a bygone era that might have looked at home with a couple of peach baskets nailed to either wall, and a court on which most of Billy E’s boys had been playing since grammar school – but the vibe was undeniably electric.

The hundreds of Lucy’s parishioners who’d crammed into the gym and who sat shoulder-to-shoulder, wedged in like so many sardines, were roaring at levels that were nerve-racking, even to a bunch of kids who’d been playing in front of boisterous, rowdy crowds their entire lives. 

But who could blame those St. Lucy’s crazies?  Their team had a chance to knock off the dreaded Heartsmen and ruin their perfect season. Moments like that just didn’t happen every day on the Lower West End.

The denizens of the scarlet-and-white loved their boys with all their hearts – almost as much as the most talented Lucian of all loved them. More than a half a century later, in fact, long after time, fate and poor health had turned him into a shadow of his former self, Tookie Chisholm would still be displaying proudly the high school class ring he'd earned years prior as a Parochial Leaguer. Because in that little Catholic enclave of working class white folks, crazy-strict nuns, and sage (and, at times, remarkably forgiving) priests, Tookie had found something he’d never really found before; a loyal, extended family, and people who not only loved and accepted him, but who demanded more of him; people who held him – a one-time racial, cultural and religious outsider – to a higher standard than he’d ever been held to, before or since; people who, despite all his flaws, still believed in him and his ability to lead their boys to Friday night glory.

As the two teams ran through their pre-game drills, and the two coaches exchanged pleasantries and good-lucks over near the scorer’s table, it was all Tookie could do to contain himself. He’d never been so ready to play a game and never prouder to be sporting the colors of St. Lucy’s, including the bold “S L A” emblazoned on the flap across the back of his scarlet-trimmed, white cotton warm-up, a piece of uniform embroidery that would fly up behind him like Superman’s cape every time he exploded upward to ram home one more monstrous pre-game dunk, a thundering display of power, hand size, and verticality that was a rare sight, indeed, in the Parochial League and the sound of which caused more than a few of the Heartsmen to look over their shoulder at the other end of the court.

Billy E remained confident but wary.  After all, his team was undefeated for a reason. They possessed the strongest and most complete player in the league, Pete Schmid, along with a deep bench, and a starting five of tall, brawny and skilled kids whose collective lack of quickness, if not foot speed, could never be fully exposed by a court as intimate as St. Lucy’s. So, indeed, he had plenty of reasons to feel confident.

Yet, something about that evening – especially as he watched Chisholm warming up in front of him and felt the electricity being generated behind him by the throbbing horde of Lower West Enders – gnawed at him. Billy E, the consummate showman, jokester and barroom ringmaster, was suddenly feeling some unexpected butterflies. He stood there, hands in pockets, working on a fresh stick of Juicy Fruit, contemplating what he had quietly but most assuredly come to realize was going to be a war.

Sure enough, on the opening tip, Tookie bolted skyward, reached up toward the lights, and got his left hand on the ball at its near-peak, a half a tick or so before the taller but more deliberate Schmid. He tipped it to Red Maroney, who in turn whipped it up ahead to Joe Murman on the right wing for an open 16-footer that the youngster drained clean. 

Just like that, mere seconds into the final Friday of regular-season play in the 1966-67 Parochial League season, the white bulbs on the ancient, dusty scoreboard on the far end of the gym flashed “St. Lucy 02, Visitor 00.”  Meanwhile, the crowd behind Billy howled its delight and the creaky, wooden bleacher beneath him shook with the rumbled exultation of hundreds of stomping, salt-stained and still-wet rubber boots.

As Hearts brought the ball down for the very first time, Tookie hunched over and eyed Schmid, almost like a big cat might lie in wait for its prey.  He had an idea he’d been hatching in anticipation of this moment; something he’d picked up earlier that week from Dave Sims, Coach Banack’s buddy from work. 

Sims that particular day had fouled Tookie hard early – literally punched him in the stomach, in fact, when he went up for his first shot of the afternoon – an overt statement that not only hurt, but planted a seed of doubt in Tookie's mind that caused him to subsequently flinch the next three or four times he went up.  Tookie thought about that, and thought about what such a hard, early foul might do to get Schmid off his game – as great as it may have been. Tookie Chisholm had been playing against Pete Schmid since both were 9^th graders and he’d seen first hand how dominant the German could be. 

But Tookie also viewed Schmid as a disciplined and highly mechanical player who always liked to color within the lines when it came to basketball.  To Tookie’s thinking, his was not the kind of game that immediately translated to the rough-and-tumble ball he’d personally grown up playing in Kirk, Wilson and Thornden Park.

So, the very first time Schmid pump faked and went up, Tookie did much the same thing that Sims had done to him.  Only, instead of driving his fist into the powerful Heartsman’s stomach, like Sims had done to him, he elbowed him hard in the ribs near the right baseline, something that elicited a throaty groan and ignited a spark of rage in Schmid’s eyes.  The big forward hit his two foul shots, and Tookie did, indeed, pick up his first foul. But the message he hoped to send had been delivered, and it had been received loud and clear. 

Despite their 7-9 record, St. Lucy’s – or at least Tookie Chisholm – wasn’t going anywhere for the next 32 minutes. And if Schmid and his Heartsmen wanted to keep that stupid little perfect season of theirs intact – on Tookie’s home court, no less – it was going to take every last ounce of everything they had.

For pure shooters, thanks to its matchbook size, the softness of its backboards and the almost comical looseness of its rims, there was no court in the entire Parochial League any more forgiving than the little gym on Gifford Street, just down the block from Paul Seymour’s liquor emporium. St. Pat’s was certainly in St. Lucy’s class as a favorable shooting venue, at least from the perspective of the two baskets. The difference was, though, the respective heights of the two ceilings. 

At St. Pat’s, the forgivingness of its baskets was more than offset by its infamously low ceiling, a built-in height restriction that constantly forced any shooter to change the arc of his shot, especially from deep in the corner or out near the top of the key. 

St. Lucy’s, on the other hand, had no such limitations. The ceiling was plenty high and the place relatively well-lit, at least compared to the other Parochial League gyms; something that, coupled with the well-worn nature of its spongy, wooden backboards and its decades-old rims, made it pure heaven for a shooter.

That’s why, a full decade prior, it was the gym where three of the deadliest shooters the league had ever seen – Richie Pospiech, Gene Fisch and Chuck Bisesi – combined to put up an astounding 111 points between them as the Hearts held on for a nail-biting 110-104 victory over the Lucians, the single highest scoring game in Parochial League history.

And this cold and snowy February night proved to be much like that record-breaking affair ten or so years earlier. It seemed as if neither the Heartsmen nor the Lucians could miss early on, especially two kids for whom high-scoring games were anything but a given; Joe Zaganczyk, the good-looking, Beatle-loving guard for the Hearts, and Mike Higgins, the St. Lucy’s kid with the sweet stroke and the uncanny knack for coming up with loose balls.  Both youngsters were solid players, but hardly spectacular. And both proved to be something of a coach’s dream, consistently making precious few mistakes and more than their share of heads-up plays. Neither was the kind who was going to make any opposing coach lose sleep, though. Not like, say, Pete Schmid or Tookie Chisholm could.

On this night, however, those two youngsters found themselves in a groove. It was one of those times in a player’s life when everything he seems to throw up somehow finds the mark. In the first period alone, the two teams combined for 47 points in just eight minutes, with Sacred Heart emerging with a slim 25-22 lead. 

In Zaganczyk’s case, he found himself with a little extra spring in his step because the upcoming weekend promised to be the very kind for which he lived, one full of the three things he loved most in the world: basketball, music and girls.  There was the St. Lucy’s game on Friday, the gig at S.U. on Saturday with his band, Richie and the Strangers, and then another game on Sunday afternoon, against St. John the Baptist to close out what, in all probability, was going to be an undefeated season.  Young Joey Zaganczyk, for all he may have lacked in home life and a sense of being loved, more than made up for in deliciously male pursuits. 

Mike Higgins, on the other hand, had two things going for him that night: one being his hot hand, the other being the fact that Billy E had suddenly become so intent on trying to stop Tookie Chisholm, he was creating all sorts of opportunities for anyone willing and able to take advantage of them.  Mike Higgins – the kid with the feathery touch and the uncanny knack for finding cracks in any defense – had suddenly become a beneficiary.

What Billy E had done midway through the first quarter, after Tookie scored six quick and relatively easy points, was put his team into a box-and-one he’d been working on that week in practice.  He began alternating three of his relatively quick and athletic guards to dog the silky St. Lucy's star all over the court, while their teammates remained planted under the goal in a collapsible, defensive box. The three, Billy’s quarterback, Danny Van Cott, along with Leo Najdul and Richie Dabrowski, two of his most active and hyperkinetic Bandits, were then instructed to deny Tookie the ball and keep him as far away from his basket as possible. Wherever the Lucy’s scoring machine went on the floor, inside or out, one of their teammates would then immediately jump out (or down, or over) and double team him whenever he came anywhere near them or their quadrant of the box. 

While that tactic may have slowed Tookie down some, he fully understood the extent to which it was creating openings elsewhere on the court.  Not only did Mike Higgins have the luxury of, now, looser coverage, but a teammate more than willing to get him the ball when he was open. In the second quarter, as a result, during which big Tookie took (and made) only two shots the entire eight minutes, Higgins enjoyed the finest quarter of his basketball life, scoring twelve rapid-fire points to keep his Lucians hot on the heels of the Hearts, 53-51. 

As the first half buzzer sounded and Billy E angrily strode off toward his locker room, he could barely think above the deafening roar and the non-stop pounding of so many winter boots, a jarring cacophony of sound and vibration that had spurred the kids in scarlet-and-white to play their best half of the season and was now driving him to distraction, while threatening to serve as the unofficial soundtrack of, quite possibly, the biggest Parochial League upset of all time.

A few miles to the West, that very same night, a bunch of Bishop Ludden and Central Tech kids, both Black and white, would be throwing haymakers at one another in a mix of anger, frustration and race-based fear, while one of them, a senior named Barry Thornton, would find himself having to disarm a schoolmate hell-bent on mayhem by forcibly separating him from the hatchet he’d been carrying.

But those things, even if Billy E had known about them, would have been of little consequence at that moment. In the beating heart of Syracuse’s Lower West End, he had his own set of problems, and they stemmed from the fact that a bunch of hustling, clawing and scratching ragamuffins – along with one uniquely gifted kid who made his way from the other side of town each and every school day – were refusing to acknowledge they weren’t as good as his boys and had no right being within spitting distance after sixteen minutes of play.

In the locker room, Billy exploded. He raged. He spit fire, nails and hot lead, all at the same time, lighting into his sweaty, panting and brawny charges – especially the starters – with uncharacteristic intensity, hitting them straight between their eyes and doing so with both barrels.  He particularly took them to task for their shoddy defense and their almost criminal lack of effort. 

It wasn’t true, of course, but the Hearts’ coach had a point to make. His Heartsmen were in trouble. If they didn't wake up, their undefeated season would gone be forever – and not just for this year, or the next, but for as long as God granted them breath.

Billy didn’t say those exact words, but that was his message.  The Hearts kids – each of them sitting there in that dingy, smelly little locker room with a small ring of hearts on their chest – knew full well that unless they got serious over the span of the next sixteen minutes, they would all someday look back on this night as one in which they let something special, historic, and, perhaps, even magical, slip through their fingers.

To that end, Billy decided to change things up a bit in the second half, at least to start.  He decided to slow the pace markedly, if only to limit the occasions Lucy’s would have for putting the ball into that damn Chisholm’s hands. He told his boys he wanted them to work the ball around more and be more selective about where and when they shot.  Also, to look for Schmid more as he alternated between the high and low post. “Boys, we’re getting away from our offense.  I want less freelancing out there and a lot more ball movement.” 

“Let’s not blow this now. We’ve worked too hard and we've come too far.” When he was done, Billy E called his boys together as a show of unity, touching hands in a huddled circle, like he always did, and then sent them back out to try to right their listing ship.

The third quarter played out much like Billy had hoped. With the Hearts more deliberate on offense and working the ball around more than they had at any point in the first half, the pace visibly slowed. In fact, after lighting up the scoreboard like a proverbial Christmas tree for the first sixteen minutes of play, the two clubs combined to score fewer third quarter points than the Lucians alone scored in the second.  Nevertheless, like a mongoose at the neck of Billy E’s powerful club, the Lucian kids refused to quit and refused to stop attacking.  As a result, at the end of three periods of play, they trailed by just six, 68-62.

That’s when Bob Banack, Billy’s opposite number, made a coaching decision of his own. Banack had been a nice player for Lucy’s during his schoolboy days, but had never known how hard coaching was until he actually gave it a try.  It wasn’t the X’s and O’s he found so hard. It was the losing. Coming up short on the scoreboard as a player had certainly hurt, but he was just one of five out there and could always find some measure of solace in some aspect of his own performance. As a coach, however, he was responsible for everything that occurred in a game, at least from his team’s perspective, from preparation and conditioning through strategy, execution and, of course, results. 

The first time he ever experienced the sick feeling that losing can impart in a coach was in his very first game as Lucy’s head man. It was an away affair just a year prior against a solid St. John the Baptist team.  In that game, his boys lost on a last-second tip-in of a missed free throw. It had crushed him, left him so emotionally devastated that he almost tendered his resignation the next day for fear of ever having to feel that way again.  Decades later he would still remember the name of the seldom-used Baptist's kid who’d put a dagger through his heart by tipping in the game winner that night.

But what was important about that game was that, in losing it, Bob Banack came to realize what a special player he had in Tookie Chisholm. His team had trailed that evening by double figures heading into the final period – in a hostile environment, no less. But during that fourth quarter, his big southpaw simply took over the game, much to his coach’s wonder and awe. 

Scoring seemingly at will, Chisholm turned a twelve-point deficit into a four-point one within a few minutes. Finally, with just twenty seconds to go and his team down two, Tookie scored a tough basket by following up a teammate’s missed shot with a sweeping, snatching rebound.  Then, faking right, he dribbled left along the baseline and hit a magnificent reverse lay-up on which he was also fouled so hard he got knocked to the ground and hit his head. 

As Tookie casually got up, rubbed the back of his neck, exhaled, and then casually sank his free throw to give his team a one-point lead, Bobby Banack sat on the bench and felt like a man on top of the world. His boys had just gone into the enemy’s den and snatched a most improbable directly victory from the jaws of defeat.

Or so he thought. 

A year later, the losing had become easier for Bobby Banack. But only a little. Nevertheless, the memory of how his big forward had taken over that St. John the Baptist game a year ago now burned in his brain as his players huddled for the start of the final period, all of them awaiting instructions as the possibility of an epic upset hung in the balance.

The difference was, in that game a year ago, Tookie Chisholm had taken it upon himself to assume control.  This time it was Banack’s turn. And the coaching decision he made that snowy Friday night against Sacred Heart – a team trying its ever-loving best to clinch the Parochial League title and keep its perfect record intact – and the message he delivered to his overachieving and dog-tired kids was as simple as it was direct: Get the ball to Tookie.

And the message to his best player? Tookie...Do your thing.

Which is exactly what Tookie Chisholm did, playing the final eight minutes against Pete Schmid and his undefeated mates as though it might just be the final few minutes of basketball the Good Lord would ever grant him. Inside. Outside. Jump shots. Put-backs. Steals. Rebounds. Blocked shots. Breakaways. No look passes. It didn’t matter. Tookie was a raging fire on both ends of the court and Billy E was at a loss to stop him.

That didn’t prevent him from working the sideline, though, and barking out orders and screaming out beefs about terrible calls in a way he’d never, ever done before. But Billy couldn’t help himself. He was mad and terrified at the same time.  Fate was slipping through his fingers and he could feel it.  And, frankly, so could just about everyone else.

When big Tookie drove hard to the basket from the left baseline – blowing right by Najdal in the process – and then, cut off by Sakowski, exploded backward for a arcing fall-away off one leg from a ridiculous, almost impossible angle, it seemed, indeed, that something fated and for-the-ages had been written in the stars that blanketed a dark and frigid Syracuse. 

On that unlikely shot, with Lucy’s down five, Chisholm was angled so far behind the basket he was forced to arc the ball high over the large wooden backboard, from well behind it, all while falling into the crowd of fans standing shoulder-to-shoulder along the baseline.  The fifteen-foot Hail Mary, which seemed higher than it was long, somehow found nothing but the bottom of the net as the Lucy’s fans roared in joyous disbelief and those nearest to Tookie hugged and patted him on the back.

In one of the most unlikely Parochial League games ever played, St. Lucy’s, who that season had found a way to lose more games than they won, had just cut the powerful Hearts’ lead to just three with a mere hundred and sixty three ticks of the clock remaining.

What’s more, the scruffy and paper-thin St. Lucy’s squad of Bob Banack found itself in possession of the absolute best player on the court –  maybe the city – a kid who was playing with a passion few had ever seen. Even if a decade later, when the Post-Standard would publish its list of the 200 greatest Parochial League players ever, Tookie Chisholm, despite leading the league in scoring for two consecutive years, would not even be listed among the finest players in St. Lucy’s history.

The reality was, Tookie Chisholm was as good as anyone, anywhere – and particularly on that night.  No one knew that better than Billy.  So, when that unlikeliest of all shots came off big Lloyd’s fingertips and arced over and from behind the backboard, before catching in the soft netting below, the men, women and children watching suddenly felt they were witnessing a miracle in their humble little gym, and that the only certainty was that the windows were slammed shut and, now, all bets were off. 

Fortunately for the Heartsmen, they had their own brand of magic brewing. Joe Zaganczyk, the genial, good-looking Polish kid from the broken home, who’d started the game like a house afire, still couldn’t seem to miss. Indeed, he was in the early stages of the almost magical weekend he’d been dreaming about in class all week long.

Even as Billy tried to signal time out after Tookie’s arcing prayer from behind the backboard, Van Cott inbounded, whipped the ball ahead to Contos, who spun and found Zaganczyk wide open on the left wing.  Zaganczyk’s sixteen-foot jumper was so pure that it audibly snapped the net, which then wrapped itself around the rim so tightly play had to be stopped. Summoned from his office with a twelve-foot step ladder, the Lucy’s janitor had to climb up and untangle the net, which given the tightness of the wrap, took him more time than most expected.

Billy used the unexpected break in lieu of the time out he’d been trying so desperately to call.  The Hearts coach gathered his kids around and looked each of them in the eye.  “All right, boys,” he barked above the roar. "This game’s ours.  And anyone who doesn’t believe that can have a seat next to me for the rest of it – or the rest of his damn career, for all I care.”  None of the Hearts kids said a word.  Hands on knees, they simply stared up at their coach, who was as serious as they'd ever seen him.

Billy E continued. “They’re running out of time out there. Just stick to our game plan. That’s all we have to do. Eventually, they’re going to start fouling us.  Just keep your heads about you out there. Understand? No bad passes. Keep moving on offense. And find the open man.  He’s there. Just, just find him.  Also, when the time comes – and it will come – make your foul shots.  You do that, and I promise you.  This one'll be ours.”

And that’s exactly what those Sacred Heart kids did. Especially Zaganczyk. He not only kept moving and kept finding the open man, just as his coach told him, but he ended up hitting all six of his free throws down the stretch to finish with a game – and career – high 29 points. 

As for Tookie, he netted 25, twelve of them in the game's final eight minutes.

Mike Higgins, meanwhile, hit enough outside jumpers and found a sufficient number of seams in the defense to end with a season-high 24 points. 

As the final buzzer sounded, Billy E let out a massive sigh and walked over to shake Bob Banack’s hand. He wanted to congratulate the Lucians’ young head man on how well-prepared his team had been and for how gallantly they fought. 

As he reached Banack, and as the scoreboard above the two read, “St. Lucy’s 83, Visitors 89,”  a thought flashed through Billy's mind.  He thought this one just might turn out to be the very tonic his boys needed to refocus themselves.  Nothing, after all, like a good old-fashioned nail-biter late in the season to ensure a team, however deep and powerful, will continue to listen to its coach and take nothing for granted.

That, at least, was what Billy E told himself.

 

 

 

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