Floor Burns
by M.C. Antil

Chapter Sixteen: Winds of Change

Charlie Brady was nothing if not a man with a world-class temper. Throughout his life there was always an undercurrent of anger dwelling just a pin prick or so beneath the surface of his skin. And, while any number of emotions may have dwelt there beside it, anger was one that seemed to be able to take hold of the priest and send him to otherworldly levels of rage, especially when triggered by some moment of perceived injustice against God’s meekest or most vulnerable.

When Brady was residing at 672 West Onondaga Street, following his departure from his humble quarters at the Foery Foundation, he shared that address with five other priests, four of them just a handful of years removed from the seminary. All those priests were smart, all were ambitious, and all were roughly 30 years Brady's junior. The four, Chuck Fahey, Tom Costello, John McGraw and Ed Hayes, along with a slightly older priest named Dan Lawler, had learned first-hand about how intense Brady’s fits of anger could be, and how they could momentarily consume him.

To that end, the five developed a secret warning sign they’d use whenever Brady came home in one of his moods because something decidedly un-Christian had set him off. They didn’t have to say a word. One would simply use his two forefingers to form a small cross he'd then hide against his chest when he saw Brady bearing down on any combination of the others. Their sign meant simply, “Be careful, boys. He’s on the warpath.”

The thing that set Brady off most, especially early on, was police brutality. The handful of racist cops who patrolled his 15th Ward – cops, the likes of whom for 40 years had used their billy clubs as a calling card – had long held a special place on Brady’s list of targets. By the late 1950’s, however, that list had expanded to include other agents of injustice, including absentee landlords, bankers, mortgage lenders, and housing officials hell-bent on keeping his flock down in their ramshackle and slowly decaying clapboard neighborhood.

One night Brady came home in a particularly fetid rage. The specifics have been lost to time, but it had something to do with living conditions in the Ward. Lawler, ignoring Fahey’s raised eyebrows, cocked head, and the two surreptitiously crossed fingers across the table, took the bait and dove in headfirst. “Charlie,” he said, “I understand how you must feel. I do. But you need to understand too, this is a very, very complicated issue.”

Brady looked across the table at Lawler. And as he did, his cheeks flushed and the hair on the back of his neck rose. Then, slamming the butt of his fork against the solid oak table, snapping all five housemates to attention, he leaned in and roared at his fellow priest, “Dan, I promise you – I promise you – that if the Lawler family had been forced to eat shit their entire lives the damn issue would be anything but complicated!”

Brady caught himself, smiled, as always, then leaned back and said, almost as though he was another person entirely, “Oh my, oh my. What have I done? What have I said? I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry, my beautiful Dan. Forgive me, will you? I guess I just lost my head...and probably my membership in the Holy Name Society too, don't ya think?”

But then Brady’s anger, still not fully diffused, would well up again, even as he was castigating himself. And then the whole cycle would repeat itself, again and again, yo-yoing up and down, until his anger had run its course and given way, one more time, to the unique brand of love that ultimately defined him.

Father Brady would prove to be more than just a housemate to those four brothers of the cloth, however. In time, he’d become their mentor and their moral compass. Before any of them would realize it, he'd have shaped their world views and molded their understanding of Jesus and the responsibility of His Church in society.

That’s when each of the priests began to really study Brady, even emulate him. That’s also when they came to understand the extent to which, for all that Art Young, the one-time Post-Standard printer, might have done to get Al and Marshall Nelson into the Parochial League, it was Brady who'd been the real mover and shaker. It was Brady who, long before Young, had been carving out a path that no one in Syracuse had ever dared carve before, much less travel, while serving as one of the diocese’s few voices of social change.

It was Brady who'd worked every pastor of every one of the ten Parochial League parishes – in fact, every school in the diocese – to get them to admit Negro schoolchildren, and not just the great athletes, but boys and girls of all abilities. It is your duty as a Catholic, he told them. It is what Christ would do. To deny any of His children on the basis of color or the location of their home is not only un-Christian, it is sinful.

Even to an all-Catholic audience, it was not an easy sell. One older monsignor, in particular, a pastor in one of the Parochial League’s most prominent parishes, looked down his nose one day and told Brady that, at best, he was being naïve, but at worst he was endangering the city's the social hierarchy – and, quite possibly, the offertory donations of all fifty congregations in the diocese. Brady, apoplectic, stormed out of the monsignor’s office. At home, he immediately sat down and wrote a sermon in which he attacked the very essence of the man’s thinking. When he delivered the sermon the following Sunday, though the fuel remained his rage, he was able to channel his rage into a rarely seen eloquence. If one hadn’t known better, his words the following Sunday seemed like the words of a man always in charge of his emotions.

Even as the confluence of circumstances that would lead to the destruction of the 15th Ward were already afoot, three events in particular impacted Brady deeply, one after another – and in the process changed him even further.

The first was a trip he arranged with the Catholic Interracial Council to Washington, DC. It was August, 1963, and the occasion was the freedom march on the nation’s capitol, followed by an address by Martin Luther King, Jr.  King, at that point, was not yet the "Reverend King" he'd eventually become in the eyes of the world, much less history. He was simply a Negro preacher and civil rights leader who possessed what a cynic might call regional appeal. He'd led the boycott following Rosa Parks' arrest in Montgomery eight years earlier, and he'd since become the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But he had not yet risen to the status of global messiah for the cause. As a result, few members of Brady’s CIC chapter were willing to take off time for work and/or pay the few dollars it would take for a seat on the Greyhound to see him speak.

Disheartened but not disillusioned, Brady and Dolores Morgan (the young lady who, under her maiden name, Lynch, had been the first African American in any Catholic school in Syracuse) went to Plan B. They expanded their market and sold seats to those outside the CIC. Because of that, both Brady and Morgan were able to be present the day as Dr. King delivered his I Have a Dream speech and created one of the seminal moments in American history.

A few weeks later, Brady was back home at 672 West Onondaga watching a special report hosted by Walter Cronkite of CBS. As he watched, there appeared onscreen photos of four young Negro girls, none of them even a teenager yet. Brady sat there horrified as Cronkite told viewers the girls had been slaughtered in their church in Birmingham, Alabama when it was dynamited by a person (or persons) apparently targeting Negro worshipers. According to God Love Ya, Alethea Connolly’s biography, as the news sank in Brady began to cry, and as his realization of the horror deepened, barely audible and to himself, he began slowly chanting mea culpa...mea culpa, whispering as he did the names of the four slaughtered lambs.

On the TV, Cronkite introduced the editor of the Atlanta Journal who then read an essay he’d just composed. Eugene Patterson, a native Georgian, had been mowing his lawn that morning when he’d gotten a call alerting him of the bombing. Without changing clothes, and with tears in his own eyes, Patterson jumped in his car, raced downtown, and sat at his typewriter pecking away, trying to somehow put his scrambled thoughts and emotions into words.

As Brady sat rapt and leaned in toward the television, Patterson began reading with an air of righteous indignation and steely Southern resolve from the single sheet of paper he held. Though the newspaperman’s essay targeted his fellow Southerners, its truth ran deep and touched a nerve in Brady and countless others across the country. It distilled the poignancy of the crime down to a simple, haunting image:

A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her. Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.

 It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple. They killed four children.

 Only we can trace the truth, Southerner, you and I. We broke those children's bodies. We hold that shoe in our hand, Southerner. Let us see it straight, and look at the blood on it.

Patterson’s words tore at Brady, even as reality sank in. He was devastated – and yet, despite that, felt more certain than ever of his beliefs.

Three months later, again on Walter Cronkite, Brady once again saw hate on parade, this time near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, about a two-hour bus ride from Birmingham. What he saw were helmeted officers on horseback, and in full riot regalia, tear-gassing and savagely clubbing a few hundred peaceful protesters, the vast majority of them African American. One young woman, Amelia Boynton, cracked with a billy club, lay bleeding and unconscious on the side of State Route 80. The largely black-and-white images horrified the nation. They horrified President Lyndon Johnson. Charlie Brady was beyond horrified, though. Horrified was yesterday’s emotion.

Brady immediately went upstairs and began scrounging around for any money he might have had lying around, borrowing the rest from one of his housemates. The next morning, following a quick call to Bishop Foery and with suitcase in hand, the priest laid a bunch of spare change and a few wrinkled bills on the counter at the bus terminal and asked the man behind it for a single seat on the next Alabama-bound Greyhound.

Father Charles Brady, proud patriot and U.S. war veteran, had spent his entire adult life trying to improve his country's fraying and deeply flawed relationship with its black citizens. What’s more, he tried to fight the personal battle he waged one heart, and even one soul, at a time, with love as his weapon. But thanks to the lightning strike of three events he’d witnessed in a relative bat of an eye – events that all had the denial of human dignity at their core – Brady started to take a more macro view of society and his role in it.

In the Spring of 1964, the priest would end up taking two trips to Alabama to march with King from Selma to Montgomery. The first he did alone. The second he did after returning briefly to Syracuse and recruiting a dozen or so multi-faith religious and/or civil rights activists he knew – including a Southern Baptist minister, a half dozen priests (among them his housemates), a couple of nuns, and two members of his Catholic Interracial Council, including a Corcoran High School English teacher named Jerry Berrigan whose brothers, Philip and Daniel, would soon make their mark as two of the nation’s most infamous anti-war radicals.  Together, they headed back to Alabama on a chartered Mohawk Airline twin-engine prop plane for the tail end of King’s 45-mile sojourn, which would culminate on the steps of the State Capitol in downtown Montgomery.

As much as he continued to preach and traffic in love, and as much as he still lived the life of the saint of Syracuse's streets, Charlie Brady had also become something of an unwilling and unwitting social reformer. It wasn’t so much something he dictated for himself as much as it was something the fates and times bestowed upon him. After all, no man of moral substance could have watched what he saw unfolding and not taken a stand.

A few weeks after King’s voting rights march, and now back in town, an occasion arose that, like the march from Selma, was as much about a societal injustice as it was one man’s overwhelming sense of moral duty. And while the occasion was a simple act of public protest that began as a honest and entirely innocent statement on the need for greater justice in the area of local hiring by the local power company – at least on Brady’s part – its moment as a statement of principle would quickly devolve into something a whole lot murkier and far more complicated.

For over a year, Brady's 15th Ward had slowly and systematically been subjected to mass demolitions as civic leaders – led by Syracuse Mayor William Walsh – made broad allowances (and carved a path) for erecting a brand new interstate highway through town, as well as the execution of a federally funded modernization initiative that targeted the most blighted urban areas in the Northeast U.S.

That systematic demolition within the confines of the Ward triggered a small but ardent wave of community protesters, the loudest and angriest of which came from the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (or to most, just CORE), one launched a year prior by something of a carpetbagger; an ambitious, purposeful and decidedly political Syracuse University organic chemist named George Wiley.

Wiley, originally from New Jersey and educated in Upstate New York and Rhode Island, was one of only two African Americans on the S.U. faculty. He’d become radicalized by any number of factors, including the growing civil rights movement, a fringe faction of which viewed the country’s white power elite as trying to maintain its power by keeping Black Americans suppressed – and doing that by ensuring they remain both poor and, for the most part, uneducated. In addition, two years prior to moving to Syracuse Wiley had been a young professor at what, at that time, was ground zero for radical politics in the country, U.C. Berkley.

Given the Salt City’s systematic razing of the Ward, and given that there were many areas in town where a civil rights activist might shine a light on racial injustice and inflate it into a full-blown national referendum, Wiley was a bit like a kid in a candy store in Syracuse . He had so many targets he almost didn’t know where to turn.

What he chose first was the local power company, Niagara Mohawk, an organization that, although a monopoly, employed only a handful of 15th Ward residents, and none at the executive level. The picketing of the Niagara Mohawk offices – located in a magnificent art deco building built in the 1930s as a beacon to the hope and optimism of America’s Age of Electricity – presented CORE, both visually and practically, an ideal target for their message about white injustice against the Black downtrodden.

Brady didn’t see it that way, of course, at least not initially. He only knew that it was, indeed, unfair that Niagara Mohawk should continue to make money off the backs of Negroes, while not returning that consideration in the form of more jobs and better opportunities. Nevertheless, in the Spring and Summer of 1965, Father Brady picketed virtually every day on Erie Boulevard, side by side with members of CORE, across from the company’s headquarters – in addition, of course, to continuing to say daily mass and perform his many self-appointed duties as “pastor” of the Ward.

One of those by Brady’s side the entire time was Marshall Nelson, the young man who as an 8th grader had helped his brother Al break the Parochial League’s color line. Marshall, now 31, a husband and father of two, had since become president of Brady’s CIC. Nelson’s intentions, like Brady’s, were honest and pure, and he too regularly picketed in hopes of making a change in Niagara Mohawk’s local hiring practices and its longstanding tradition of crony employment and nepotism.

CORE, however – and, in particular Wiley – wanted more; more people, more coverage, and above all, more confrontation. Confrontation drew media attention, and heightened public awareness was always helpful.

One day, unbeknownst to Brady and Nelson, a couple of busses pulled into town full of mostly young African Americans from Alabama. Many of them had marched alongside King in Selma and they’d been invited to join the Niagara Mohawk picket by Wiley and another local activist, John Brule. Soon the rhetoric from CORE, and in particular Wiley, was flowing hot and heavy. Rancorous bullhorn cries onsite, denouncing “tokenism” and the “white suppression of the American Negro" soon replaced what, until then, had been an earnest and largely peaceful protest.

The Syracuse media started to take notice – particularly the Post-Standard. Soon local press coverage ramped up considerably, the hotter the rhetoric, the more prominent the coverage. What the local media did not do, however, was tie the picketing in front of Niagara Mohawk to the real-time plowing under of the Ward and the lack of fair housing. Those two issues were inextricably linked, if not inseparable. Yet in Syracuse’s all-white media (radio, television and, in particular, newspaper), few bothered to connect the dots.

Eventually, given that CORE recruited so many S.U. students and so many young African Americans from the Ward, the stakes ramped up considerably. One day, a grad student named Roger Knapp, a young sociologist and doctoral candidate in East African Studies, was arrested for an infraction he’d committed on the picket lines. It may have been a planned maneuver by CORE, of which Knapp was an active member, or not. Either way, days later, while still in the city lockup just a few blocks from Niagara Mohawk on Clinton Square, Roger Knapp announced he was going on a hunger strike.

Soon the young man’s hunger strike started making headlines of its own. And a short time thereafter, the Post-Standard began running pointed pieces on its op-ed page that, while largely overlooking the validity of CORE’s claims, took dead aim on the organization and castigated what the paper's editors considered “outside agitators” and trouble-making “rabble rousers” among its leadership, an element that the editors contended had taken a tiny issue and blown it out of proportion for their own political gain.

The rhetoric surrounding the job issue, which had once been confined to street level and was directed solely at the city’s white power base, was now suddenly flowing in both directions, and with rancor. Syracuse, meanwhile, whether it knew it or not, had just started showing the early symptoms, if not the early cracks, of the kind of cultural and social splintering that would soon blow the city’s neighborhoods apart and change its face (and ethnic makeup) forever.

For Brady, it seemed things were spinning out of control at a dizzying level. What had once been a simple moral issue, was now quickly becoming an ugly political one. What’s more, as a patriotic war veteran and fiercely proud U.S. citizen, he did not feel comfortable speaking out against (or butting heads with) his own government – even when he might disagree with it. He still believed the best way to exact change in America was to do it from the inside out, and to do it one heart at a time.

But CORE wanted more. CORE was out for blood. CORE didn’t just want change. CORE demanded change, and George Wiley and his small cadre of young radicals were bound and determined to do whatever it took to bring that change about.

That said, and his patriotism notwithstanding, Brady still saw a moral obligation to support CORE’s ultimate goal; the protection and advancement of his flock in the Ward. So, rather than turning his back entirely, he tried to do little things to support CORE. A few days into Knapp’s hunger strike, through his CIC, Brady spearheaded a movement to establish a 24-hour vigil in support of the hunger striker. It was, in essence, a second act of protest to support an existing one. Not only that, but Brady was the very first person to sign up to stand watch, and he was soon regularly checking in on Knapp’s health and well-being.

Brady, however, was not the only member of the local Catholic clergy to sign up. A number of nuns from across the diocese, many of whom had long placed personal piety above all else and who, as servants of the Lord, were less likely to protest in public than even dance there, joined Brady on his vigil and stood side-by-side with him for hours on end, always in full habit.

Also, while the four priests with whom Brady lived signed up, none of them volunteered to stand vigil during daylight hours. They only volunteered at night; after midnight, in fact. As Tom Costello would say years later, it was one thing to go to Selma to march. That was easy. It was out of town and no one knew you. But to be a young priest with your whole career ahead of you, and to participate in such a public protest in your hometown in front of so many people – so many Catholics – who could have started viewing you very differently, that was something else entirely.

Charlie Brady wasn't afraid, though, regardless of the cost. The social change afoot in Syracuse might have scared him, but the thought that the families and people of his beloved 15th Ward would soon be cast adrift by city officials was far more frightening. When it came to living the Word of God openly and with courage, and living His Word for the world to see, Father Charles Brady would prove to be a warrior the likes of which the city of Syracuse had never seen.

 

 

 

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Jane Grover was a milky skinned and gently beautiful mother of three whose most striking feature, besides her smiling Irish eyes, was her soft, flowing flock of brilliantly red hair. Jane was the librarian at St. Charles, where her three boys went to grammar school. And then, shockingly, suddenly, she was gone. Cancer claimed her Irish beauty and then, soon thereafter, her life. It was Christmas Eve, just a weeks after Jane's 41st birthday.

Ten months later, George Grover, in part to help his boys’ lives feel just a touch less empty without their mother, went to Olum’s, a bustling little appliance store adjacent to the Old Port, just a stone’s throw from Sacred Heart. There, after two quick tours of the display floor, he bought them their very first color television set.

Except George didn’t buy just any color TV. He bought a new state-of-the-art General Electric model manufactured just five miles north of there on Electronics Parkway (at that point, arguably, the nation’s busiest hub in the production of America’s hottest consumer product – the color television). The set George had Olum’s deliver and install was one of those top-of-the-line stereophonic jobs with an attached console loaded with more bells and whistles than he’d ever seen. What’s more, he had the sales guy throw in a cutting-edge and electronically tunable rooftop antenna that, with a simple half-turn of a gold knob on a brown plastic box, could magically transform a snowy black and white picture into a razor-sharp color one.

Unlike many in Syracuse, however, George didn’t buy his color TV to watch the likes of Bonanza on Sunday nights with its stirring robin’s egg-blue skies, brilliant red bandanas, and lush-green meadows. He didn’t buy it because it was the thing to do, or to keep up with the Joneses next door. He did it because of a game; a single college football contest that promised to be one for the ages. Given that the Grover household on Marian Drive was now, without Jane, much like Bonanza’s Ponderosa, an all-male domain – and also because sports could still (and would always) unite the Grover men as a unit – George went to Olum’s one day after work because he knew that weekend the #1-ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish were slated to take off the gloves and trade roundhouses with the #2-ranked Spartans of Michigan State, and he wanted to watch the game in style with his boys.

The game held special interest for George for reasons that went beyond the simple fact that the two top ranked teams in the country were squaring off.

For all its basketball love, over the course of the past decade Syracuse had become a veritable hotbed of college football. In fact, under the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense that Ben Schwartzwalter introduced and then perfected at old Archbold Stadium, the Syracuse football program had not only won a national championship seven years earlier, it had become something of an incubator for generational, halfbacks – all of them wearing #44 –  including current NFL rushing leader, Jimmy Brown, the late Ernie Davis, the first African American to win the Heisman, and, in 1966, All-American Floyd Little.

Even a number of Schwartzwalder’s fullbacks and erstwhile blockers had (or would soon) become superstars. John Mackey switched positions after being drafted by Baltimore’s Colts and became the most feared tight end in NFL history. Jim Nance, a former NCAA wrestling champion, led the AFL in rushing the year prior for the Boston Patriots and won the league MVP. And Little’s partner in the current S.U. backfield, Larry Csonka, would soon gain fame as the emotional heart, if not the face, of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only NFL team in history to go through an entire season and playoffs undefeated.

As loyal as Syracusans might have been to the local teams, they were also, given the Irish Catholic nature of the city, hopelessly addicted to the legend and lore of Notre Dame, going back to the glory days of Knute Rockne and the Gipper. In fact, during that ’66 season, one soft-spoken and well-to-do Irish widow who lived alone in a well-appointed brick home on the city’s East Side, Catherine McCrane, used to tune into Notre Dame football on WFBL every Saturday and listen intently in her parlor (especially during blowouts) in hopes that her nephew, backup quarterback Coley O’Brien, would somehow get a chance to play.

Then there was the whole race issue. Though All American and future Hall of Famer, Alan Page, an African American tackle, would lace them up for the Irish that Saturday, Notre Dame was virtually all-white, especially on offense.

Michigan State, on the other hand, was a team of a decidedly darker hue. In fact, the Spartans were led that season by Jimmy Raye, one of the first Blacks to ever start at quarterback at a major college. Raye, a Texas kid, was a member of head coach Duffy Daugherty’s gently whispered but never openly acknowledged “Underground Railroad” – Black players he had hand-picked from a small number of racially segregated high schools throughout the South, including defensive end Bubba Smith (Texas), linebacker George Webster (South Carolina) and split end Gene Washington (Texas).

The game would end in a controversial 10-10 tie. Notre Dame coach, Ara Parseghian, perhaps because Smith had knocked his starting QB Terry Hanratty out of the game early on, would be forced to call on his seldom-used backup, Coley O’Brien.  With O'Brien at the helm, and rather than trying to drive down the field for a game-winning field goal attempt, he chose instead to run out the clock and let the game end in a tie. Parseghian's controversial decision was validated when the following week the AP poll overwhelmingly selected his Irish as the overall national champions.

The National Football League seemed to have a slightly different take, however, on the relative strengths of the two clubs. The following April, during the league’s annual draft of college players, before a single member of the national champion Irish got selected, an unprecedented four of the first eight players taken in the draft were Spartans, –  every one of them African American.

Just like with the UTEP/Kentucky basketball championship earlier that same year, in which the racial makeup of two teams was ignored by the national press, the racial gulf between the Notre Dame and Michigan State football teams, though unreported in the media, was an issue that was not lost on even the most casual of fans – particularly in places like Syracuse’s 15th Ward.

And last but certainly not least, around Syracuse interest was unusually high in the Notre Dame/MSU “Game of the Century” because of what might be termed the “Daugherty factor.” Duffy Daugherty, the Spartans' head man, had played for S.U. in his undergrad days where, as a 5’8,” 175 pound guard, he'd captained the team. He had also served as an assistant on the Hill, and he and Coach Schwartzwalder remained dear friends.

In addition, Duffy’s little sister, Jean, happened to be, arguably, the most beloved woman in all of Syracuse. A tireless social activist, volunteer, and member in good standing of Father Brady’s Catholic Interracial Council, she was also a college-educated TV producer who, in time, would be honored by the Syracuse Press Club on its Wall of Distinction. In her career, Jean Daugherty would also go on to create, produce and play a featured role in the longest-running and most beloved children’s show in Syracuse history. On the Magic Toy Shop, produced and aired by WHEN, the local CBS affiliate, Daugherty portrayed a wise, kind-hearted and ever-patient character known as the Play Lady, while at the same time serving as executive producer for every one of the show’s 6,200 episodes.

In the fall of 1966, George Grover’s purchase of a color television set may have been the single act of a single man in a single situation. But his purchase represented what would prove to be, in Syracuse and beyond, one of the first drops in a tsunami of technological and social change in tens of millions of American living rooms.  Just as television had replaced radio a decade earlier, grainy black and white images would be soon be displaced by crystal clear color ones, bringing the Vietnam War into American households with a graphic force and an intimacy that was not only disturbing, but hit way too close to home.

In a different but equally significant way, a single football game between Notre Dame, a largely white football team, and Michigan State, a conspicuously Black one, would highlight for many across the country, Syracuse included, that what had always been considered a largely white domain – scholastic sports – was now undergoing a profound change that both reflected and exposed the dawn of an increasingly integrated and far more complex America.

 

 

 

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Early in the Vietnam War, the Army took a poll of uniformed staff. One out of every three enlisted men reported to have joined because of the draft. Two out of every five male officers reported the same thing.

Even though Vietnam was a peacetime “armed conflict,” and even though in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson had run against the proudly hawkish Barry Goldwater and won in an historic landslide on the promise of peace, in his second term LBJ ratcheted up America’s commitment to fighting the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. In doing so, even as he lamented having to “send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle,” he turned what had been a commitment of a few thousand “advisors” into a military quagmire of historic proportions. In the process, he triggered the most polarizing and emotional political issue of the 1960's – one even more fraught than the racial divide.

In July of 1965, LBJ signed an executive order that, among other things, eliminated the marital draft exemption. At the same time, he increased U.S. draft inductions from 17,000 young men per month to 35,000. The situation had yet to spiral out of control, but it soon would. Even among loyal Americans, one could feel a growing resistance to the war. Something had changed. All across the country, the Vietnam War was no longer just some random border dispute a half a world away. It was something dark and ominous, something touching nearly half a million American families a year and, with its icy cold fingers, ominously tapping them on the shoulder.

And Syracuse was anything but immune. But while sometimes the tap of those cold fingers was just a tap, other times it would prove to be much more.

One night in the Fall of 1966, John Contos was sitting at the family dinner table reading his Herald-Journal. His son Jack was on his third piece of chicken and had just polished off most of Irene’s lima beans. The two were alone. John lowered his paper, looked at his boy working on what was left of a chicken thigh, thought for a moment, and then said to him, “What are you going to do next year after you graduate?”

Jack Contos, like a lot of kids his age, hadn’t given much thought to his future until that moment. Being a kid from a long line of proud fighting men, guys who’d served their country in various branches of the military over the years, he told his father he thought maybe he’d join the Marines, like him.  "You know," he said, "go fight in Vietnam."

In World War II, John Contos had been a leather-necking Marine “island hopper” in the South Pacific. As a teenager, he’d fought and seen young men just like himself suffer and die at the hands of the Japanese. He’d seen some of his best friends killed in horrific ways – dismembered, disemboweled, even burned alive.

Hearing his son's answer, the elder Contos put his paper down, sat upright and gave the boy a hard, uneasy look. Big John was not a verbose or particularly articulate man. He was trying to find just the right words, something as a freight handler – albeit a damn good one – he rarely had the occasion, much less the call, to do.

“Jack,” he said. “I’ve been to war. I’ve…” The old man stopped and looked away. The words were hard. “It’s just…It’s…Well…it’s not what you think it is.”

Gaining a small measure of certainty, he continued, “I’m not saying you shouldn’t become a soldier, maybe even a Marine. I just want you to really think before you make it your first choice.” He took a moment before continuing, softening his tone a bit. “Maybe, you know, try college first. See if that’s for you. If you don’t like it and you decide, you know, you still want to join up, fine. By all means, I’ll back you 100%. You know I will. Who knows, maybe then you can go in as an officer. But promise me you’ll at least think about college first, okay?  Will you do that for me, Jack?”

Jack Contos looked at his father in a way he’d never quite looked at him before.  “OK, dad," he said. "Sure.”

Mike Kelly, meanwhile, was hardly even a good basketball player, much less a great one. At St. Patrick’s, the kid didn’t start. In fact, he never started. Not once. In two years of varsity basketball, Mike didn’t really even get to play in many games to speak of except in blowouts and the occasional cameo appearance here and there; as Bob Hayes' 8th or 9th man.

But no one experienced every minute on a court more fully, no one lived more in the moment with a St. Pat’s uniform on his back, and no one in the entire Parochial League played any harder or with any more fury than Michael Joseph Kelly, Jr. – especially on defense.

That’s why, even though his skills and playing time might not otherwise have merited it, some of the finest and most talented ballplayers Mike had grown up with – kids he’d known since kindergarten, kids who were great shooters, rebounders and starters like John Bova and Jocko Collins – always looked up to him, hung around him, and, indeed, wanted to be his friend.

One day, Mike’s little brother John was on his way up Ulster Street when he was approached by one of the older Tipp Hill boys. John and the guy’s kid brother had gotten into it the day prior, and John had gotten the better of him. But now his older brother – maybe two or three years John’s senior – wanted a measure of revenge for the beating John had laid on his kid brother.

The next thing John knew, he’d been shoved backwards and cracked his head against the sidewalk – cracked it hard, in fact. Then as he watched, the older boy began coming at him, lip curled and fists clenched. John was in trouble and knew it. He was scared, and had good reason to be.

Before the older kid had a chance to do anything more than cock his arm in anticipation, however, from out of nowhere Mike Kelly appeared and was on him like a swarm of hornets, beating him mercilessly with a flurry of punches, one after another. And each crack of Mike’s right fist against the young man’s stunned face, each thwack, seemed to serve as the rhythm track of his warning to the bully, each break punctuated by another loud thwack: “Don’t you ever…ever…touch my little...brother...again...You hear me?”

As little Johnny Kelly lay there, rubbed the back of his head and watched, he did so not realizing that, while he might have been in the process of losing a big brother, he was also witnessing the birth of his very first real-life hero. Because, at least to John, Bobby, Leo and Terry Kelly, that’s exactly who and what their big brother, Mike, was now and, from that point forward, would always be.

Heroic rescues aside, the oldest of the Kelly boys still never managed to amount to even a hill of beans as a ballplayer. At St. Pat’s, despite all the training Coach Hayes tried to give him, and despite all those Saturday mornings running around as a Little Leprechaun, Mike just never seemed to be able to get the damn ball to do what he wanted.

Sadly, his decided lack of on-court refinement extended to when the other team had the ball, as well. Maybe that’s why, of all the nicknames that all the kids in Tipp Hill ever earned, Mike Kelly’s may have been the most uniquely unflattering, and yet spot-on. On the West End of Syracuse and beyond, Mike was known to anyone and everyone as simply, “Hacker.”

Hacker Kelly’s real game – the game he loved most– was baseball. Mike not only relished hitting, fielding and throwing a hardball, but over the years he got to be pretty darn good at it. In fact, he played his freshman year at Siena College in Albany, and did well enough that he actually began thinking (or maybe dreaming) he might one day have a shot at getting drafted and, in time, cracking a big league roster.

The problem for Hacker, though, was the fact Siena didn’t play an exceptionally high level of baseball. Plus, as a northeast school, the length of the season and playing (and practice) field conditions were constantly being impacted by cold and rainy Spring weather.

Consequently, Mike decided to transfer to a school in California with a big-time program. In the midst of making the transfer happen, however, something entirely unexpected occurred. There developed a small gap of time during which his student deferment briefly lapsed. When that happened, just like that – poof – Hacker Kelly got a notice from Uncle Sam, and before you could say “Let’s turn two,” the young hardball player from St. Pat’s and Tipp Hill, the kid with the huge heart and even bigger dreams, found himself on an outbound Trailways, headed to basic training.

Vietnam was an odd war. Unlike the Civil War, the War of 1812, or even America's two world wars, it was not a traditional conflict. It was a guerilla war fought in a jungle. The closest approximation in U.S. history may have been the Revolutionary War. It’s just that in Vietnam, we weren’t the Minutemen. We were the Redcoats. We weren’t the noble freedom fighters in everyday clothes picking off the imperialists from behind trees. They were. We were the outsiders walking down the middle of the road in full uniform and getting killed or injured, one by one, by normally clad local boys hiding in the bushes.

In 1965, a U.S. Commanding General named Ellis Williamson woke up to this cold, hard fact and decided he needed to change the rules and take LBJ’s war directly to the Vietcong. So he selected a certain type of young fighting man and created his very own band of guerillas. These guys were tough as all get-out. They were smart. And they were dependable. Above all, their sole focus was to outwit the enemy and to take him down by whatever means necessary.

These unofficial bands of warriors were initially called Delta Teams, then Tiger Forces, and then, finally, Hatchet Teams.

General Westmoreland eventually realized how effective Williamson’s small units of stealth fighters were and sanctioned them, bestowing upon them the clunky, military-sounding name, “Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols” (or LRRPs). The grunts on the front lines simply started calling them Lurps.

Hacker Kelly, the perennial Parochial League bench jockey and handsome, Black Irish kid who played every infrequent minute as though it might be his last, was chosen to be a Lurp –and in many ways was a textbook Lurp.

The LRRPs may have had commanders back at camp who issued them general orders, but in the jungle they were a self-reliant team of warriors who constantly deferred to their alpha dog, whoever that alpha dog may have been, and regardless of what rank he held – a guy like, say, Mike Kelly.

The Lurps soon started dressing in whatever clothes made them comfortable, including sandals in summer instead of heavy army boots. They didn’t so much give and take orders as they spontaneously made up plans – often as a unit – reacting to events and situations as they presented themselves. What’s more, the Lurps didn’t so much attempt to draw enemy fire as they tried to sneak up on enemy soldiers and neutralize them, usually with knives, and often without making a sound.

In a war known for its “special forces,” there were no forces in the deadly jungles of Vietnam any more special than the LRRPs. Eventually, in fact, they became so feared that the Viet Cong started placing bounties on their heads, and VC soldiers reportedly took no greater satisfaction than in killing a Lurp.

John Kelly, then a senior at St. Pat’s, was asleep in his bed one Sunday morning when he saw his little brother Terry standing in the doorway. “What’s going on,” he asked. Terry, who was ten at the time, said innocently, “There was a soldier in uniform at the door a little while ago.”

“What’d he want?” asked John groggily.

“He wanted mom.”

John Kelly, eyes now wide open, sat bolt upright and flew out of bed. He immediately woke his brother, Leo, pulling on his shirt as he did. “C’mon. We gotta go.”

The two older Kelly boys drove as fast as they could to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where their mother – the former Mary McInerney, a pretty Irish lass and lifelong Tipp Hill girl – was working as a nurse. Mary’s husband, Michael Joseph “Joe” Kelly, had died some nine years prior, leaving her and the five boys to fend for themselves. She’d since taken a job at St. Joe’s, trying to hang onto the Burnet Park Drive house she and the boys called home, as well as keep enough food on the table for five growing appetites.

When they got to their mother’s wing of St. Joe’s, they first thing Johnny and Leo noticed was a uniformed soldier, apparently the one who’d been trying to track their mother down. The young fresh-faced kid in full dress turned slowly and caught their eye. He was probably no more than a year or two older than John and wore a pained, helpless expression as he watched them approach.

That's when the boys saw their mother. Mary Kelly, in her white nurse's cap, collapsed into the arms of two fellow nurses.  She was sobbing and heaving uncontrollably, her hands clutching at her now-ashen face.

Michael "Hacker" Kelly – Mary’s first-born and her late husband’s namesake – was gone.

The Kellys’ grief would be as deep as it was pure, and it would rock them to their core, both individually and as a family. Still, as proud Irishmen, they chose not to view Hacker's death as a reason to mourn, but a reason to come together and to celebrate a young life well-lived.

In time, the Kellys would learn the details of Michael’s death. Call it a small mercy, but at least the sniper’s bullet had been fast and true, and had apparently done its job quickly. Before he even realized it, Hacker was already well on his way home and back into God’s loving arms.

Years later, when asked what he recalled about the day, John Kelly would say one thing that always stayed with him was the memory the young man in uniform who’d knocked on the door that Sunday morning. That poor kid had had just about the hardest job in the world, and one that no amount of training could have ever prepared him for. And when the young man said he’d stay with the family until Mike’s body was flown home, Mary Kelly took him in, fed him, and if only for a few days, made him part of her family. Mary Kelly would end up comforting that boy in uniform as much as he did her.

Because, it was not just any city, or any neighborhood, to which that young soldier had come to deliver this worst of all possible news. It was Syracuse. And it was Tipp Hill.

In The Speed of Darkness, Steve Tesich’s 1989 play about two Vietnam vets who share a dirty war secret, one of them, now a hungry and homeless shell of a man, tells his friend’s teenage daughter about an incident he once had at the Vietnam Memorial.

He explains he’d been trying to use his can opener to carve his name onto the black marble of the memorial when he got stopped by two MPs, who threatened to arrest him. The pair sensed the man, Lou, was a veteran, and let him go. But they told him that the wall was only for those killed over there, not for those who survived. Lou just looked at them, thought of the dog-eared snapshot he still carried around with him of his former life – a faded Kodachrome image of his teenage self with his best girl and his prized convertible, bought second-hand with money he'd worked hard to save – and said sadly, “Don’t you get it, fellas? I didn’t survive.”

Joe Mulherin, a slightly undersized and gently bow-legged Irish kid with a quick wit and wicked sense of humor, hailed from Eastwood. He’d been a tough-as-nails Parochial League guard and complementary piece for St. John the Baptist in the early 60’s. A hustling, heads-up bulldog – especially on defense – Joe had a game that meshed well with those of Coach Frank Satalin’s two sons, Jimmy and Fran. Together, the trio formed the heart and soul of what was, at least for two or three seasons, a Parochial League power. Under Satalin – with Jimmy leading the scoring, Franny acting as a coach on the court, and Joe focusing on many of the little things that all great team need – Baptist’s won the title two straight years, as well as the 1963 Parochial League Playoffs and All-City Championship, in which they topped Jack Johnstone’s powerful Central High. For his many contributions to the prolonged success of St. John's, Joe was twice named "Cager of the Week" by the Post-Standard and earned second team All Parochial honors his senior year.

After graduation, Joe enrolled for a semester at an all-new local junior college, Onondaga Community College, which at that point lacked a full-time campus. OCC had been formed by the New York State University system a few years prior and was still operating out of a refurbished warehouse on the edge of the 15th Ward, a place that had been modernized, painted white and re-christened Midtown Plaza.

OCC’s very first basketball coach turned out to be Paul Seymour, the ex-Nat who apparently missed the game to an extent that, when OCC officials approached him about starting up a basketball program for them, he accepted the challenge on the spot– even as he continued to sell a little real estate on the side and run his liquor store full time. Led by a number of ex-Parochial and City League stars – including Sacred Heart’s John Tatusko and Jim Pospiech, Central High's Doug Dowdell and, of course, Joe – OCC came out of the gate like a house afire under Seymour, winning its first 13 games and climbing to the #1 ranking in the nation for junior colleges.

Unfortunately, six or so of OCC's best players (including Joe) apparently liked basketball more than studying or going to class. As a result, all were either suspended or dropped out of school altogether. Joe, unfortunately, found himself in the latter group. He dropped out of OCC before the second semester even began.

Given that, and given the likelihood of his now being drafted by the U.S. Army and having to spend two years doing whatever the Army wanted him to do wherever the hell they wanted him to do it, Joe did what thousands of other like-minded young men across the U.S. opted to do; he joined the Marines. It was a three-year commitment, to be sure, but it came with some measure of assurance that he'd have a say in what capacity he served, along (at least in part) with where he'd be able to fulfill his commitment.

In time, following the most intense training – training he'd never imagined possible, much less survivable – Joe was shipped off to Vietnam where he spent twelve months in hell; twelve months in a jungle with bugs the size of house pets; twelve months in a place with rain so violent that at times – especially when it appeared to be coming at him sideways – he was forced to cup his hands over his nose and mouth for fear he might drown standing up.  Joe spent twelve months in a war without rules, and a war in which the enemy wore no uniform to distinguish himself, and where even a small boy to whom you were offering a candy bar might suddenly pull the pin on a hidden grenade and smile knowingly as both of you were blown to pieces.

But as Joe Mulherin – then barely twenty-one and just two years removed from taking offensive fouls, diving on loose balls, and making no-look passes in the All City Game – continued to fight to survive, and continued to watch the death and suffering all about him slowly numb him to many of life’s most basic touchstones, back in Syracuse life went on and things continued to move forward.

Semper fi, indeed.

In the three years since Joe’s deployment, Jack and Marge Mulherin had sold their small family home in Eastwood, pulled up stakes and headed for greener pastures – literally, greener pastures. Ludden Parkway, as the name suggests, was just across Fay Road from the all-new Bishop Ludden High, the home of the green-and-white Gaelic Knights.  Located on the fringes of Westvale, Ludden Parkway was a cul-de-sac of good-sized, all-new designer houses with fine green lawns, a cul-de-sac carved into the base of a verdant and still undeveloped Mills Hill, and a-cul-de-sac in which a housecat was just as likely to drag home a pheasant as he was a mouse.

Whereas Eastwood had been a city within the city, an urban neighborhood anchored by a bustling main drag offering a row of shoulder-to-shoulder taverns, bakeries, barber shops, beauty salons, churches, five-and-dimes, restaurants, pool halls, gas stations, markets, butcher shops and a movie theater, Ludden Parkway’s closest attempt at commerce was the four corners of Taunton, a quarter mile to the west, where a handful of establishments included a general store with a worn hardwood floor and a creaky screen door, a part-time insurance agency, a one-woman beauty shop that seemed just as likely to be closed as open, and Morey’s, a rustic cider mill whose roots traced back to the turn of the century.

While their son was doing his duty and dodging bullets in Vietnam, Jack, Marge and the rest of the Mulherin clan had moved from the city to suburbia; a slice of heaven that, while part of Syracuse, still seemed more country than city.

When Joe finally made it home, his family welcomed him with open arms. They strung a banner across the entrance to Ludden Parkway, “Welcome Home Joe!” Underneath, Jack added with a crudely sketched Magic Marker, “Thank God You Made it Back Safely.”

The day of Joe’s return, Jack and Marge Mulherin had family and friends over. They ate hot dogs and hamburgers. They played basketball on the mini-court that Jack erected in his all-new two-car garage. They mixed cocktails and drank beer. They played music. They sang and laughed. It was so great to have their boy Joe back in one piece.

Only Joe wasn’t in one piece. That very first night his brother Dick opened his eyes to a sound in his bedroom. There, in the moonlight, he saw his brother Joe in the corner in his underwear, leaning against the wall. He was peeing into a laundry basket. He had no idea he was relieving himself in a basket of dirty clothes, much less that he was doing it in Syracuse. This became a nightly occurrence, though Joe never knew until the following morning what he had done.

Soon after returning, perhaps in an attempt to reclaim some semblance of normalcy, Joe agreed to coach the CYO team of his parents’ new parish, St. Charles Borromeo. To say he was intense would do disservice to intense coaches everywhere. Joe was borderline unhinged – at least he was on a few occasions – both in games and in practice. One time one of his kids made a mistake during practice and Joe threw a ball so hard off the back of the young man’s head that it almost hit the ceiling. Meanwhile the boy lay sprawled out on the floor, dazed and with stars in his eyes. Joe had never done anything like that before in his life.

Another time, at halftime during one of his team's first games, one of Joe's best players picked up two offensive fouls just before the break by lowering his head and driving into the teeth of the opposing zone. As Joe screamed at the kid in the locker room during intermission, his face grew redder and redder, and the scar on his neck – a eerie remnant of a recent horrific accident that saw him thrown headlong through his car’s windshield – became so scarlet it seemed it might hemorrhage. Then, without warning, the bug-eyed ex-Marine emphasized his point by lowering his head and running full speed into a closed locker, denting it badly, and almost knocking himself out in the process. He even drew blood.

No kid on St. Charles CYO moved as their coach lay there. They didn’t even dare look at each other. Every one of them just stared at the floor. A few probably even said a prayer. Some likely prayed that their coach hadn’t just killed himself, while others, scared to death of everything about Joe Mulherin, probably secretly prayed he had.

Joe eventually married and eventually had a beautiful daughter, but the emotional damage from his time in the jungle was just too severe and eventually his life began to spiral downward. Alcoholism, roller coaster bouts of depression and rage, divorce, lost jobs; in time he managed to destroy or lose all the things that were most important to him.

But the Joe Mulherin story didn’t end there. Who knows, maybe it was the guy’s Marine training. Maybe it was love of family and friends. Or, just maybe, it was Joe’s faith, the seeds of which had been planted in his heart by all those nuns and priests in his years at Blessed Sacrament and St. John the Baptist.

Regardless, Joe Mulherin dug deep and found something within him, something worth holding onto, that gave him the strength to get through the sea of pain and darkness that had enveloped him. He got sober. He found peace. And board by board, nail by nail, he began repairing all the bridges he'd managed to burn.

In the process, he became a devoted member and sponsor at Alcoholic's Anonymous. He deepened and strengthened his bond with his daughter and turned himself into a devoted grandfather. He started volunteering. Little as he may have had, he began giving of himself to others around town until there was, literally, nothing left. Joe even began to regularly visit the parks and green spaces near his tiny apartment, picking up litter, pulling weeds, trimming trees and planting flowers.

And that’s how Joe Mulherin, ex-Marine, would eventually spend the rest of the time God granted him; until, at 61, a massive heart attack ended his long and painful journey.

The day many years before, when Joe first arrived home from Vietnam, a friend of his little brother’s was there among the well-wishers. He was a kid from Westvale, maybe thirteen at the time. He’d never known or even heard of Joe, other than through his family’s tales of his exploits as one of the hardest-nosed players in the Parochial League. But over the years that kid would watch Joe go from bigger-than-life to the fringes of it, and then, somehow, back again.

Years later, that kid even had occasion to visit Joe and to see firsthand just how small his world had grown. At the time, Joe lived alone in a tiny three-room apartment behind John Sherlock’s trophy shop on Genesee Street, a place at which every organization in town, from the Grand Street Boys to the Diocese of Syracuse, would buy their annual sporting trophies and have etched onto them, for then and evermore, the winner of the Ormond Spencer Award, or the CYO Foul Shooting Contest, or best of all, the Parochial League championship.

There were times over the years when that kid thought about that day, when Joe first returned from Vietnam. He thought about Joe, decked out in his dress blues, thought about those dozens of people waiting with so much love in their eyes, not to mention tears, and thought about that banner that spanned the gateway of Ludden Parkway.

But more than anything, he thought about what it must have felt like to be Joe on that day – a day me must have dreamt about time and again while trying to survive the daily onslaughts in that God-forsaken hellhole. The kid couldn't help but wonder what Joe must have been feeling as he looked up at a banner that welcomed him home to a place he’d never even seen in his life.

And now that kid sits here typing this, the story of Joe Mulherin, regretful he never took the time to tell Joe how proud he was of him, not just for how much courage he showed in battle, but for how much he displayed after it. The grit and determination Joe showed in rebuilding his life after Vietnam was a testament to his character and the old Parochial Leaguer in him, a spirit that defined not just Joe Mulherin, but Hacker Kelly, Charlie Brady, Jane Grover, and so many other Syracusans; men and women whose lives would eventually become tiny shards of the most remarkable, interconnected and deeply human stories this chronicler has ever encountered, much less tried to piece together. Yet, that's what he's attempting here, to tell the story of a city, its people, and their time together, so that one day others might read it and know.

 

 

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