The '63 Steelers
Authors: Rudy Dicks
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WRITING SPORTS SERIES
Richard “Pete” Peterson, Editor
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The Cleveland Indians
Franklin Lewis
The Cincinnati Reds
Lee Allen
The Chicago White Sox
Warren Brown
Dreaming Baseball
James T. Farrell
My Greatest Day in Football
Murray Goodman and Leonard Lewin
The Detroit Tigers
Frederick G. Lieb
The Philadelphia Phillies
Frederick G. Lieb
The Washington Senators
Shirley Povich
The '63 Steelers: A Renegade Team's Chase for Glory
Rudy Dicks
A RENEGADE TEAM'S
CHASE FOR GLORY
RUDY DICKS
THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Kent, Ohio
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©2012 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2012013505
ISBN 978-1-60635-143-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
Every effort has been made to obtain permission from those persons
interviewed by the author who are quoted in the book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dicks, Rudy.
The '63 Steelers : a renegade team's chase for glory / Rudy Dicks.
p. cm. â (Writing sports series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60635-143-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) â
1. Pittsburgh Steelers (Football team)âHistory.
I. Title. II. Title: 1963 Steelers. III. Title: Nineteen sixty three Steelers.
GV956.P57D5 2012
796.332'640974886âdc23
2012013505
16 15 14 13 12 Â Â 5 4 3 2 1
For the 1963 Pittsburgh Steelers â¦
⦠and for Sheldon J. Dicks, who set an example for
how to be as tough as Red Mack,
as compassionate as Art Rooney, and as confident as Bobby Layne â¦
⦠and for Lillian W. Dicks,
for nurturing in her sons
a love for reading and writing
Â
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You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.
âRoger Kahn,
The Boys of Summer
The noblest battles of all are those fought in vain.
âEdmond Rostand,
Cyrano de Bergerac
At Cleveland Municipal Stadium
I grew up in the late fifties and early sixties in a ranch-style house at the corner of Rosewae Drive and Skywae Drive in a city that the
Saturday Evening Post
labeled “Crime Town USA” and that also came to be known as “Murder Town.”
1
Some days my mother would hide the front section of our hometown paper, the
Youngstown Vindicator
, so that my brothers and I would not be exposed to the gory headlines and stories about guys with funny nicknames getting blown up in cars and their body parts being scattered across the neighbor's yard. I didn't find out about her protectiveness until years later, but I wouldn't have minded anyway, as long as she didn't take away the sports section. The only bombs I cared about as a kid were the ones quarterbacks threw.
That '63
Post
story said that there had been seventy-five bombings in Youngstown over a decade's time, which, if accurate, means that the only person busier than the wise guys in town was my mother stashing away sections of the afternoon paper. But the world of Cadillac Charlie, the Crab, Tar Baby, and the “bug” (the numbers game) was far from ours in northeast Ohio. My view from the crest of the hill on Rosewae was filled with more innocence than Lake Wobegon: dads mowing the lawn, moms working in the garden, kids riding bikes, and the fireworks in the distance from Idora Park, where my dad would take my mom on Sunday nights in the summer to listen and dance to Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, and Woody Herman. You could phone us by dialing SWeetbriar 23065 or send us a
letter using a new number introduced in the summer of '63, something called a zip code, which replaced our old postal code, number 11.
There were much scarier places, I knew, such as the Deep South, Europe, and Africa, because I had seen them up close, bigger than life, when my dad took us downtown to the Palace, Paramount, and Warner theaters, which showed
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
The Guns of Navarone
, and
Lawrence of Arabia
. Good thing, I told myself, that we lived someplace safe.
The next-door neighbors had a son in high school who played catch with me, coaxed me to show off my basketball-dribbling skills in front of his friend, and one afternoon tried to teach me to play the guitar. Because of his hairstyle, he reminded me of Edd “Kookie” Byrnes from
77 Sunset Strip
, and I was sure that he owned a black leather jacket; maybe he even snuck Marlboro cigarettes like they showed on TV ads. After our family moved away a few years later, I turned on my transistor radio one morning and heard his voice booming out, singing the Isley Brothers' “Nobody But Me.” It was Dick Belley, and for nearly half a century his version would remain as popular as it was in '67. Music fans remember Dick Belley as a member of the Human Beinz, who played at Idora Park regularly, but I remember him as a decent older boy who took the time to befriend a kid.
We played Wiffle ball in the backyard, and kickball and kick-the-can in a cul-de-sac, and we loaded kids into our station wagon to go to the drive-in with a cooler full of pop, but my favorite spot of all was the one right in front of me every time I stepped out the front door: a stretch of green lawn that looked as lush to me as any fairway at Augusta would to a golf fan. It was the biggest yard in the neighborhood, and the best for tackle football, and it was where the neighborhood kids always played.
When we weren't playing football, we were watching it on TV. Growing up in Youngstown, what was more intimidating than any mobsters was being a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and finding yourself outnumbered by Cleveland Browns fans. Youngstown's equidistant location between Cleveland and Pittsburgh was convenient for the mob's itinerary, but it didn't mean loyalties were divided equally between the teams. Even I started out, tentatively, as a Browns fan. Without cable TV, the Internet, or
Monday Night Football
, my exposure to other teams was limited to the daily newspaper and football magazines.
One late November Sunday morning when I was seven, I asked my dad if we would be rooting for the Browns that afternoon. My father was born and raised on the Iron Range in Minnesota, so he had more allegiance to the University of Minnesota, Bronislau “Bronko” Nagurski, and the Duluth Eskimos barnstorming team than
he did to the Browns. He paused and then told me about the man who played quarterback for the Steelers, the Browns' opponent that day. “His name is Bobby Layne,” my dad said, “and he believes he can do anything.”
I wasn't convinced, especially considering the Browns were 6â2 and the Steelers 3â4â1, and my doubts were justified as Cleveland clung to a 20â14 lead in the final minutes. But then the man who would be dubbed “Last-Minute Layne” in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
the next day began working his two-minute magic as my dad and I watched on our black-and-white TV.
2
Two pass completions, a penalty, and a run put the Steelers on the Browns' 17, and with only forty seconds left, Layne hit Gern Nagler under the goalpost with a touchdown pass.
Pennsylvania governor David L. Lawrence was the preeminent fan among the estimated 10,000 Steelers diehards who made the three-hour trip from Pittsburgh to Municipal Stadium on the shores of Lake Erie, and his reaction was duly noted by the
Post-Gazette:
“The governor cast aside dignity for a brief moment in the press box by throwing his hat high in the air and announcing to one and all: âThat was the greatest play of all time.'”
3
A bit of an exaggeration, even for a politician, because the only great plays for Pittsburgh in the previous twenty-six years of the Steelers' existence had been performed downtown at the Nixon Theater. In that time span, the Steelers had experienced only five winning seasons and only once made it to a postseason game. But the heroics were plenty impressive to a seven-year-old, and when Layne kicked the extra point that gave the Steelers a 21â20 victory, he converted me into a Bobby Layne fan and a Pittsburgh Steeler rooter. I would always remember that day, November 22, 1959, but I could never imagine that the afternoon four years later, to the day, would be even more memorable.
Over the next couple of years, my dad took me to Forbes Field to watch the Vince Lombardi Packer teams, which were evolving into a powerhouse; the expansion Cowboys team led by young quarterback Don Meredith and coached by Tom Landry; and the team that I grew to hate, the Browns, powered by Jim Brown. I struggled in my heartâprobably as much as the players did on the fieldâthrough a 5â6â1 season in 1960, and then a 6â8 record in '61 before the Steelers' second-place finish in '62, at 9â5, allowed me to dream that they could win the Eastern Conference in '63.
On a Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963, I was in school, watching the hands on the clock inch toward 3:15 p.m., and eagerly looking forward to a trip to Forbes Field in less than forty-eight hours to watch the Steelers play the Western Conference leader,
the Chicago Bears, when the bell rang, dismissing us for the weekend. I was almost to the door when someone rushed up and announced that President Kennedy had been shot.
My brothers and I attended a very small private school in downtown Youngstown, which, in a spooky coincidence, was named the Kennedy School, after the school's headmistress. We studied current events all year through the newspaper, so we had scrutinized the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential race, especially when the rivals campaigned fiercely in Youngstown, a key industrial city in a pivotal state. We even held our own mock election.
I remember an older schoolmate who cried over news of the assassination. I did not. I wonder now how many eleven-year-olds did. Mostly, I guess, I felt puzzled. We grew up playing with cap guns and watching men shoot pistols and rifles on
Combat!
and
Gunsmoke
and
The Untouchables
, and reading comic books with illustrations of soldiers who had been shot, but we didn't comprehend that gunsâreal guns with real bulletsâwere fired on our own streets. We had studied Abraham Lincoln's assassination, but it was the kind of event that seemed isolated and frozen in history, as unlikely to be duplicated in our day as an Indian attack in the neighborhood.