Last Team Standing (14 page)

More than one-third of the female war workers were married and had children younger than 14, a statistic that was widely regarded as alarming. The fear, as with the Father Draft, was that children would be neglected. It was a fear that was not completely unfounded. Exposés in
Fortune
and the
Saturday Evening Post
depicted children locked alone in freezing houses and sleeping in automobiles while their mothers worked. In response, the government began funding day-care programs for the first time. The Swan Island Center at the Kasier shipyard in Portland, Oregon, was a model day-care center. It operated around the clock to accommodate mothers on every shift. The cost, including meals, was 75 cents per child per day ($1.25 for two children). By the end of the war, more than 3,000 publicly funded day-care centers were caring for more than 130,000 children across the country. The centers were also credited with dramatically increasing worker productivity.

The mere sight of women in coveralls was enough to trigger conniption fits in some. It appalled the popular advice columnist Dorothy Dix (real name Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer; definitely not to be confused with the nineteenth-century social activist Dorothea Dix).

“The reason that women pass up the frills and furbelows of their sex for the hard-boiled shirts and tubular britches of men,” Dix wrote in 1943, “is because they are so naturally lacking in femininity that they try to turn themselves into imitation men as a compensation for not being the real thing.” In a
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
story headlined “Will Slacks Produce a Crop of Old Maids? ‘No,' Girls Say, ‘We'll Get Our Men After War,'” an 18-year-old shipyard worker named Eleanor Penczak defended her “masculine” attire: “We're here to work—not to look glamorous. And anybody who thinks our main job in life should be to go around looking feminine just doesn't appreciate the needs of the day.”

Women working in war plants were sometimes subjected to virulent sexual harassment. Catcalls were common.

“You'd think those fellows down there had never seen a girl,” said a sympathetic male at the Boeing plant in Seattle. “Every time a skirt would whip by up there, you could hear the whistles above the riveting, and I'll bet the girls could feel the focus of every eye in the place.”

Labor shortages allowed women to make inroads even in the resoundingly virile world of football. In the fall of 1943, Bell Township High School in rural western Pennsylvania, apparently unable to find a qualified and willing male, hired a 22-year-old gym teacher named Pauline Rugh to coach the football team. Rugh was a recent graduate of Penn State, and she returned to her alma mater for a quick tutorial.

“It is physically impossible to teach you all about football in three days,” Penn State coach Bob Higgins lectured her, “but we'll get you started and then depend on you to ask questions as new problems arise.” In newspaper stories Rugh was invariably described as “comely.” Typical was what Red Smith, later a Pulitzer Prize-winning
New York Times
columnist, wrote in the
Philadelphia Record:
“As far as local records show, Miss Rugh is the first she-coach of a recognized team of males in the history of the sport. What's more, she is reliably described as a very tasty dish, a blonde with a couple of eyes like this, O O, and a throbbing contralto voice.”

Rugh seemed uncomfortable with all the attention. She did her best to avoid the reporters and “picture men” who camped on her doorway. Yet her attempts to shun publicity only stirred more interest in her story. “This,” noted the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's
Havey Boyle, “probably, is a technique that works in other feminine adventures, too, marriage being one of the more notable.”

Bell Township High School's wartime experiment, however noble, failed. The team lost all eight games it played and was outscored 219-13 in the process.

The Eagles and the Steelers hoped their own wartime experiment would end more happily.

7

A
t 8:00
A.M. ON
S
UNDAY,
S
EPTEMBER
5, 1943, Al Wistert, fresh off the college all-star game and his draft physical, reported to the Steagles training camp, which had already been under way for ten days. He could hardly believe his eyes. To reduce travel, Commissioner Elmer Layden had ordered all NFL teams to hold their camps close to home. The Steagles chose for their training site a hard, rocky field at 54th Street and City Line Avenue, between a Standard Oil gas station and a dumping ground for construction debris. Bits of broken glass and tin cans were scattered everywhere. It was a far cry from the immaculate, manicured grounds Wistert had enjoyed at the University of Michigan. The locker room, a short walk away in a field house at St. Joseph's College, was cramped and musty. Three dim lightbulbs hung from the ceiling. The showers consisted of three nozzles sticking out of the wall, with a wooden grate for a drain.

“I was thinking that the NFL was the next step up,” Wistert recalled. “I could hardly see my way around the locker room, and the lockers were so small that I couldn't get my shoes in. I had to stand them on end to get them in the locker. And I'm supposed to be stepping up in class? Holy smokes!”

Wistert changed into his pads and charged onto the field. The team was supposed to hold an intra-squad scrimmage that
morning. But Greasy Neale and Walt Kiesling were nowhere to be found. The team's two coaches, who were both living at the Hotel Philadelphian, had not received their wakeup calls, so the players just lolled about in the late-summer heat. Wistert approached Bill Hewitt, who was sitting on a rock smoking a cigarette.

“You couldn't miss him,” Wistert said. “He looked like a gorilla.” Hewitt had played football at Michigan with Wistert's older brother Whitey, and Wistert was counting on Hewitt to show him around and introduce him to his new teammates. But when Wistert offered his hand to Hewitt, the Offside Kid just got up and walked away without saying a word. In fact, all the players ignored Wistert, because they were envious of his supposed $4,500 contract.

“It was kind of a nightmare for me,” recalled Wistert. It took him several days to figure out what was going on—and many more to convince his teammates that he was actually making less than they assumed.

Around 11:00 a.m. Neale and Kiesling finally showed up, to be greeted by much ribbing from their players, who jokingly threatened to fine them. It was a rare moment of levity in a training camp that, in just ten days, had grown extremely tense. Wistert could tell immediately that the two coaches couldn't stand each other.

“Kiesling and Neale got along like a cat and a dog,” Wistert said. “At times they would argue on the field in front of all the players. It was just crazy.”

Greasy Neale and Walt Kiesling barely knew each other when their respective teams merged in June. In their long football careers, they had met on the gridiron just three times, as opposing coaches when the Eagles played the Steelers in 1941 and 1942. (The results: one Eagles win, one Steelers win, and one tie.)

They got off on the wrong foot when Kiesling arrived in Philadelphia on August 18 and discovered that Neale had unilaterally installed the T formation while Kiesling was still in St. Paul. Big Kies was an old fashioned single-winger. He despised the T, which he found unnecessarily complicated and a bit effete.

In appearance, disposition, and coaching style, Neale and Kiesling were complete opposites.

On game days Neale always wore a jacket and tie, with a trench coat and a fedora. He was curious, quick-witted, and unafraid of change (as evidenced by his late conversion to the T formation). He was also gloriously profane.

“He was creative about it,” said Al Wistert. “He never said ‘son of a bitch' or ‘goddamn.'” Among Neale's favorites: “You couldn't knock a sick whore off a shit pot!” “You stand around like a bear cub playin' with his prick!” “They killed Christ and let you live!”

Neale was hard on his players. He'd fine them for the most innocuous infractions. But he was always fair and never mean and whatever his faults his players would come to adore him.

“I loved Greasy,” halfback Jack Hinkle said. “He was like a father to me. The only players who didn't get along with Greasy were the first-year men. Greasy loved the veterans. He'd say, ‘Give me a team of veterans and I'll win the title.'”

Neale believed in making a football team “a family affair” and enjoyed golfing and playing bridge with his “boys” while his wife Genevieve socialized with their wives.

“It is to be doubted,” wrote the
New York Times
sports columnist Arthur Daley, “that any coach ever inspired deeper loyalty and affection from his players than did Greasy.”

“He's in my prayers every night,” said Vic Sears, a soft-spoken tackle who played nine seasons for Neale in Philadelphia.

Disheveled and stern, Walt Kiesling was less revered. After his playing days, his weight ballooned to more than 300 pounds. His clothes always seemed a size too small, and in photographs his tie is invariably crooked. He was dull and unimaginative. He liked to begin every game with the same play, running his fullback into the middle of the line. When Steelers owner Art Rooney finally insisted he begin a game with a pass, Kiesling sabotaged the play by ordering one of his linemen to jump offside.

“If this pass play works,” he told the team, “that Rooney will be down here every week giving us plays.” He constantly berated his players, loudly and publicly.

“Seldom did Kiesling praise the athletes he coached,” wrote the longtime Steelers broadcaster Joe Tucker. “He had been a standout by performance and expected and demanded that everyone who wore the Pittsburgh uniform play to his potential.”

On one especially hot day at the Steagles training camp, Kiesling ordered all the water buckets removed from the field.

“You can't get into condition by swilling water down your throats,” the corpulent coach roared, apparently ignorant of the benefits of hydration.

In Pittsburgh, his players disliked him so much they once threatened to go on strike. Art Rooney liked him, though, and that was all that mattered.

“He was a tremendous coach,” Rooney said, “and not only that, a great guy.” Indeed, Rooney seemed to have a better opinion of Kiesling's head coaching skills than even Kiesling himself.

“The thing about Walt was that he preferred to be an assistant,” said Ole Haugsrud, who signed Kiesling to his first pro contract in Duluth. “He was available whenever the Steelers needed somebody, yet he would much rather be an assistant than the boss.”

Neale and Kiesling were fundamentally different people.

“Greasy had a sense of humor, and he was a confident, upbeat guy,” recalled Frank “Bucko” Kilroy, a rookie tackle on the Steagles in 1943. “I wouldn't say Kiesling didn't have a sense of humor, but he was more serious.”

The two coaches clashed incessantly. Neale, having toiled in Ducky Pond's shadow at Yale for seven long seasons, was not prepared to share the spotlight with Kiesling. Inflexible and dogmatic, Kiesling was incapable of compromising with Neale.

“They hated each other,” recalled Vic Sears matter-of-factly. But they did have one thing in common: Both men suffered from an overabundance of self-esteem.

“When Greasy Neale is the head coach there is nobody else gonna be the head coach,” Al Wistert said. “He was a very domineering person.”

“Kies was a great coach,” Rooney said of Kiesling, “but everything with Kies was that nobody knew football
better
than Kies.”

As training camp wore on, the animosity between the two coaches only deepened. Wistert said, “I can remember one day when Greasy Neale got all upset and he threw his cardboard armful of plays that he had down on the grass field and stomped off the field! He was quitting! It was pretty bad, I'll tell ya.”

To ease tensions, Steelers co-owner Bert Bell suggested the two head coaches divide their duties rather than collaborating: Neale would coach the offense, Kiesling the defense. It was a division of labor rarely attempted in pro football; until then, coaching duties were usually divided between the line and the backfield, not offense and defense. It was a good arrangement, said Ray Graves, a lantern-jawed center who played for the Steagles.