This is a basketball story, to be sure. And in an odd way it’s a love story. But more than anything, it is the story of a city and its people. And to understand these often remarkable people, it is important to also understand the time and place in which they lived – but especially the latter. Because if there was one thing that defined the colorful yet unpretentious men and women at the heart of this story – that shaped who they were, what they valued, and how they saw themselves – it was, perhaps more than anything, their remarkable sense of place.
That place was Syracuse, New York.
If you called Syracuse home in the Fall of 1966, whatever civic pride you might have carried in your back pocket – be it over the bustling local economy, the success of the Syracuse University football team, or just some vague but deep-rooted belief that you lived in the greatest little city in America – it was tempered by one sobering reality: that your city’s namesake, Siracusa, Sicily, a tiny village on an island off the coast of Italy, might have earned its name because thousands of years prior, in some now-dead language, the word sirako translated roughly to “the place near the swamp.” As a Syracusan, therefore, you lived with the gnawing possibility that the city you called home got its name because it bore a striking resemblance to a stretch of land that centuries ago, and a half a world away, once doubled as nature's sewer.
But what kept you from developing an overly inflated sense of yourself was not Syracuse’s name. It was Syracuse’s weather, a relentless confluence of atmospheric conditions that, much like Pisa’s leaning tower or Hershey’s chocolate factory, was the one thing an outsider would think of at the mere mention of its name. Not only are the skies above Syracuse as overcast as any in the country, but at times there is something – call it a stubbornness; even a brutal, almost sadistic cruelty – to the clouds that can eventually darken even the sunniest disposition.
In Syracuse, New York, the clouds don’t so much drift by, as they drop anchor.
It’s part of what has always made Syracusans so colorful, yet kept them so grounded. Those man-sized clouds – clouds capable of producing staggering quantities (and at times curious combinations) of rain, sleet, mist, drizzle, and most of all, snow – seemed to be God’s way of reminding Syracusans to never take themselves, or their lot in life, too seriously.
And in 1966, by God, most didn’t. If you were born and raised in the Syracuse, New York of the middle of the 20th Century, whatever inflated opinion you might have secretly harbored about yourself, it was likely tempered by a broader and deeper understanding of what it meant to be a Central New Yorker, which was: you are who you are, and everyone knows it, so why pretend otherwise?
Unlike its sister city, Rochester, some 80 miles to the West, with its light industry, white collar ambition, and music conservatory, the Syracuse of '66 rarely put on airs or tried to pass itself off as anything more than what it was – 25 square miles of hard-working, hard-drinking and hard-to-keep-down people, many of whom, if given the choice between fame, power, or the ability to walk into a bar, order a beer and crack everyone up with a good joke, almost certainly would choose the latter.
This is not to say Syracusans lacked pride in their hometown. They took, to the contrary, great pride in it and many loved to crow about it when it earned even a passing mention in the national media.
Much like many smaller northeast cities, the Syracuse of 1966 featured a bustling downtown of full of locally owned shops and offices surrounded by an ever-expanding network of neighborhoods, many dominated by one ethnic group or another, and all loosely connected by a series of asymmetrical streets radiating from the heart of downtown like spokes in a wheel.
In those neighborhoods were thousands of men (and even a few women) who spent week after week performing repetitive manual labor at any one of the dozens of local factories, foundries and mills. For that reason, a number of Syracusans viewed themselves, first and foremost, as builders. A man from Syracuse didn’t spend his days shuffling papers, processing transactions or, heaven forbid, writing memos. He built things. He used his hands and he made things. The vast majority of the city’s residents were tradesmen and craftsmen; workers who used their tools and knowhow to forge durable products that somehow, through a confluence of transportation, commerce and human endeavor, were then purchased, taken home and used by people in places they’d never seen, read about, or often even heard of.
Two things the Syracusans of 1966 did know, however. First, they knew that their city’s reputation as a maker of things was forged on the broad shoulders and sweaty backs of its workers. In fact, in taverns, clubs and other public meeting places, it was not uncommon to find some over-served factory man crowing about the world-class and globally distributed products he'd been making all day.
And second, those Syracusans knew their local history, especially as it related to the economic impact of their muscular little town.
Many, for example, could point out that their city played a leading role in the geographic makeup of an 18th century world atlas. After having told you about the miles of salt marshes that once lined nearby Onondaga Lake, they’d explain how, having reached a delicate (even fragile) peace with the natives, from their small outpost adjacent to the lake, a few Jesuit missionaries, some of the area’s first French immigrants, turned their tiny piece of swampland into the world-famous “Salt City,” in time producing enough salt to supply most of the U.S.
And, as a kicker, they’d also tell you how Syracuse’s salt also made it possible for General Grant’s Union army to pack and keep a well-stocked food supply, which in turn helped the North prevail in the Civil War.
In 1966, a number of Syracusans could recite chapter and verse on the Chamber of Commerce’s roster of relatively small but influential trade shops; places like Marsellus Casket on the West Side, in whose caskets a number of great Americans were buried, including Harry Truman and (just three years prior) John Kennedy; like Crouse-Hinds on the North Side, that patented the world's first headlight and was the country’s leading manufacturer of street lights; Will & Baumer, Cathedral, and Muench-Kreutzer candle companies, three of the largest and most important manufacturers of ecclesiastical candles in the world, whose candles graced even the Vatican in Rome.
Although many would have considered the purchase of a piece of Stickley furniture a luxury they could ill-afford, they could still tell you how an immigrant named Gustav Stickley settled in nearby Auburn and then started making his world-famous heirloom-quality furniture in a small, unassuming building in Eastwood, on Syracuse’s East Side.
There was hardly a Syracusan who didn’t go to a restaurant on vacation and surreptitiously check under the dinnerware for the logo of Syracuse China or Iroquois China, or glance at the silverware for the word Oneida, indicating the piece had been forged by the master silversmiths in the one-time utopian community east of the city.
Virtually every last person in town could tell you something about Carrier, the local air conditioning giant, which employed thousands of workers in and around the area and whose air conditioners ignited a housing boom in Florida, Texas, Arizona and other places across the Sun Belt – places that, ironically, would hasten the decline of Northeast factory towns just like Syracuse, while altering U.S. population patterns as much as any invention since the automobile.
Over a few beers, many would have been happy to tell you how, on the heels of a huge wave of German immigrants in the mid-1800’s, the city became a hotbed of Bavarian pilsners and lagers, and how by the turn of the century, thanks in part to its bustling factories and ever-expanding population of factory workers, Syracuse had become home to a number of local breweries, big and small. And because of those hard-drinking, hard-working laborers, a handful of companies in town combined to produce over 20,000 hand-rolled cigars a day in what was, briefly, one of the city’s most important industries – that is, until World War I triggered a demand for cigarettes that all but wiped out domestic cigar production.
In 1966, a number of old timers could still tell you about the late, lamented Franklin Auto Works on Fayette and South Geddes Streets, a place that for three decades made the revolutionary Franklin, an automobile powered by the world’s first air-cooled engine and a vehicle that has since achieved legendary status among collectors. They’d also relate with more than a twinge of regret the sad final chapter of the Franklin story that played itself out some 30 years prior; how Franklin's powerful V-12 engine, introduced just after the stock market crash of 1929, proved to be the wrong product at the wrong time in America, and how the company's sprawling 34-acre campus would then shut down, its assets sold to maverick Preston Tucker, who at that point was still trying to build a safer, more fuel-efficient car, despite opposition from Detroit’s power elite.
At one point in the first half of the 20th Century, it was believed that, thanks to industry leaders like the Smith Typewriter Company (which eventually became Smith-Corona) and the Monarch Typewriter Company, virtually half of all typewriters in America were made in Syracuse. Meanwhile, a manufacturer of appliances on the city's North Side, the Easy Washing Machine Company, over the course of one nineteen-year stretch after World War II managed to sell just over $100 million in washing machines alone.
That’s not to mention the General Electric plant, which by 1966 was producing the hottest new product in America: the color television; Bristol Labs, which had been instrumental in helping the Allied forces win World War II by suppling them the bulk of the penicillin that doctors and medics used to treat wounds and keep infections at bay, Continental Can Company, the country's second leading producer of tin cans, New Process Gear, which made auto parts for Chrysler; the local General Motors factory; Crucible Steel, a specialty steel mill on the shores of Onondaga Lake; the Solvay Process Company, one of the leading providers of soda ash in the U.S.; Church and Dwight, which each year was turning out megatons of world-famous Arm & Hammer baking soda; Camillus Cutlery, which in the first half of the century produced more than a million knives a year; Rockwell, which manufactured truck axle bearings; two internationally renowned menswear factories, Learbury Suit Company and Nettleton Shoes, the latter of which patented the world's very first loafer for men; plus Lipe-Rollway bearings, Autolite spark plugs, Sylvania Electronics, Pass & Seymour switches, R.E. Dietz Lighting, and, literally, dozens of other firms, all of which by the mid-20th century were producing mountains of high-end products for export to all four corners of the globe.
It wasn't just men's loafers that were invented in Syracuse. The serrated bread knife was invented there, as were the folding dental chair and the ubiquitous Brannock device – that odd black and silver gizmo with a sliding scale that, seemingly, every shoe salesman since Thom McAn has used to determine a customer's foot size.
During the city’s heyday, the Ford Foundation called Syracuse “one of the two best places (in the U.S.) for investing money in enterprise,” and Fortune reported that more major corporations had operations there than any other city in the country. Indeed, what author Franklin Chase wrote of Syracuse in 1924 continued to hold true for four decades. Said Chase, “In truth, Syracuse manufactured more different articles numerically than even New York City itself.”
As the calendar turned to 1966, the city of Syracuse, at the crossroads of the still-under-construction Interstate 81 and what was being called the Thomas E. Dewey 'Thruway," and smack dab in the geographic center of the Empire State, stood as a glistening paragon of American capitalism. While cities elsewhere struggled to keep the locals employed, and relied more and more on government jobs to do so, Syracuse didn’t merely survive, it blossomed. It was a boom town in every sense of the word, and it shone like a beacon of possibility for blue collar workers the world over.
But this is not a business story. It’s a basketball story. More specifically, it’s the story of a single basketball game between two schools, one a photo negative of the other.
And it is a story of how, through the filter of time, this one game’s dramatic conclusion might have been the exclamation point on Syracuse’s golden age; the closing chapter of a memorable time in city history (and by extension, American history) in which people lived lives that were not nearly so fast, not nearly so suburban, not nearly so isolated, and not nearly so virtual as the ones they would eventually lead.
Yet the gritty, blue-collar Syracuse of this story would soon be swept away by a tsunami of social and religious change, and an entirely new and different Syracuse would settle in its place. Just a few short years after the game at the heart of this story would be played, many first-generation immigrants would be gone, and with them the sights, sounds and smells of the neighborhoods they built. Gone as well would be all but a handful of the shops, schools and churches they once called their own.
Gone too would be the remarkable sense of community that these people created, a front-porch world in which radio broadcasts of ballgames, news reports and music would waft gently over the neighborhood; a world in which folks waved each other a hearty good morning, called one another by name, and traded news, gossip, congratulations and condolences as easily as they shared garden tools or cups of sugar.
Decades later, that one high school game pitting a sprawling all-new public school overlooking the city against a tiny, parish-based Catholic school wedged between a corner bar and a family-run appliance store, would be remembered as the swan song of a brawny little town that in its day could swing a hammer with the best of them. By the time the final horn had sounded on the 1966-67 basketball season, like so many Rust Belt towns, Syracuse, New York – or at least the Syracuse that once made so many things so well – would slowly but surely begin to fade into memory, eroded away by time, innovation and factors far beyond its control.
Before that, though, there was a basketball season. And during that season, two teams came together; one all-white, the other mostly black. And over the course of four and a half months each rose to the top of its league, and each won its playoffs, placing them on a collision course. Then, amid a backdrop of crackling racial tension, an escalating and ill-conceived distant war, and a series of stunning assassinations, bloody riots and other body blows to America’s sense of itself, the two schools came together in one final winner-take-all affair played on the grandest stage the city had to offer.
The 1967 All-City Championship featured City League champ Corcoran High, formed just two years prior, and tiny Sacred Heart of the Parochial League, a predominantly Polish school with 19 boys in its senior class. Over the course of four quarters of hard-fought, bare-knuckle basketball, a dozen or so teenagers and the men who coached them didn’t so much make history, as mark it.
The game that Corcoran and Sacred Heart played that night in the Onondaga County War Memorial – a concrete-and-marble tribute to those who helped win World War II – would emerge as a tipping point. The contest coincided with the curtain ringing down on one glorious chapter of history and rising on another less-certain one; an age of growth and prosperity replaced by an era of white flight, shuttered factories, and a type of urban cancer that would in time consume most of the city’s once-vibrant neighborhoods.
Indeed, in the years immediately following 1966, for Syracuse and so many blue collar towns like it, the questions began to far outnumber the answers.
On the night of March 10, 1967, the final buzzer of the All-City Championship signaled more than just the end of a game; it marked the end of an era. In a few short years, many of the first generation immigrants from Syracuse's many bedroom neighborhoods would start to die off. Others would watch as their sons and daughters began moving to the suburbs, or they would move there themselves.
And into that void would step a new generation of working poor, many of them African American, whose own unique and vibrant neighborhood had been plowed under in the name of progress, and whose quest for a small piece of the American Dream was going to be far more complicated than the people they displaced.
While no one sitting in the Onondaga County War Memorial could have possibly realized it, that 1967 All-City game between Corcoran and Sacred Heart – the final such winner-take-all contest ever played – would become something of an imperfect metaphor; a living, breathing symbol of all Syracuse had once been, and all it was about to become.
