It was a landscape-shifting year across America, but no more so than in Syracuse. In addition to monumental social changes, 1968 was also the year little St. John the Evangelist, just beyond Salina Street and the heart of the downtown shopping district, became the very first Parochial League casualty.
It wasn’t that St. John's could no longer afford to operate its own school high school. To the contrary, many parishioners called the Brattle Road section of the city home; a patch of suburban heaven right in the middle of the city, and a neighborhood just off James Street comprised of winding, well-maintained and well-lit streets, all marked by large, leafy lots on which stood a number of giant hardwood trees and homes as proud and as stately as any in Syracuse.
No, it was that the humble and coal-stained little brick building that had long housed St. John’s, one dating to the mid-19th Century, one that had once welcomed the very first Black player in Parochial League history, and a building that by 1968 was still burning coal for heat, was crumbling beyond any measure of practical repair.
It was also that CBA, the private all-boys high school that had once stood on the other side of Willow Street, had recently, like so many Jewish families in the 15th Ward, chosen to relocate to Dewitt, just east of town.
And it was that St. Joseph’s, the suddenly booming hospital just behind the school on Prospect Street continued to expand and swallow up real estate.
But mostly, is was about internal politics within the Syracuse diocese and the fact that the venerable Bishop Walter A. Foery, the Parochial League’s staunchest supporter and its longtime guardian angel, was no longer calling the shots. Oh, he was still at the chancery in body and spirit, all right. But mentally, he was elsewhere. The years had taken their toll on the old man’s cognitive skills and, as a result, some early form of dementia had, at long last, compelled Church leaders to quietly turn over all internal decision-making to David Cunningham, Foery's number two and likely successor.
Cunningham had already shepherded the construction of both Bishop Ludden in the western suburbs and Bishop Grimes to the East, and those two well-appointed high school academies were now siphoning Catholic teens off the Parochial League rolls by the busload.
In fact, the very week the 1966-67 season was ending, a muscular and talented fifteen year-old guard for Cathedral named Jon Button, who in a few days would be named the only freshman on that year’s All-Parochial squad (he’d earn Honorable Mention), decided to transfer to Bishop Grimes where, as a sophomore, he’d blossom and almost single handedly turn his new school into a City League contender.
Evangelist, as stated, was the first Parochial League school to go. Yet Bobby Felasco’s perennial Friday night power would soon be followed out the door by, first, St. Vincent’s and, then, St. Anthony’s, all three the victim of some noxious mix of greener pastures, racial angst and an almost tectonic shift in city demographics. Syracuse’s white flight had found a higher gear and even though the venerable old churches in the three above parishes – one downtown, one east and one south – would soldier on for years, the same could not be said of their once-charming and once-beloved little K-12 neighborhood schools.
Not even proud little St. Patrick’s in colorful Tipp Hill would survive the rush of locals seeking a better life in Syracuse's suburbs, at least not intact. In just a few short years, the diocese would combine St. Pat's with St. Lucy’s from the Lower West End and rechristen their reimagined (yet still mostly Irish) hybrid – a union of two cultures seemingly held together with duct tape and baling wire – “West End Catholic.” Sadly, that administrative sleight-of-hand only delayed the inevitable. As a result, by the end of the decade both Pat's and Lucy's would be just two more empty buildings that stood abandoned and alone, both of them harboring nothing more than three generation’s worth of echoed voices, glories past and, now, gently fading memories.
Before the Parochial League turned out its lights and closed its doors one last time, a number of things would happen that might have otherwise seemed inconceivable just two or three years prior.
Billy E, for example, would leave Sacred Heart and move to, of all places, Wyoming, because that was where he got transferred by his employer, Allied Chemical.
Bobby Felasco would take his coaching brilliance and up-tempo game and move a few blocks south to Cathedral Academy. He’d bring with him, of course, a few of Evangelist’s best young players (notably Jimmy Benz’ kid brother, Billy) and, for a few seasons anyway, he'd turn Cathedral, a league doormat, into a force not unlike the one he’d built at Evangelist.
Bob Hayes, the hardworking city cop and coach, would close the tap on his remarkable Little Leprechaun program on Saturday mornings in Tipp Hill, put his beloved St. Pat’s team in his rearview mirror and, for one season anyway, coach a group of mostly lace curtain Irish boys at Most Holy Rosary. Hayes’ two sons would leave the Parochial League’s blacktop entirely and, with their dad’s blessing, ride a few miles every morning out to the wide-open fields that wrapped themselves around the now-bustling Bishop Ludden High.
But perhaps most telling, for a neighborhood league that was once so close-knit it was possible for fans, players and coaches to walk to a handful of away games each season, the final two years would find the Parochial League's four remaining soldiers – Sacred Heart, West Side Catholic, Assumption, and St. John the Baptist – compelled to make hours-long bus rides to and from Otselic Valley High once a year for a Friday night game. Otselic Valley was a public school in a tiny rural crossroads deep in the foothills just southeast of Syracuse, and a village closer to Cooperstown and the National Baseball Hall of Fame than it was to the Salt City and the Old Port, Aunt Josie’s, P-Z-O’s, Webber’s, Enrico's and Danzer’s, home of the best damn corned beef sandwich a man could ever hope to find.
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For the better part of the 1960's, Black culture in America had been doing its best to pass itself off as scrubbed up, buttoned down, and ready for prime time as possible. From Nat “King” Cole and Motown to Sammy Davis, Jr., the Fifth Dimension, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, and a sugar-sweet Diahann Carroll sitcom called Julia, there was seemingly no shortage of Black artists out there – at least prior to 1968 – willing to dress, talk, sound and act as “white” as possible in attempt to appeal to America's largely white core of consumers.
But then came 1968 and so much of that dynamic seemed, almost overnight, to get flipped on its ear. Five hit songs that year, in particular, embodied what was happening in Syracuse and cities like it – especially with respect to Black culture and its deepening influence on American teenagers, if not America itself.
In January, the a group called the Four Tops released their version of a song titled Walk Away Renee. The tune, written and recorded two years earlier by five white kids from New York calling themselves the Left Banke, had been always viewed as a beautiful but ultimately toothless little baroque-sounding ballad. But in the hands of Levi Stubbs – the Tops' lead singer, whose muscular baritone could attach a pair of man-sized testicles to just about any song it tackled – the Left Banke's composition took on a much different hue and tenor. The Four Tops' version of Walk Away Renee dripped with the excruciating pain that only a love that will never return can know. When released on January 18 of 1968, the single, with Stubbs' savagely powerful Black voice, was able to achieve a soul-stirring quality that the original, as interpreted by its young white composers, could never have imagined.
A few months later, another Black musical artist – an unknown left-handed guitar dynamo named Jimi Hendrix – took an otherwise earnest protest song by another white composer, Bob Dylan, cut its head off, and then proceeded to dance around with it on a pole – a virtual lightning rod in a thunderstorm of social upheaval. Hendrix’s transcendent take on Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower – the unlikeliest of singles, and one that, for all its edginess, somehow managed to crack the Top 40 in Syracuse – was yet one more example of the greatness a pop song could attain when placed in the hands of a generational Black talent.
Then, in August of that year, a single was released that would turn out to be, arguably, as culturally impactful as almost any released in the latter half of the 20th Century. Even in the heart of Syracuse’s Black community, a debate had started to rage over the proper nomenclature for a person of color. In the minds of many older African Americans, men and women who lived through the era of Jim Crow, separate entrances and colored water fountains, the proper word – the proper title – was “Negro.” To many of the younger generation, however, the preferred word was now “Black.”
But that August – the same month that sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos shocked the world with their head-down/fist-raised “Black power” salute during the national anthem and the Mexico City Olympics – James Brown released Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud, a blistering five-and-a-half-minute funkfest split into two sides of the same 45, each full of raw, brassy horns and brawny grunts by a singer known to millions as simply “Soul Brother #1.” And when that happened, and when Say it Loud… began getting airplay on countless urban radio stations and vaulting its way up the R&B charts, all debate ended, like that. No longer were men and women of color to be openly referred to as “Negroes.” From that point forward, the term of choice was Black.
Perhaps, the most notable shift in Black culture in 1968 took place at venerable Motown Records in Detroit. For the run of the decade, no one had seemed more concerned with whitewashing black artists and their music than the label's founder, Berry Gordy. An impresario of the highest order, Gordy knew full well that many Top 40 station managers and deejays across the South would refuse even to listen to a record if they knew it was by a Black artist. As a result, for the first two or three years, no Motown album jacket or 45 sleeve released displayed a single photograph of an artist or group. Gordy, in fact, went so far as to insist that every one of his artists attend the charm school he’d created across the street from the studio, in order to teach them the proper way to walk and talk in polite society.
He also made it a point to have printed on virtually all of his very first Motown records the bold and rather ambitious tagline, “The Sound of Young America,” a phrase nearly drowning in its own sense of gee-whiz/Wonder Bread wholesomeness.
But then came 1968, a year that would mark a fundamental sea change for the most successful Black-owned business in the world. Two songs, in particular, led that change. Some seven months earlier, Gladys Knight and the Pips had recorded a version of a song co-written by one of Berry’s recent hires, a young producer named Norman Whitfield. The song, as recorded by Knight, had a driving beat and was highly “dance-able.” Its lyrics, however, almost seemed an afterthought, especially in light of the song’s up-tempo time signature and its throbbing sense of rhythm.
Seven months later, however, a much slower version of the song was released on a new album by singer Motown artist Marvin Gaye. That version – the third cut on Side One – was subsequently discovered by deejays coast to coast, a number of whom began placing it into their regular rotation. Gordy, personally, hated Gaye’s take on the song and, for the longest time, resisted releasing it as a single. But once that version began to get strong word-of-mouth, and once it began shooting up the charts based solely on its airplay as an album cut, the Motown founder had no choice but to release it as a 45.
And when Gordy did that, in October of 1968, Marvin Gaye’s Heard it Through the Grapevine became not just a national phenomenon, it became an almost perfect song for its times. In light of the Tet Offensive and the often violent protests over Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the incendiary podium protest in Mexico City, the bloody riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the torching of yet another all-Black ghetto in yet another tinder box of a major city, the song spoke to Black America, if not an entire generation of kids, like few songs ever. It was slow and ominous, to the point of eerie. It reeked of an almost crippling sense of paranoia. And it was passionate, even though the man at the center of all that passion sounded so helpless about his circumstances that, it seemed, all he could do was stand at the microphone and howl.
Less than a month after the release of Gaye’s Heard it Through the Grapevine, however, a second Motown song would go even further.
The Supremes, a trio, had always been Gordy’s darlings – especially lead singer Diana Ross, who’d quickly become Motown’s go-to ingénue and most bankable star (not to mention, Gordy’s lover). As a result, the Supremes regularly dressed and looked not so much like pop stars, but Vegas headliners. They wore skin-tight sequined dresses, high-heeled pumps, and bouffant wigs of various cuts and styles. What’s more, the three were all told time and again to stay as thin as possible to be able to fit into both their wardrobe and the image that Gordy had carefully crafted for them.
One of the three, however, Florence Ballard, had issues with the last part and in 1967 was fired by Gordy for not just her weight gain, but her drinking problem. Then, just as the group was getting ready to appear on Ed Sullivan the following year – in November of 1968 – to promote their newest single, Gordy suddenly jettisoned a second Supreme, Mary Wilson, leaving Ross as the group’s only original member.
As a result, when the Supremes took the stage on Sunday night in front of a national television audience and tens of millions of Ed Sullivan viewers, there were still three Black girls in the lineup. Just not the same three that fans had grown to know and love over the years. Not that anyone noticed, however. After all, most watching seemed more focused on the way the Supremes looked and dressed that night, especially Ross. Gone were their elegant, tight-fitting dresses. Gone, too, were their wigs and heels. In fact, they didn’t wear shoes at all. All three were clad in non-matching, everyday clothes and they sang barefoot. And all three wore their hair as they’d never done so, at least in performance: naturally, and in tight, short afros.
What’s more, the set on which they appeared was not some glitzy array of geometric shapes, lights and risers designed to glamorize them. Just the opposite, in fact; Ed Sullivan’s historic stage, at least for the three girls’ performance that night, was transformed into a set designer’s rendering of a real-life “tenement slum” (a phrase that then popped up early in the song Ross introduced to the world).
Make no mistake, despite the look of all three Supremes, it was the ever-elegant Ross who captured almost everyone's attention. Dressed in a simple yellow sweatshirt and a pair of ragged cutoffs, she soon began singing about love, but doing so in a way that shocked millions of Americans.
The Supremes new song might have been about love, but it wasn’t love in the vein of, say, Where Did Our Love Go, or Baby Love, or Stop in the Name of Love. No, it was an entirely different kind of song about an entirely different kind of love. Love Child was an unambiguous urban lament whose lyrics spoke of such heretofore social taboos as teen pregnancy, a poor woman’s chastity under siege, and the daunting prospect of having a child in the ghetto and out of wedlock.
The song's lyrics were challenging for many Ed Sullivan viewers to wrap their brains around, especially the devout Catholics among them.
Started my life in an old, cold, rundown tenement slum.
My father left, he never even married Mom.
I shared the guilt my mama knew,
So afraid that others knew I had no name.
Ah, this love we're contemplating
Is worth the pain of waiting.
We'll only end up hating
The child we may be creating.
Love child, never meant to be
Love child, (scorned by) society
Love child, always second best
Love child, different from the rest.
Gone, suddenly, was so much of what Motown had once tacitly promised its largely white audience. Gone was the almost childlike sweetness of sugar pie, honey bunch, my girl, and come and get these memories. And gone was the irrepressible joy of dancing in the street and going to a go-go to dance Mickey's monkey, not to mention the billowy innocence of such largely innocuous lyrical hooks as “ooh baby, baby,” “shop around,” and “get ready.”
By 1968, Berry Gordy might still have been offering his white record buyers in working class towns like Syracuse a chance to hear, if not celebrate, the “Sound of Young America.” The difference was, by then – especially in light of Heard it Through the Grapevine and Love Child – two things about Motown’s tagline had shifted radically. Now, not only had the “Sound” of the generation driving pop music's train been blown apart, but so too had the face, if not the very notion, of what constituted "Young America."
* * * * *
From a basketball perspective, there was nothing quite like it in Syracuse.
Granted, the annual Boys Club Tourney always managed to draw high-end talent to Central New York from across the county. But perhaps because that round-robin affair was always held indoors in the Spring when the days were getting longer and the sidewalks warmer, or because it was staged in an aging building on the scarred fringes of what had once been the 15th Ward, it never rose to the point where it became the put-up-or-shut-up tournament in town.
That distinction, at least for much of the 1960's, was always reserved for the "Blessed Sacrament Summer Basketball League," an annual rite-of-passage tournament for any player with ambitions that went beyond his own driveway. That tournament was held every Summer on the rear lot of Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic Church and grammar school on the main drag in Eastwood, Syracuse’s bustling city-within-a-city on its near East Side.
The annual six-week competition, held early each summer, was the brainchild of a young, socially active priest named Ron Buckel, who'd once been a Blessed Sacrament altar boy. One evening, at Christ the King Seminary on the campus of St. Bonaventure, Buckel had cobbled together an idea he had for a midsummer tourney during a much-needed break from his studies. Originally conceived as a way to keep high school kids off the street, the Blessed Sacrament Tournament was also designed to give boys in his hometown of Syracuse a full-fledged opportunity to gain the kind of bragging rights they’d then be able to carry in their pocket for years.
Like so many things, Buckel's little open competition started out modestly. But soon, as it started getting ink in the local papers and began drawning deeper and better teams, he got the idea to expand it. It wasn’t long before he’d convinced Blessed Sacrament pastor's to add an open division for collegiate players and up. And when that happened, and when word got out, the entire tournament went to a whole new level in terms of press coverage, public awareness and, above all, tavern talk.
Set up as a double-elimination affair (meaning any team losing two games would be eliminated), the annual Blessed Sacrament Tournament was soon like the proverbial slow-moving train – one that, as it got a full head of steam, was soon barreling along as much on its own momentum as it was anything else.
The games, held from early July to early August, kicked off each day in the middle of the afternoon and extended into magic hour, just before nightfall. And while the scholastic contests, those played in the afternoon, featured some of the city’s finest high school players and were fun to watch, it was the open games, the ones played just after dinner, that drew the most eye-popping talent and served as catnip for the city’s most dyed-in-the-wool bird dog scouts and fans.
At nights, the crowds surrounding the courts behind Blessed Sacrament often amounted to hundreds of men, women, and children three and four deep, some sitting in lawn chairs, but the vast majority standing and watching some of the best basketball any of them had seen since the old Nats left town.
Every so often, one of the later games would go into overtime. When that happened, the skies above the court would invariably begin to darken, even as the intensity of the game heightened. At that point, a handful of fans would go to their respective cars, start them up and drive them onto the blacktop where they’d then form a crudely shaped semi-circle around one side of the action, their headlights providing the necessary illumination to finish out the game.
The eerie stillness of the dying day, the glowing halo of the bank of headlights, and the giant shadows now dancing upon a canvas of red brick – shadows of young men, black and white, taking jump shots and making steals; and shadows of long, lithe bodies blocking shots, whipping crisp passes and knifing through defenses for driving layups – added a surreal and almost mystical quality to a handful of Blessed Sacrament games each summer.
As on so many courts throughout the city for much of that decade, the skin color of any one team was always far less important than whether or not that team could actually play. There were never any racial confrontations in the early days of Father Buckel’s tournament. There was only great basketball. Powerful Black teams, such as the Grand Street Boys and the Olympians, regularly played, and often won, the tournament, and did so without a whisper of racial tension.
But that was before 1968. That was before Interstate 81 had left a deep gash through the heart of the city, and before the demolition of the 15th Ward had fully run its course. That was before ghettos in cities across the country began going up in flames on a regular basis. Most of all, that was before a lone assassin – a hate-filled drifter – used his map and hunting rifle to track down and kill Dr. Martin Luther King, a national symbol of peace and hope, as he stood among friends on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis.
When that happened, suddenly all bets were off. When that happened, almost overnight in Syracuse, it seemed almost impossible to get a team of white kids on the same basketball court as a team of Black ones without some massive, game-ending brawl erupting at some point or another. It was almost as though some darker power had waved its hand and decreed that any two teams in little Syracuse – any two teams, that is, on opposite sides of the racial divide – were going to fight, no matter how well the players might have known, respected, and in some cases even liked each other.
These types of brawls had actually started with the Bishop Ludden/Central melee in March of 1967, continuing pretty much unabated throughout the 1967-68 City League season. But by the following summer Black vs. white confrontations during games had become frightening in both their intensity and their frequency.
However, the summer immediately following the assassination of Dr. King, would not end up being the most fight-filled and racially charge the Blessed Sacrament Tournament would ever see. That would come the following year; and then again in the year after that. What was clear, though, as far back as that Summer of 1968, was that unless something was done, and done soon, it would be just a matter of time before someone really got hurt, or worse.
One of the reasons that the Syracuse of 1968 did not explode, at least to the extent that it could have, likely had to do with a handful of adults in town – one white and one Black – both of whom rose to the occasion and, as best they could within their limited spheres of influence, tried to keep Syracuse’s racial violence to a minimum.
One was a school administrator named David Kidd, the longtime principal of the Blackest school in the city, Central Tech, and, as such, boss to both Manny Breland and Bob Capone. Just after sunrise on the morning after King's assassination, he gathered his staff and teachers – whom he’d all called in early – in Lincoln auditorium on the school's first floor. He told them there’d be no classes that day, only a morning assembly. He asked them to get ready, and explained to them that, among the students, almost every human emotion was likely to be on display that day, and that they should plan and respond accordingly.
But more than anything, he told them, let the kids do what they feel is right – especially today. If they want to talk, let them talk. If they want to leave, don't try to stop them. Try to understand what they’re feeling and what they’re going through, and do your best to empathize. As much as anything, though, give them space.
Kidd went on to explain he’d been up all night trying to get his thoughts together, and that he wanted to speak to the full student body immediately after first bell.
As the students shuffled into the building that morning – those who chose to go to school, anyway – the tension was so thick and so palpable it made it difficult for many of the teachers to even breathe. It almost felt as if one spark and the entire building might explode.
As Kidd got ready to welcome the students and say his piece, one of his vice principals came rushing up to him with some news. There were, apparently, a hundred or so kids from nearby Roosevelt Junior High who’d just entered the school through the front door and who were now shouting back and forth with a growing number of Central kids. They looked like they had trouble in mind, said the vice principal, who asked if he should call the police.
“No,” said Kidd, after a moment. “Let them in. And let the kids handle this themselves.”
As the Roosevelt students, virtually all of them Black, made their way into the auditorium, a buzzing started among many of the Central kids as they turned in their seats and realized what as happening. Kidd could feel his lips tingle, his tongue dry, and the knot in his stomach tighten. He immediately welcomed the unannounced visitors, explaining that he and his students were in the middle of an assembly about Dr. King's death, but that they were more than welcome to join them. He cautioned, however, that they were guests at Central and should behave accordingly. If not, they’d be asked to leave.
What only a handful in the hall realized was that, when a single African American guidance counsellor named Frank Anderson had intercepted the Roosevelt kids a few minutes prior, more than a few of them had been carrying bricks. Keeping in mind what his boss had told him, Anderson tried to stay calm, telling the angry youngsters, "You’re more than welcome here, all of you, especially today. But the bricks and stones have to stay outside.”
Later, another African American member of Kidd's staff, a young educator named Keith Sterling, who Kidd had asked to run the assembly, introduced his boss even as he held one of the confiscated bricks in his right hand. The Central principal rose from the crowd below and walked slowly up and onto the stage. Silhouetted against the now abandoned basketball court that spanned the school's still-magnificent stage, David Kidd stood alone – a white man just hours removed from the brutal and senseless killing of, arguably, the single most iconic and beloved African American in history. He began speaking softly and compassionately to the young and mostly Black audience gathered in front of him. His words were raw, and honest, and spontaneous – and all of them straight from his heart. By the end of his brief address, the entire room was in silence, save for the sound of a few sniffles.
Afterwards, the students got to their feet en masse – the vast majority still in silence – and made their way out the doors. A number of teachers rushed up to their principal with tears in their eyes. Some shook Kidd’s hand. A few hugged him. But what every last one of those men and women did was thank the Central principal for what he’d just done in bringing his school together, however tenuously.
Four days later, atop the editorial page of the evening Herald-Journal sat a letter to the editor. It was one that praised Kidd, and not just for his words, but his leadership. That entire opinion page that afternoon was a virtual microcosm of the times, especially locally; a handful of letters about Vietnam, including one calling out New York Senator Bobby Kennedy for having the temerity to suggest that both North and South Vietnam be included in whatever peace negotiations occur; a letter ruing the recent decision to close St. Mary’s, a tiny but much-loved maternity hospital on the city's North Side; an op-ed piece railing about the growing use of marijuana and LSD among America’s youth; a second opinion piece detailing the heightened level of concern over what to do with all the “dead” space that now existed in downtown Syracuse, thanks to Interstate 81; a letter from an anonymous St. John the Evangelist student claiming that, although the diocese might be able to take away his school, it'll never be able to take away his memories.
But it was the letter at the very top of the page that drew the most eyes. That was letter the Herald’s editors chose to highlight and to which they assigned the somewhat evocative headline, “His Decision Saved the Day.”
It was a letter from a local Catholic priest who’d been asked by Kidd to attend the assembly that morning to offer a prayer for peace before things got underway. Father Joseph Champlin, assistant pastor at the nearby Cathedral, wrote that Kidd’s words to the students were forceful and profound, and that they resonated deeply with everyone on hand. He cited one passage in particular that Kidd delivered, even after a number of the African American kids had already left or been excused to attend various services in honor of Dr. King. Champlin wrote that the principal said to the remaining students and teachers before him, “Today’s generation will either solve this race issue and move the country forward, or it will fail to come to grips with it in their own hearts, and destroy America in the process.”
After praising Kidd and his faculty, along with the Central and Roosevelt students, the vast majority of whom remained respectful throughout, Champlin concluded: “Martin Luther King did not live to see his dream come true. But this experience at Central Tech proves that it is a possibility.”
At least one other adult rose up and tried his best to keep Syracuse’s racial violence from boiling over during the long and uniquely hot summer of 1968. That was Manny Breland, himself.
Chief O’Connor of the Syracuse Police Department had become aware of Breland for a number of reasons over the course of the prior year. During the confrontation with Central students on Adams Street – despite the heightened racial tension – O’Connor had noted how Breland had been completely honest, straightforward and candid with the kids, winning their respect and cooperation in the process. For that reason, the following summer, as the Syracuse Parks & Recreation Department was launching a new program – something called the “Happenin’ Wagon” – Syracuse’s top cop enlisted Manny’s help directly.
Syracuse’s Happenin’ Wagon (designed to “Keep Things Cool”) was basically a well-appointed recreational vehicle that went from park to park on different nights of the week all summer long to act as something of a mobile command center for a full program of shows, concerts and dance parties, all of them targeting teens and young adults. O’Connor wanted a few older and otherwise respected former 15th Warders – guys like Manny, Herman Edge and Billy Gilbert – to act as visible (yet inconspicuous) agents of the police department, especially in three of the city’s blackest and most volatile park facilities: Thornden, Wilson and Kirk Park.
For a guy like Manny, a teacher staring at the prospect of no paycheck for almost three months, it was pretty much the perfect summer job. It got him out of the house a few nights a week, allowing him to stay in touch with many of his students and players. It also gave him a chance to listen to music and eat some good food, all while getting paid for the privilege of doing so.
However, since O’Connor did not want a significant or obvious uniformed presence at any Happenin’ Wagon event, the only identification Manny and his fellow “officers” received from him were tee shirts that bore a small logo and some lettering, identifying them as city employees.
Music, food, and supplemental income aside, things were largely uneventful for Manny that Summer of ’68 – that is, until one Sunday night when he got an urgent call from a good friend and fellow teacher named Bill Beard, who, like his wife, Etta, had been a longtime city school teacher. Beard told Breland, simply, but with a clear sense of panic in his voice, “Manny, you need to get down here now. I mean it. We got real trouble.”
By the time Manny arrived at Beard's place on the corner of State and Raynor, just two blocks southwest of Pioneer Homes, Syracuse's now-infamous "Brick City," it was almost like a scene from a low-budget movie about the Apocalypse. Two rows of officers with helmets on and plexiglass shields up were creating a wall between a few hundred shouting African American youths and the handful of shops and homes near the intersection. Other cops on horseback stood by on alert, each of them mounted, armed and ready to fire, if so ordered.
A rock had been thrown through the front window of Rothschild Drugs on State Street, and the store looted. After that, a small corner market and deli just a block away had been set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail through its front window, even as the elderly Jewish shop owner stood behind the counter near the register, ready to die in defense of his livelihood.
Manny quickly learned that a few boys had been playing some street football before the sun had gone down that evening. Later, as they were hanging around, talking and laughing among themselves, and perhaps drinking, two officers in a squad car drove up and ordered them to disperse. The boys may have been disrespectful. They may not have been. Who can say for sure? What was true, however, was that the majority of those kids lived right behind the spot they were gathered, in the Bricks of Pioneer Homes. And, as such, as they snapped to the cops, they had every right to be there. It was a free country.
One thing led to another and before anyone realized what was happening, the officers, both of them white, had jumped out of their squad car and used their nightsticks to club and then arrest one of the boys (Manny knew him, and also knew he was the quietest kid in the group, the boy least likely to sass a cop or do anything to merit an all-out beatdown with a billy club).
The moment the young man was handcuffed was the moment all hell broke loose. When the rest of the boys moved toward the cops in their friend’s defense is when one of the two officers, the younger of the two, ran to the squad car and radioed for immediate assistance.
Within minutes, the call was answered. Before anyone knew it, two cops turned into almost thirty, and a single squad car morphed into an entire squadron, complete with paddy wagons, mounted officers, riot guns, riot gear and a number of tear gas canisters and launchers.
By the time Manny arrived just a few moments later, it seemed everything was in full-scale meltdown. Three trucks’ worth of Syracuse firefighters had arrived and were attempting to put out the blaze in the corner market before it could spread to the houses on either side of it, while a pair of ambulance attendants worked on its owner, treating the elderly Jewish man for smoke inhalation and, one might assume, emotional trauma. Minutes earlier, he'd been pulled to safety by one of the first patrolmen to answer the call, after he determined that there was at least one person still inside the building that was quickly becoming engulfed in flames.
Meanwhile, cops in full riot gear were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, facing a barrage of bricks, stones and bottles from the angry mob of mostly black young men, while the officer in charge of them issued orders over a bullhorn from behind a wall of plexiglass, demanding the mob to disperse.
The city cops were courageous, to be sure, but they were also badly outnumbered. And it looked for a while as though the whole South Side neighborhood that surrounded them, a collection of a dozen or so blocks of small single and two-family homes on the very fringes of what was left of the Ward, might explode into a sea of violence.
Big “Boobie” Breland was doing his ever-loving best to try to calm the now-roaring crowd, yelling to a few boys he recognized to go home before they got hurt. But it was useless, and he knew it, though that didn’t stop him from trying. At one point, dodging a few bricks and stones, the Central coach ran up to the commanding officer and asked what he might do to help. The officer, looking up at Breland with a mix of impatience and disbelief, barked, “Whoever you are, get the hell outta here and go home. Now!”
Manny persisted, trying to explain that he worked with Chief O’Connor and that he might be able to help, given his relationship with the neighborhood kids. By that point, though, the cop had lost all patience with the giant Negro standing in front of him, a guy who – at least in his mind – was doing more harm than good. “Get the fuck outta here, will ya?” he looked up and snapped, now with equal parts rage and fear in his eyes. “Or I swear to God, I’m gonna arrest your black ass.”
As this exchange was occurring, a second officer, an Officer Galvin, perhaps sensing something was wrong, came up to the two. “What’s going on, cap'n?” the cop asked his superior ever-so cautiously out of respect, while at the same time trying like hell to shield his head with his left hand. When the senior officer spit back an offhand and somewhat mumbled response, the patrolman, a good little ballplayer in his own right back in the day, who recognized Manny from having watched him play at S.U., and who was fully aware he’d recently won a championship at Central, said calmly, “He’s okay, captain. Really. This is Manny Breland. He and I play ball together at Thornden sometimes. My guess is, that he also coaches at least a few of those kids over there.”
Manny was reluctantly released with both a look and a warning, but things remained just a well-placed brick or, maybe, a quick or itchy trigger finger away from escalating from something ugly to something tragic.
Later, as the still relatively new Central coach moved down State Street, looking to help in any way he could, he saw a rock get thrown from the alley between an apartment building and Rothschild Drugs, a rock that struck one of the riot squad officers flush, bringing him to his knees. At that point, a second officer had raised his tear gas launcher to almost eye level and was bracing it against his right shoulder, as if he intended to fire.
The problem was, as Manny and others quickly realized, the apartment house off the alley where the cop was aiming was full of children and adults (many of them senior citizens), some of whom were now gathered on the front steps and in the front yard, while others were leaning out open windows above the alley. It was, in other words, a recipe for disaster and a situation that, if not managed immediately – and properly – might trigger even more rage on the part of the mob.
Manny reflexively yelled out to the young officer, “Hey, hey!!! You can’t do that! Those are innocent people over there…People who had nothing to do with this!”
He then hurriedly made his way back to the man in charge, the cop with the bullhorn who’d just threatened to arrest him. “Please, sir,” said Manny. “You can’t fire no tear gas. Not yet. You just can’t. Please. That’ll not only hurt innocent people, but it will also take this whole thing and make it even worse than it is.”
The head cop gave Manny a look, as if to say, “Make it worse? Seriously? Are you frickin' kidding me? How in God’s name is that even possible?” Nevertheless, the cop had been around the block more than a few times and knew full well that the big man in front of him was right. As a result, and without wasting even another second, he looked over and shouted to the officer with the tear gas launcher, as well as those around him, to hold their fire.
That little mini riot eventually dissipated, but not before scarring the city even further and triggering a new wave of white flight to the safer, quieter and more family-friendly suburbs of Syracuse – this particular wave emanating from the roughly twenty or so square blocks that radiated down toward St. Anthony’s, south and west of the corner of State and Raynor.
During that long and particularly nerve-wracking night, Manny Breland eventually happened upon at least one youngster who’d played for him that season, a smart, talented and otherwise disciplined senior guard named Alex Bullock. Manny had spotted Bullock picking up a brick with the clear intention of inflicting damage, either to one of the uniformed officers lined up before him, or maybe to an inviting plate glass widow or windshield in one of the cars parked on the street.
Manny didn’t even have to shout out Bullock’s name or yell over to him. The young man simply caught his coach’s eye from roughly twenty yards away. Their eyes locked, and did so for a full beat or two. Then Breland said to his championship team’s best shooter in a firm and disciplined coach-like tone, “Put it down, son. Now. And go home now.”
Years later, Al Bullock – who would eventually start and run a successful business in Atlanta and who, in the process, would turn himself into one of the 15th Ward’s greatest success stories – recalled how he’d chosen to put that brick down that night, and how doing so had, undoubtedly, altered the course of his life.
But he'd also go on to say there was something that “Mr. Breland” never knew about their chance encounter – when, once again, and if only for a moment, they became coach and player. What Manny Breland didn’t know was that after Bullock tossed aside the brick he'd been holding, and after he smiled meekly at his mentor and turned his back to walk away, the youngster happened to look around at the dark and increasingly troubled inner-city streets of Syracuse, parts of which were still smoldering, and thought to himself, “Go home? Hell…I am home.”
* * * * *
By the home stretch of 1968, it was as though the new Interstate 81, which by then was running – bold and constantly looming – straight through the heart of downtown Syracuse, had become a bitterly ironic symbol for much of what the city had become.
The almost mythically productive little Salt City, which for years had been a model of unity and harmony, was becoming divided in almost every way imaginable: politically, racially, economically, socially, even chronologically. As summer turned to fall that year, the soul of Central New York’s still-proud manufacturing mecca was, sadly, becoming as divided as its aerial map.
But the splintering of Syracuse ran deeper and was far more nuanced than it appeared at first blush. By the second half of 1968, even the city's once-solid African American community had begun to fracture. Unmoored by the loss of its home turf, 15th Ward, the nearly 20,000 strong community was at odds with itself, becoming almost two distinct and warring sides of the same coin.
On one side of were those Blacks like Manny Breland, who still believed in the American way and playing by the rules; on the other were those now being called “Afro-Americans,” Black men and women (a significant number, like Al Bullock, still in their teens) who increasingly believed in revolution, Black power and pushing back, that the rules of society were established by white men to keep the Black man down, and that the only way for America’s Blacks to get what was rightfully theirs was to take it – and to do so by force, if necessary.
In Syracuse, these two different mindsets were embodied in a thirty-something Southern transplant named Donnie Fielder and a much younger Southern transplant named Bob Harrison, two men who, skin color aside, could not have been more different. Because while both Fielder and Harrison may have wanted the best for Syracuse’s people of color – especially the youngest ones – their respective paths to getting there were entirely different.
If any man stood as a model of the first, more conciliatory view of Black America, it was Fielder, a graduate of the famed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Fielder was the longtime athletic director of the East Genesee Street Boys Club and was one of those rare individuals who somehow managed to be just as tough as he was gentle.
As the father figure for hundreds of young Black boys in Syracuse, Fielder always tried to be a role model for just about any youngster who ever set foot in the place, from toddlers on up. As an old-school drill-sergeant type, he also strove to be a beacon, however flawed, for all the African American young men who would follow in his footsteps, a leader whose place of birth, era and conscience guided virtually every last thing he ever did or said in the presence of a youngster.
To countless people in the city's Black community, if there was an African American version of the Saint of Syracuse, Father Brady, it was Donnie Fielder.
As a product of both the Jim Crow South and the don’t-rock-the-boat 1950’s, Fielder was well-steeped in two concepts that drove him to operate the way he did; separate-but-equal and using sports to build character in a boy. The born-and-raised Southerner in him accepted the crystal-clear certainty of the former, while the four-sport letterman in him, the onetime multi-sport collegian, saw the latter as a road to achievement, if not personal excellence.
For Fielder, personal excellence was everything. To him, the only way any young Black man was ever going to win a seat at any white table was by being better. In Fielder’s world, if a young Black boy wanted to be a baseball player in America, he couldn’t be just any player. He had to be Jackie Robinson, or Willie Mays or Hank Aaron. If a young man (or woman) of color wanted to be a singer, that kid couldn’t just be some garden-variety crooner, he or she had to be Ella Fitzgerald, or Lena Horne, or Nat “King” Cole.
To earn your chance as a Black child in 20th Century America – at least the way Fielder saw it – you couldn’t simply be good enough. Because, by 1968, especially if you were young, Black and full of hope, good-enough was just not going to cut it. You had to be great, and so clearly great that no one of any color would even think to try to deny you a seat at their table.
And yet, while Fielder was unflinching in his steely adherence to society’s norms and a Black man’s place in it, he could also be a man of remarkable understanding and forgiveness. His office walls, for example, were full of photos – from ceiling to floor – of boys who’d meant something to him over the years. Those shots depicted many of the Boys Club’s biggest stars and its most accomplished athletes. But there were also shots of lesser-known young men; boys full of character and life, boys who had atoned for their mistakes, and boys who would regularly give of themselves. There were shots of boys who, despite the gifts God may or may not have given them, always sought something better for those around them.
In Donnie Fielder’s Boys Club, winning a trophy was great, and winning a championship was greater still. But winning a spot, however small, on his office wall was one of the highest honors a young man who’d spent his life in the loving arms of Syracuse's 15th Ward could receive.
Fielder and his fellow director, Harold “Tiny” Shure, also took great pains to try to teach all their boys a measure of financial responsibility. To that end, any boy hoping to use the Boys Club had to first fork over a fifty-cent onetime membership fee. And any boy unwilling or unable to pay the nominal four bits was denied access. What’s more, Fielder and Shure then issued all their members a small card with their full name hole-punched into it. And any boy without his membership card, or any boy misbehaving or breaking one of Fielder’s countless rules of good behavior and fair play, was immediately shown the door.
But even though the Boy’s Club was predominantly a gymnasium, game room, wrestling room, weight room and swimming pool, Donnie Fielder used more than sports to plant the seeds of character in a young man. He also tried to teach his kids more practical lessons, as well. One summer, for example, he and Shure (a longtime 15th Ward Jew, dating back to the days when the Ward was commonly referred to by the Black residents as “Jewtown”) hired a local carpenter to show any young man who wished to learn how to build his own shoeshine box. Not only did the physical act of building such a box prove useful – but having built and stocked his own shoeshine kit, it also gave any enterprising boy a way to put a few nickels in his pocket each week.
Such lessons, at least to Fielder, were far more than practical. In the soon-to-be smoldering ruins of the 15th Ward, and in a world that expected so little of any boy who’d grown up in them, these lessons would prove to be lifelong, if not life changing.
But by 1968, a growing number of Blacks had started to view Donnie Fielder’s way of preparing inner-city kids to compete as hopelessly out of touch. His way of molding young minds, at least to them, seemed sadly tone deaf, lacking any sense of what was actually happening right outside the club’s doors.
To such people, while, say, greasing the pole in the gym for the club’s annual field days and then placing a brand new pair of Converse sneakers atop it (a prize for the first boy to successfully navigate his way up the pole), or simulating a camping trip by allowing a dozen or so kids to sleep under the stars on the roof of the building, might have been creative and well-intentioned, they were ultimately naïve attempts to try to change the lives of boys who, at that point – more than simple hand-holding – needed a healthy dose of reality, if not a good hard slap in the face.
One such young Black Syracusan who’d received more than his share of face slaps was the Ward’s poster child for that second, alternative school of thought. He was an undersized alpha dog and street-brawler named Arthur “Bobby” Harrison.
Compared to Donnie Fielder, Harrison was a different type of Southern transplant. As a six year-old schoolboy, he’d watched his grandfather get beaten to within an inch of his life while tending to the illegal still he operated in the woods near his home in Darlington, South Carolina. His grandfather's savage beating came, at least in young Bob’s mind, from a combination of county sheriffs and Ku Klux Klansmen – all of them, presumably, white.
In fairness, were those sheriffs and robed-and-hooded Klansmen actually working in concert, and were they actually there together that Sunday afternoon? Or was that memory just a mash-up of a few others by a scared and scarred little boy? Whatever the case, it hardly mattered. What mattered was that it was real in young Bob Harrison’s mind, and would remain so for most of the rest of his uniquely hard life.
So, when he and his mother, Ella Mae, moved north to Syracuse’s 15th Ward in the 1950s, he did so already believing that the game was rigged against people like him and that the other guys – especially the white guys in uniform – were constantly dealing off the bottom of the deck.
In the Ward, young Bobby soon learned to fend for himself. He was a good student, or at least he was plenty smart, but he didn’t have much use for authority or those in it. Instead, he relied on his razor-sharp instincts and his own inherent and occasionally fluid sense of right and wrong.
For all his instincts and inherent street sense, the two things Bob Harrison had going for him were the fact he was a natural born leader to whom other young men just seemed to gravitate, and that he was, pound for pound, just about the toughest and most fearless son-of-a-bitch anyone in the Ward had ever seen.
Even though he only stood maybe 5’7” or 5’8”, Harrison would fight anyone, anywhere, at the drop of a hat, especially if he felt that person was worthy, or had done something to merit such a beating. He was the type of fighter you’d better kill because he was never going to give up, whatever the odds against him.
One day, thirteen year-old, Bob was walking past an old junkyard in the Ward, a scrap and salvage facility that sat just behind the Dunbar Center off McBride Street. There was a big dog curled up behind the chain-link fence and, upon seeing Bob, the dog charged and threw himself savagely against the fence, barking, growling and baring his teeth, drooling madly as he did. The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that.
On the fourth day, Bob decided to make a quick stop at the Loblaws on Adams Street. He walked straight back to the meat department of the grocery store, looked both ways and quietly stuck a small T-bone steak down his pants. He then exited without making eye contact. When he walked by the junkyard, this time Bob Harrison tossed the pilfered steak over the fence.
At first, the dog hardly noticed, so intent was he on throwing himself against the fence.
But the next day, Bob repeated his routine, this time stealing a pair of pork chops. And the day after that, he stole yet another steak. Then some sausage. And so on, and so on.
This went on for the better part of a month. Each day Harrison would shoplift a nice piece of raw meat, each day he would unwrap it, and each day he would feed it to the savage animal who spent his days dutifully protecting his junkyard domain.
Eventually Bob started feeding the dog by a pushing the stolen meat through the long vertical gap between the fence and its hinged gate, talking softly and reassuringly to the crazed animal as he did.
About four weeks into this ritual, as Harrison approached the junkyard gate, meat in hand, the dog raced up, jumped up on its hind legs and started wagging its tail and trying to lick the hand of the human on the opposite side of the fence. That’s the moment the owner came out and barked at Harrison, “Hey, boy! Yeah, you! You know what you done? Huh? You ruined that damned dog a mine. Just plum ruined him. He ain’t no good for nothin’ now – at least not to me. In fact, you better take that flea-bitten piece of shit outta here. ‘Cause if you don’t, I swear, I’m gonna take my shotgun and shoot his sorry ass!”
That’s how Bob Harrison acquired his best friend and soon-to-be constant companion; a big, gnarly German Shepherd-mix of a cur that he’d soon name Fellow. And just like his master, Fellow would remain for the longest time mad at the very world that helped create him. Yet, Bob and Fellow quickly became symbols of respect and authority among those of a certain age in the Ward – even though one of the two was still young enough to be riding his bike every day. Over time they'd slowly teach each other loyalty and respect, while both developed an intuitive and almost freakish sense of people, Fellow as a matter of pure, animal instinct, and Bob simply by watching and learning from his companion.
As Urban Renewal, along with the the relentless encroachment of Interstate 81, not only kicked in, but ramped up – and as the 15th Ward started to crumble, faster and faster, block by block – chaos and uncertainty soon replaced what had long been the place’s overarching, if not downright tactile sense of neighborhood. And when that happened, Bob Harrison's role in Syracuse’s Black community – at least among many of its youngest members – began to increase, while helping to fill in some of the void being created by his neighborhood's loss of its physical infrastructure. He would, in time, amass a gang of young followers, if not spiritual disciples – many of them high school dropouts – whose rules were not so much the rules of society, but the rules of rubble-strewn streets and the rules of basic survival. Many in the Ward soon started referring to Bob’s de facto gang of believers simply as, “the Fellas.”
To be sure, Bobby Harrison always had a somewhat ambivalent view of the law and authority, and he and his boys did plenty of illegal things in their time, most of them – outside of a few beatings and some physical messages sent to rivals and would-be rivals – non-violent. Mostly, they simply stole and hawked, stole and gifted, and stole and hustled. Yet, despite his ongoing ambivalence toward one set of rules, Bob also had plenty of unwritten ones that he constantly lived by and tried to impress upon the others. No older people were to be touched or bothered, nor children either. And, for the longest time, no one was allowed to own a gun. Even knives were largely frowned upon.
What's more, in much the way Percy Harris had used large amounts of money to shield the 15th Ward from racist cops and certain legal zealots, Bob Harrison used his toughness to help protect his little neighborhood. Through the toughness and fear he was able to engender in others, he became something of righteous vigilante, dispensing his own brand of justice and providing many who didn't pass Fellow's sniff test the beating and broken limbs he felt they deserved. When something truly and fundamentally wrong took place in town – such as the shooting death of an unarmed teenager named Jeremiah Mitchell, one of his Central schoolmates and a football teammate by a local cop – Bob was among the first to point out the injustice to the Fellas and, by extension, fuel the rage of Syracuse's Black community.
Of course, being the alpha and leader of a gang of inner-city street toughs put Harrison on many a radar within the city, particularly among law enforcement officials. So, when young Bobby Harrison, now fifteen, was accused one day of viciously beating up a Catholic priest, who he claimed made unwanted sexual advances toward him, the law finally caught up with him. As much he and his mother later protested in court, he soon found himself locked up in juvenile detention on a completely unrelated charge of sex with a minor, despite the fact he himself was a minor. That initial stay in a juvenile detention center, or "juvie," was followed soon thereafter by a second, this time at a juvenile work camp outside of Rochester. Living and working in a series of state and county correctional facilities, Bob became certain that those employed there – particularly the older white men, the guys with the real power – were systematically trying to break his spirit and rob him of his righteous and almost pathologically stubborn sense of self.
He was now, and until further notice, being schooled, incentivized, threatened, terrified, disciplined, cajoled, shaped and molded by bunch of hardened peers and overseers, people who used cruelty as a weapon as often as they used it as a defense. Little Bobby Harrison was now, like it or not, and for better or for worse, officially part of a dark, parallel universe in American society known with a clinical, if not eerie, sense of detachment simply as, "the system."
The reality of constantly being in and out of detention centers and, in time, full-blown prisons, would conspire to make young Bob Harrison, a handsome but still-menacing individual, even angrier and more defiant than ever. He would, of course, pass on much of his rage to those young men in the Ward who continued to look up to him and who still wanted to, as much as anything, be like him – and he did so every time he was released from someplace new and every time he'd come home to his, now, ever-dwindling turf, the 15th Ward.
That’s why Jimmy Pugh in 1968, for example, the youngster who’d been arrested in nearby Fulton that basketball season, and a kid bailed out of jail that same night by his school’s new coach, Manny Breland, had taken to wearing a 45-caliber bullet around his neck. That’s also why Pugh, one night that Spring, in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination, had gone out and, in a case of blind rage, bent down all six rims on the court adjacent to Pioneer Homes, leaving all six completely unusable for basketball. Pugh’s message to his fellow teens in the Bricks, if not every one his black classmates at Central? These are no longer times for fun and games. These are times to rise up, times to take up arms, and times to grab what is rightfully ours.
Pugh, you see – just like Bobby Harrison – was but a reflection of what so many young African Americans were starting to feel down to their marrow. Through righteous anger they were taking ownership of their own blackness in a way that few, if any, previous generations of American “Negroes” ever had before. As James Brown's anthem that summer put it, these kids were saying it loud, "I'm black and I'm proud."
Much of that pride, at least in Pugh’s case, was fragile, and a good deal of the anger, as in Harrison’s, a touch misdirected. Nevertheless, among thousands of young black men and women in the streets of inner-city Syracuse, that combination of pride and anger was real, and it reverberated across much of Onondaga County as an incendiary year continued to draw down.
Plus, the rage and the boldness of young Black voices like Harrison’s and Pugh’s, even if people didn't know their names, were sending chills down the spines of of many white folks in Syracuse, especially in and around the working class neighborhood of St. Anthony’s, the residents of which, until the explosion of anger following the King assassination, had never even entertained the idea of selling, much less actually moving.
Marty Shiel, for example, lived just a few blocks from St. Anthony’s, where he’d been a big star for the Paduans and made the All-Parochial team following his senior season. He and his family also lived right next door to a quiet and hard-working Black family named the Thomases. The Shiels and Thomases had been neighbors for years, and pretty good ones at that. In addition, Mr. Shiel and Mr. Thomas both had good-paying, full-time jobs, the former with Allied Chemical, and the latter with Chrysler’s New Process Gear division on Plum Street. Though the two families had never been particularly close, they regularly said hello and occasionally borrowed one another’s garden tools and foodstuffs, or at least when the need arose. There had never been, in other words, even a whiff of racial tension or acknowledgement of the racial differences between the two families.
But then came 1968, when suddenly, it seemed, the most important thing about any man within a stone’s throw of Columbus Circle was not so much how he conducted himself, or how hard he worked, or even how deeply cared for and protected his family. It was the color of his skin. And that was an issue and attitude that, frankly, cut both ways in the city. White and Black. And it was doubly true around St. Anthony’s and Syracuse’s near South Side.
Shiel one summer evening two years prior, in fact, had invited one of his buddies to stay over on a Friday night so that they could get up bright and early the next day, down a quick bowl of cereal, and then head over to Kirk Park to play ball. The two, like so many sixteen year-olds in town, had spent the previous evening splitting a six-pack of beer bought using fake ID's and flirting with a few Catholic girls in the neighborhood, while cruising up and down street after street on foot. That ball-playing pal of Shiel’s, a kid named Jimmy Driscoll, whose dad worked as a detective with the Syracuse police, lived a mile or so southwest of the Shiels, just a block or so off Seneca Turnpike. While, by most any measure, such a distance would have been largely inconsequential, in Syracuse, New York during the Summer of 1966 it represented the difference between spending a quiet and uneventful night under the stars sipping cheap beer and spinning tall tales and a night spent in harm’s way.
At about nine o’clock that evening, near the block of Colvin and South Salina, the two boys happened to be hanging out in the parking lot of nearby Brighton School, finishing their final two cans of beers and trying to figure out what the heck they were going to do next. Before either knew what was happening, they heard some yelling and watched in wonder as the nighttime sky a few yards away, almost like a halo around the empty brick school building, assumed a bright and radiant amber glow. Then, almost at once, they saw the reason for that glow. A mob of twenty or so black kids, teens roughly their age and maybe a bit older, had lit a pair of Molotov cocktails and used them to firebomb a small commercial establishment that sat darkened on the east side of Salina Street.
Both boys hit the ground immediately, scared to death of being seen. Neither had ever witnessed anything like it before, especially from close up. Both lay chest-down against the ground for the longest time and stared straight ahead, almost afraid to even take a breath for fear of the sound it might make. Finally, Shiel whispered slowly and softly, “My house is about three blocks that way. When I count to three, we get up and run like hell and we don’t stop running until we get home.”
He looked over to his buddy and added, “Got it?”
Driscoll nodded, but then thought for a moment and looked over at Shiel and said, “Oh, and Mart? That invitation to sleep over tonight? Yeah, well…thanks for nothin’.”
Even though the tale of Marty Shiel and Jimmy Driscoll was but one of many stories of random violence and mayhem during that run of crazy, combustible summers in Syracuse, it illustrates just how and why the city’s white flight – which had begun just a few years prior as something of a trickle – was now starting to flow with great purpose and intensity.
It wasn’t just the nature or the depth of the divides in town that had become apparent, it was the speed at which all that division was taking place. Consider the schoolboy careers of two of the finest ballplayers in Syracuse history, Roy Neal and his kid brother, Terry – both of whom starred at Central Tech.
Roy and Terry, along with big brother Tom and sister Dorothy, had first moved to Syracuse with their mother a few years prior. They'd come from central Mississippi by way of Detroit. All four of the Neal kids had spent various amounts of time on the family farm, a sprawling, arable swath of red dirt in the heart of Chickasaw County, some thirty miles due south of Tupelo. And while back in the day Roy (along with Tom) would spend hours working for the two dollars a day his grandmother paid him every night before supper to chop cotton, mend fences, tend hogs and milk cows, Terry had been just a touch too young for that kind of manual labor.
His one and only chore as a preschooler – before, that is, heading north – was to empty the slop buckets in the house and keep them clean and covered. It wasn’t always convenient, you see, to make it all the way to the outhouse, especially at night. As a result, and because there was no running water at the time in the Neal farmhouse, the receptacle into which everyone relieved themselves at night was the white porcelain “slop” bucket in his or her room, the one with the thin wire handle that was always kept covered and tucked away in the far corner of the bedroom.
After moving to Syracuse in 1961, and after spending hours playing full and half-court games at nearby Wilson park, the family’s tall and lanky middle son, Roy, came to fall in love with basketball. Not only that, he got pretty good at it. In fact, by the Spring of 1968, Roy Neal had emerged as a full-blown star in the Central New York City League. But despite that, he was – for the most part, anyway – the quietest of the Neal boys and rarely spoke unless spoken to.
But it wasn’t as though Roy Neal didn’t have a lot to say. He just chose not to say it all that often, or at least not in mixed company. His junior year, for instance, when, as the best player in the city, he somehow managed to foul out in a big game against the Gaelic Knights of Bishop Ludden with five minutes still to go in the first half, he did not explode. And he didn’t pop off to either official. He just simply walked to his bench, plopped down at the end of it, lowered his head into a towel and began to quietly seethe, letting others vent the anger he was feeling – people like teammate Frank Broadwater who, later that same game, and tired of all the one-sided calls, grabbed one of the refs by his jersey and pinned him up against the wall. In the course of doing so, he'd find himself banned from playing any high school game in any sport for the rest of his days.
Meanwhile, the youngest Neal, Terry, grew up to be something of a cross between his two old brothers. Overcoming a severe stuttering problem that had plagued him since his days in, first, Mississippi, and then Detroit, he’d managed to grow into an engaging storyteller, much like the Neal's oldest, Tom.
Additionally, like Roy, Terry could simply flat-out play. Though never a great scorer, he'd soon find himself recognized far and wide as one of the finest all-round high school talents in Central New York.
For all their gifts and all their uniquely defined personalities, the three Neal boys – Tom, Roy and little Terry – would prove to be a reminder of just how dramatically and quickly things had been turned on their ear in Syracuse’s black community.
Yet, as the 1960’s continued to careen unchecked, and as the little village in the heart of the city that was the 15th Ward continued to find itself systematically plowed under in the name of progress, some kids in the Ward were forced to find their role models elsewhere, often in its now hollowed-out and rubble-laden streets. Tom Neal, for example, found himself looking up to and trying to emulate a few people: his uncle, his mother’s new boyfriend, his mentor at Central, Mr. Capone, and even Bob Harrison.
Roy and Terry, on the other hand, found a father figure in the Boys Club's Donnie Fielder, the rec leader who gave them both the kind of tough love that few male adults in the Ward seemed willing to offer. He set boundaries for the two, and punished and rewarded them, depending upon the extent to which they respected the boundaries he'd established. Roy Neal, in fact, would admit years later that it wasn’t until he was nearing his sixtieth birthday that he finally stopped dreaming about his days under Fielder’s careful watch and about the hours on end he had spent trying to do whatever he could to please the Boys Club’s demanding athletic director.
But perhaps the most profound difference taking place in the Ward played itself in the not-so-subtle differences between the schooldays of the two youngest Neal brothers, Roy and Terry.
In the Fall of 1965, when Roy was in his first year at the corner of Warren and Adams, the Central varsity basketball team was mostly black and its uniform colors were scarlet and powder blue. During pre-game warm-ups, the Scarlet Lancers’ captain always had the team’s manager play the iconic, whistled version of Sweet Georgia Brown, the version that had long served as the official warm-up song of the most famous Black team of them all, the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters.
In one sense the Globetrotters had always engendered more than their share of Black pride around the country. After all, they were a team comprised entirely of young Black men (ostensibly from Harlem, the epicenter of black culture) who, time and time again, played (and often humiliated) the very same team of white players.
Yet, by the same token, the Globetrotters were also very much like Motown had once been under Berry Gordy: spit-polished and packaged up specifically for a mainstream audience, and done so in the absolutely whitest way possible. The team’s on-court dialogue, its routines, its entire act, in fact, were intentionally scrubbed clean and declawed for one simple and very practical reason. Management wanted to be able to pack houses and fill arenas everywhere – and not just in the inner city or all-black neighborhoods, but globally and throughout the U.S., especially in the suburbs and such traditionally white bastions as Iowa, Nebraska and Idaho.
For that reason, at least to a number of African Americans, there had always been an uneasy sort of “Uncle Tom”/"Stepin Fetchit" quality to the Globetrotters’ schtick. It might have been harmless comedy designed to do little more than entertain and keep the crowds coming back. But it was a brand of humor built on unflattering stereotypes that many proud men and women of color had spent their lives trying to get past and grow beyond. For many, Sweet Georgia Brown felt like perpetuating a stereotype for the sake of a few extra bucks.
However, just four years after Roy’s sophomore season at Central, came Terry’s junior year. And in those four short trips around the sun, a strong sense of black pride had taken hold of countless Central students. Close-cropped razor cuts had given way to all-natural afros. The powder blue that had long served as one of the two core colors of Central’s uniforms had been replaced by a bold and unambiguous black. The single satin powder blue warmup jacket had been ditched in favor of a new look entirely: scarlet and white warm-up pants with wide vertical stripes, and flowing white tops, each adorned with black piping and lettering. Both warmup pants and tops were then accented – like a cherry on a sundae – by a scarlet tam, a jaunty, brimless cap made of soft, blood-red felt that each boy wore with attitude and to one side of his head. The result was a sartorial ensemble that made the 1969-70 Scarlet Lancer basketball team look as though it just climbed off the pages of a fashion magazine.
Just as important as the team’s new look was its new theme song. Gone forever was Sweet Georgia Brown. Now the Lancers exploded out of their locker room to the blaring strains of a stirring, brassy and contemporary soul hit by a young singer/songwriter from Chicago named Curtis Mayfield.
Move on Up was a soulful, urban homage to black aspiration, hope and deliverance, as spiritually aligned with Southern Baptist gospel and old Negro work songs as it was to modern day pop music and Top 40 radio.
By the Fall of 1969, for the first time in memory, Central Tech’s games were being attended by African Americans of all ages from points all across the city. They were drawing not just students, or family members and friends, but quite often people who didn’t even follow basketball. People were coming simply because they wanted to be there and feel even a small part of whatever it was that was happening in Syracuse.
For thousands of displaced 15th Ward residents, Central Tech’s basketball games – especially its home games – had become social events, joyous celebrations of black culture and the rekindled pride so many of those cast-adrift blacks were now feeling about themselves and their boys – a dozen or so young men who, under the guidance of the Ward’s greatest success story ever, the much-loved “Boobie” Breland, had managed to turn themselves into the biggest, baddest basketball show in town.
But, alas, such pride was never too far removed from the deep anger and frustration that a number of these same young men now wore on their sleeves, an anger triggered not only by how things were in Syracuse, but how they’d always been – and likely how they always would be.
That combination of anger and frustration was likely central to the reason the Lancers came to blows with Bishop Ludden in two consecutive games, the second confrontation far more violent than the first, and why the Blessed Sacrament Tournament became, in the mere blink of an eye, less a basketball tournament than a series of bare-knuckled brawls.
And that very same combination of anger and frustration was why Central’s home games – those otherwise raucous celebrations of Black culture – began to take a decidedly ugly turn. Manny Breland had developed a legion of followers during his team’s championship run in 1968, a colorful bunch of middle-aged idlers from the Ward who liked to spend their days drinking cheap wine out of brown paper bags, hanging around the pool hall, and – once or twice a week – betting on Manny’s Lancers to cover whatever spread had been assigned to their game by the local bookies. Manny knew most of them, at least by reputation, and he began to refer to this rather motley crew of Mad Dog-swilling basketball nuts as his “Booster Club.” For the longest time Breland considered those winos colorful, loud and outspoken, but, otherwise, entirely harmless.
Yet, even that changed during the 1969-70 season when one of the the “Boosters” – a guy sufficiently primed by two pint’s worth of Mad Dog, and having taken exception to the calls of one of the referees during a hard-fought loss to Corcoran (a game that, in the process, cost the guy money he could ill-afford to lose) – threw a blatant, cheap-shot roundhouse directly into the face of that same ref as he jogged past on his way to the post-game locker room, opening a deep gash over one eye that required a dozen or so stitches and a trip to the emergency room.
For those reasons and, frankly, far too many others to list, by the time of Terry Neal’s senior year at Central an increasingly frustrated Superintendent Franklyn Barry had decreed that – given the rumbles and fights now regularly occurring in his City League – any and all basketball games involving the four city senior high schools (Central, Corcoran, Nottingham and Henninger) would only be held in the afternoon, just after school, and no longer at night. The school superintendent calculated (and perhaps even hoped) that sunlight would, indeed, be the best disinfectant. Additionally, Barry decreed that all varsity games would take place before the JV contests, rather than the other way around, which had been standard practice ever since high school basketball was first introduced some fifty years prior.
Perhaps, even more revealing about the volume of change in Central during that time was the ugly fact that by then there were now multiple armed officers stationed daily in and around Central Tech, the oldest and most historic public school in the city. What’s more, their numbers had grown to such an alarming degree that one day Bob Capone went around and counted fourteen patrolmen milling about the surrounding streets, halls and parking lot, each with a night stick, either in his hand or hanging off his belt.
For Capone, the institution of learning that had been such a big part his life for so long – the stately cathedral to education in the heart of the city, with the world class auditorium and killer acoustics, along with the classic statue of Minerva, Greek goddess of wisdom, standing tall and proud in its front foyer – suddenly felt more like a prison than a school.
Truth be told, for many white residents, particularly on the South Side, the only consideration at that point was that things in Syracuse were now heading in a troubling direction and it was time to pull up stakes and get the family the hell out of Dodge.
* * * * *
Okay, so maybe this book’s original premise was a bit of a misdirection and a little coy. After all, on one level this has been the story of a high school basketball game on a starry March night in 1967. But beyond that, it’s been the cautionary tale of a city and its people during a crazy, troubled time in their shared history.
In that regard, it’s not really been a single story at all, but dozens of smaller ones, all of them carefully researched and knit together in a patchwork quilt of time, place and circumstance. The book you’re finishing has been a jigsaw puzzle of faces, names and events. Hopefully, it's revealed, if only for a moment in time, a snapshot of one small city’s dreams and fears, its joys and heartaches, its warmest memories and deepest bonds – along with a handful of its broken promises, poor choices, and lessons still waiting to be learned.
But it wouldn't be fair to you, the reader, to discuss the emotional, physical and social splintering of the Syracuse New York of the mid-20th Century, without also sharing the abiding sense of hope that dwelt at the heart of two completely unrelated events near the end of one of the most difficult years in American history. While on one level, those two events, both of which occurred in December of 1968, could not have been more different. Each in their own way, acted as a profound reminder of the verity that all mankind is one, and that all men, regardless of their physical and cultural differences, are united and bound forever in ways that, frankly, they may never fully understand.
The first of the two took place the third day of December. Aired locally on WSYR, Channel 3, the Tuesday evening primetime special was formally listed in TV Guide as, Singer Presents…Elvis. It would in time, however, be known as simply the “Comeback Special.” The one-hour extravaganza, sponsored in part by the iconic sewing machine company, was originally conceived by Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, as a straightforward Christmas special, complete with the singer performing a handful of his old hits and traditional carols, while appearing in a few skits. The hip-shaking icon, to his credit, hated the Colonels’ idea.
But then NBC producer Bob Finkel came on board, and the more Finkel thought about it, the more he began to piece together in his mind a TV special that was something far different than what had been originally pitched to him. Privately, he explained to the “King of Rock ‘n Roll” that while Parker had had him in Hollywood all decade long making a bunch of forgettable and, frankly, bad movies, if only because the money had been so addictive, the music industry he’d helped revolutionize had started to pass him by. As a result, a whole generation of Americans was in the process of growing up without knowing how truly great he was. He told Elvis, forget Christmas. This show, this hour-long blank canvas, is your opportunity to prove to the world you’re still a musical force and to show everyone, young and old alike, you still have musical greatness in you.
Presley bought in fully to Finkel’s vision for the show and, even though Parker would go on to voice strong protest over its radically new direction, Elvis would ultimately overrule his manager.
Given that freedom, Frankel then quickly chose a director, a guy named Steve Binder, who’d directed the critically acclaimed concert film, the T.A.M.I. Show, and who’d recently come off a run as principal director of Hullaballoo, a weekly prime-time pop music series. Frankel wanted Binder to give Elvis a younger look and sound for the special. For that reason, the director immediately nixed Parker’s idea for the ending, which had Elvis delivering a straightforward version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, followed by a few brief personal comments spoken directly to the audience.
Presley – like millions – had been utterly rocked by the back-to-back assassinations of two of the greatest champions of peace and civil justice of the 20th Century, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Because of that, he told his manager he wanted to say something to the viewers about the two men and their impact on his life.
Binder, a West Coast studio veteran who could smell a clunker from a mile away, would have none of it. Instead, he told Elvis and Parker, he wanted an entirely new song to close the show, one that would reflect the spirit of the season and, at the same time, offer a message of hope for the troubled times.
That’s when a little-known lyricist Frankel had hired, a guy named Walter Earl Brown, spoke up during a production meeting, explaining he’d written some lyrics and pieced together a placeholder of a melody after Dr. King had been killed, using many of King’s own words. Binder, intrigued, glanced at his musical director, a guy named Billy Goldenberg, and told him to take a look at Brown’s shell of a song and, if it had merit, work it into a possible closing number.
One of the keys to the original recording of If I Can Dream was its timing. Singer presents…Elvis, or more to the point, Brown’s song that would close it, had been recorded on June 29 of that year, just two and a half months after King had been killed and only three weeks after Kennedy.
Singer Presents…Elvis would turn out to be the most watched television show of 1968 and would, at least for one week, topple the powerful Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In from its usual spot atop the weekly Nielsens. What some forty million Americans saw that night, with the spirit of Christmas in the air, was Elvis as they’d never really seen him before.
For many in Syracuse and beyond, the highlight of the show had been its opening when, dressed in black leather and looking trim and exuding a feral energy, Elvis performed with a handful of sidemen on a small stage in the round, and in doing so electrified the small audience who’d been invited to sit in.
But it was the special’s final four minutes that took the entire evening to a new level. With the murders of King and Kennedy still fresh in viewer's minds, Elvis stood alone and without an audience, dressed in a white suit and red tie and situated in front of all-black backdrop, a massive set adorned with only the five letters of his first name in towering red lights. The song began innocently enough. A solitary trumpet. A soft electric bass. The gentle brush of a cymbal.
Elvis eased into the words as he sang them, as if holding something back for when he might need it.
There must be lights burning brighter somewhere.
Got to be birds flying higher in a sky more blue.
If I can dream of a better land,
where all my brothers walk hand-in-hand,
Tell my why, oh why, oh why can’t my dream come true?
Even to casual viewers, the song had a different tone than they’d heard up to that point, which was Presley breathing new and unexpected life into a bunch of his old #1 hits like Hound Dog, Heartbreak Hotel and All Shook Up.
But this was different, and that was soon apparent. The tip-off might have been the lyrics’ overt spiritual imagery or, maybe, the song’s almost gospel-like tone and arrangement. More likely, however, was the use of the word “dream” in the very first verse.
Since that dark April day in Memphis earlier in the year, it had been almost impossible to even hear the word “dream” and not think of that seminal moment five years prior, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, when King had stood there and uttered that one syllable in a way that no man, black or white, had ever quite done before.
If I Can Dream’s second verse began to build in intensity as Elvis dug in vocally, wrapping his heart and soul around every lyric, almost as though it might be the last he would ever sing.
There must be peace and understanding sometime.
Strong winds of promise that will blow away all the doubt and fear.
If I can dream of a warmer sun, where hope keeps shining on everyone,
Tell me why, oh why, oh why won’t that sun appear?
But it wasn’t until If I Can Dream’s raw and emotional bridge, followed by its third verse, heralded by a thundering, rolling drum fill, that the final song of Elvis’ “comeback special” upped the goose bump factor considerably for everyone in the country fortunate enough to be tuned in.
We’re lost in a cloud with too much rain,
We’re trapped in a world that’s troubled with pain,
But as long as a man has the strength to dream,
He can redeem his soul and fly.
In the final verse, Presley reached a rapturous crescendo. One of his background singers, a young Black girl, was so moved by the song she started to cry, tears streaming down her cheeks, as she watched Elvis and matched him, note for note, with her own vocal power and passion.
As Presley's powerful voice strained, it grew ragged, but it never broke, never quit. You could see the pain in his face, almost feel Elvis scratch and claw to pour his soul into the only moment of songwriting greatness a journeyman tunesmith named Walter Earl Brown would ever know in his life.
Deep in my heart there’s a trembling question,
Still I’m sure that the answer, answer’s gonna come somehow.
Out there in the dark, there’s a beckoning candle, oh yeah.
And while I can think, while I can walk,
While I can stand, while I can talk,
While I can dream, please let my dream,
Come true, oh yeah…right now.
When it was over, there would be no words from Presley, no thoughts about Dr. King or Senator Kennedy. After all, he’d just said everything he'd ever need to say about the two men. There’d be no applause either, because the song had been performed on an empty soundstage. Instead, Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, just raised his microphone to his mouth one last time, looked into the camera – and, by extension, 40 million living rooms all across America – and said simply, “Thank you. Good night.”
* * * * *
While the Elvis Comeback Special that first week of December drove home its message of hope and harmony in rather literal terms, the second event – which took place on Christmas Eve – offered a far more symbolic message of peace. On that day, the least know of the Apollo astronauts, a flight engineer and amateur photographer named Bill Anders, was able to capture one of the single most iconic and enduring images of his or any other lifetime.
But let's rewind a bit first. In 1961, John F. Kennedy, the newly-elected president and living, breathing symbol of the country’s youthful promise, announced to the world his goal of sending an American to the moon by the end of the decade. Outside of science fiction, no one had even considered such a crazy idea, much less figured it could actually be done. But here it was just seven years later, and the United States was knocking on the door of doing just that.
Apollo 8 would be the first NASA mission to reach the moon and orbit it. The tricky and, frankly, most perilous part, however, would be when the Apollo 8 capsule crossed over to the dark side of the moon and lost radio contact with NASA’s command center in Houston. Each of the planned ten circumnavigations would take the trio of astronauts just north of two hours apiece, meaning that for each of the ten there’d be complete radio silence for just under half that time.
That Christmas Eve, with Captain Frank Borman on the microphone, Apollo 8 entered the moon’s atmosphere and neared its target. Even as Borman was detailing the visuals outside one window of the craft to the room full of scientists and engineers back in Houston, they could already see it for themselves: the vast darkness of space and the dusty, gray emptiness of the crater-filled lunar surface.
As the three pioneers crossed over and entered, for the first time, the invisible halo of the lunar blackout space, the radio in the command center crackled and popped, as did Borman’s voice. Then, after a few spasms of noise and interference, nothing. Nothing at all. Just…silence.
And even though the dozens of men and handful of women back in Houston had been prepared for this moment, they were all in uncharted waters now, and every one of them knew it. Some did crosswords or doodled on scrap paper; others made small talk; and those assigned to do so, continued to monitor the consoles in front of them. Everyone in the room, however, was on the edge of their seats, many with their hearts racing and a few with their mouths dry and their hands clammy. One mistake, and not only would the lives of three good men be lost, but the entire program would be set back immeasurably.
As the seconds ticked away, the mood only seemed to get tenser and more nerve-wracking. Then, just shy of an hour after Apollo 8’s radio silence commenced, there came a crackle. Once again, Borman’s voice came over the loudspeaker, a little crackly at first, but then pure and clean. The whole control room in Houston erupted in spontaneous applause and pats on each other's backs.
That’s when Anders, who’d been taking black-and-white photographs out of one window, turned to look out the other. “Oh my God,” he said breathlessly to his crewmates. “Look at that picture over there.”
Anders said to Jim Lovell, “You got a color film, Jim? Hand me that roll of color…” Anders quickly threaded the roll of 70mm Kodak film that Lovell had handed him into his camera and focused his lens out the window.
And that was the moment. That was when – just like in Elvis’ third verse earlier that month – for one instant time stood still and magic occurred. In that one heartbeat, all the tumblers of the universe fell into place and what was revealed was a glimpse not only of where mankind might go, but the place from whence we had all come.
Because, there, rising out of the infinite blackness, and over the ashy, lifeless silence of the moon, was a magnificent celestial body, a blue marble of differing hues, shapes and textures. What Anders had seen and just captured was Planet Earth peeking her nose over the lunar horizon, shedding some small measure of light, color and meaning into the darkness that enveloped the tiny floating capsule and its three inhabitants.
A few hours later, on Christmas Eve, NASA produced a live, primetime telecast for all three networks – one shown, as well, across five continents simultaneously. That half-hour special, which began at 9:30 in Syracuse – a time by which many of the city’s youngest had long since gone to bed in anticipation of Santa’s visit – was viewed by an estimated one billion people worldwide, the largest audience to ever watch any program in the history of the medium.
Meanwhile, outside and in the streets of little Syracuse, the first flakes of winter, almost on cue, began falling. It wasn’t much – certainly less than a full-on snowfall, but more than a simple dusting. Yet, what those flakes might have lacked in volume, they more than made up for in timing and beauty. As a blanket of white spread softly over the city and its neighborhoods, it added a sense of peace and divinity that the scientific wonder that was unfolding inside so many snug and warm homes on this holiest of nights that had seen a new kind of miracle.
Nineteen sixty eight had been a horrible year on so many levels for so many good people in the Salt City, and so many images from the past twelve months – some of them nearly a year old – still stood front and center.
There was that deeply disturbing photo dating all the way back to January of a South Vietnamese police captain during the Tet executing a Viet Cong soldier, a searing image captured just as the bullet seemed ready to exit the young man’s skull.
There was the awful image of Dr. King lying on the balcony of his Memphis hotel room in a pool of his own blood, while a handful of colleagues pointed desperately in the direction of the gunshot that had just laid low their moral and spiritual leader.
There was the image of a likewise dying Bobby Kennedy taken just two months prior of him being comforted in his final moments by a young immigrant busboy who cradled his head just inch or so above the hard tile floor of the kitchen of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel.
There was the image of the two medal-winning U.S. Olympic athletes in Mexico City during the playing of the national anthem, both with heads bowed, a single black-gloved fist raised in protest.
Not to mention the countless images from the blood-stained streets of Chicago during that summer’s Democratic Convention, or the comparable number of shots of fiery race riots and angry anti-war protests on various city streets and college campuses all across America.
But it wasn’t just the images that were unsettling to so many in Syracuse. It was the speed and frequency with which everything around them seemed to be unraveling.
Even inside NASA, the pressure to move forward quickly and at all costs seemed to have created an almost “ready, fire, aim” mentality inside one of the most thorough and exacting branches of the U.S. government.
Yet, as a tribute to the hundreds of dedicated mathematicians, engineers, manufacturers, physicists, biologists and chemists who’d worked day and night, non-stop to try to achieve the unlikeliest of goals, the entire Apollo 8 mission – at least to that point – had gone off with only minor glitches. Everything else – as scientific and/or as math-based as it might have been – seemed almost touched by the Almighty Himself.
And one supposes there may actually have been something to that whole “touched by God” thing, because never before in history, or so it seemed, had science and religion ever come together quite so magnificently, or in a more timely fashion. A leader of a generation of troubled Americans a hundred years prior had once waxed about "our better angels." And the leader decades in the future would soon talk about our striving to "touch the face of God." This was a moment that a generation of Syracusans – indeed, all Americans – had a chance to, perhaps, catch a fleeting glimpse of those two concepts, and in doing so understand them a little better.
That’s, perhaps, why in the worldwide NASA telecast that night, which opened as Apollo 8 was in its second lunar orbit, the crew of astronauts – on their own – chose to end the show in a way that caught more than a few off-guard. Anders – the only Catholic in the crew – spoke first, and the words to follow were the idea of his wife. And he spoke, even as video of the image he’d snapped just a few hours earlier – the shimmering blue Earth shining bright and proud in a sea of darkness – aired over the thin, reedy crackle of his voice.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
The Apollo 8 crew, awed by the divinity, if not majesty, of what they were seeing beyond their capsule’s tiny window, chose to end their special thirty-minute Christmas Eve telecast by reading the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis, with all three members taking turns – first Anders, then Lovell, then Borman.
The beauty and serenity of the image, combined with the Biblical words, touched millions across the globe, moving many to tears, even though the vast majority outside the U.S. were watching on tiny black-and-white sets and unable to understand much, if anything, of what Anders, Lovell and Borman were saying. Those at home and those watching in color, however, saw the Earth in all its glory, and more than a few Americans realized just how small, fragile, and touched by the Creator she suddenly appeared.
For a planet, a country, and even a city that at various points throughout that long and grueling year had appeared on the verge of cracking, it was a moment of desperately needed hope. It was a moment of inspiration and affirmation. And it was a moment that was, above all else, and despite the enormity of the human achievement behind it, humbling.
Anders’ photo – soon to be titled “Earthrise” – would not yet appear in print, at least not until the editors of Life burned the midnight oil that week to rush out a special edition, one that hit the newsstands on New Year’s Day. And though Life’s editors devoted the entire center spread to Anders’ stunning photograph, and even commissioned Poet Laureate James Dickey to write a poem to accompany it, it was the words of another poet that seemed to best capture the essence of Earthrise and why people the world over were so moved by it.
In an essay on Christmas Day for the New York Times, Archibald MacLeish, the venerable Librarian of Congress (and a guy who moonlighted as a pretty darn good poet himself), wrote as he watched the Apollo 8 special from home on Christmas Eve, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”
Like Elvis’ stirring rendition of If I Can Dream three weeks prior, not everyone in Syracuse was able to see, much less appreciate, the visual poetry inherent in Earthrise, nor did everyone fully wrap their brains around its almost transcendent message. To them, it was just a photograph – admittedly, a unique one, but a simple, two-dimensional photograph, nevertheless.
But to countless others, the celestial image captured by Bill Anders offered some clarity, insight and maybe even a little bit of meaning to their troubled times. To such people, it wasn’t just the vibrant color of their home planet that touched them. It was its size.
Because to Syracusans who really, really understood the truth that Earthrise laid bare for anyone with the ability to see and feel it, what they understood was this: it wasn’t Mother Earth’s vastness that made her so special. It was her smallness. Sitting at their kitchen tables, or in their La-Z-Boy recliners while staring wide-eyed at that Life center spread, even as the Christmas spirit lingered in the air, many came to realize, as MacLeish had, that they were all riders on the same, damn little planet – brothers and sisters, every one.
In the end, it was, indeed, just a photo, and Syracuse, like the entire country, still had plenty of pain and trouble in store for it. It would not be long, for example, before people all across the Salt City would read in horror about the deaths of four college kids on an otherwise quiet and unassuming campus in northeast Ohio. Those four students, during an otherwise nonviolent protest in the Spring of 1970, would fall victim to rifle fire from a battery of national guardsmen – each of whom, at least in theory, had raised his right hand at some point and sworn to protect and defend the very same kids who now lay bleeding and dying just a few yards from their dorm rooms.
But Earthrise mattered, dammit. And it did so in a way that, especially during such troubled times, touched many men’s hearts, even if they didn’t fully understand why.
It mattered to Kenny Huffman and to Billy E. It mattered to Father Charlie Brady. It mattered to Manny Breland and to Bob Capone. It mattered to the Reddick clan, as well as to the Harlows, the Schmids, the Dabrowskis, and the Karazubas. It mattered to Paul Seymour and his hard-ass one-time coach, Al Cervi. It mattered to Al and Marshall Nelson and their mayor, Bill Walsh, not to mention his young family up on Tipp Hill. It mattered to Jack Contos, to his mother, Irene, and to Andy, the old Hearts parishioner with the piercing voice and the forever untied Elmer Fudd hat. It mattered to Bobby Felasco and to all those sawed-off and tough-minded little pit bulls he continued to train to run his offense. It mattered to little Danny Van Cott, to big Tommy Sakowski, and to “Pan” Najdul, Sakowski’s Holocaust-surviving and discipline-obsessed mentor. It mattered to Leon Shenandoah, to Oren Lyons, and to countless members of the Onondaga Nation, south of the city. It mattered to Joey Zaganczyk and to his best friend and brother-from-another-mother, Jimmy Przybyl. It mattered to those two proud sons of Poland, Gene and Andrew Fisch, and to the three Neal brothers up from Mississippi, by way of Detroit. And to the guys on both sides of the long, shiny and forever-jam packed bar at the Old Port, to those two magnificently wild Irishmen just a few blocks west, Pete and Danny Coleman, and to the staff and management of the Dunbar Center and Boys Club, both pillars of the 15th Ward. It mattered to Henry Ponti. It mattered to Dolores Morgan. It mattered to Percy Harris, to Bobby Harrison, and to the Celtic-hating and Nat-loving Strangler. It mattered to Tookie and Ricky Chisholm and to the head leprechaun, Bob Hayes. It mattered to Charlie Fahey, to Tom Costello, and to all the priests living at 672 West Onondaga. It mattered to all those in town still working hard to keep Syracuse proud and strong and to even a few who’d already turned tail and run for the safety and promise of the suburbs. And to the nuns, and priests, and parents of what remained of the venerable old Parochial League. It mattered to the local chancery and to countless generations of Syracuse Catholics and non-Catholics still unborn.
That photo mattered to these people because the truth it laid bare mattered. Because more troubled days lie ahead, and the thing that would keep all good people going, the thing they could hold onto was right there in that photo in front of them, even if they didn't know how to articulate it or put it into words.
Yes, 1968 had been difficult for the Salt City and its residents. And, yes, Syracuse’s unprecedented run of manufacturing dominance had, likely, already crested, and its glory days now mostly just visible in its rearview mirror.
And yet, what most of these Syracusans still didn’t know was that, in a few short years, all the pain and uncertainty they’d just experienced over the course of eighteen months’ worth of social havoc was going to seem like a stroll in the park – especially compared to the economic turmoil now lying in wait for them.
Because for all the strife, all the division, and all the deep and lasting social ills that had managed to take root in Syracuse, there had always been a wonderful counterbalance to mitigate any and all such unwanted invaders: namely, its jobs, the comfort and security of making a good, honest living, knowing that a hard-earned paycheck would be handed to you like clockwork at the end of every workweek, even as all that delectable breaded fish was being dropped into all those popping, hissing fryers all across town.
For well over a century in Syracuse, New York, there had always been a seemingly never-ending supply of factories, machine shops, plants, foundries, and mills. Row upon row of proud, belching smokestacks, eager workers, rush orders, incoming phone calls, jam-packed employee parking lots, humming assembly lines, and bustling neighborhood taverns and family restaurants.
When all those things were in their prime and all were chugging along as the heart and soul of the local economy, they served to cover up almost any crack in town, and mend just about any broken fence.
But in just over two decades' time, it would all be gone, or at mostly gone, and in its place would be endless stretches of shuttered factories, scores of chained and weed-choked parking lots, and too many boarded-up and broken windows to even count. At that point, all Syracuse’s problems would find themselves suddenly amplified by a factor that no one had ever even imagined before. And when that happened, in what felt like a heartbeat, the Salt City’s glorious, booming past crossed over and became its very own cruel and taunting memory.
Which brings us back, one last time, to Earthrise. The photograph’s message was as profound as it was unspoken, and it mattered to so many Syracusans, especially as one troubled year ended and another began. Because as 1968 wound down and 1969 spread its wings, the shimmering beauty of Earthrise was there to remind men and women – and not just in Syracuse, but the world over – of what Archibald MacLeish expressed so eloquently: our planet is a tiny blue marble alone in a cold, dark sea of indifference, and we are all on this wild ride together.
Politically. Socially. Economically. Religiously. Culturally. And, certainly, racially. Whatever our differences, however deep and vast our divides, that one simple photographic image that hit the newsstands in the wee hours of 1969 was evidence of humankind's potential. But it was more. It was also an admonition to always keep things in perspective and to never forget that our best hope of overcoming ignorance, hatred and whatever other social ills eventually darken our door, if not our best path to healing, growing and moving forward toward the light of peace and harmony, is by never forgetting that we are all brothers and sisters, all in this together, and, as hard as it may be to embrace at times, all playing on the same team.
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