Billy E got up on Saturday and felt like a king. With the diocesan playoffs looming, there’d be practice tomorrow morning, of course. And, as usual, it would be right after Sunday mass. But today would be a day of relaxation for Billy and one in which he could bask, if only for twenty-four hours or so, in the glory of the previous night’s win.
Even as he lit the gas burner beneath a small stove-top percolator and shook open his morning Post-Standard to see what Mike Holdridge had to say about the game – including that crazy Dabrowski’s prayer from deep in the near corner – part of him just wanted to kick back and do nothing.
He did get a chuckle, however, as he leafed through the front section as he recalled the previous night’s audience with the Boss, when Monsignor Piejda, sitting regally behind his big oak desk, had his boys line up shoulder-to-shoulder in front of him, then rose and strode over to them, Jack Contos at the head of the line, and going from one to the next, just as he'd always done after a particularly big Hearts win. He'd look each boy in the eye, shake one hand, while deliberately and somewhat theatrically placing a crisp five-dollar bill in the other. It was gesture of the Boss’ appreciation for all the twelve young man had done to bring honor and glory to his parish.
Of course, likewise, and just as he’d done each and every time – as far back, in fact, as the first season of varsity play at Sacred Heart – when Piejda reached his ever-devilish coach at the end of the line, there’d be no five-dollar bill and no slow, deliberate gesture of gratitude. Instead, just as Billy had done every other time he gone through this orchestrated ritual, (and much to the grinning delight of the twelve kids alongside him), the Hearts head coach merely looked at the priest who, in turn, said without so much as a wink, “There will be no reward for you tonight, Coach.” Then he would add, as if he’d never said it before, “Instead, your reward will come in heaven.”
Then, just as he’d done every year, Billy simply swallowed whatever had happened to catch in his throat, smiled through gently clenched teeth, and offered the priest a mostly earnest, “Thank you, Monsignor.”
And while Billy proceeded to read Holdridge’s game story that Saturday over his cup of morning Joe – just as he would with the afternoon sports pages over a nice pork dinner with a side of beets – it wasn’t what Billy read that was so interesting or noteworthy. It was what he didn’t.
What Billy E had only glanced at (but not read) in that morning’s Post-Standard was a baseball story just two columns to the right of Holdridge’s All City account. It was a 300-word recap of all the previous day’s Spring Training games from Florida, along with a few line scores. In that truncated compilation of game stories was a passing mention of what would prove to be an unprecedented (and even historic) circumstance in an otherwise uneventful Friday afternoon matchup between the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox, namely:
“The game was expected to mark the debut of the double pinch hitter, a plan which Joe Cronin, president of the American League, has endorsed. It allows American League teams playing each other to use the same pinch hitter more than once in a game."
"Bill Skowron was the White Sox’ designated specialist and Tony Horton handled the job for the Red Sox. But neither team used its option, with Skowron walking in his only at bat and Horton going out in his lone swing.”
Meanwhile, in that evening’s Herald-Journal, adjacent to Adam Gajewski’s All City recap – and next to the photo of Dabrowski being held high and beaming like any kid would under the circumstances – was a basketball story. But it wasn’t just any basketball story. It was an altogether different one.
It was a story that detailed how NBA commissioner Walter Kennedy had just sent a telegram to every player in the league reminding him that if they were to go on strike in advance of the upcoming playoffs, as the players were threatening to do in protest over their pension plan, Kennedy was going to cancel the playoffs entirely and those players would, in turn, forfeit all the postseason money – some $280,000, to be divided among them.
As it currently stood, any player who’d been in the league for ten-plus years received a pension of $200 a month, paid to him from an endowment-type insurance plan that the league had set up on the players’ behalf. (And a plan for which each player was responsible for one-half of his monthly premium of $1,000. The NBA owners then matched that $500 with $500 of their own to make up the difference.)
The AP story also mentioned how certain players were voicing a growing level of concern over something called a “reserve clause” in each of their contracts that bound them to their teams for as long as those teams chose to keep them.
There was, in fact, no players union in the NBA – nor, in fact, was there a union in any pro sports league. But thanks, mostly, to an uncompromising and tough-minded New Yorker named Marvin Miller, a sawed-off little cur of a labor attorney representing a talented but just-traded veteran outfielder named Curt Flood, there soon would be. And when that happened, when Curt Flood sacrificed his career for a cause bigger than himself, pro sports would never be the same.
On a very basic level the two wire stories that Billy E chose to ignore on that crisp, cool, Saturday morning in the second week of March, 1967 were simply two more sports stories fighting for column inches in an otherwise jam-packed sports page.
But, no one – not Billy or anyone else – could be faulted for failing to realize the kind of impact these small and seemingly innocuous items would have on the world of sports going forward. With implications that extended far beyond the chalk lines, these two stories were singing canaries in America's increasingly gas-filled coal mine. Each, in its own way, signaled what, for the foreseeable future, would come to be the single most defining element of the American experience, if not the American way of life:
Change.
But not just any change. And not just garden-variety change – the kind that most folks had some level of familiarity with, or had seen once or twice along the way.
No. What was coming, rolling like thunder across the plains, was a radical and even painful sort of change; a change that would turn almost every aspect of life on its ear, especially up and down Main Street in the hundreds of once-stable and once-secure working-class cities and towns that peppered the country’s proud and still-mighty industrial northeast.
Places, in other words, like Syracuse, New York.
* * * * *
The rest of that year would turn out to be memorable for so many reasons.
Muhammad Ali would refuse induction into the U.S. Army and be arrested, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would officially – and boldly – denounce America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Spencer Tracy, John Coltrane, Dorothy Parker and Carl Sandburg would die, Kurt Cobain, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Will Farrell and Gavin Newsom would be born.
Ronald Reagan would be elected to his very first political office, as Governor of California.
The Philadelphia 76ers would win their very first NBA championship since leaving the Salt City behind and changing their name from the Nationals.
Two films that took the thorny issue of race head-on – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night – would be released to great acclaim and even greater commercial success.
Life magazine would feature on one of its covers a full-color photograph of a twelve year-old boy from Newark – Joe Bass, Jr. – lying sprawled and motionless in the street in a pool of his own blood following a night of bloody rioting, looting, and sniper fire. Inside of that same issue, Life would publish a series of black-and-white images of the final hours of a second young black man from Newark – a guy named Billy Furr – who was shot and killed by the police for looting two cases of beer, but not before telling the reporter, “We ain’t riotin’ agin’ all you whites. We’re riotin’ agin’ police brutality, like that cab driver they beat up the other night. That stuff goes on all the time. When the police treat us like people ‘stead of treatin’ us like animals, then the riots will stop.”
That year the U.S. Supreme Court would rule in Loving v. Virginia that all state laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional, while the very first African American chief justice, Thurgood Marshall, would be elevated to the highest court in the land.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be created by Congress, an entity that would soon give rise to both the PBS television network and the NPR radio network.
The world's first rock musical, Hair, would premiere on Broadway.
The “Summer of Love” and the “Be-In” would both occur to various levels of generational bemusement in the San Francisco Bay Area, as would the Monterey Pop Festival. While the Doors, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground and Creedence Clearwater Revival would all release their very first albums. Meanwhile, a twenty-one year-old Berkeley dropout and free-speech activist named Jann Wenner would distribute the premiere issue of a tabloid-style music rag he called, Rolling Stone.
But despite all that, and despite all the sweeping social change that 1967 represented to so many working men and women in America, much less, Syracuse, the change and tumult of that particular twelve-month period would prove to be a downright whimper compared to the giant, roaring howl that the subsequent twelve month period would soon produce.
* * * * *
It was called the Tet Offensive, named for the fateful day (on the celebration of the Tet, the annual Vietnamese New Year) when some 80,000 Viet Cong guerillas launched a full-out assault on over a hundred cities, villages, and U.S. military installations throughout South Vietnam. The first day of that offensive, which struck like lightning – unexpected, unannounced and deep into the night – was January 30, 1968.
Typical of it was one battle, in particular – a days-long siege in an otherwise quiet and centuries-old little city called Hue, a massive and deadly firefight that virtually leveled the beautiful, ancient and mystical city and killed nearly a thousand of its civilians, along with over over two hundred American fighting men and non-armed personnel.
The battle in historic little Hue was unlike the jungle/guerilla war that comprised most of the Vietnam conflict, but instead was fought in the streets and residential neighborhoods of the city, completely wiping out a number of magnificent and irreplaceable cultural artifacts and structures.
What was critical about the Tet, however, was something that went far beyond death count and the destruction of history, however tragic. Because the Tet became the moment at which, virtually, any American of age and reason, from LBJ on down, began to view the Vietnam War differently than he or she ever had before. And that situation was only amplified by the new-found (and growing) power of the family television set – in particular, the voice of the venerable Walter Cronkite and his nightly CBS Evening News.
Before the Tet, the war had been widely viewed as a regional and eminently winnable border dispute that served as a relatively low-cost safety net against the further spread of Communism. After it, however – with all the raw footage getting beamed nightly onto television screens from Maine to California – Vietnam began to be seen in vastly different terms by millions across the country, Americans young and old, black and white, and on the political left and right. As a result, that armed conflict in the far-off cradle of Southeast Asia began dividing U.S. citizens along ideological lines in ways they’d not been divided since the Civil War.
On one side were what many in the media began calling “Hawks,” mostly older, mostly white, and mostly conservative flag-waving Americans – many of them some combination of working men and combat veterans – who were deeply offended by the Tet and who felt it was time to ratchet up America’s war effort and wipe those Godless Viet Cong “gooks” off the face of the Earth.
On the other side were the “Doves,” the anti-war half of America’s new and growing divide. Many were college kids of various races and creeds, as well as young men of prime draft age, who saw the Vietnam War as an immoral and illegal act of American imperialism that, perhaps for the first time ever, placed their country on the wrong side of history.
For the Hawks and the Doves, the Tet only served to highlight that huge and growing gulf between America’s right and left. For Syracuse (or, more to the point, this story), it was critical because it deeply impacted many of LBJ’s “Great Society” programs – especially, Urban Renewal. To finance the dramatic spike in war expenditures triggered by the Tet ambush, Johnson was forced to shuffle money in the budget, much of it pulled from domestic social programs like Urban Renewal that had been in place only a few years.
As a result, even though most, but not all of Syracuse’s 15th Ward had been leveled, and many, but not all of downtown’s oldest and most magnificent buildings reduced to rubble, any and all such federally mandated tear-downs and construction projects seemed to cease overnight.
Which brings us to a young man named Ed Krukowski.
Eddie Krukowski was a bright, engaging and polite young Polish boy whose parents owned a small market and butcher shop on the corner of Richmond and Liberty Streets, just a stone’s throw from Sacred Heart. Eddie, in fact, had gone to Sacred Heart for grammar school. But when it came time to decide if he wanted to continue his education at his parish's all-new high school, which had just opened, or go elsewhere, he chose the latter. So, rather than walking to and from Sacred Heart every day, just a few blocks from his home on Tipp Hill, he chose to go crosstown to Christian Brothers Academy, the most competitive and prestigious high school in the city, even though it was a full seven miles and two long bus rides away.
But Eddie Krukowski had never been one to settle. He wanted more out of life and, certainly, expected more of himself than anyone around him. That’s why after graduation, and after finishing near the top of his class, he was accepted into (and with his parents’ blessing, enrolled in) West Point, where he soon became a top-flight Army cadet. He’d go on to graduate with honors, marry his sweetheart, have a son, and, in time, move his young family to Colorado.
But when things in Vietnam began to escalate, Eddie Krukowski didn’t hesitate. Even with an infant son and young wife at home, he immediately volunteered to be one of the few thousand “advisors” that President Kennedy had committed to sending to Southeast Asia. Young Eddie believed, as an Army officer, it was his duty to defend freedom and fight communism, regardless of where that fight might take him.
That innate sense of duty, along with his deep sense of humanity, is also why Eddie Krukowski used to regularly write home and ask his parents to send him toys, that he’d then give to the boys and girls in the little village where he was stationed. That’s also why he would soon begin writing and explaining that he hoped, at least once his tour was over, to adopt one of those orphans he’d gotten to know in the village of Dong Xoai.
First Lieutenant Edward E. Krukowski was nine months into his year-long tour of duty when, on June 10, 1965, in the jungles outside little Dong Xoai, a bullet ripped through his young body, killing him instantly.
Eddie was just 24 years old, the very first boy from Syracuse killed in Vietnam – but, sadly, not the last.
Over the course of the next seven long years, fifty-nine young men who’d grown up playing basketball and throwing snowballs in one of Syracuse’s working class neighborhoods – most all of them teenagers or in their early twenties – would lose their lives a half a world away, many in places that months earlier they didn’t even know existed, and might have had trouble pronouncing, if they did.
As the deaths of those local boys began to mount over the passing weeks, months and years, the list of those sons of Syracuse lost in Vietnam began to take on the almost eerie look and feel of a Friday night Parochial League box score.
There were Italian boys with names like Mercurio, Cutri, Fanella and Sacco, Irish boys with names like Collins, Donovan, Gleason and Flaherty, German boys with names like Benz, Stein and Reichelt, Polish boys with names like Czajak, Dobash, Rybak and Michalski, and African American boys – kids who’d spent their entire lives within the nurturing confines of the Ward – with names like Johnson, Belt, Torrance and Wilson. There was even a Native American boy from down near the Onondaga Nation whose name was Bigtree.
And each time another young man from Syracuse died and his body was returned to his mother in a flag-covered pine box, another part of his hometown’s sense of certainty died with him. And the more his factory town’s once-unshakeable sense of clarity and conviction eroded, the greater the divide grew between Central New York’s Hawks and its Doves – the anger and rhetoric on one side becoming matched, almost shout for shout, by the other.
History, of course, would eventually determine that America’s long and agonizing time in Vietnam was a colossal mistake – the product of a decade’s worth of miscalculations, flawed objectives, and politically motivated cover-ups. But some good actually came of it, at least in Syracuse. Because at the time of the Tet – a time during which Urban Renewal and its companion wrecking ball were both muscled up and in full swing – there were many buildings in Syracuse marked for demolition that never ended up being razed.
Oh sure, the magnificent brick and stone buildings that once graced the north and south sides of Clinton Square had been demolished, including the historic Jerry Rescue Building that had once served as the site of the trial of twenty-six runaway slaves who’d been captured en masse in Syracuse while traveling north on Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad.
And, yes, the beautifully ornate Yates and Onondaga Hotels had likewise been demolished, along with two irreplaceable Vaudeville-era theaters, R.K.O. Keith’s and the Paramount.
It was true as well that many of the proposed buildings that had been slotted to go into the expanse of urban landscape that had been made possible by the leveling the 15th Ward, including a sprawling and airy public plaza, never got beyond the planning stages, much less built.
But among the many buildings that would have been destroyed save for 1968’s startling Tet Offensive were a handful of some of the most majestic and beloved structures in the history of downtown Syracuse.
The Gere Bank Building, for example, on Hanover Square was spared, a beautiful stone citadel on the banks of the old Erie Canal that in the 1890s cost its owner some $150,000 to build, a full third of which went to the construction of state-of-the-art, fireproof and below-the-ground steel vaults to protect the bank’s money.
Also spared was the adjacent Gridley Building with one side on Clinton Square, a towering and magnificent structure made completely of indigenous limestone, and one whose lighted clock tower had, at least for the first half of the 20th Century, served as the city’s unofficial timepiece.
Likewise saved was North Salina Street’s Third National Bank Building – also on Clinton Square and also an Archimedes Russell masterpiece – this one a Queen Anne-style red sandstone structure marked by a multi-gabled roof, carved sunflowers in a Gothic trefoil, and a street-level circular bay-and-window that stood in silent watch over the entire square.
Perhaps, most important of all, the Loew’s State Theater on South Salina was spared. A richly detailed and thoroughly opulent show palace, Loew's was the first “Oriental-style” theater in the country, a live entertainment venue festooned with two sweeping staircases, two huge murals, thousands of plush red-and-black velvet seats, a gilded, hand-painted and vaulted ceiling, and, for a time, a giant Tiffany chandelier made by Louis Tiffany himself for the powerful owner of the New York Central Railroad, Cornelius Vanderbilt.
These timeless and irreplaceable buildings and others, every one a downtown pillar, had all been marked for demolition and slated to fall to Bill Walsh’s wrecking ball at some point in 1968. And they would have too, but for two fateful decisions in the first two months of that year, both of them now forever linked in time; the decision by the Viet Cong to launch a sweeping attack on a night when their enemy had just assumed they’d be off celebrating, and the decision by an American president, as a result, to reallocate his finite resources.
The simple facts say that Eddie Krukowski and those other fifty-eight boys from Syracuse were killed in Vietnam. Many will rightfully contend that every one of them died fighting for their country. But in light of subsequent facts, and in light of how things eventually played out, it’s not unreasonable to claim that, as much as those young men died for their country, those boys – every last one of them – also gave their lives for their city.
Because it’s not a stretch to say that without the many iconic buildings that their deaths, in a small way, helped save from the wrecking ball – those just mentioned and others, buildings that a half century later would still be serving as the architectural and spiritual backbone of the city – there simply would not be a Syracuse.
Or at least, the Syracuse that would have survived would have been a plainer, drabber, and far less substantial place – not to mention a far less beautiful one.
On the day that Eddie Krukowski was laid to rest in a leafy corner of Sacred Heart Cemetery, just on the other side of Tipp Hill, the line of cars from the church to the burial site was, quite possibly, as long as that little cemetery had ever seen. After all, Eddie was not just a war hero. In his city and parish, anyway, he was a symbol – a symbol of all that was good and noble about being Polish in America.
Among the cemetery workers who sat there on the soft grass and watched as Eddie Krukowski’s casket got lowered into the cold ground on an otherwise warm and sunny day was a young man just a week or so into his very first summer job. That hulking fourteen year-old and wanna-be power forward in blue jeans and thick, black glasses, a kid who just that month had graduated from Sacred Heart grammar school, had been hired by the caretaker to spend a few dozen hours each week using one of the facility's three push mowers to keep the grass between the headstones neat and trimmed.
And as young Tom Sakowski sat there and watched a fallen soldier’s casket disappear into the ground before him, more intrigued and respectful than actually moved, his right arm resting on one knee and a blade of grass dangling from his mouth, he did so completely unaware that the only world – the only city – he’d ever known in his life had just taken one more step down an increasingly dark and uncertain path.
* * * * *
Manny Breland was, admittedly, not just another guy from the Ward. He’d been a giant star at Central High, especially to those in his neighborhood. He was also a local kid who’d made history by becoming the first African American to ever win a full athletic scholarship to Syracuse University, in the process becoming Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown’s teammate and S.U. basketball legend Vinnie Cohen’s roommate, while lettering in both those sports himself. And, given his height, skin color and massive physicality, he was a guy whose presence was felt the very moment he entered a room.
But following that 1966-67 school year, Franklyn Barry, Syracuse’s progressive and proactive superintendent of schools, had bigger plans for the guy everyone in the Ward still called “Boobie.” At that point, Breland had been serving as one of Barry’s gym teachers in one of his district’s mostly anonymous and most Black junior high schools.
Barry, an educated and lettered middle-aged white man who’d once lived in the suburbs and who’d come to his job as Superintendent of the Syracuse City Schools following a brief but successful run as head of the largely white North Syracuse District, wanted to know if Breland would be interested in coaching Central’s basketball team the upcoming season. The proposed position, he explained, would also include a place on the Central faculty, a package deal that would end up rankling more than a few white teachers at the school, all of whom were union members who felt such a move was forbidden by the rules of their union.
But Barry was a skilled administrator who always took the long view on any and all decisions. He saw Breland as the one man in his district capable of navigating Syracuse’s growing racial divide. The Black community, even the kids, would respect his size, stature and reputation, while the all-white school administrators would acquire for themselves a powerful ally who’d been taught to compete and succeed within the framework of the system as outlined. In other words, a Black man who played by the rules.
Barry had first made a name for himself in Syracuse a few years prior by proposing a radical educational concept he soon called his “Campus Plan.” As far back as 1962, Mayor Bill Walsh, spurred by his own sense of conscience and motivated, perhaps, to an even greater degree by a series of rather loud and conspicuous protests by the George Wiley-led local chapter of CORE, had formed a committee to analyze the state of education in his city, with a particular emphasis on the imbalance, if not downright inequality between Syracuse’s mostly black and mostly white public schools.
One school board member, in particular – a gentleman named David Jaquith – had long been dead-set against the very idea that there were any racial inequities in Syracuse’s schools, and at one particular board meeting in the Spring said to those gathered, “I don’t accept the premise that racial imbalance represents any kind of missed opportunity. I don’t think the school should accept responsibility for fixing what is basically a housing problem.”
But even Jaquith, himself, got on board after a test conducted by Walsh’s committee to study the performance of a handful of “Negro” students who’d been taken out of the largely black Madison Junior High and bused two miles east to the virtually all-white Levy. Jaquith, who had been integration’s biggest foe on the board, suddenly, and almost overnight, became one of its staunchest supporters when it was revealed just how much better each student had performed in the well-appointed, well-equipped and far more-accountable environment at Levy. As Jaquith told a packed house at a school board one night after the release of the findings of Walsh’s study, with more than a touch of wonder in his voice, “At Madison Junior High School, if you cooperated with the teacher and you did your work, you were a ‘kook.’ At Levy Junior High School if you didn’t cooperate with the teacher and you didn’t do your work, you were a ‘kook.’”
In the immediate aftermath, one of the first things the Syracuse School Board did following integration’s new-found momentum (and its new-found advocates in City Hall, especially the powerful guy behind the biggest and most important desk), was to hire the best superintendent they could find.
Enter Franklyn Barry.
Led by Barry’s vision and bold, progressive ideas, and armed with Walsh’s commitment and outsized political muscle, the integration of Syracuse’s public schools began in earnest in the Fall of 1965.
That’s when, on September 14, and on the front page of that day’s Herald-Journal (and the following day’s Post-Standard), some of the most compelling (what editors call) “art” in city history appeared above the fold. It was a series of Norman Rockwell-like photos of the mayor escorting young black children to school on their first day at Salem-Hyde Elementary – and, in the case of one young African American girl, a photo of the two of them hand-in-hand as they walked. Bill Walsh had gladly grabbed that series of photo ops because that was the day on which school integration had, at long last, become a matter of law in his proud little smokestack town.
But with integration, of course, came school busing and with busing came rancor, especially among thousands of white parents of a certain mindset. Among many such parents, the thinking began to take root that the best way to protect a child from having to go to a public school with “Negroes” was to send him or her to one of Syracuse’s Catholic schools.
That little bit of parental decision-making might have actually worked too, except for one thing; the young resolute man of the cloth who Bishop Foery had recently named superintendent of schools in his diocese, a determined idealist and refreshingly pragmatic young doer named Father Thomas J. Costello – who, beyond his truly brilliant mind, was a highly principled man. Costello also been one of those younger priests who’d lived with Father Brady on West Onondaga Street in his late twenties and early thirties, who’d traveled to Montgomery with him to march alongside Dr. King, and whose worldview had been forever shaped by having learned firsthand at the knee of the Saint of Syracuse himself.
One night in Prescott School, on the city’s North Side, a woman at an increasingly heated public forum on busing and integration rose and, while pointing a finger menacingly, told the panel on stage through clenched teeth, “Before you ever bus my child, I will transfer him into a Catholic school!” At which point, and with no real authority, Costello calmly looked down and responded, “The Catholic schools will not accept transfers from the Syracuse public schools. If there are changes of residence from out of town or something like that, we’d be interested, but won’t – for the present time – be accepting any transfers.”
A couple of days later, Costello, though not necessarily asking for it, received a somewhat cautious nod of approval from his boss, Bishop Foery, for his bold statement and verbal line in the sand.
It was clear, however, that the battle lines in Syracuse were being drawn. Superintendent Barry’s so-called “campus plan” had been a direct response to all that hue and cry over busing – which had emerged as the hot-button issue in the city. Yet, rather than bus a handful of kids each day, Barry at one point reasoned to himself, why not bus them all?
Even before things heated up, Barry had envisioned a series of four educational complexes on all four sides of the city, the first on the West Side, near Burnet Park, which roughly a quarter of Syracuse’s boys and girls would be free to attend, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. He envisioned multiple grammar schools, multiple junior highs and multiple high schools – even a Catholic school tucked in there – with every last one nestled in a green, sprawling and open-air variation of a classic college “campus.”
Try as he might, though, Barry was no miracle worker. His campus plan died a slow and somewhat painful death after three years of spirited, passionate, and often heated debate.
It's death did not happen, however, before the city’s ongoing white flight managed to find an even higher gear. By the Spring of 1967, even though three of the four public high schools in the city – Corcoran, Henninger and Nottingham – still maintained a semblance of racial balance, the fourth – Central Tech – had become the virtual antithesis of such balance.
That’s why one overcast day, and with the specter of 1968 looming on the horizon, the ever-vigilant Barry approached one of his junior high phys-ed teachers, Emmanuel “Boobie” Breland, and asked him to take the reins of the highest profile sports team in the blackest school in his district. Big Boobie, for his part, had never coached anything or anyone in his life. But, perhaps, sensing the importance of what Barry was asking of him, if not the times themselves, he reached out his big right hand and accepted the superintendent’s challenge on the spot.
* * * * *
First things first – and let’s get this out of the way now. The following year, Manny Breland’s Scarlet Lancers did, indeed, win the 1968 CNY Cities League basketball championship. Using the core of the team that Jack Johnstone had assembled, nurtured, and coached the first part of the decade, the Lancers – now fully matured – also marched through and won with relative ease the New York State Section Three championship.
As it turns out, however, coaching basketball and outscoring opponents was the easy part of Manny’s new job. The harder part was dealing with Central Tech’s increasingly restless and self-aware body of students; a bunch of senior-high Black kids who, like no generation of African American teenagers before them, had started to raise their fist, spread their wings, and look for new and different ways to be counted.
Manny’s first year on the job, in fact – beginning in the Fall of 1967 – many of the kids at Central, spurred by a heightened awareness of their own Blackness, if not their African roots, started staging a series of planned “walkout” protests. What, specifically, those kids were protesting against and what they actually wanted from the largely white school leadership would remain as much a mystery years later as it was even as they were doing it. Whatever the reason though – call it raging hormones, pent up frustration, a budding social conscience, or maybe a mix of all those things – those kids’ walkouts eventually became something of the order of the day in Manny Breland’s first year.
Yet, despite their regular walkouts and protests, there were at least two staffers who the Central kids always responded to, always admired, and always trusted more than anyone. Manny was one. The other was one of Breland’s fellow staff members, a kind-hearted and soft-spoken Italian teacher-turned-guidance counselor named Bob Capone.
Capone had started out as a math teacher at Madison Junior High. As a white kid raised in the rough-and-tumble “Bricks” of Pioneer Homes, he’d spent the first few of his schoolboy years, those immediately following World War II, not only living in shadow of the Bricks but going to Washington Irving Elementary in the heart of the Ward.
As a freshly minted and still-idealistic young educator, Capone had been an important source of understanding for many of these same Central kids back when they were together at Madison, nurturing them, if only as their math teacher, through any number of traumas, such as drunken and occasionally abusive parents, landlord evictions, chronic poverty, and, as much as anything, the sultry allure of the streets.
The respect he garnered was why, after only a few months on the job at Central, the twenty four-year old Bob Capone was elevated by the principal from teacher to guidance counselor. While Capone and Breland had been on the staff together at Madison, during their first year at Central they became dear friends, while also emerging as beacons of hope for many of their students.
For those reasons and others – not the least of which was the uncommon humanity that bonded them – by the Fall of 1967, both Breland and Capone had earned some major "street cred" from the Central kids – more so than any of the other teachers in the building.
Part of their secret was how attuned both were to their students' moods. Often, in the teachers’ lounge that first year, Breland and Capone would half-joke with one another how, on certain days, it was actually possible to walk into Central in the morning and know it was going to be a long day. You could feel it in the air and see it in the kids’ eyes – or, at least, in how they avoided making eye contact with anyone in authority. On one such day, a day on which Breland and Capone could almost smell trouble from the get-go, it began with a student walkout at ten that morning. That was the start, and something of the trigger event, for what was to follow. Because what really changed everything, and the reason years later that both men would talk about that day as if it were yesterday, was what transpired after the walkout.
Upstate Medical Center had just been built in the heart of what had once been the 15th Ward, or, more specifically, Renwick Place and a section of the Ward once affectionately referred to as “Sugar Hill.” The now-state-of-the-art hospital was located just down Adams Street at the base of the S.U. campus and a few blocks east of Central’s magnificent main building. As a four-lane, one-way thoroughfare, Adams had grown to become the de facto access road for any and all emergency vehicles headed to Upstate from points north, west and south of the city.
But because there were now a few thousand kids, most of them black, milling about in the middle of the street and preventing emergency vehicles from gaining access to the hospital, it wasn’t long before the police showed up.
Only what showed up at Central that day wasn’t just a couple of patrolmen in a squad car. It was the riot brigade armed with rifles and billy clubs, and accompanied by the so-called “paddy wagon.” Commanding this force of armed-and-shielded riot officers was a tough, grizzled Irishman from New York City named John O’Connor, a veteran lawman who’d moved upstate and had been serving as Syracuse’s police chief for the past five months.
O’Connor had some experience with this kind of "situation" in his newly adopted hometown, having been sworn in the very morning after a violent (and racially fueled) outbreak five months earlier on the 800 block of East Genesee Street. Some two hundred people that night – most all of them young, displaced 15th Ward African Americans, had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the window of the Capital Cleaners on Fayette Street, burning the mom-and-pop establishment to the ground in minutes.
That angry crowd had then tossed a brick through the front window of Lund’s Men’s Store on Crouse Ave and looted it of a few thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise. The rioters also broke windows at the Regent Theater on East Genesee and tossed a second Molotov cocktail through the front window of a residence a few doors down from the theater. All told, there were sixty-four arrests that night, with Mayor Walsh immediately imposing what would turn out to be a three-day curfew.
So, at least when it came to spontaneous and illegal assemblies on the streets of Syracuse, that morning on Adams Street was not, by any means, Chief O’Connor’s first rodeo.
Immediately after pulling up in front of the school, Syracuse’s top cop jumped out of the car, megaphone in hand, and began advising the students – in what one onlooker would later call his best “Bronx brogue” – that this was an illegal assembly and for everyone to disperse. O’Connor didn’t articulate whether those Central kids should go home or return to class. Most of the whites among them, however, took the chief’s instructions literally and simply left the scene before they were told to return to class.
Not so the bulk of Central’s Black students. They, instead, started yelling back at Syracuse’s new chief of police and his well-armed militia, some of them crabbing their crotches or thrusting a middle finger upward violently at O’Connor, gestures of contempt for both him and his words.
That’s when one young student broke away from the crowd and tried to grab the megaphone out of O’Connor’s hand, much to the delight of his schoolmates, a number of whom were egging him on as he beamed with pride over his own rambunctiousness.
However, that’s also when O’Connor yanked the megaphone back, held it high, and gave a slight nod to the uniformed officer closest to him. That cop then, almost as if spring loaded, quickly raised the thick wooden club in his right hand and brought it down hard on the young man’s head.
The sound that nightstick made when it came down square on that poor kid’s coconut conjured up images of how a watermelon might sound if dropped from a first-story window.
All Manny Breland could do was look on with horror as two other cops then picked the Central student up off the ground, one under each arm, and dumped him unceremoniously into the paddy wagon. That’s when a couple of male students raced over to Breland, even as the shouting at O’Connor reached an even more fevered pitch. “Mr. Breland…Mr. Breland!” the boys pleaded above the angry voices of their schoolmates, “They can’t get away with that. They just can’t. You gotta do something!”
Instead of trying to do something he knew he’d be powerless to do, big Manny simply looked down at the boys and said unequivocally, “I don’t understand. Do you think this is a game? Do you think you can just try to steal the man’s bullhorn and not have to pay for it?” He then looked directly into the students’ eyes, neither of whom he really knew, and added without even a trace of judgement. “This is real life, boys,” he said, sounding every bit the budding basketball coach he was. “And in life there are consequences.”
Meanwhile, just a few yards away, Breland’s good friend and colleague, Bob Capone, was talking to a small group of young female students, one of whom, with tears welling up in her eyes, asked her vice principal in a slightly dazed and almost confused way, “What do they think they’re doing, Mr. Capone? It’s…it’s just not right.”
“I’m sorry, Darlene,” said Capone with sympathy and understanding. “I truly am. But these guys aren’t teachers and they’re not trained like teachers. They’re cops and they’re doing exactly what they’ve been trained to do.” Looking over the tops of the students now gathered around him, he added earnestly, “Please, you girls – everybody – go home before anyone else gets hurt. Please. Just leave. We can all talk about this tomorrow morning. I promise.”
Cleaning up that single Black student protest on that single block of Adams Street near Central Tech High School in the Fall of 1967 took Police Chief John O’Connor and his men all of about forty-five minutes, a bullhorn, and one timely and well-placed blow from a hickory billy club. The long and arduous task of repairing their city’s deepening racial divide in the wake of the 15th Ward’s demise, however, would prove to be something far more complicated and elusive.
* * * * *
Nineteen sixty eight in muscular little Syracuse, as in so many other industrial American cities, big and small, the wheels just seemed to come off the cart.
That was especially true when it came to the white-hot issue of Vietnam and the protests over it. In Syracuse, in that year alone, there were four different stories – and four different events – all of which had at their core a deep disillusionment, if not a full-fledged anger, over America’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia.
The four individuals at the heart of those stories – David Miller, Daniel Berrigan, David Ifshin, and Ronald Brazee – all had strong ties to Syracuse.
David Miller, for one, had always been a good kid. An East Side Catholic, he’d grown up in a small frame house near Schiller Park and graduated from CBA, where he’d played some varsity basketball. In fact, he’d proven to be such a deadly shooter in high school, that he often came off the bench to provide the Brothers instant offense – so much so, in fact, he became known around the league as something of a Frank Ramsay, who at that point was playing that same "sixth man" role for Red Auerbach’s Celtics of the NBA.
Miller was also a young man who cared deeply about the condition of his fellow man, having learned firsthand at Le Moyne, a tiny Jesuit college, that any man’s world view, if not his life, should always be governed by a steadfast and courageous mix of morality, compassion and intellect.
It’s why, for a few years anyway, David attended mass every Sunday morning at Father Norcott’s St. Joseph’s French Church in the 15th Ward, and watched with wonder as Father Brady joyously dispensed his unique and selfless brand of love to many of the Ward’s neediest. He also regularly volunteered to help ladle soup and pass out bread to the hungry and homeless in the church’s basement.
That’s why, after Brady had gotten to know David a little, sensing he’d found a kindred spirit in the youngster, he asked him if he’d like to take over the Bible study class that St. Joe’s held for the Ward’s schoolchildren every Saturday.
Charlie Brady was, in fact, at least part of the reason why Miller had been arrested three times already for protesting some perceived injustice or another. His most recent run-in with the law – at least before the one that would ultimately earn him national headlines and get his face plastered on the front pages of newspapers across the country – was for trespassing on Niagara Mohawk property while walking side-by-side with Brady in protest over the regional power company’s discriminatory hiring practices, an arrest that had, ultimately, earned him over twenty days in the city lockup.
David Miller was not, however, a troublemaker. Quite the opposite, in fact. Miller was a loving and gentle pacifist in every sense of the word, and a young man who, over the years, had slowly become more and more committed to social justice. To that end, and while still at Le Moyne, he joined and became an active member of the Catholic Workers Movement, a faith-based network of chapters that stressed peace and passivism, along with the dignity of all men.
At Le Moyne, even as he was playing on the freshman basketball team, being referred to as “Red” by his drinking buddies, wooing his college sweetheart, and winning the intramural touch football championship two out of three years, David was also proving to be the classic idealist coming of age in a classic liberal arts school. The Jesuits at Le Moyne exposed him and his hungry mind not only to the teachings of far left faculty members like Father Daniel Berrigan, a Syracusan who in a few short years would emerge as the country’s leading symbol of faith-based radical politics, but also the musings of another of his instructors, Tony Bouscaren, whose politics and writings were so staunchly (and even proudly) far right wing that he’d eventually be nominated for a high-level post in the Reagan administration.
But with his college days now behind him, everything changed for Miller with one single act of defiance on the morning of October 15, 1965. That was the day on which, in lower Manhattan, he took part in an act of social protest that, from that point forward, fundamentally altered the very shape, tenor and direction of his life.
On that day, sporting a fresh shave and haircut, along with the new Wells & Coverley suit his mother bought him for graduation, Miller stepped onto the back of a flatbed truck near Battery Park, said a few words, and, after a few failed tries with a match, borrowed a cigarette lighter and lit his draft card on fire, holding it aloft to the cheers of a few hundred fellow protesters who’d assembled there with him.
Young men had been burning their draft cards in America for well over two years. But this was different. This was the first time a young man had burned his card since doing so had been declared illegal. A redundant and largely symbolic law had just been passed – almost unanimously, mind you – by Congress that made burning or destroying a valid draft card a Class A felony. That confluence of fresh law and personal principles put one David Miller, All American boy, in the crosshairs of, among others, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Three days later, following his arrest by some FBI agents at a Catholic Workers event in New Hampshire, Miller’s picture and story became front page news all across the country. To his credit, and knowing his arrest was imminent, he’d chosen to get his hair cut and to don his new suit, tie and a fresh shirt each and every morning. Miller wanted the world to know, and in no uncertain terms, that he was not just some garden variety hippie who’d burned his draft card on a lark. He was a young, devout Catholic and servant of the Lord who stood firmly against any and all wars, but especially this one.
The reason 1968 was so important to David Miller (not to mention his wife, daughter, and those who knew him) was because that was the year during which, the appeal process having run its course, he was sent to federal prison in Pennsylvania for the start of what, at maximum, could have been a five-year stretch.
Before Miller was led off to prison in cuffs, though, while covering his trial for Life magazine, journalist Loudon Wainwright wrote most presciently, “As for David Miller, I wonder about him...I have no argument with his right to express his views, though I would disagree with many of them.” Wainwright concluded almost wistfully: “I do not question his sincerity, his courage, or his good works, which have been considerable. Yet during the trial I somehow began to worry about his future.”
Dolores Morgan, the mother of ten and former 15th Ward resident who’d also been the very first African American student of any kind at any Parochial League school, and who continued to support Father Brady on so many of his pro-social initiatives, thought the world of young David Miller. She’d watched how he had embraced the Ward and its little French church, and watched too, at least through the window, the sincerity he always exuded whenever he was teaching her son and his classmates their Saturday morning Bible studies.
That’s why it broke her heart to see those pictures of David being carted off to prison for doing nothing other than standing up for something he believed. And that’s why it broke her heart even more when a friend who’d run into Miller some three years later, just after he’d been released, told her he'd beheld a changed, if not a broken man. He said it barely even looked like David. Dolores thought of what a high-security federal prison could do to any man, much less one as young, as innocent, and as fresh-faced as David Miller, who at the time was both a young father and husband. That very thought, in fact, made the mother in Dolores shiver at the possibilities.
As for Miller, he’d soon leave Syracuse altogether and head for points West. He’d eventually practice law for a bit in the Bay Area and have a few more children along the way. He’d even fight a few more battles on behalf of the kind of social justice that had always moved him. As for keeping up to date on him, the only thing that most in Syracuse knew about him was that he’d apparently crawled inside his new post-prison world and let the door slam behind him. Miller did write a book about, among other things, his anti-war experiences. But beyond that, just about all anyone knew back east was that the young Syracusan who’d once been such a devout Catholic and such a strong believer in the dignity and goodness of all men had traded much of that in to focus on, as he outlined in his book, such curious pursuits as ecofeminism, witchcraft and Mayan ball games.
The aforementioned Berrigan, meanwhile, a longtime Jesuit priest and, likewise, Syracusan, also had himself something of an above-the-fold year in 1968. Having left Le Moyne and his hometown behind for a life of political activism, he and his kid brother, Phil, like Miller, managed to make some national news and draw J. Edgar Hoover’s ire. In their case, it was for a dramatic protest they pulled off in a little Catonsville, Maryland.
On May 17 of that year, the two Berrigans and seven others walked into the selective service office in Catonsville, just south of Baltimore, grabbed 378 draft files, carried them into the parking lot in a basket of wire mesh, doused them with a quantity of homemade napalm they’d been carrying (an incendiary used, symbolically, by soldiers in Vietnam), and set the entire thing afire. They did all that while reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
The Catonsville Nine, as they were soon being called, got arrested on the spot and, while in custody, both humorously and earnestly, sent flowers to the clerk at the selective service office with their apologies for having tied and gagged her during their little escapade. Dan Berrigan and six of the other protesters, rather than showing up for their arraignment, then chose to skip town and head underground, living anonymously for the next few years and constantly moving from location to location to avoid detection.
Unlike David Miller, though, who curried some measure of sympathy from many Syracusans and who was viewed as much a victim and confused kid as he was a law breaker, Berrigan was seen as a professional agitator and troublemaker. He was looked upon in his hometown as a guy who constantly wanted to taunt Hoover and his fellow “establishment” types, regularly showing up on the nightly news from various points around the country, lecturing the FBI director and anyone in power about the error of their ways, it not the immorality of their positions.
Regardless, it seemed to many in conservative little Syracuse that the world outside was going to hell in the proverbial hand basket – so much so that even Catholic priests were starting to behave like spoiled, pampered brats, thumbing their noses at authority and mocking many of the very conventions that helped make America the country it was.
That year, 1968, as it so happened, was also the year that fundamentally changed forever a young man named David Ifshin.
Like All-American Dave Bing a few years prior, Ifshin had come up to Syracuse from the Washington, DC area. Unlike Bing, however, young David didn't have a near-genius ability to shoot or dribble a basketball. He was just a good Jewish boy from a working-class part of Silver Spring, a young man with a keen mind who read a lot, actively followed current events, and regularly volunteered to help his old man around the small liquor store he owned in a rough-and-tumble section of DC.
Harold and Shirley’s son had grown up at the knees of two longtime Roosevelt Democrats. Harold had even fought proudly in World War II. Members of the "Greatest Generation," the Ifshins instilled in their boy a deep and abiding sense of patriotism and support for a government that opened pathways to a better life for all its citizens.
Yet, David had begun to question his parent’s perspective in the summer of 1964 after an eye-opening visit to the frontlines of the civil rights struggle. An essay on race relations had won him a place on a Kiwanis Club trip where he visited St. Augustine, Florida, after the so-called “Wade-In” in which segregationists poured acid into public swimming pools. Ifshin also traveled to Philadelphia, Mississippi just after the disappearance of civil rights volunteers, Michael Goodman, James Chaney, and Andrew Schwerner, all three of whom were subsequently found to have been murdered on a desolate country road by the Ku Klux Klan.
Nevertheless, when eighteen-year-old David arrived in Central New York in the Fall of 1966 as a freshman at Syracuse University, he was still a slightly left-leaning political moderate who, despite increasing unrest among so many his age, still supported LBJ’s best efforts to prevent all those dominos from falling in Southeast Asia. To that end, he soon joined the campus chapter of the Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC), an Army program designed to recruit and train commissioned officers directly off carefully selected college campuses.
But David Ifshin's sense of himself as an informed political moderate suddenly – as if overnight – began to dissipate. That was due, largely, to a single trip he made in the long and particularly hot Summer of 1968 as a newly elected member of the Syracuse University student government, a position that afforded him the opportunity to fly to the nation’s heartland, to Chicago, and that year’s Democratic National Convention.
David Ifshin had always been a believer in nonviolence and the right to non-violent protest, à la Dr. King. Especially given his days at the liquor store, even after what he seen during the summer of 1964, he believed that in a democratic society the police had his back – had, in fact, everyone’s back. But what happened in Chicago that summer opened his eyes in ways they’d never been opened before. He saw peaceful protesters – some of them no more than seventeen or eighteen (and a few, even, with infants in their arms or children by their side) – being savagely beaten with nightsticks by police officers, many of them on horseback or firing teargas canisters. To Ifshin’s impressionable mind, those Chicago cops looked and acted more like a well-trained, military-state army than they did a well-meaning collection of public servants and protectors of the peace.
Inside the Chicago Coliseum on the city's South Side, an arena just a stone’s throw from its storied Union Stockyards, as a few moderate delegates were taking the dais to rip Mayor Daley and his heavy-handed use of “Gestapo tactics” to quell the unrest, on Michigan Ave, just a little uptown of there, youthful blood continued to flow in the streets.
The seeds had been planted on that single trip during that summer like no other. David Ifshin had managed to meet the likes of Yippie leaders Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. He had encountered folk singer, Phil Ochs, who would later become a good friend, and whose I’m Not Marching Anymore and Draft Dodger Blues had both become anti-war anthems for the growing youth culture. When he returned to Syracuse, Ifshin was no longer taking anything for granted, no longer content to just sit on the political sidelines. Instead, he had come to reflexively question authority, and to demand a seat at the table whenever and wherever decisions were being made about university life.
Soon, the brash young activist was elected student body president. He organized sit-ins, student protests and other forms of demonstration. At one point, he even led a non-violent takeover of one of the school's administration buildings. Before long, David Ifshin had grown his hair, begun sporting what would soon become his signature goatee, and was using his burning, laser-focused eyes and a voice that could simultaneously seduce and cut like a straight razor to display a level of intensity and public passion that few on campus had ever seen from him before.
Ifshin also began taking on Syracuse chancellor John Corbally directly, regularly engaging in heated debates with his school’s chief administrator about many aspects of student life, especially its ROTC program. He also spent hours in the school’s quad in the heart of campus discussing, with virtually anyone he happened to encounter, the importance of taking a more active role in the day-to-day operations of the university’s administration, including its campus police.
Ifshin, in fact, soon became so public and such a polarizing figure in his adopted hometown, that he eventually became something of a whipping boy for the editorial staffs of the two local newspapers. Both even went so far as to make him the centerpiece of a pair of full-blown essays featured prominently atop their respective op-ed pages.
Those op-ed pieces (or, frankly, any news stories about him) rarely, if ever, exhibited even a modicum of balance. A few took cruel and incendiary swipes at the S.U. student president, maliciously (and inaccurately) painting Ifshin as something of a Godless, nihilistic, draft-dodging college brat who, like so many “hippies” of the day, wore his hair long, refused to shave or bathe, and who was willing and eager to tear down anything simply because it was there.
The over-the-top reactions and florid language of the editorialists in Syracuse's two major dailies were echoed throughout the country as conservatives – or more broadly, the “older generation” – reacted with rancor to any demands for change by the country’s “younger generation.” In Syracuse, it was Ifshin’s lot, rightly or wrongly, to bear the consequences of such a vast yet arbitrary cultural and generational divide.
One such opinion piece in the Herald-Journal even claimed that Ifshin was a member of a highly subversive minority of college students who “are more than slightly interested in a full Communist victory in Vietnam and in ‘the death’ of American colleges…and other institutions in the U.S. by whatever means, fair or foul.”
That same editorial concluded: “It’s about time college administrators, trustees, and loyal faculty members began examining what is happening under their noses. And it’s past time that the ‘silent majority’ of students who are in college to get an education awoke to the manner in which they are being taken by their so-called Student Government leaders” (this, despite the fact Ifshin had been elected just that Fall by a clear majority of the S.U. student body).
Yet, it was not until after the above hatchet-job had run that David Ifshin would truly do something that turned him into a national figure and, in some circles, a full-blown social pariah.
In 1970, as part of his duties as the new president of an organization calling itself the National Student Association (NSA), the recent Syracuse University grad and a small contingent of representatives from colleges around the country boarded a plane, flew to Hanoi, and engaged in a series of mock peace negotiations with kids from a handful of comparable schools in North Vietnam.
This was at the height of the Vietnam War, mind you, when tensions between the U.S. and North Vietnam were at their highest level. It was why, the South Vietnamese government, believing the stunt was both treasonous and counterproductive to any real-life peace negotiations, steadfastly denied Ifshin and his contingent access to Saigon.
But, once in Hanoi, Ifshin did something that went far beyond the scope of the trip’s original intent. After being shown graphic photographs, along with given a tour of a local hospital to see first-hand what the American bombing and napalm were doing to so many men, women and children in North Vietnam, he gave an interview on Radio Hanoi in which he railed against America’s involvement in the war.
He even went so far as to urge any U.S. fighting man within the sound of his voice to go AWOL. He told the GI’s they were fighting an immoral war for a country that continued to support an illegal regime in Saigon. He told them the war they were fighting and dying for was not about stopping the spread of Communism. For the U.S., it was about money. For the North Vietnamese, it was about freeing the noble men and women of Vietnam to choose their own destiny and run their own country.
Even as his words hung in the air, Ifshin knew he had crossed a line. He immediately regretted giving the interview, especially after just having seen what he had in those photos and witnessing all the human suffering he’d been forced to observe.
But, it was too late. The damage had been done.
The jaw-dropping public statement by a young man who was serving, ostensibly, as an emissary for his country, shocked people back home, including tens of thousands of his fellow Syracusans. For many, including those on the political left, what young David Ifshin did – two years before Jane Fonda, mind you – was beyond the pale, and certainly beyond any reasonable expectation for the limits of free speech, especially in a time of war.
To so many simple, hard-working and God-fearing men and women back in Central New York, what that punk, that war protester, that long-haired ingrate from S.U., had just done was downright treasonous. And if any act deserved hanging for having given aid and comfort to the enemy, that was it.
Years later, Arizona Senator John McCain, who’d spent five and a half years in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” including two solid years of solitary confinement, being systematically tortured and brainwashed, said Ifshin’s comments, along with other propaganda recordings, had been piped into his cell for hours on end, morning to night. He’d later admit that all that torture and propaganda ultimately broke him – a breaking of his spirit that ultimately compelled him to sign a statement of guilt drawn up for him that denounced the country he loved and for which he’d fought so selflessly and given so much.
Although McCain’s personal understanding of that crazy, ill-conceived jungle war had evolved greatly over time, when he got himself elected to Congress nearly a decade later, one of his very first official duties was to deliver a speech written specifically for him by President Ronald Reagan’s staff, one that denounced Ifshin for what he’d done to harm the country, if not McCain personally, during a time of war.
The idea that McCain and Ifshin would later bury the hatchet and actually become dear friends would have been immaterial to so many in Syracuse, New York in 1970.
Also immaterial would have been the notion that one day relatively early in his career, Ifshin would walk into McCain’s office, reach out his hand, look the first-term Congressman in the eye, and tell him he was sorry, that he’d made a terrible mistake as a young man and would do anything in the world to take back all he’d said and done.
Nor would it have mattered, even one whit, that the two men would eventually grow so close that, following Ifshin’s death from cancer in 1996, McCain would spend the balance of his days referring to him as a “friend and patriot,” and that, at the funeral, McCain would deliver a tearful eulogy in which he spoke about how David Ifshin had become his personal hero and had taught him that there are many ways to love one’s country, and that Ifshin had shown him what it meant to sacrifice everything, even your own name, in defense of the country you loved.
But least in Central New York, none of any of that would have mattered in the Fall of 1970.
Because in that turbulent era, all that mattered was that a twenty-one year old recent S.U. grad named David Ifshin, an English major from the nation's capitol, had taken it upon himself to drive a stake deep into the heart of Syracuse, further dividing an already splintering city and ratcheting up its anger and fear factor to an almost untenable level.
Which leads us to the fourth and final person on the list.
Ronald Brazee was significantly different from the other three Vietnam-era men with whom he shared both a year and a city. First off, he was barely a man at all, even a young one. He was boy, for God’s sake; a junior at Central High in nearby Auburn, and a sixteen year-old teenager who still brought home American History and Trigonometry homework every night. Unlike the others, he was still living under the same roof as his mom and dad.
Ultimately, though, the thing that separated Ronald Brazee from the likes of David Miller, Daniel Berrigan and David Ifshin was the simple fact that he was the only one of the four who did not survive the era – or, sadly, even the decade.
Ronnie Brazee ended up dying a horrific, nearly slow-motion death. It was a death that began on a side street in downtown Syracuse, and though it may not have made the headlines the other three men managed to make, the circumstance of it were all the proof anyone who saw it needed that the world – their world – was spinning madly out of control.
The concept of self-immolation as a form of social protest had never really entered most people's minds before – that is, until the Summer of 1963 when a Buddhist monk, protesting the U.S.-backed Diem regime in South Vietnam, sat down cross-legged in a public square in the heart of Saigon and, without saying a word, doused himself with gasoline, lit a match, and purposefully set himself ablaze, much to the horror of the hundreds who looked on helplessly.
The Buddhist monk’s excruciating yet completely silent suicide in full public view was a searing statement of political and religious resistance. It not only made front-page news the world over, it elevated awareness of the armed conflict in tiny Vietnam to a higher level of awareness than it had ever known before.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, who was there on assignment with the New York Times, later wrote:
Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh. ... Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.
That monk’s solitary and spine-chilling act of self-sacrifice turned out to be the very first of a flurry of eerily similar anti-war displays. But the one subsequent act of anti-war self-immolation that, for whatever reason, achieved a level of global awareness similar to the monk’s, took place a full two years later and a half a world away. It was a highly public suicide-by-fire that occurred on an otherwise sunny and (until that moment, anyway) uneventful Fall day on the lower East Side of Manhattan.
On that day, a young man from the tiny Finger Lakes community of Geneva, New York named Roger LaPorte walked up to the front door of the Dag Hammarskjold Library in the United Nations Plaza and doused himself with the gallon of gasoline he’d been carrying. Then, like the monk in Saigon, he began praying even as he lit the match he held in his right hand.
LaPorte – a la David Miller, was a deeply committed member of the Catholic Workers Movement – and he would die twenty-four hours later in Bellevue Hospital without ever having lost consciousness. The former seminarian, at the time of his death, was but twenty-two years old.
Later, in a eulogy for his fellow Catholic warrior and anti-war crusader, Father Dan Berrigan said of young Roger LaPorte’s supreme act of protest, “This is no suicide…this is a sacrifice so that others may live.”
But back to Ronnie Brazee.
Ronnie had skipped school that warm but unusually breezy day – March 19, 1968 – and had hitchhiked from Auburn to Syracuse, ostensibly to visit his cousin. At some point or another, the young man managed to get his hands on a gas can, walked to a service station, plopped down two dimes and three pennies, and bought himself a full gallon’s worth of gas. He then hopped on a city bus and rode it to Columbus Circle, where he got off quietly and walked up to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, gas can in hand.
Inside that majestic old stone structure, in fact up near its altar, Ronnie apparently next attempted to take one of the already-lit candles for the sick and dying and use it to ignite himself, having already doused himself and ditched the gas can. But as the young man was about to grab one of the lit candles, he heard a faint but hollowed echo near the back of the vaulted and otherwise empty apse. He turned, noticing that an older woman had entered and was now in the act of kneeling down to pray in the very last pew.
For a moment, Ronnie did nothing but stare. Suddenly, he bolted out the side door, the one that opened up directly onto Jefferson Street. There, he came upon a middle-aged banker from Solvay who worked downtown and who happened to be returning from a late lunch. Ron Brazee asked the man for a match and, without saying a word, ripped one off the pack handed to him, struck it twice nervously, and then held the small flame against his gas-soaked shirt and windbreaker.
Instantly, the shirt and windbreaker exploded into flames, shocking the man and leaving poor Ronnie screaming in a mix of fear and agony and running west toward Warren Street – and, one would like to think, back toward his mother’s arms in Auburn.
At that point, Charlie Fahey, another of those young priests who lived under the same roof as Charlie Brady on 672 West Onondaga, was returning to his office at Catholic Charities – an organization that, at the time, was housed in an available space on the second floor of the cathedral rectory.
Even consciously he consciously realized what was happening, Fahey, a tall and rangy one-time defensive-minded forward at CBA, instinctively bolted off in pursuit of the youngster he saw engulfed in flames. As the young priest ran, he began frantically ripping off his black linen sport coat, first one arm, then the other. When he finally reached Ronnie, who continued to stumble forward, even though he knew the young man was in agony, Father Fahey did the only thing he could think to do, tackling the boy and, using a combination of his size 44 sport coat and his own body, feverishly tried to extinguish the flames, even as young Ronnie hugged him and sobbed, while shaking in the throes of unspeakable agony.
Like Roger LaPorte, Ronnie would not die right away. Unlike LaPorte, however, he’d cling to life for weeks, suffering the whole time with massive third-degree burns over ninety-eight percent of his body. Ronnie even regained consciousness to some degree and was able to speak for a time with his mother, who sat in constant vigil at St. Joseph’s Hospital over her son’s broken body as he tried so hard to hold on. Eventually, however, as with so many burn victims, an infection set in and, almost mercifully, took young Ronnie home to God.
Very little was written about the incident in the Syracuse newspapers, since Ronald Brazee did not make a statement before setting himself ablaze, and didn’t leave so much as a note. To the editors and news directors in town, it was likely viewed as nothing more than just one more suicide – admittedly, an unusually loud and public one; but a suicide, nevertheless.
And while the manner of Ronnie’s death did get significantly more play in the local Auburn papers, with no note and no statement of protest, the boy’s passing – as it was in Syracuse – was considered suicide.
The only question for the Brazees to ponder was, why? Why would Ronnie do such a thing? There was no note and he never let on to his mother.
Years later, some of his siblings reasoned that their brother may have been mentally imbalanced, maybe clinically depressed, or perhaps even bipolar.
Regardless, in the aftermath, Ronnie’s death rarely got discussed in the Brazee home. Mr. Brazee, in particular, was almost eerily closed-mouthed about the entire affair. Perhaps it was because his second oldest, Ronnie, was the one who seemed most troubled whenever he voiced one of his largely conservative opinions, especially when the topic turned to Vietnam.
Ronnie was a young buck just coming of age. Ronnie was also a high school kid becoming more aware of the world about him with each passing day. As such, like so many other young men and women, he was starting to view America’s involvement in Southeast Asia as one big quagmire, beginning to question why the hell we were even there.
Though Ronnie never said a word when the old man started talking politics, or badmouthing hippies, long-hairs, or Commies, one got the sense he might have been biting his tongue the whole time, maybe out of respect.
No one knows why sixteen year-old Ronald Brazee skipped school that particular day or why he did what he ultimately did – much less why he chose such a gruesome method for his own demise. But it’s certainly not hard to speculate. After all, all over the world, and all about Ronnie, anti-war protesters were continuing to set themselves ablaze as the ultimate form of sacrifice and plea for peace.
Perhaps, that's why, shortly after Ronnie’s death – and, perhaps, thinking about all those protesters out there who continued to kill themselves the exact same way his big brother had – thirteen year-old Michael Brazee went to the kitchen one day, grabbed a butter knife, and went about the task of slowly scraping the “America…Love It or Leave It” sticker – the one that his old man had plastered up there so proudly – off the front door of his family’s home.
The year was 1968. And though people on both sides of Syracuse’s growing divide continued to rage and believe those on the other side were doing their best to destroy the country, there was at least one thing on which every last Syracusan, left or right, could agree. Nineteen sixty-eight had become, unquestionably, the most unnerving twelve-month period in the history of their proud and, once, rock-solid little city.
* * * * *
By 1968, at least to many in town, Ben Schwartwalder had become a full-blown, larger-than-life Bunyanesque figure. Which is to say, the longtime Syracuse University head football coach had over the years grown into a living, breathing, cussing, snorting, stomping, hard-charging, and flat-top wearing legend.
Long before the phrase got devalued to such a point that it was applied to every Tom, Dick and Harry who happened to button up a uniform each day, Ben had achieved – under deadly fire, and the unlikeliest of circumstances – all the merit badges one would ever need to qualify as an honest-to-goodness All-American hero.
A kid who’d grown up as a dirt-poor urchin on the banks of the Ohio in a tiny river town on the far reaches of West Virginia, Schwartzwalder not only lived through World War I and helped his family survive the Great Depression, but he’d also volunteered for the Army just before D-Day and (in his mid-thirties) served as a paratrooper during World War II, one day jumping out of a plane into the teeth of the heavy anti-aircraft fire that, for hours, pierced the skies over Normandy – winning ribbons, medals and a lifetime’s worth of loyalty in the process.
In his time, he’d also been one of the toughest linemen, pound for pound, in all of college football, having played center for the West Virginia University – at all of a hundred and forty-six pounds.
But that was in the past – or at least a lot of it was, anyway.
Because that year, 1968, Ben Schwartzwalder, local legend and football god, was on the cusp of turning sixty. As such, at least to a budding new generation of Syracusans, he might as well have been about to turn a hundred. Because for so many young rebels, flower children and sons and daughters of Aquarius – both on-campus and in the city itself – that glorious national title and Heisman Trophy that ol’ Ben had helped bring home to Syracuse some ten years prior had already begun to take on the musty aroma of a distant and increasingly irrelevant memory.
At least that’s how, by 1968, so many in town under the age of twenty had begun to view their football coach and his legacy. To everyone else, however, especially the older S.U. alums and locals over forty, Coach Ben Schwartzwalder of good old “Bill Orange” was not only special, he was as iconic and beloved as any man who'd ever called the Salt City home.
But, lo and behold, then came the Fall of 1968 and the opening days of an entirely new and different era for Syracuse University football.
Greg Allen had come to Syracuse in large part because S.U. All American Floyd Little had always been one of his heroes. A two-sport star from Plainfield, New Jersey and, like Little, a gifted running back, he’d been recruited by Schwartzwalder to Syracuse. He had chosen to enroll, in large part, because on his very first recruiting trip he’d met a fellow African American recruit – a center/linebacker from Connecticut named John Lobon – and the two not only became fast friends, but they made something of a pinkie promise to attend college and play football together.
Al Newton, on the other hand, had already been at Syracuse for a year. Like Allen, he’d also been a star running back in high school, in his case, Rindge Tech in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Newton had also been personally recruited by Little, who by then had become a perennial Heisman Trophy candidate for the Orangemen.
But 1968 was an important year for Newton, because that was the year during which, after having been a dominant force for the Syracuse freshman team the previous season, he was expected to take a giant step and help the varsity reclaim some of its lost glory, filling the role that star fullbacks Jim Nance and Larry Csonka had played during their time on the Syracuse campus. Big things, in other words, were expected of the young man.
Beyond their football talents, Greg Allen, John Lobon and Al Newton were all intelligent and academically focused young men, especially Allen and Newton.
Allen for example, had come to Syracuse with the intention of possibly becoming a doctor. His first semester, he majored in Biology. And Lobon, who loved history, enrolled as a history major with the intention of, maybe, becoming a teacher.
But Newton, academically speaking, turned out to be a cut above them both. At Rindge Tech, he’d not only been a National Honor Society member, but also a finalist for a National Merit Scholarship. His love in high school was mathematics. As a senior, Newton had been accepted at both Harvard and Columbia, but had chosen Syracuse because of something called a 3/2 program, one in which, at a handful of colleges in the country, Syracuse among them, it was possible to earn two bachelor’s degrees in five years. Newton had designs on getting degrees in both math and engineering, with his ultimate goal to someday become a civil engineer and completely reimagine American cities.
The problem for Newton – and it was a problem that both Allen and Lobon would also encounter their first year – was that Coach Schwartzwalder made it clear that no classes, no matter how important to one's major, could interfere with football. A few African American players were even urged to switch majors before the start of the second semester. Instead of majoring in, say, biology, or history, or engineering, they were urged to enroll in classes with names like Theory of Basketball and Public Heath, all of them under an umbrella curriculum the university referred to as “General Studies.”
The thinking was, apparently, that the responsibility, time and effort it took to play football would simply not allow certain types of young men to engage in the university’s higher-level academic pursuits. Football practice took far too much time, particularly when such obligations as practical, three-hour engineering or biology labs were competing for a young player’s time and attention.
While many white S.U. football players were, similarly, urged to pursue less ambitious college degrees, a good number were not. Not so with the Black players. But almost every African American on Coach Schwartzwalder’s team – even one with such demonstrated skills as Al Newton – was either encouraged to switch his major to General Studies, or to drop any courses, especially labs, that created scheduling conflicts with football. The player was then told he could make up any lost hours during the Summer with a handful of less strenuous and stressful “General Studies” courses, such as the aforementioned Theory of Basketball.
This troubling academic situation was then coupled with a somewhat peculiar physical one; a gnawing circumstance that Newton first began to notice his freshman year, but one that soon became apparent to many players in Ben’s program, freshmen and upper classmen alike. The S.U. team doctor at the time – by training, a gynecologist – didn’t seem to want to touch any player, and, in particular, any player of color. In fact, the doctor rarely, if ever, touched players at all – even while attempting to make a diagnosis of a potentially debilitating injury. Every injury to virtually an athlete in the Syracuse athletic program – black or white, no matter the sport, and no matter how significant – was treated in much the same way: “Put a little ice on it and give it a couple of days. You’ll be fine.”
Ben had, of course, been coaching young Black men for over two decades. As a small-town West Virginia boy, though he’d not entirely embraced racial integration on a personal level, he’d managed to come to peace with it as a matter of practice. After all, as he would soon discover, integrating his team helped him win an awful lot of football games.
To that end, over the years he’d given many young men of color positions of prominence on his teams – something that was almost unheard of in the country, even up north. Bernie Custis, for example, a future Tuskegee Airman, started for Schwartzwalder as quarterback as far back as 1949, and even roomed with a white boy at the time, a young Jewish kid from New York City named Al Davis, who, himself, would grow up to both coach and own the Oakland Raiders.
Ben also coached three of the most storied running backs in the history of the college game – all three of them Black, and all three sporting uniform #44 – Jim Brown, Ernie Davis and Floyd Little. Brown should have been the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player. Davis actually was the first Black to win it. And Little finished in the top five in the Heisman voting two consecutive years.
That’s not to mention some other generational African American players Ben Schwartzwalder recruited and coached at Syracuse, players like ten-year NFL tackle John Brown of the Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers, AFL MVP and rushing leader Jim Nance of the Boston Patriots, and Baltimore Colts Hall of Fame tight end, John Mackey, to name but a few.
Ben had even gone so far, back in the day, as to support his players when, on their own, they drafted and signed a petition refusing to stay at any hotel on the road – especially down South – that did not allow their team’s handful of Black players to stay in the same building as their white teammates. Ben Schwartzwalder was a man of principle, to be sure. Above all, he was a great football coach who believed in not galvanizing concept of team.
But few Black players, even the always-outspoken Brown, had ever challenged Schwartzwalder or questioned his worldview quite the way those kids on his late 60’s teams did.
For years, Ben had tackled race head on by using a locker room technique he’d developed over time, and one that had served him well for the bulk of his career. He’d single out a Black kid – usually the most skilled or respected on his team – and then ask that young man, point-blank, and in front of his teammates, “Floyd Little (or Ernie Davis, or Jim Nance), do we have a racial problem on this team?” At which point, that young African American player would invariably look into his eyes and say something like, “No, coach. Not at all. No problems on this team.” And that would be the end of any talk about race for the rest of the season.
But all that came to a screeching halt during that 1968 season and the one that followed. The first year, when Schwartzwalder asked sophomore fullback Al Newton if there were any racial problems on the Syracuse football team, Newton shocked Ben, his coaches, and players by proclaiming, after stumbling a bit to find just the right words, “Well, yeah, coach. I kinda think maybe we do.”
Allen was even more direct the following year, when asked the very same question, and Schwartzwalder called him into his office to discuss it. Behind his small gray metal desk and looking sternly over the top of his eyeglasses, the coach looked at Allen and said, “Look son. I gotta tell ya’. You have a choice, right here, right now. You can either choose to be a football player or a Black man. Your call.” Allen, the sophomore running back, tried to explain his position without endangering his playing time. He said, “Look, coach, in all fairness, I’m going to be a Black man a lot longer than I’m going to be a football player. I don’t know, but…Why can’t I be both?”
It’s important to note, here, that at the start of the 1968 season, Syracuse University football, which for years had been synonymous with greatness, especially in the backfield, had begun to fall on hard times. A big part of that had less to do with the quality of players that Schwartzwalder continued to recruit and more to do with the style of play to which he more and more fervently embraced.
By the late 1960’s, the college game was going through some critical, even radical changes, not the least of which was the growing understanding that speed, passing and opening the field as much as possible could often trump raw power. The best way to beat the kind of smash-mouth, between-the-hashmarks football that Ben and a handful of other older coaches in the country had come to symbolize was through raw speed and cat-like quickness. And there was, perhaps, no greater example of that than the annual Rose Bowl game on New Year’s Day, in which the smaller but faster Pac 10 schools were starting to dominate, and often humiliate, the bigger and stronger but far more plodding schools of the Big 10 – Rust Belt programs, just like Syracuse, whose run-first offenses and powerful-but-conspicuously-slow defenses had taken their once-greatest assets and turned them, almost overnight, into liabilities.
The pressure on Ben Schwartzwalder, in other words, was tremendous, and growing by the day. It wasn’t just that his country’s young people were becoming so radicalized, what with the Vietnam protests, the hippies, the Yippies, the drugs and the free love. It wasn’t that all those “Negroes” out there were revolting and rioting and burning down their own cities and homes, just to make a point. It wasn’t even that the game was changing, or that the style of football that Ben had played for so long was starting to make him look, more and more, like a dinosaur – it was all those things.
It was that life itself was starting to move too quickly for him and in a direction that, frankly, unnerved him. It was that the country that he loved so deeply, the country for which he’d risked everything a mere two decades prior, now felt alien to him.
So, Ben Schwartzwalder did the only thing he knew how to do. He dug in his heels even harder. Rather than accept the tidal wave of societal change that continued to unfold before his eyes, or modify his approach to coaching young men (especially young men of color), he doubled down and became even more set in his ways.
By 1970, the frustrations of the now eight African American players on the S.U. varsity football team were running so high they felt compelled to present their coach with a formal list of “demands” for improving conditions in and around the football program. Schwartzwalder, however, refused to acknowledge a single one of their demands or budge even an inch.
What’s more, because those players’ grievances were so under-reported and almost criminally misrepresented by the local media – especially by Herald-Journal columnist and sports editor Arnie Burdick, the single most powerful and widely read sportswriter in town – the support for ol’ Ben among Syracuse’s alumni and fans not only rose, it skyrocketed.
No one locally knew how hard the Black kids had worked to fine-tune their list of grievances, and the extent to which they'd tried to make them as race-neutral as possible. Their checklist of four carefully thought-out and well-crafted demands – compiled after countless nights in various dorm rooms, the Martin Luther King Center on campus, and even Ben’s Kitchen, a small, soul food joint in what remained of the 15th Ward, where Newton worked on weekends to pay for all the chitlins, pork chop sandwiches, collard greens, corn bread and sweet tea that Ben, the owner, would dish up for him on Sundays – dealt with such universal student/athlete issues as stronger academic support for athletes, fair treatment for all players, and improved medical staffing.
There was only one item on the kids’ list of four grievances that was, in fact, based solely on skin color. Unfortunately, that was the one the Syracuse media – particularly Burdick – chose to spotlight and harp on for the loyal fans of old Bill Orange.
That demand, more specifically, was that the university hire at least one Black assistant for its football program.
For years, you see, especially during early-season, two-a-day practices, it was not uncommon for an S.U. assistant to berate a Black player for a mental mistake or missed block by referring to him as “boy” – as in “What the hell you thinkin’ out there, boy?” or “Hey, boy, wake up. Where you supposed to be on that play?”
Yet, by 1968, and following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, that word – boy – had become as toxic to many Black Americans as any word in the English language – even more so, perhaps, than the dreaded N-word. King, in fact, had been in Memphis earlier that very year, the site of his looming assassination, because of a protracted garbage strike. And countless city sanitation workers on those lines throughout that work stoppage – Black men of all ages who walked shoulder-to-shoulder with King for hours on end – held up picket signs on which four words, and four words only, were printed: “I Am a Man.”
So, the idea that such a demeaning and manipulative word – one that conjured up in many young Black minds images of plantations, cotton picking, and slave trading – was being used openly and with impunity at Syracuse University, an esteemed institute of higher learning, was completely unacceptable to a group of eight young African American males who were, as a unit, coming of age even as the 1970’s beckoned.
Yet, as might be expected, the deck was too greatly stacked against those kids, and the odds against them, still, way too long to accomplish all they hoped to. They were, after all, operating in a northeast, working-class, smokestack city in the heart of the 20th Century. They were operating in a Syracuse, New York full of hard-working, hard-drinking, and hard-loving men and women who toiled in factories and offices all week long, who danced on Saturday nights and prayed in churches on Sunday mornings, who obeyed the rules, who always did their best, and who believed deeply in the social order into which they’d been born and raised – men and women who continued to view Coach Ben Schwartzwalder as the very epitome of hard-work, discipline, determination and, frankly, all that was good about the country they loved.
So, when these eight African American youngsters had the temerity to turn their back on good ol’ Ben and abandon their teammates in the Spring of 1970, they got utterly savaged in local media. In both newspapers, but especially in Arnie Burdick’s column, the eight players who left in protest soon became the “militant blacks,” or the “militant Negroes.”
And in corner bars and neighborhood taverns all across town, to so many patrons, shift workers, and S.U. football fans, it was even uglier. They became the “uppity niggers” up on the hill, a bunch of spoiled, lazy punks who conjured up images of overgrown afros and loud, odd-looking clothes, a collection of street thugs who, by all rights, should have been happy just going to college on someone else’s dime in exchange for having to do little more than play a few football games each year.
By then, the sprawling ghettos in any number of mostly Black enclaves like Watts, Detroit and Newark had already been torched during the race riots of the 1960's. Four years had passed since the militant and heavily armed Black Panthers had been formed in Oakland. And it was, now, two full years since Tommie Smith's and John Carlos’ black-gloved, Black-power salute of protest during the U.S. national anthem at the Mexico City Olympics. With so many higher profile national stories involving race – stories that had been told and retold in the media countless times – the Syracuse footballers' single act of on-campus civil disobedience in the Spring of 1970 seemed to many in town to be little more than a Johnny-come-lately, me-too gesture of racial bellyaching.
For the vast majority of white football fans, the walkout at venerable old Archbold Stadium wasn't just a sacrilegious betrayal of their teammates, it was a paper thin and largely toothless demonstration by a bunch of lazy, shiftless ingrates that had little or no substance behind it – beyond, perhaps, the almost childish call for the hiring of a single Black assistant.
To be fair, who could blame many of these longtime Syracuse football fans? After all, they weren’t being told the truth. Or, if they were, they were just being told a tiny portion of it.
The reality was far different and infinitely more complex than what had been portrayed to viewers of Syracuse’s six o’clock news or reported by the city’s local sportswriters. But just like with the circuitous yet full-cycle journey of anti-war protester-turned-patriot David Ifshin, what would happen in time, and how things would eventually play themselves out, would be entirely irrelevant to the men and women at the heart of this story – especially in the moment.
To them, it did not matter one iota that the Syracuse 8 (as the media would soon start calling them) – Greg Allen, John Lobon, Clarence “Bucky” McGill, John Godbolt, Dana Harrell, Duane Walker, Richard Bulls and Al Newton (who’d since adopted the Islamic name, Abdullah Alif Muhammad) – would, in time, make amends and attempt to rebuild the very bridge they’d once so famously burned. Nor did it matter at all that, eventually (or at least four decades later), the eight would all be welcomed back into S.U.’s good graces. Along with a ninth black player, Ron Womack, they would all be issued formal apologies by the school. Those who could attend would, in time, be introduced to a cheering crowd in the Carrier Dome and subsequently awarded the varsity jackets they’d been denied for so long. And they would all be presented – two posthumously – with a chancellor’s award, Syracuse University’s highest honor for any alum.
Yet, just as with Ifshin, none of that mattered to local Syracusans in the Spring of 1970.
* * * * *
Ben Schwartzwalder was one of two deeply-loved symbols of S.U. football that happened to find themselves in the crosshairs as the decade of the 70’s appeared on the horizon. The second turned out to be something of a cartoon character, but a character to which many Syracuse football fans felt a deep and profound loyalty. They viewed this largely two-dimensional character as being as part of their cultural heritage, if not their birthright as Central New Yorkers. Unfortunately, the much-loved symbol and their own sense of heritage proved to be no match for the symbol and heritage of the actual people upon whose bloody history that symbol was based.
That symbol-in-the-crosshairs was the age-old mascot of Syracuse University men’s sports teams, the Saltine Warrior. To S.U. fans of a certain age, to watch the Warrior – played by a member of one of the school’s most popular fraternities, who each week would dress up in moccasins, leather pants, a leather vest and a headdress, and who'd don what was supposed to be, apparently, war paint, then dance up and down the sidelines, urging the Orangemen to hold that line or make that first down – was as much a part of Fall afternoons in Central New York as brilliantly colored trees, the smell of burning leaves, and the sweet, delicate flavor of fresh-made cider.
Now, there is a story – a cherished and generational legend – that, by all rights, ought to be told to any reader here (and, frankly, told in its entirely). But, given its length, complexity, and the myriad tentacles that invariably spring from it, here’s a simplified version for the purposes of this narrative.
In the Onondaga Nation – and, indeed, the Iroquois Confederacy of six nations – there's a single, yet essential position known to the natives as Tadodaho. The original Tadodaho (an Onondaga elder who is part of that larger, untold story that encompasses not only the sacred land upon which Syracuse was built, but the onetime massive swamps that for centuries lined Onondaga Lake, and the local native people themselves), had for years been a hate-filled and terrifying tribal leader; a disfigured demon in almost subhuman form who kept his people in line with a vengeful mix of fear, anger, and when needed, death. But through the efforts of another Onondaga elder, a remarkable man named Hiawatha, and an even more remarkable chosen son referred to throughout history as, simply, the Great Peacemaker, Tadodaho was almost magically transformed, becoming a man who, through his new-found light and purity of heart, was able to dedicate his life to the pursuit of peace.
Thereafter, whichever Onondaga elder happened to hold title of Tadodaho became his people's spiritual leader and moral conscience – not just of the Onondaga, but for the entire Iroquois Confederacy.
Enter a quiet and unassuming family man named Leon Shenandoah, who that very same year – 1968 – was chosen by his fellow council chiefs as their newest Tadodaho. A dedicated worker, skilled with his hands and good at fixing broken things, Shenandoah placed a premium on friends and family, treasured the beauty, solitude and spirituality of nature, and took the greatest joy in life’s smallest moments and many of its most underappreciated things.
Beyond that, there really was nothing particularly remarkable about the man – at least not on the surface. But that didn’t stop those chiefs from selecting the fifty-three year-old Shenandoah as the confederacy’s Tadodaho, the spiritual leader of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois being a French word the six nations been forced to wear by the white man) – the Onondaga, the Mohawk, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Oneida, and the Tuscarora. The tribal chiefs saw in Leon Shenandoah the seeds for the very type of man any great leader would ultimately need to be, especially as times grew more challenging for native people. They believed Shenandoah, a man of wisdom, patience, strength, moral courage and cast-iron will, had it in him to grow into the position they were now bestowing upon him – which is, of course, exactly what happened, though not before he was tested in a way that, perhaps, only one other 20th Century Tadodaho had ever been tested before.
First, a bit more background before detailing the circumstances that shone the harsh glare of scrutiny upon a beloved but otherwise inane little college mascot.
Nineteen sixty eight also happened to be the year an activist named Dennis Banks, along with Russell Means, co-founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) out West, an organization set up to protect the rights of Native Americans coast to coast, while shedding a light on the white man’s long and sordid history of broken treaties and false promises.
To that end, Banks soon found himself at the epicenter of a number of high-profile displays of native protest and civil disobedience, including the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco, the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties, a nationwide caravan originating on the west coast and culminating in the nation’s capital, and, most infamously, the 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in which both federal agents and natives lost their lives to gunfire.
But, in reality, Banks had nothing on Leon Shenandoah, at least when it came to waking up thousands, native or otherwise, to the challenges, if not the rapidly fading footprint of all indigenous people on the American landscape. Because even as Banks was drawing his national headlines, Shenandoah was quietly and with little fanfare attempting to instill in the people of the Iroquois Confederacy, especially the younger ones, the understanding that their culture, traditions, language and heritage were all under attack and at risk of being lost forever.
What’s more, thanks to the insights and wisdom of Shenandoah’s own elders – people like Irving Powless, Sr. and others born in the 1800’s – Leon and his fellow council members (some of whom, like Chief Oren Lyons, were actually decorated ex-soldiers) came to view Vietnam in a different light than the vast majority of their old Army buddies. They soon came to understand that the situation in Southeast Asia was almost identical to the one that had their forefathers hundreds of years prior. Because, just like then, white men from a distant land were using military might and their own sense of imperialism to try to impose their will, their form of government, their language, and their culture on a proud and independent native people.
Meanwhile, between the Native Americans’ never-ending quest for peace and their deep and abiding respect for Mother Earth, it wasn’t long before many in the sixties “counter culture” – the so-called hippies, war protesters, and those seeking to get “back to nature” – discovered they had far more in common with the American “Indian” than they ever realized.
Oren Lyons years later would even recall one Saturday getting a knock on his front door, and opening it to discover a handful of longhaired teens on his doorstep, kids barely old enough to shave, adorned in colorful shirts, jeans and love beads. The teenagers explained they wanted to become Indians and hoped to live on the reservation. They said they’d be willing to learn and would do whatever it took to become full-blown natives. They told Lyons they’d walked to the reservation from their homes in Syracuse that morning because they’d grown tired of the white man’s rules and his society.
The chief of the Onondaga Hawk Clan, who himself had played lacrosse alongside All American Jim Brown at Syracuse University, who once served proudly as a member of the storied 82nd Airborne during the Korean War, and who had done time as a successful commercial artist on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, tried his best to explain that it wasn’t as easy as all that, and that maybe those kids should think about heading back home. Their parents, he tried to explain, were probably starting to worry and would soon be wondering if something bad hadn’t happened to them.
But the simple fact was, by the early (and increasingly youth-obsessed) 1970’s, just as an acute awareness of roots and ancestral heritage had started to take hold in the local African American community, it had similarly taken hold in Syracuse’s native population. So, one day, when a young native named Doug Stone, a Mohawk by birth, asked for a meeting with Shenandoah and his fellow chiefs of the council, Stone explained he’d just transferred to Syracuse University from New Mexico and had been deeply offended by what he’d seen at a recent S.U. football game: a white man dressed as a native warrior, running up and down the sidelines and leading the cheering crowd.
Even though the leadership at Stanford University in California had already voted to switch their school’s nickname from the Stanford Indian to the Stanford Cardinal out of deference to Native Americans, no other school or sports team in the country had yet to follow suit. That is, until the day Leon Shenandoah, Tadodaho of the Iroquois Confederacy, called and asked for a meeting with Syracuse University chancellor Melvin Eggers.
Now, normally, it wouldn’t have been necessary for Shenandoah to call to set up such a meeting. He could have just as easily knocked on the door and asked the woman behind the desk for a few moments of the chancellor’s time. After all, the Onondaga chief would have been on campus anyway – him being a maintenance man there, and all.
But, instead, Shenandoah called and set up a formal, face-to-face with Eggers and handful of concerned members of his confederacy, among them, Lyons, who twenty years prior had starred in goal for the first undefeated team in the long and storied history of S.U. lacrosse.
At the meeting, and at Shenandoah’s suggestion, it was Lyons who took the lead. After all, it was Lyons who possessed a measure of standing in the S.U. community. It was Lyons with the ability to best articulate his innermost thoughts. And it was Lyons whose passion continued to burn so intensely that, at times, it could almost seem a force unto itself.
After welcoming the six members of the Iroquois contingent, Eggers asked what he and the handful of trustees who’d joined him could do for them. Looking at the chancellor in the eye, Lyons leaned in slightly and started out by saying something to the effect that, as representatives of the Iroquois, he and his colleagues were there to talk to him about the university’s continued use of the Saltine Warrior as the school’s mascot.
As Lyons put it to the men on the other side of the conference table: “The Army mule is a mascot. The Yale bulldog is a mascot. The Navy goat is a mascot. A proud people are not a mascot, nor should they be.” He then added, now commanding the chancellor’s gaze, “By continuing to have this man dressed up like a native warrior every Saturday, you are putting our people on the same level as animals.”
Eggers and the trustees who’d gathered all took a moment to let Lyons’ words linger in the air and settle in their minds. Controversy, confrontation and even crisis would prove to be nothing the former economics professor-turned-university-chancellor couldn’t handle, and handle as well, arguably, as any chancellor in Syracuse history. After all, it was Eggers who’d followed John Corbally into the position and who, in doing so, walked into a virtual hornet’s nest of social issues, all of which had seemingly been made even more fractious by his predecessor. It was Eggers who personally and regularly met with a group of angry student leaders, and who, in his very first meeting with them, on his very first day on the job, agreed in writing to resign if and when the student senate asked him to. And it was Eggers who once diffused a major (and potentially violent) student occupation during the latter stages of the Vietnam War.
On top of all that, in roughly a decade, it would be Melvin Eggers’ firm yet gentle hand that would prove vital in helping the student body heal in the aftermath of the loss of thirty-five Syracuse exchange students in the terrorist bombing of the ill-fated Pan-Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland.
For their part, Shenandoah, Lyons, and the rest of the Iroquois had no idea what to expect that day from the university chancellor. But they certainly expected at least some measure of resistance. After all, the Saltine Warrior was an institution, if not a signature part of the university’s athletic program – and had been for decades. What’s more, that human mascot remained beloved by countless S.U. alumni in Central New York and beyond; men and women who represented not only the university’s most fervent and vocal supporters, but the very core of its life-sustaining financial backers.
Instead of resistance, however, and instead of even a whimper of protest, Eggers just sat there for a moment with one elbow on each arm of his chair, his fingers steepled in front of his mouth gently kissing his lips. He then looked around the table and into the eyes of each and every member of the native contingent. As he did that, the chancellor said gently and evenly to those half dozen men and women – but, in particular, to Shenandoah and Lyons – “I agree with you. I mean that. Completely."
He then added, “And, frankly, I’ve been expecting this day for some time now. I am truly, truly sorry for any insensitivity this institution has shown the Iroquois people, and I give you my word, the Saltine Warrior will no longer serve as the mascot of Syracuse University.”
And that was that. Or so one might have thought.
The problem was, just as with Ben Schwartzwalder and the Syracuse 8, the football fans and good people of Syracuse knew only part of the story because, for the most part, their local media had only fed them part of it. And those very same men and women based whatever feelings they had about the school’s decision to move on from the Saltine Warrior accordingly.
Because just as in the case of that 1970 protest by those eight uppity young Negroes against their beloved war veteran of a coach, the fans never really understood the deeper context of the issues between the Onondaga people and Syracuse University.
That’s why in the days ahead, on the op-ed page of both newspapers, the letters to the editor in support of the Saltine Warrior ran probably ten to one. Many of the pro-Warrior letters were written with such passion and intensity that one could almost visualize the writer’s white knuckles as he or she held pen in hand and hurriedly scribbled out the words that flowed from within.
Yes, these local Syracusans all understood to some degree that native tribes once roamed North America, and that much of the land they’d once used for sustaining their lives and cultures had been taken forcibly from them by white settlers who often lied, cheated and even killed in the pursuit of it. Yet many felt, in a turn-the-page sort of way, that much of that was now ancient history, water under the proverbial bridge.
But there were a great many things the locals didn’t know about the Onondaga people or the injustices they’d suffered over the years, many of them right there in Central New York.
The locals never understood, for example, that Syracuse University’s signature building, its Hall of Languages, the very first and most storied structure on the entire campus, was built on land given to the school by the Onondagas in the 1800’s in exchange for the right of future generations of Onondaga children to be able to attend the university and earn a college degree at no charge.
They didn’t know that that promise, even if it had been made in good faith, had never been kept by S.U.
They didn’t know, either, that the mighty Onondaga Nation had once measured over a hundred and eighty million acres, from Upstate New York to Canada, and that, in just over a hundred and fifty years, that once-sprawling domain of the Onondaga had been reduced to a mere fifty-nine hundred poverty-stricken acres, just south of the city.
Nor did they know that Onondaga Lake – the lake that the City of Syracuse continued to use as its very own cesspool for tons of its toxic, industrial waste, if not its very own toilet for the raw sewerage it continued to produce – was not only sacred to the Onondaga, but that its banks were the very site where the revolutionary form of democracy that America’s founding fathers would subsequently use as a model for their all-new country was first imagined and brought to life by the leaders of the five nations of the Haudenosaunee (including, of course, Hiawatha, the Peacemaker, and Tadodaho himself).
The only thing most Syracuse sports fans knew was that, now, some four years after the whole Wounded Knee episode – which, if they understood it at all, felt like old news to them – the local natives down near the Salina Drive-In were raising yet another high-profile stink, this time about something as ridiculous as a school mascot.
To many such residents, the removal of the Syracuse University Saltine Warrior was not a matter of principal or even a matter of right and wrong. It was a matter of political correctness gone completely off the rails. It was about university officials kowtowing yet again to yet another petty demand by yet another small but zealous band of left-leaning cranks trying like hell to destroy a great country. After all, Syracuse’s local pro baseball team was still the Chiefs, and nobody was saying anything about that. So, what in God’s name was wrong with an Indian in warpaint serving as the official mascot for the S.U. football team? The university and those college boys who dressed up as the Saltine Warrior on weekends weren’t making fun of Indians at all. To the contrary, as portrayed by those fun-loving frat boys on those crisp Fall Saturday afternoons, S.U.’s mascot was proud and strong, just like the young Onondaga men whose likeness and spirit they tried to capture.
Or so the vast majority of these locals reasoned at the time.
To be fair, there was at least some measure of history on their side. Most of these very same locals remembered the confrontation that Chief Shenandoah, the leaders of the council, and a number of their native brethren had with dozens of armed New York State troopers dressed in full riot gear over the attempted (and, ultimately, failed) construction of a third lane on both sides of Interstate 81, a smooth, still-new stretch of blacktop that ran directly through the eastern portion of the Onondaga’s sovereign land.
Most also remembered how silly that stare-down had seemed at the time, even as it was happening back in 1971. Many of them wanted to know what the big deal was – all the state wanted to do was to add a simple third lane to a simple two-lane highway for a handful of miles, for God’s sake. Who, in their right mind, would have a problem with that little sliver of human progress?
For the better part of a week though, thousands of Syracusans had watched the city's crazy Indians on Fred Hillegas’ six o’clock news show – natives male and female, young and old – squat down and sit cross-legged in front of those earth movers all lined up on the side of the road, refusing to budge even an inch.
They'd watched former Beatle John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, come to town that very same week for the opening of an exhibit of Yoko’s art at the all-new Everson Museum in the heart of what used to be the 15th Ward. And they’d seen in both papers how Lennon had reached out to Shenandoah after seeing a report about the armed standoff on the local Syracuse news. They’d also seen and read how the ex-Beatle had then invited him and a few tribal elders to his suite at the Hotel Syracuse, had listened to their side of the story, and had agreed on the spot to support them, and even participate in their protest against the state.
It all seemed so silly and so trivial to so many. Much ado about a whole lot of nothing.
But just as with their perception of those eight young Black football players who’d walked out on Ben Schwartzwalder a short time prior, those good men and women of Syracuse – men and women who continued to watch Fred Hillegas every night and read the Post-Standard every morning – had no idea what it meant to stand in the shoes of Chief Leon Shenandoah of the Onondaga Nation, or be Tadodaho, the spiritual leader of the once-mighty but now marginalized Iroquois.
They had no clue what it felt like to watch your beloved culture and your sacred land continue to be slowly consumed by an ever-rising tide of white greed, entitlement and environmental carnage. Or to behold, as the moral flame of both your forefathers and your people, a hundred and eighty million rich, bountiful acres got turned in the relative blink of an eye into a fifty-nine hundred acre tract of rocky and barely arable land, only to then have New York State come along a short time later and say to what’s left of your people, and without asking permission, “Well, we’re going to take just a few acres more.”
It might just have been the loss of a simple and almost cartoonish team mascot, but to many longtime residents of the area, the demise of the Syracuse University Saltine Warrior meant so much more. It was yet another example of how so much of what they continued to hold dear, and so much of what defined them as proud and loyal Central New Yorkers, was being tossed overboard by their leaders in a desperate attempt to keep their now-leaky ship afloat.
All those good Syracusans saw was more, greater, and even faster change. And all they sensed was the passing of one more thing that they held dear, and one more thing that they'd never see again.
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