On the final day of Billy E’s first week of practice that November – ironically, a Friday, with the smell of fried fish filling the city – the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued what it called a Pastoral Statement on Penitence and Abstinence. Coming on the heels of the Second Vatican Council, just concluded, the statement was composed by bishops who’d actually participated. Directed to Catholics throughout the U.S., it read in part:
Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law.
While that one sentence was offered as a single thought on the larger notion of abstinence, it was its parenthetical aside (the “we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence” part) that served as a dog whistle for thousands of Catholics in and around Central New York. Everything else – particularly the idea that the Church hoped its followers might continue to abstain – for the vast majority of those Friday fish-eaters was just so much white noise.
For Salt City Catholics of all shapes and sizes, with the threat of mortal sin no longer attached, the longtime ban on enjoying the likes of, say, a sizzling hot dog from Heid’s on a Friday, a giant Danzer’s corned beef on rye, a piping-hot pepperoni pizza from P-Z-O’s, or a juicy Tarby’s cheeseburger was, at long last, dead and buried. That’s all that really mattered to a vast majority of the city’s practicing Catholics.
Of course, it still felt a little odd for the most devout of them, especially the school-aged kids who’d been weaned on meatless Fridays. As one cheerleader would say years later, “They said if you ate a hamburger on a Friday and got hit by a car and killed, you'd be doomed to hell forever. And then they turned around and said, 'Not a problem.' "
Fridays afternoons in Syracuse, the after work traditions, with all their alluring smells and quirky habits, didn’t change all that much, at least not initially. But with that one proclamation in the Fall of 1966, as Indian Summer gave way to wood chopping season, it almost seemed as though a small snowball had been placed on a hill high above Syracuse, a snowball that, once pushed, would quickly gain in size and momentum as it barreled its way toward the city below.
The not-so-subtle shift in daily life, however, wasn’t just about finally being able to bite into a cubed steak on a Friday afternoon. It was far more spiritually transformative than that. For evidence, one needed to look no further than the Church itself, a centuries-old monolith steeped in an almost hypnotic mix of tradition, piety, penance and faith, and one that, at least at that point, was still vital to the lives of most Syracusans. Besides relaxing the centuries-old tradition of Friday abstinence, Vatican II also instituted sweeping changes that, in the breathless pursuit of trying to stay relevant, gutted so much of the mystery and allure that had always been hallmarks of the Roman Catholic experience.
Following the tone established by Vatican II, in religious orders all across the U.S. – a change felt in every Catholic school in the city and one that impacted students more than their parents – the rules compelling nuns to wear heavy woolen habits, oversized rosary beads and restrictive swaddling were relaxed, made optional or, in a few orders, abandoned altogether.
The altar, which for centuries had faced away from the apse and toward a crucifix above the congregation, was turned a full 180 degrees. That meant, in a bit of irony, certain priests, for the first time ever, were forced to stand face-to-face with the men, women and children of their flocks as they said mass; looking each in the eye as they dutifully re-enacted the passion and simple majesty of Christ’s last supper.
Perhaps, above all, beginning in the early days of 1967, Catholic priests everywhere began saying mass, not in Latin, but in plain, everyday English. An otherwise dead language whose sound could be magic to the ears, and a language that when wedded to the clink of a metal chain and the sweet aroma of burning incense could trigger a visceral, sensory reaction, Latin had long been the anchor that had given the ritual of mass much of its mystery, wonder and spiritual power.
Magically rhythmic and alliterative call-and-answer phrases that had long been essential to the ritual of the Catholic mass – lilting gems like, Kyrie eleison…Kyrie eleison…Christe eleison – had now, following Vatican II, suddenly been transformed into the more mundane and workmanlike, “Lord have mercy…Lord have mercy…Christ have mercy.”
While the response to the priest’s Dominus vobiscum, a response that most altar boys worth their salt had learned well in advance of their First Communion, if only because it was so much fun to say, overnight went from the whimsical, Et cum spiritu tuo to the largely tepid, “And with your spirit.” (And eventually, the blasé and almost conversational sounding, “And also with you.”)
But if that weren’t enough, many parishes soon found themselves trying to jam a giant square peg into a very round hole: an unlikely trend embraced by a number of young and progressive priests that would soon be labeled a “folk mass.” In folk masses, traditional hymns and Gregorian chants found themselves unceremoniously cast aside in favor of Anglicized versions of a number of traditional songs – along with, every now and then, a Top 40 hit from the likes of Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary, and the Beatles.
Adam Smalley, for example, a music-loving young cleric whose first assignments included St. Vincent’s, St. Charles, and St. Patrick’s in nearby Oneida, was one of the first priests in the diocese to incorporate his guitar and contemporary ballads like the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” into one of his occasional, let-your-hair-down/think-and-be-young celebrations of the Almighty.
Regardless, for thousands of Catholics in the Salt City, their beloved Church felt, for the first time ever, somehow different; as though grasping for something few could see, or even cared to.
What’s more, to many Catholics, the Church seemed to be growing untethered right before their eyes. Because, in the pursuit of trying to bring itself closer to them, and to look, sound and act more like they did, many of those believers started to feel just the opposite. For the first time in their lives, Syracuse Catholics of all ages started to emotionally distance themselves, if only by the tiniest degree, from the Church they’d grown up with and had always embraced.
That’s why, in the Fall of 1966, even though few, if any, in town realized it, the gentle echoes of a profound turn of events that had transpired in Italy some four years prior could still be heard, if they only knew to listen. Bishop Foery, for decades the guardian angel of the Parochial League, and the lifelong servant of the Lord who’d spent his time in Syracuse using his parish-based network to churn out batch after batch of young Catholic soldiers, had flown to Rome in the Fall of 1962 with every intention of participating in Pope John XXIII’s highly anticipated Second Ecumenical Council .
Unfortunately, by the time he did so – and just as that tumultuous decade began to gain momentum – many of Foery’s ideas about education (especially his crazy one about kids being taught by the same priests and nuns under the same roof and for thirteen straight years) had begun to feel out of touch with Syracuse’s shifting demographics, if not the norms of society as a whole.
That viewpoint was held by many in the chancery, but especially Monsignor David Cunningham, Foery’s number two and heir-apparent. Cunningham saw with his own eyes that Syracuse’s so-called white flight was gaining traction, and that the race-based exodus from the city would soon reach critical mass – especially as Interstates 81 and 690 continued to take shape and the city’s mostly-black 15th Ward continued to spill out into its one-time vibrant and predominantly white neighborhoods.
For that reason, Cunningham knew full well where the future of the Syracuse diocese lay – and it was certainly not in the rapidly changing city parishes that had long served as the backbone of his boss’ idyllic-yet-idiosyncratic basketball league: a now sepia-colored collection of nuns, priests and students built on an equally nostalgic marriage of church, school, neighborhood and immigrant group.
No, for Cunningham and others, the future of Catholicism in the Salt City lay in its booming suburbs, which by then had started to see dozens of sleepy little bedroom communities and crossroads towns blossoming into sprawling, verdant, and oh-so rich pastures of growth and opportunity.
Walter Foery’s reign of religious leadership was quickly coming to an end, and with it so many of the increasingly provincial ideas he’d held so dear for so long.
In truth, Foery had always been puzzling and, to many priests, somewhat troubled. He was also regarded by many of those same fellow clerics as mercurial and a guy who simply could not sit still for any length of time, especially in an important meeting. The man was clearly intelligent, but he lost focus easily and even predictably, almost as though he was a ship in choppy seas whose sails remained full but whose rudder didn’t always reach the water.
Regardless, in 1937, at just 46 years old, Walter A. Foery, head of Catholic Charities in Rochester, was unexpectedly named by Pope Pius XI, the aging Pontiff in Rome, as bishop of Syracuse, some 70 miles to the East – the youngest priest to ever hold that position.
As the leader of the Catholic Church’s flock, at the geographic, economic and cultural heart of the most important state in the union, and as a conservative whose personal motto was “Stand Firm in Faith,” Foery became a staunch and high-profile advocate for traditional Church doctrine. In 1945, for example, he voiced outrage and called it “unthinkable” when the delegates of the all-new United Nations voted to forego a morning prayer to open their first-ever conference in San Francisco.
In 1959, Foery once again drew attention to himself, at least locally, by chastising the leaders of the Syracuse Metropolitan Health Council to a reporter for having admitted to their ranks Planned Parenthood, an organization that a decade prior had changed its name from the far less-nuanced American Birth Control League.
Around that time, he also launched a summer day camp for Catholic boys and girls on Cross Lake in rural Jordan, and breathed life into the foundering Lourdes Camp by relocating it from rural Cortland County to the shores of magnificent Skaneateles Lake. He then named the former after himself, and ran both out of the new CYO office on North Salina Street.
And, of course, in 1939, just two years after being handed the reins of the Syracuse diocese, he adopted and began nurturing the all-new Parochial League in his likewise all-new hometown, a scholastic league he fell in love with at first sight, and the only league of its kind in the entire country, onr made up solely of parish-based, K-12 neighborhood schools.
But by 1962 and the dawn of Vatican II, the world that Foery had helped shape had become almost alien to him. So that Fall, even as he got off the plane at Leonardo di Vinci Airport in Rome, Foery began to angst deeply, and do so within the recesses of his own turbulent mind.
For that reason, Foery barely made it through a day and a half in Rome. In fact, he attended only a handful of breakout sessions before quietly retreating to his hotel late on the morning of day two, where he slowly started to pack his bags and then, alone atop his unmade bed, dialed the phone on the nightstand beside him. Walter Foery had had enough of Vatican II. His mind was awhirl, and he was likely suffering a panic attack. More than anything, he just wanted to go home.
The very next day Foery was back in Syracuse, once again within the safety of the bishop’s manor. Less than 72 hours after landing in Italy, in other words, Bishop Foery had returned to cold and rainy Hancock Field in slate-grey Syracuse. It was almost as though the future of the Catholic Church was too much for the aging cleric to comprehend, let alone actually face.
Indeed, it would only be a few short years before Bishop Walter A. Foery and his cherished Parochial League, the one-of-a-kind family of schools he’d once fallen in love with and adopted as his own, a lovingly knit patchwork quilt of tiny, brick schools into which he’d poured his heart and soul, would be gone forever, relegated to the pages of history and the fading memories of the dwindling few who’d once been touched by them both.
* * * * *
They affectionately referred to themselves the “Chinese Bandits,” a name the Sacred Heart bench players had bestowed upon themselves two years prior when Adam Markowski was still coaching and Jack Contos was numbered among their ranks. The Bandits were the Hearts’ shock troops, the subs, the B-team; the guys whose job it was to occasionally spell one of the starters, but mostly to just practice hard and provide throaty, moral support from the sidelines during each and every game.
Above all, the Chinese Bandits job was to keep the Sacred Heart starters battle-tested and to temper them against the intense heat of Parochial League warfare.
Make no mistake, every coach in the league had at his disposal a benchful of anywhere from five to seven reserves. But the Hearts bench under Billy E was more than just a handful of nondescript scrubs the starters would regularly beat up on to stay in shape and fine tune their games.
Sacred Hearts' bench was a collection of kids, a few of whom, under different conditions, might have been starting on almost any other team in the league. By the 1966-67 season, the talent drain had already begun to severely impact nine of the ten schools in the league. Syracuse's white flight had begun to suck the life out of them. Bishop Ludden had emerged as a legitimate alternative to West Side Catholics looking to provide their kids with the type of solid, nun-driven education they’d once enjoyed. And now, in its very first year, Bishop Grimes was doing the very same thing on the East Side.
Only Sacred Heart, with its legion of proud, loyal Polish families in and around Syracuse’s West End, seemed immune from the bloodletting.
As a result, where other teams in the Parochial League might have had one or two star-level kids, and two or three other nice role-players, the quality dropped off considerably after that. Those nine other benches, such as they were, were generally populated by earnest but marginally talented kids who, likely, would have been forced to play CYO ball had they chosen to attend Ludden, Grimes, or CBA, the Christian Brothers school that had recently moved from the city to suburban Dewitt.
Billy E, on the other hand, had a collection of nonstarters in his back pocket who, despite a flaw or two, could still play and who, to a man, brought something meaningful to his team’s makeup.
Leo Najdul, for example – whose father Frank was the ex-Nazi war prisoner and volunteer track coach who continued to mentor (and push) big Tom Sakowski – brought his father’s mental toughness and cast iron will to the discipline of playing defense and diving for loose balls, however close to the wall or bleachers they may have been.
Tommy Godzac remained a deadly shooter and solid passer with the ability to spell any one of Billy E’s starters at a moment’s notice, and do so without even a hiccup to the team’s offensive flow or the crispness of its ball movement.
Jimmy Pryzbyl (pronounced SHIH-bel) was a tallish, angular and shy young man with a nose for the ball, and a kid who kept his thoughts and words to himself. Pryzbyl loved rebounding, could guard almost anyone on the court for at least a few minutes, and lived to do exactly whatever it was that Billy E instructed him to do.
Walt Kicak, a senior, was a strong, solid youngster with broad shoulders and good size, a kid who was as physically talented as any upperclassman on Sacred Heart not named Schmid or Contos.
Paul Stepien, a completely unselfish player with uncanny court sense, had a nose for consistently finding the open man and was as good a ball handler as either of Billy E’s two starting guards, Dan Van Cott and Joe Zaganczyk.
Rich Dabrowski, a fifteen-year-old sophomore, had quick feet and quicker hands, and he remained deceptively strong for a stringbean of a youngster with ears like open taxi doors and an Adam’s apple the size of a walnut.
Even Jimmy Corbett, a smart-aleck black Irishman from the very top of Tipp Hill, though a fringy talent, brought something of real value to Billy E’s club. He was a fearless wiseass whose combination of self-confidence and unwillingness to back down from anyone was contagious and set a tone for his more talented teammates.
Yet, in one way or another, even the best of those Bandits had a flaw or two. Najdul, for example, was undersized and had stiff hands. Stepien couldn’t shoot very well. Dabrowski was as green as a shamrock and often got too worked up for his own good. As gifted as Godzac may have been with the ball in his hands, defensively he was at times out of his depths. And Kicak, as brilliantly as he could occasionally be in practice, was tight whenever he found himself in full uniform and under the glare of a gym full of Sacred Heart crazies.
Even with their faults, however, Billy's Chinese Bandits came together that year and forged an alliance among themselves within the larger context of their team.
Sure, they all wanted to play more. Sure, they all constantly sought to impress Billy to the extent that, at some point during an upcoming nail-biter against, say, St. Anthony’s or Assumption, he might point in their direction or call their name. Certainly, the underclassmen among them all felt they were constantly auditioning for a bigger role next season.
But mostly, they bonded because they knew collectively they had a job to do. Their job was to push Billy E’s starters to get better and to ready them for battle.
No other coach in the league was so advantaged, in large part due to the aforementioned talent drain, a product of Syracuse's ongoing white flight.
At St. Lucy’s, for example, a tall forward named Lloyd “Tookie” Chisholm, who would ultimately claim that year’s scoring title, was a magnificent athlete and great player. A tall, rangy junior with a giant wingspan and a feathery touch, Chisholm had teamed the year prior with another African American kid named Lou Moore to keep a woefully thin St. Lucy’s roster more than competitive. But by the 1966-67 season, Moore had graduated and the Lucy’s lineup had become that much thinner as school enrollment shrunk yet again and, yet again, more and more white families continued to pack their bags and move out of the rapidly changing Lower West End and Skunk City.
It wasn’t that Lucy’s didn’t have five decent starters that year; they did. It was that they didn’t have the kind of kids on their bench who could do battle with Chisholm every day in practice and who had the talent and physical skills to continually goad, and push, and challenge the budding star to try to become the best player he could be.
That was a luxury only Billy E had, thanks to his secret weapon: the Chinese Bandits.
Billy’s daily practices were more than just simple exercises in repetition. They were mini-wars of will and tiny battles of hustle-over-talent as the Bandits continually tried to one-up the starters, behind whom every one of them sat, constantly talking trash and daring the starters to try to do something special.
The Bandits, likewise, always kept score in their heads during each day’s practice game and would regularly announce that score whenever one of their shots happened to fall.
Pryzbyl and Dabrowski, in particular, loved nothing better than being able to make a quick steal or rise up and block a shot against one of their taller, more physically developed teammates. When Billy's subs did manage to come out on top after one of these otherwise inconsequential games, they’d all quietly start beaming at what they, as a team, had just been able to accomplish against a starting five that had yet to suffer even a single loss in the Parochial League.
Perhaps as a result, tensions occasionally ran high. One day, Jack Contos, fed up with Najdul’s constant Charlie Hustle-style defense and his steady stream of taunts, finally lost it. The jumping jack of a forward went after the smaller Najdul after practice in the locker room with rage in his eyes. And Najdul, true to the fire instilled in him by his old man, threw every bit of that and more right back into the face of the bigger, stronger and more physically gifted Contos.
Eventually, Contos ended their brief set-to by picking up his wiry teammate by his sweaty jersey, slamming him against a locker, and then letting him drop to the floor like a rag doll. Nonplussed, Najdul continued to shout after the still-seething Contos, even as the latter walked away, and even as he sat on his backside and against the locker on the very spot where his teammate had unceremoniously dumped him.
Perhaps no Sacred Heart starter got more frustrated with the Chinese Bandits, however, than Pete Schmid, Billy E’s powerful and otherwise stoic German forward. The junior all-league performer, in fact, was often knocked off his game by the Bandits in ways he simply wasn't by even the best of his Parochial League opponents.
Occasionally in practice, when one of Billy’s Bandits didn’t bite on one of his head fakes, or didn’t leave his feet to try to block one of his shots, but instead held his ground with his arms stretched high and inched up into the giant forward as he rose skyward, Schmid would throw up his hands and let out a snort of disgust.
He’d even, now and then, go so far as to shove the Bandit guarding him backwards in a spasm of frustration that implied he wanted the kid to back-the-hell off and drop that whole Charlie Hustle act.
These confrontations only made Billy smile for reasons that any teacher or coach watching would have easily recognized and fully understood.
But of all the things those Bandits did to help their teammates on the court, at least one of them did something far more important off it.
Joe Zaganczyk was, in many ways, a classic Richard Cory-type kid – a gifted young man who, from afar anyway, “glittered when he walked.” Joey Zaganczyk was handsome. Joey Zaganczyk was a star athlete. He played in a rock band. He was smart. He had a killer head of thick, sandy brown hair. He was a class officer. He was a nice guy. And, perhaps, for all those things and more, it seemed just about every girl in school had a secret crush on him.
But Joe Zaganczyk bore a heavy burden, and it was a burden about which only a precious few of his Polish friends knew, if only because the young man never talked about it (or himself, frankly). His parents’ marriage, which had long been cratering, had fallen apart years prior. Zaganczyk, therefore – a kid growing up in a devout Catholic neighborhood and an era during which such things never, ever happened – was the by-product of divorced parents.
This was not 21st Century America, mind you. This was 20th Century America; mid-20th Century America, to be exact. It was a time, in other words, when divorce did not merely carry a social stigma, nor was it just some little interpersonal no-no to try to avoid.
To the contrary, it was a time in America when the very idea of divorce represented a burn-in-hell, moral taboo for any Catholic willing to adhere to the strictures of his or her faith. Divorce may not have, technically, been a mortal sin. But to countless Catholics, particularly many Poles in Syracuse's West End, it seemed pretty darn close and, to their thinking, probably should have been.
What’s more, it was an era during which divorce created an almost unfathomable burden for all those caught in its sway – especially the children whose family and home life had been made sacrificial lambs. Joe Zaganczyk was one such child; an innocent who found himself caught in the heavy emotional crossfire triggered by the rarest of rarities in his mostly Catholic city; a legal yet ugly divorce.
Jimmy Pryzbyl – one of Billy E’s hardest working Bandits – was, like Zaganczyk, a notoriously quiet kid. Unlike Zaganczyk, however, the gangly Pryzbyl’s external demeanor was less a personal choice than it was a product of his deep-seeded mix of humility and shyness, spiced with more than a dollop of insecurity. And perhaps it was their mutual unwillingness of talk in front of people they didn’t know, or have a light shone upon them, that first drew Jim Pryzbyl and Joe Zaganczyk to one another and, in time, led them to become best friends.
For whatever reason, though, in seemingly no time whatsoever the two classmates had become inseparable, and started spending large stretches of their days together, usually at Jimmy’s house. From there, and quicker than a Bobby Felasco fast-break, Joe Zaganczyk soon found himself sleeping over at the Pryzbyl home almost every Friday and Saturday night, joining the Pryzbyls for 10 o’clock mass on most Sunday mornings, and regularly participating in day trips and even long-distance family vacations.
It was almost as though young Joe Zaganczyk had become a twin brother to Jimmy Pryzbyl, a big brother to Judi Pryzbyl, and a second son to Frank and Charlotte Pryzbyl.
A number of psychologists will tell you that children of divorce can often be driven to seek perfection because they ultimately blame themselves for their mother and father’s breakup, convincing themselves that, if they’d just been a little better, or maybe a little more perfect, their parents’ marriage would have survived.
As a result, love, for such kids, becomes an almost entirely performance-based phenomenon, a transactional relationship in which one act is required to beget a reciprocal one.
The world will never know if Joe Zaganczyk became such a child, or if he felt such things. But the simple fact was, at some point in high school, young Joey Zaganczyk turned himself into the single sharpest dresser in Sacred Heart, a kid whose clothes were always clean and pressed, if not altogether new. His hair was always just so, and he’d constantly sneak side glances into shiny surfaces to make sure it was still perfectly combed and each strand still in place. He ran for class president and was elected easily. He spent hours on end at the Boys Club shooting foul shots until he rarely, if ever, missed. And when he joined Richie Strager’s little garage band, he convinced his fellow bandmates not to learn Rolling Stone songs, with all their dark imagery and bad-boy vibes. He, instead, sold them on the virtues of learning a few of the Beatles’ more joyous pop songs, the ones to which millions of school girls continued to swoon, scream, and sing along.
Maybe that’s why he found himself so drawn to, not just Jimmy Pryzbyl, but to his entire family, especially his parents, Frank and Charlotte, who’d come to accept him as their own. Because during his high school years, Billy E’s star sharpshooter discovered something he’d never known before and something he would, in time, carry with him wherever the years happened to take him.
In the simple, warm and inviting home of his best friend and teammate, Jimmy Pryzbyl – a Chinese Bandit of the highest order – Joe Zaganczyk found not only acceptance. He found, for the first time in his life, unconditional love.
* * * * *
To thousands of locals he was something of a kind (though colorless and dry-as-a-bone) uncle, a buttoned-down, nice-enough sort who fed them little snippets of news each evening, and did so in a gentle, soothing sort of way so as not to upset them (or, apparently, anyone else). His name was Fred Hillegas. He was the dean of Central New York news anchors and a guy who, with WSYR-TV station manager, E.R. “Curly” Vadeboncoeur, had pretty much invented local television news and election night coverage in the Salt City.
Hillegas, a blocky, pie-face, and square-jawed anchor with slicked-back hair, a deliberate, sonorous delivery, and a pronounced under-bite, sat behind a simple, unadorned desk at the WSYR studios on James Street with his name spelled out on a placard beneath him, not unlike a game show contestant. He was the weekday deliverer of the six o’clock news on Syracuse’s NBC affiliate, WSYR, and the headliner of the single most watched local TV show in the area.
To Channel 3 viewers, he may have been Fred Hillegas, local anchor, but to Mayor Bill Walsh he was, and would always remain, Fred “Full of Gas” – a TV presence whose blather could amount to so much hot air and so many partial-truths, near-misses and oh-so gentle distortions. Walsh saw Hillegas as a decent guy and a honest, hard-working journalist, who also happened to be a news reporter whose accounts, at least in his opinion, never quite captured the essence of all the good that continued to happen in Syracuse under his watch, especially when it came to Urban Renewal.
There was a certain irony to Bill Walsh's view of Hillegas, of course, because, like so many in the local media, the newsman continued to frame the ongoing rollout of Urban Renewal, construction of Interstate 81, and razing of the 15th Ward (along with the protests and arrests they invariably generated) in a way that, likely, could have been drawn up by Walsh himself. Little weight was ever given, for example, to the human toll of all that urban displacement, and little attention was ever paid to what that systematic (and, at times, cold and heartless) destruction was doing to the lives of the thousands of Syracuse men, women and children who, for decades (if not their entire lives) had called that dog-eared little patch of the city home.
Similarly, when stories of the civil disobedience triggered by yet another wave of Urban Renewal did get aired on Hillegas’ six o’clock broadcast (or, for that matter, made either paper), special attention was regularly paid to the origin of the protesters. Time and again, whenever Urban Renewal was the story, it was made clear (almost as though City Hall had been granted right of final approval) that the root cause of the city’s steady stream Urban Renewal protests continued to be hired guns from places other than Central New York; highly trained and strategically imported teams of (in the journalistic buzzwords of the day) “radical organizers,” “professional muckrakers,” and “outside agitators.”
But then, just before the beginning of the '66-'67 season, Fred Hillegas led off his six o’clock broadcast with, not a hard news item at all, but a soft one (in fact, a news item of almost curious levels of softness). Tomorrow, reported the dry newsreader through sleepy eyes and his trademark under-bite, would be the very first day that WSYR – or for that matter any TV station in Central New York – would broadcast its entire schedule, local and national, in full and living color.
It may have been an unabashed plug for Channel 3, a not-so-veiled attempt by the self-proclaimed “peacock" network’s parent, GE, to move even more color TVs out the door, and a spasm of self-congratulatory glee the likes of which might have otherwise done physical harm to anyone so bold as to try to pat himself that hard on the back.
But that moment mattered, and did so in a way that went beyond just one more local station embracing one more technology. It mattered because it marked a tipping point for television and the ever-increasing fascination with youth culture. Black and white may have been the language of the generation of Americans that had both fought and won World War II, but color had quickly emerged as the language of choice for the generation that had been spawned as a result of it.
When millions of servicemen (and women) returned home from Europe, Northern Africa and the South Pacific, starting in 1945, those young people began celebrating in a way that any red-blooded American might celebrate for not having been killed in the patriotic pursuit of world freedom. They started making babies, and plenty of them. And before anyone even realized it, the “Baby Boomer” generation found itself not merely rooted, but in full flower.
And while the country’s obsession with youth may have been ignited the night Elvis Presley first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in September of 1956, and may have, indeed, found a higher gear the night the Beatles did the same in February of ‘64, when a silly little half hour show called the Monkees aired for the first time in rich, lifelike color on a Friday in September of 1966, Madison Ave’s commitment to (and fascination with) those postwar Boomers had officially reached a pitch that could then, and for the foreseeable future, be best described as frenzied.
And once that frenzy kicked in, and once Madison Ave’s hard-working, hard-living and hard-playing “mad men” fully committed their energies and limitless imaginations to the bottomless pursuit of those kids’ hearts and minds, American technology, entertainment and commerce would never be the same.
By 1966, no longer were U.S. teenagers simply being thrown an occasional bone or two by TV writers. Now they were being targeted, if not catered to. Throughout the decade, more and more, prime time TV shows began to skew younger and younger in style and content.
It began with the advent of a handful of animated shows in the early ‘60s, most of them from Hanna-Barbara studios; half-hour, hand-drawn prime time sitcoms (and dramas) with full-blown story arcs and names like the Flintstones, the Jetsons and Johnny Quest, each paid for many times over by strategically placed 30- and 60-second ads for must-have toys like Barbie Dolls, GI Joes, EZ Bake Ovens, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, Creepy Crawlers, Vac-U-Forms and Mattel Power Shops, along with dozens of board and party games like Mystery Date, Operation, Mousetrap, Battleship and Twister.
It next evolved into a parade of live-performance and youth-targeted musical/variety programs; Top 40-inspired shows like Shindig, Hullabaloo, Hootenanny, Where the Action Is, and a dressed-up nighttime version of Dick Clark’s syndicated, after-school dance show, American Bandstand.
And it culminated during the 1966 Fall season with the premiere of the Monkees, a madcap inside joke about a made-up (yet almost scientifically pieced-together) rock band of four different “types” of twenty-something kids in L.A. – an earnest but calculating Frankenstein’s monster of a show that tried, in all its gentle cynicism, to manufacture, then bottle, the organic spontaneity of Beatlemania, a global phenomenon that had all-but consumed the Boomer generation two years prior.
If the Monkees was the new show that, during the 1966-67 basketball season, reflected the sunlit yin of that forever-young/forever-free Pepsi generation – their brighter, lighter and even sillier side – a second show premiering that very same season seemed to embody the other side of those maturing Boomers: a groundbreaking and at times hard-edged comedy/variety show that mirrored those kids' yang, a show that spoke to their darker, moodier, and more cynical side.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which aired for the first time on the second Sunday of February, 1967, came out of the box all scrubbed and polished, looking like so many of the variety shows before it: largely neutered, vaudeville-style revues fronted by such bastions of harmless, red-white-and-blue yuks as Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Red Skelton. But even though the show’s co-hosts and namesakes, Tom and Dick Smothers, donned blazers and ties, wore close-cropped hair, and used instruments more as stage props than musical devices, there was something about them that felt different, a touch subversive.
The show had a decidedly anti-establishment bent to its writing, a bent that manifested itself in many of its comedic skits and one that played particularly well with many of those maturing (and now increasingly political) Boomers.
The show’s anti-establishment take on things became even more pointed as LBJ’s ragged, undeclared war in Vietnam first escalated and then, seemingly overnight, spun out of control. That’s the point at which the Smothers Brothers’ comedy bits started to get more daring, and the writers began using their unsparing and unsettling brand of edgy, absurdist satire to take dead aim at those in power and, in particular, those calling the shots in Southeast Asia.
If biting satire and left-leaning humor were the vehicles by which the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour first drew attention to itself, its collection of musical guests was what really resonated with Boomers.
The show’s two stars had cut their teeth in the Greenwich Village folk scene and they initially booked a bunch of folkie/acoustic acts like Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul & Mary, Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian and Simon & Garfunkel to sing a song or two, but the brothers soon branched out and began showcasing young, groundbreaking talent from across the musical spectrum, a number of whom were straight out of the world of rock, and a few of whom were still in the process of inventing that still-young genre: Cream, the Buffalo Springfield, the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Animals, Steppenwolf and the Who, to name just a few.
Sunday nights in family rooms throughout hard-working, devout and nose-to-the-grindstone Syracuse – nights that for years been reserved for warm-and-fuzzy family fare like Lassie, Bonanza, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, the Ed Sullivan Show and Candid Camera – had a whole new look and sound.
But the change in the texture of life in Syracuse was only beginning.
At roughly the same time that the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour first aired, a largely unknown gospel singer from the Motor City, a young lady with broad shoulders and a powerful voice, went into the studio to record one of her first pop songs for her new label, Atlantic Records. The track Aretha Franking laid down was a cover of a fringe hit for singer/songwriter, Otis Redding, who’d sung it as a put-upon, world-weary male, a guy who’d sounded somewhat beaten up by life and resigned to it.
But in Ms. Franklin’s hands, guided by producer Jerry Wexler and engineer Tom Dowd, both of whom had a deep understanding of both singer and song, Respect was turned inside out and infused with a feral, almost kinetic sense of unleashed feminine power.
Released days later, the single immediately became the #1 smash across the U.S. More than that, it became a thunderbolt, echoing across the landscape, a perfect record for its time, one that defied anyone, anywhere to try to ignore its power.
The same month that the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour premiered and Aretha recorded Respect, and an unknown, left-handed guitar genius from Seattle calling himself “Jimi” Hendrix laid down an otherworldly single titled Purple Haze, on the other side of the Atlantic, in London, the Beatles – the most popular artists in the world – were in the process of laying down two new songs of their own; the first by Paul McCartney, and the second by John Lennon, with a little help from his friend and writing partner.
The first was entitled, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the second, A Day in the Life. Together, the two songs would serve as the musical bookends of, arguably, the most groundbreaking vinyl release the world had ever heard: the brassy number that trumpeted the opening of the Beatles’ concept album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the haunting opus that closed it.
It wasn’t the greatness of any one song, or even the greatness of the album itself, as much as it was the collective and profound influence it had on Western culture. What’s more, it came at a time of unprecedented social turbulence, upheaval and raised consciousness; a three-month stretch of time that would soon be referred to, even by the venerable Walter Cronkite, as the “Summer of Love.”
From the moment it was released in June, Sgt. Pepper’s changed everything. Almost overnight, it became the album that kicked down the doors of just about every preconceived notion the record industry, music critics, and fans ever had about what was possible in pop music.
That’s not to say, of course, that little Syracuse, New York, was any more or less impacted by such artistic breakthroughs than any other city in America. What was true was that for the largely conservative and proudly blue-collar town, there seemed to be a relentlessness to the rate and nature of change that was making many locals feel threatened in a way they hadn’t since World War II.
What’s more, for thousands of the city’s longtime, hardworking residents – men and women from across the political spectrum – it began to feel as though being over the age of 30 had suddenly become a crime, and if not a crime against humanity or even polite society, then certainly a crime against the two powerful and largely faceless entities that each, in its own insidious way, seemed determined to establish a new, more youthful social order in town: Madison Ave and Hollywood.
By February of 1967, the change that continued to rain down upon the Salt City seemed only to heighten. It was change that Charlie Brady and Billy Jones lived with each morning they said mass. It was change that Billy E read about time and again as he checked his daily sports pages; change that Manny Breland was reminded of every time he looked up and saw the MONY Tower blinking down on what, for so long, had been his little, one-of-a-kind neighborhood; change seen every night on that Fall’s new TV lineup; and change, the sound of which kept getting louder and louder on thousands of cheap Japanese transistor radios being held up to thousands of young ears all across town.
As the news continued to break, it seemed, the dominos simply continued to fall.
Just before first practice of that year, two young African Americans, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, formed a radical organization in Oakland called the Black Panthers, a counterstrike to the peaceful, Gandhi-like protests of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a group whose willingness to resort to anything, including violence, was distilled down to the simple yet ominous phrase that Seale and Newton coined and adopted as their motto: Black Power.
Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the African American spectrum, on November 8, in the otherwise rock-solid Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts, a political unknown named Edward Brooke – running as a moderate Republican, no less – became the first-ever popularly elected "Negro" Senator in U.S. history by out-polling a Harvard-educated and prep school-trained white candidate named Endicott “Chub” Peabody.
Just a few weeks later, on December 10, the front page of the Post-Standard ran a story that the Georgia legislature, employing an arcane statute in state law, had hand-picked segregationist Lester Maddox as its next governor – despite Maddox, an unrepentant white supremacist, receiving a minority of votes in the election and triggering fierce opposition from many in his own party.
And on the 19th of that month, amid the hustle and bustle of Christmas shoppers on Salina Street, the front pages announced the fact that Syracuse’s all-new MONY Tower had been illuminated for the first time, becoming the most visible sign yet that the city's unique but ultimately powerless tenderloin district, its 15th Ward, had finally succumbed to the forces of progress, free market capitalism, and urban Darwinism.
A week after that, the day after Christmas, the Pentagon, with no fanfare and little notice, released an updated death count from Vietnam. The number of Americans killed in Southeast Asia had risen to 64,000. In the same notice, the Pentagon said it did not anticipate a decline in casualty figures for, in its words, “the foreseeable future.”
Then on Thursday, January 5, a Syracuse landmark, the venerable RKO Keith’s theater, closed its doors for the final time. It would be a mere weeks before that one-time show palace – arguably the most beautiful and tragic victim of Bill Walsh’s vision of a more modernized Syracuse, a facility once billed as “the most magnificent theater in the universe” – would lay in rubble at the feet of the wrecking ball.
Like so many of Salina Street’s storied theaters in that era of Urban Renewal – all of them echoes of America’s Gilded Age; grand theaters with equally grand names like the Eckel, the Paramount, and the Strand – RKO Keith’s was deemed, not merely expendable, but a roadblock to the city’s future.
Just days after the magnificent Keith’s went dark, Adam Clayton Powell, Harlem’s larger-than-life and often bombastic representative in Congress, a former hellfire-and-brimstone preacher who’d been stripped of his chairmanship of a powerful house committee, earned front page news Upstate for an audacious remark he'd made to a reporter.
Powell, the first African American elected to Congress, had been found by investigators to have improperly allocated funds, including travel for a young, beauty queen with whom he was having a torrid affair. All the while, he had his wife on the public payroll for a no-show job. When asked about his censure, an indignant Powell, using a word no African American public figure would ever have dared utter in the context of himself, boldly and resolutely declared that the sanctions imposed upon him by his virtually all-white colleagues were a political “lynching.” The story of Powell’s censure – and his defiant use of the word “lynching” – gave the embattled congressman above-the-fold notice in the Salt City.
In Bill Walsh’s Syracuse, the news just kept coming.
Later that January, after practice one night, Billy E watched in horror as NBC co-anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley detailed the fate of the three-man crew of Apollo 1, the first in a series of missions designed to make good on President Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon. The three men, including Gus Grissom (one of the original Mercury 7, the seven baby-faced astronauts who’d once captured the nation’s fancy as smiling, bright-eyed symbols of America’s future), were burned alive when an electrical spark ignited the pure oxygen inside their capsule. After so many glorious successes, Syracusans everywhere were suddenly confronted with the dark specter of NASA’s first failure.
Two weeks later, both papers reported that physician Dr. Robert Hall from the Columbia Academy of Medicine had admitted to a hushed room of New York lawmakers that, despite current law, in 1966 there’d been some 750 illegal abortions performed in hospitals throughout the state. The news (and number) horrified many Salt City Catholics, not the least of whom was the most important Friday fish-eater of them all, the head of the diocese, Walter Foery.
A short time after, on January 10, Congress ratified the 25th Amendment, an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that governed presidential succession, one that introduced, for the first time ever, provisions for the ouster of a president on the basis of being unfit to serve, mentally or physically. Such a possibility – that a sitting president could be viewed as unfit, especially mentally – seemed insane to many pouring over their morning Post-Standard or afternoon Herald-Journal, a generation of proud and loyal war veterans, widows and children whose collective frame of reference included such titans of strength, reason, public mindedness and American resolve as FDR, Harry Truman, Ike and JFK.
As for the late JFK, there remained hundreds of homes in Central New York in which hung a photo of the one and only Catholic politician ever elected president, usually in the front hall or kitchen, next to a crucifix and photo of the recently deceased pontiff, Pope John XXIII. For that reason, it caused more than a ripple of chatter in barber shops, beauty salons, taverns, union halls, pool rooms, VFW posts, and social clubs when – on the morning of the day Billy E’s Sacred Heart club would thrash Most Holy Rosary to run its record to 9-0 – the Post-Standard reported that New Orleans DA Jim Garrison had stated for the first time publicly that he believed Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone. Garrison then used the first of his 15 minutes of fame to announce his intentions to fully investigate the Kennedy assassination and to get to the root of what would, following his claim, become the single most asked question in Syracuse: Who killed JFK?
One week later, on February 27, John Contos came home after a long day of freight-handling, popped open a Utica Club, shook open his Herald-Journal, and saw staring back at him a headline that declared boldly, “Draft Dodgers Finding Home in Canada.” And just like that, thousands of working men in and around Syracuse had themselves a brand new phrase – draft dodger – to drop into barroom, lunchtime, or bowling-night conversations; a phrase many would begin using about anyone who’d dare question America’s role in Vietnam.
A week after that Vietnam story ran, an entirely different one broke. LBJ was out on the stump trumpeting his all-new selective service system, a blind draft lottery which, from that day hence, would be the only method used by Pentagon officials to determine which American boys would be called to fight in Vietnam.
Johnson had ordered the lottery system developed in response to mounting unrest on the part of many African American leaders – unrest, oddly enough, stoked by two men on opposite ends of the same side of the civil rights movement: renowned Atlanta-based pacifist and Southern Baptist minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., and a telegenic young militant from Harlem named Stokely Carmichael.
Both King and Carmichael had been traveling the U.S. for months, fanning the flames in the inner city and calling Johnson’s rapidly escalating conflict in Southeast Asia a war of white privilege. Both men preached that Vietnam was being fought by a disproportionate number of Negroes and poor whites; young men without the money, power, or influence to buy their way out of a commitment and into a deferment.
It was Carmichael, in fact, who that very year came up with the phrase that would soon become the unofficial rallying cry of anti-war protesters throughout the country, black and white: “Hell no, we won’t go!”
By chance or fate, the very same week that LBJ announced his draft lottery, and days before the Pentagon began mailing lottery “tickets” to some 300,000 draft-eligible men across the U.S. – draft tickets that, almost to a person, these young men started calling draft “cards” – that very same Stokely Carmichael came to Syracuse to speak to an overflow crowd of students, faculty members and 15th Ward residents at Hendricks Chapel on the S.U. campus.
By that point, the young radical had risen up to become chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Compared to his predecessor, Carmichael brought to “Snick” a harder, less-willing-to-compromise and more defiant edge in pursuit of elevating the black man’s place in, not just America, but the world.
Again, the news of a rapidly changing world just kept on coming.
On March 8, both papers ran page-one stories about the introduction of a bill in the State House called the Blumenthal Bill, named for an attorney-turned-legislator from New York City. Albert Blumenthal had just introduced a piece of progressive legislation that would, in a number of cases, make getting and performing an abortion legal.
To Blumenthal, every year back alley abortions cost hundreds, if not thousands, of young women their lives. Why, then, not take them out of the shadows and place them where they belonged: in sanitary and regulated medical facilities?
His most vocal critics – many of them Catholics from his own party and conservatives from the other side of the aisle – leapt at the opportunity to attack him, claiming Blumenthal’s bill would create what they called “abortion on demand.”
On its own merit, Blumenthal’s bill may or may not have gained much traction in the statewide media. But with that single three-word phrase attached, news of the Blumenthal Bill spread across the state like a brushfire.
Within hours, newspapers throughout New York State were typesetting headlines featuring those three words in bold, extra-large type. Before you knew it, for many devout Catholics, “abortion on demand” had become the only enemy in their spiritual crosshairs, a concept virtually synonymous with the devil himself. One such Catholic was Bishop Foery in Syracuse, who quietly seethed as he read the Post-Standard's account of the Blumenthal Bill over his morning coffee, his small, thick knuckles turning nearly white.
Two days later, on March 10, that same Post-Standard ran a story in its regional section that most in the city likely didn’t even notice, much less read. In fact, among those in this story, only Kenny Huffman may have happened upon it. Hoffman, originally a Fabius kid, a rural crossroads far south of the city, regularly read the regional news over his morning coffee for tidbits of information from the tiny villages and farm towns of his youth.
The surprisingly in-depth account detailed how the half sister of the recently assassinated Nation of Islam leader, Malcolm X – a woman named Ella Collins – had done what, in the eyes of many, was the unthinkable. Collins, who’d taken the reins of her brother’s organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), and who, herself, remained a proud member of the Nation of Islam, had put a downpayment on a large dairy farm in the virtually all-white community of Cincinnatus, some 20 miles east of Cortland, the county seat.
According to the Post-Standard, that represented the second such large tract of land that Mrs. Collins had agreed to buy in a relatively short period of time, both under the OAAU banner. The first was a similar-sized spread some 60 miles to the east in Milford, a likewise tiny, mostly white farming community in Otsego County, midway between Cooperstown and Oneonta.
Subsequent stories in the Post explained that the OAAU was attempting to create a separate “Afro-American” nation-state within the U.S., a sovereign nation that would be solely for people of color. The OAAU’s separatist Afro-American “nation” – actually a series of interconnected rural communities modeled on the one-time utopian community of silversmiths in nearby Oneida – would, at least according to the Post, eventually be national in scope and, in time, house as many as twenty million "Negroes."
The nation would be entirely self-sufficient and have its own laws and its own leaders, not to mention its own schools, farms, media outlets, healthcare facilities and businesses.
The initial goal of the OAAU’s two Upstate farms was to regularly produce enough dairy products to provide sustenance and compensation for those working the farms, while generating sufficient quantities of milk to ship downstate to Harlem, where countless black children continued to live in poverty and face the daily threat of malnourishment. Malcolm X’s belief had been that those young African American bodies and minds would be made fundamentally stronger and healthier by a steady flow of fresh milk each day.
The pace of social change in Syracuse had almost become untenable. To a confounding degree, at least to many in town, was the extent to which all that social turbulence was being caused not by some crazed tyrant a half a world away, like Hitler, Mussolini or Khrushchev, but by people who lived in the U.S. and called it home. That growing wave of social upheaval, to their thinking, and a wave that continued to wash over their little city like rancid Onondaga Lake water, was being created by Americans themselves – mostly young Americans and Americans of color – who, in their minds, seemed hell-bent on destroying all they’d worked so hard to build.
As the brutal winter started to thaw, the change didn't let up. To the contrary, it just kept coming.
Early that Spring, a young Syracuse woman unwittingly elbowed her way onto the pages of history on what, at least initially, appeared to be just another cold and damp Patriots Day in New England. Kathy Switzer, an S.U. undergrad and member of the local Syracuse Chargers track club, had been accepted to run in that year’s Boston Marathon. When the 21-year old journalism/English major submitted her entry form a few months prior, on the advice of her coach with the Chargers, she did not register as “Kathy,” or even “Kathrine.” Instead, she filled it out using only the initials, “K.V.”
Not realizing “K.V. Switzer” was a woman, the officials in Boston admitted her, the first woman to ever achieve that distinction and receive an official race number. Come Patriots Day, however, just a few miles into the event, a buzz began to ripple through the crowd as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder along the race’s winding route through Boston and seven of its bedroom communities. A woman, they heard, was running the Marathon.
A few miles into the race, a 64-year old marathon official and first-generation Scots immigrant named Jock Semple sprinted up behind Switzer in his street clothes, all wild-eyed and screaming. He then grabbed at the young runner’s shoulder and attempted to tear the number off her back, yelling as he ran and clutching at her, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!”
Running alongside Switzer that chilly New England day was her boyfriend, Tom Miller, also a Syracuse undergrad who doubled as a hammer thrower on the school’s track team. To protect Switzer, Miller instinctively lowered his right shoulder and plowed into Semple, driving the older man toward the curb and freeing his startled girlfriend from his clutches. Clearly shaken, but more resolved than ever, Switzer summoned the will to right herself and complete her marathon, the first woman in the history of the iconic Boston race to ever do so sporting an official number.
Yet, it would not be Kathy Switzer’s starting or even finishing that 1967 Boston Marathon that would ultimately change her country’s view of women or their role in competitive sports. It would be her brief confrontation with the fiery, balding Scotsman, Jock Semple. A staff photographer for the Boston Herald, a guy assigned to cover the race, happened to catch the entire episode in a series of stills, one after another. And by that evening, selected shots from the photographer's dramatic sequence were running on hundreds of front pages and in hundreds of newspapers all across the country.
When that happened – though, by the Spring of 1967, life-altering news had pretty much become standard in America – something about the photos of Semple attacking Switzer struck a chord. It wasn’t just that a woman was attempting to do something so demanding that it pushed the limits of human endurance, it was the rage in the man’s eyes as he tried to prevent her from doing it.
Much like the horrific news photo of the young Viet Cong soldier being executed at point blank range by a South Vietnamese police chief (snapped at the very moment of impact) or the equally horrific image of the young, crying Vietnamese girl running naked down a dirt lane – arms out, clothes literally burned off her body, her napalmed village in flames behind her – would serve as twin haymakers to the already dwindling public support for America’s involvement in Vietnam, so too the front-page images of pretty, young Kathy Switzer being denied a shot at her dream by an angry, older man touched millions in the country, and did so in a way no sequence of words ever could.
Indeed, that single confrontation (or, to be precise, the images of it) would soon be regarded by historians and sportswriters alike as one of the seminal moments in 20th Century American sports – particularly women’s sports, an otherwise largely ignored world that, until that very day, many in Syracuse didn’t even know existed. It was one of the very first times, in other words, when Americans, young and old, were forced to confront the notion that a woman could be every bit as driven to compete and physically challenge herself as a man – and that she should have every right to do so.
As the 1966-67 Parochial and City League seasons continued to crest toward their dramatic conclusions, changes big and small continued to tug at so many of the loose threads that were becoming more evident in the now fraying Salt City. And those changes were impacting both the quality and the texture of life in town; from the manner in which people worshiped and the traditions they held dear, to the food they ate, the places they called home, and the way they viewed one another.
* * * * *
Jim O’Brien was in the studio working the night shift at WNDR. As one of the hardest working Top 40 disc jockeys in town, the one-time Parochial League All Star pitcher and shortstop had done pretty much everything at one time or another at the station, at least on-air; morning drive, mid-days, afternoons, nighttime and even overnight.
“O.B.,” as he was called, was born and raised on the South Side, and was a kid who just loved playing sports, especially baseball, who lived for rounds of golf with his buddies, and who, as an adult, enjoyed knocking back a few as much as any Irishman anywhere. As a 1961 graduate of St. Anthony’s, where he’d starred on the mound to the point that he’d drawn the eye of at least one big league baseball scout, the 24-year old O’Brien was now of prime draft age for the war.
Fortunately for him, a few years prior he’d been accepted into the Coast Guard Reserves, a coveted 1960’s military gig that acted as a life-saving buffer for countless American boys, keeping them from having to wallow chest deep in foliage, rice paddies, and insects the size of house pets, while dodging bullets, avoiding landmines and ducking showers of napalm and agent orange.
O.B. had known a few guys who went over there to fight, some who were still there. For that reason, Vietnam continued to weigh heavily on his mind.
What’s more, for a young man who may have looked and acted like an All-American boy, Jim O’Brien was a surprisingly sensitive and thoughtful young man. So when the studio request line lit up that night, the call touched O.B. in a way most such calls would never do. The young man at the other end of the line said he was calling from a payphone at Hancock Airport; that he’d just been sitting on the linoleum floor with his suitcase by his side and his transistor to his ear. He had been listening to O.B., waiting for the plane that would fly him off to basic training. He had just been drafted, he explained, and was on his way to Vietnam.
The song he asked O.B. to play was one he felt the deejay's listeners – at least a few of them – might like to hear.
It was winter in Syracuse. 1967. The trees were bare. The snow had grown crusty and brown and lost all its gentle freshness. And the warm, dry sidewalks of Spring were still an eternity away.
O.B. set the needle down on the album. There was no 45 of this particular song, but he always kept the album within easy reach because every so often some nighttime caller would request he play I Ain’t Marching Anymore, an earnest little protest number by folk singer Phil Ochs that had evolved into something of an anthem for a handful of draft-age listeners. Being a nighttime deejay, Jim O’Brien had the freedom to, every so often, play an album cut rather than one of the current hit 45s that the daytime WNDR deejays found stacked up in front of them at the beginning of every shift.
In the silence and solitude of the studio, O.B. listened for the first time to the largely unknown album cut that the young soldier-to-be had requested, Days of Decision.
By the end of the second verse, the Church-going, South Side, St. Anthony’s boy found himself transfixed. It wasn’t so much that Phil Ochs’ Days of Decisions was a great song as much as it was, at least to O.B.’s thinking, a perfect message for a most imperfect time in Syracuse, a time in which he and his caller – whose name he never did catch – both found themselves living through.
The dark and foreboding lyrics made the tiny hairs on the back of O.B.’s neck rise.
Oh, the shadows of doubt are in many a mind,
Lookin’ for an answer they’re never gonna find,
But they’d better decide ’cause they’re runnin’ out of time,
For these are the days of decision.
Oh, the games of stalling you cannot afford,
Dark is the danger that’s knocking on the door,
And the far-reaching rockets say you can’t wait anymore,
For these are the days of decision.
As Ochs kept singing, the song seemed only to only grow more poignant and ominous.
Oh, the shadows of doubt are in many a mind,
Lookin’ for an answer they’re never gonna find,
But they’d better decide ’cause they’re runnin’ out of time,
For these are the days of decision.
Oh, the games of stalling you cannot afford,
Dark is the danger that’s knocking on the door,
And the far-reaching rockets say you can’t wait anymore,
For these are the days of decision.
In the face of the people who know they’re gonna win,
There’s a strength that’s greater than the power of the wind,
And you can’t stand around when the ice is growing thin,
For these are the days of decision.
I’ve seen your heads hiding ‘neath the blankets of fear,
When the paths they are plain and the choices are clear,
But with each passing day, boys, the cost is more dear
For these are the days of decision.
There’s many a cross that burns in the night,
And the fingers of the fire are pointing as they bite,
Oh you can’t let the smoke keep on blinding all your sight,
For these are the days of decision.
Now the mobs of anger are roamin’ the street,
From the rooftops they are aimin’ at the police on the beat,
And in city after city you know they will repeat,
For these are the days of decision.
There’s been warnin’s of fire, warnin’s of flood,
Now there’s the warnin’ of the bullet and the blood,
From the three bodies buried in the Mississippi mud,
Sayin’ these are the days of decision.
There’s a change in the wind, and a split in the road,
You can do what’s right or you can do what you are told,
And the prize of the victory will belong to the bold,
Yes, these are the days of decision.
When Days of Decision finally ended, O.B. lifted the tone arm, exhaled slowly, and did something that ran counter to just about everything he’d ever been taught about spinning records for a living. He said and did nothing. Just sat there in the stillness of the WNDR studio, quiet and alone. And for a full five seconds – a virtual eternity in radio time – every young mind and heart in Syracuse within earshot of Jim O’Brien’s radio show heard exactly what that ever-thoughtful and ever-questioning St. Anthony's kid intended for them to hear: silence.
* * * * *
