As Bill Walsh’s plan for Urban Renewal continued to swallow entire blocks of the 15th Ward – especially as Interstate 81 started to rise above the city like a thick, venomous snake – determining which buildings to raze and which to keep was only part of the problem. The other, frankly, bigger issue for city officials was determining where to put all the hundreds of now-displaced Black families.
Enter Bill Chiles.
Chiles, a light-skinned, 50-something African American from Colorado, by way of Kansas, had moved to Syracuse three decades prior when, as a Pullman porter and on an overnight stop in the Salt City, he happened to meet and fall in love with a young beauty named Ruth, a cocoa-skinned girl from the 15th Ward. Having sufficiently had his heart stolen, the young man decided to quit his job at the end of the line and never to return home. Bill Chiles had found a new home, and it was wherever Ruth was.
Bill and Ruth Chiles first settled in the Ward, for a brief time anyway, before becoming one of the first “Negro” couples in Syracuse to actually buy outside the deep red lines that, to bankers anyway, continued to define the city's 15th Ward. The Chiles’ home, a well-manicured frame house of modest means, was in a working class section of the Onondaga Valley called Nedrow, just north of what was referred to by the locals as the “reservation,” the sovereign native land that, in a 19th Century treaty, the federal government had agreed to cede to the Onondagas who still lived in the area.
By then, Chiles had found employment as a case worker for the Onondaga County Welfare Agency, a position that quickly earned him respect from peers and department heads alike for his calm demeanor, his diligence, his determination and, above all, his otherworldly sense of empathy.
Chiles, who’d been raised as an orphan by nuns and who was, as a result, a devout and lifelong Catholic, eventually became best friends with Charlie Brady. For that reason, he and Ruth eventually stopped going to Sunday mass at the Cathedral, which had always served as their home parish, even from down in Nedrow, and began attending services a few blocks east of there at little St. Joseph’s, the only Catholic church in Father Brady’s “home parish,” the city’s 15th Ward.
Chiles found himself so moved by Brady’s commitment to putting God’s word into action for all His children, as well as his fierce dedication to improving the lives of Ward residents, that he eventually volunteered to become the priest’s right hand man. The two spearheaded the formation of the local chapter of the Catholic Interracial Council, that they initially ran out of the French church and that, together, they dedicated to exploring new and different ways of bringing Syracuse’s Black and white worlds together.
For all his devotion to Christ, though, and all the esteem he continued to garner as a low-level operative in a small but vital county agency, many in town were stunned when Bill Chiles, a political nobody from down in Nedrow, was handpicked by Bill Walsh to head up his new Urban Renewal Relocation Committee.
Selected to join him was Walsh’s friend, Peggy Wood, named by the mayor as Chiles’ #2. While cynics argued that the two African Americans (neither a Syracuse native) were chosen merely for the color of their skin – and, certainly, there was the feeling among many Ward blacks that their Irish mayor was the devil incarnate and a guy, indeed, capable of such a stunt – in reality it would have been almost impossible to find a better, more qualified tandem for the job, given the enormous and particularly delicate task ahead.
Despite the fact both Walsh’s relocation heads were African Americans, they were just about polar opposites in every other way. Chiles was a non-educated and largely self-taught railroad porter, a guy who constantly had to prove his bona fides, if not his worth as a man. Wood was a one-percenter, at least among black citizens, a woman who read voraciously, who loved classical music, who regularly discussed everything from art to politics, and whose pedigree could stand alongside virtually any man in town, Black or white.
Bill Chiles, a meek, smallish and hard-working drone on the county payroll, spoke so softly that one often had to lean in to hear him. Peggy Wood, on the other hand, was a stately woman of taste and refinement, one whose confident, regal presence in a room full of people was so palpable it might have been sufficient to warm hands on a cold night.
One thing Chiles and Wood did share, however – skin color notwithstanding – was the fact that neither lived in the Ward. Chiles resided in Nedrow, some six miles south, and Wood and her husband had just bought a home in Liverpool, a mostly all-white village on the northwest corner of Onondaga Lake. For that reason, and because both were seen as interlopers, there was plenty of “Uncle Tom” and “High Yella’” talk on the street whenever the two happened to be seen going door-to-door, clipboard in hand.
Regardless, like it or not, the 15th Ward was coming down, come hell or high water. The only questions were how soon, and who'd ultimately be compensated. As Syracuse’s two newest faces of Urban Renewal – and light skinned, black ones at that – Chiles and Wood were looked upon by many African Americans as a couple of puppets in blackface, dispatched to do the bidding of the man in City Hall.
But Bill Chiles and Peggy Wood did not see themselves that way, and both worked hard for and built bridges on behalf of all Syracusans, especially those of color, in a way few locals had ever done before.
A decade earlier, when a young former Central High student/athlete named Johnny Williams (a basketball-loving, wanna-be journalist from the Ward who was biding his time as a case worker in Chiles' county welfare department) was not even considered for a reporter’s job at the Post-Standard, Bill Chiles went to bat for him.
Williams was whip-smart kid and a tireless worker. Even without knowing much about his skills as a writer, Chiles vouched for the kid’s dedication and willingness to roll up his sleeves, dig in and work as long and hard as needed.
What’s more, Williams had impeccable qualifications: a BA in English Lit and Masters in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, the first African American kid in the Ward to ever achieve that distinction.
Hearing of his Post-Standard rejection from Williams himself as the two sat nursing cups of lukewarm coffee one day, Bill Chiles sensed the young man’s frustration, a feeling that at that point – at least to him – felt perilously close to full-on rage.
The more Williams talked, the more Chiles learned about him, and the more he found himself invested in the kid. Apparently, after grad school and prior to landing his current job, Williams had been compelled to take a position bagging groceries at the Loblaws on Adams Street as a way of paying the bills and helping his single mother make ends meet.
Growing visibly frustrated the longer he confided to Chiles that day, Williams explained to his co-worker that every bagger he’d worked with at Loblaws – every one of them a Black son of the Ward – was a college graduate. Together, the would-be reporter sniped as he gulped down the rest of his coffee and rose to head back to his desk, we made up the most educated group of baggers in the damn history of the grocery business.
The next day, after requesting permission to use one of his vacation days, Chiles took it upon himself to set up a meeting with the editor of the Post-Standard, during which he lobbied the man to reconsider Williams. Alas, despite Chiles’ best efforts, Williams was offered only a token job by the man, an entry level position in the printing room. He would not, however, be considered for a job in the newsroom, not even as a copy boy. He was, according to the editor, simply not Post-Standard material.
Williams soon left the welfare department and went to work in the newsroom of a daily newspaper in another city altogether. He’d also went on to write and publish twenty-nine books, thirteen of them novels, and a number of them based on his experiences in Syracuse.
In fact, to many literary critics, John Williams would eventually rank among the finest African American writers of the 20th Century – alongside the likes of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Lorraine Hansberry – for his ability to capture the essence of the Black experience in America. As one major critic would write in a review of his 1963 novel, Sissie, “Baldwin does not seem to possess the grasp of the Negro milieu that Williams displays…Sissie is permeated by a quiet anger that builds and builds inexorably…John A. Williams may well be a front-runner in a new surge of Negro creativity.”
In one of those twenty-nine books, a personal memoir, Williams wrote of his friend, mentor, and one-time fellow case worker in Syracuse. “Among a hundred other things, Bill (Chiles) taught me that gold doesn’t necessarily glitter, and that what glitters isn’t necessarily brass. In short, he taught that the man who would seek the truth must become enmeshed in paradox.”
And he continued: “In a city where too many avoid the responsibility of leadership, Bill Chiles, without searching for it, has come to be a leader; but City Hall doesn’t know it and most of the accredited ‘Negro leaders’ hold reservations about Bill because he lacks their formal education.”
He then wrote of Mayor Walsh and the new soft-spoken head of Syracuse's now-critical Urban Renewal Relocation Committee, "...the city has asked a lot of this mild mannered Negro."
As for Peggy Wood, her legacy at the height of Urban Renewal, even a half century later, would continue to resonate. She was a woman, you see, whose efforts would prove to be decades ahead of their time. Case in point: the story of Washington Irving School
The school, in the Ward's northeast quadrant, had been recently abandoned by the Syracuse School District. It was, figured officials, a neighborhood school without a neighborhood. Urban Renewal had plowed the homes around it clean under, even as the proud school building stood by silently and watched.
In time, Washington Irving would be retrofitted to serve as the Syracuse School District’s headquarters. But for a few years anyway – and this was due largely to the energy and vision of Peggy Wood – it played an unexpected role in the lives of hundreds of high schoolers in and around Central New York.
Given that she was second in command on Bill Walsh’s Human Rights Commission (in addition, of course, to being #2 on the mayor's Relocation Committee), there was a stretch of time during which Wood temporarily assumed the reins of the commission because its regular chair, Rabbi Irwin Hyman, had been summoned out of town for a spell.
One day, a local physician named Dr. Robert Hays called to request a meeting. Dr. Hays wanted to speak to Mrs. Wood about something troubling him deeply. He said he didn’t want to overstep his bounds, but he felt there was a growing human rights issue that needed to be addressed.
At the meeting, Hays explained that the city was taking pregnant high school girls – the vast majority of them poor youngsters from the 15th Ward – and treating them not as mothers-to-be, or even scared, vulnerable girls, but as criminals. At a health care clinic at which Dr. Hays volunteered, the doctor running that clinic, a devout Catholic and esteemed member of a prominent parish, regularly called the girls ugly names to their faces and summoned them into his office by barking, “Get in here, you animal.” Given that, Hays told Wood, he could only imagine what level of attention and care the doctor was providing – or likely not providing.
Wood thanked Dr. Hays for letting her know. She then followed up and learned firsthand that not only were those girls being demonized, but even before they reached the clinic – once they were thought to be pregnant – they were sent by their school nurse to the police station, registered as though they’d been arrested, and then pregnancy-tested by the same physician under contract with the department to tend to inmates.
At that point, if any girl were to be found with child, she was immediately expelled, while the district submitted a form with her name to Albany for financial remuneration; something to which, according to state law, every school district was entitled.
To his credit, Dr. Hays did more than report his concerns (and his peer’s alleged behavior) to Walsh’s Human Rights Commission. Thoroughly outraged, he lodged a formal complaint against both the Syracuse Health Department and Syracuse School District. The complaint nearly cost Hays his job at the all-new Upstate Medical Center, but he wasn't deterred. His Hippocratic oath, he claimed, wouldn't allow him to simply look the other way and do nothing while pregnant girls were being treated like criminals.
That’s when Peggy Wood went to work. She got the right people in City Hall on her side, including a number of key money people. Before anyone knew what had happened, Wood had been granted access to the now-abandoned Washington Irving Elementary School near St. Joseph’s French Church to test a crazy idea she had as a way of mitigating the impact of all those pregnant girls being systematically kicked out of school and unleashed upon the city welfare rolls.
Peggy Wood’s experimental program was eventually called YMED, short for Young Mothers Educational Development.
Her brainchild was ostensibly designed to allow pregnant teens – the vast majority of them young black girls from Central, Corcoran and Nottingham High Schools – to continue their education and earn themselves a high school diploma. (Indeed, stories soon became legion of young Ward ladies – straight A students, a number of them – just weeks from graduation who’d been expelled for getting pregnant and who, despite an often spotless record, were being denied the diploma they’d worked four years to earn.)
The key component for Wood in choosing that specific name – Young Mothers Educational Development – was the verbal rendering of its acronym, Y-M-E-D, or Y...Med. Because she wanted that acronym, when spoken or reported on the evening news, to emphasize the program’s medical benefits as much, if not more, than its educational ones.
Dr. Hays had convinced Wood that under the current system, in which getting pregnant served as a barrier between a young girl and her diploma, the vast majority of pregnant teens were going to great lengths to conceal their condition at the very time that prenatal care was most critical to them. As a result, many were suffering complications, some of them severe, during their first trimester that might have otherwise been avoided with even basic care.
So, working with Hays, Wood created within the walls of Washington Irving a de facto clinic in which the young women were given both regular check ups and a mix of oral and written pregnancy information. She also made provisions for a number of used beds and cribs to be brought in for any girls who needed a place stay, both during their pregnancy (as many had been tossed into the street by their parents) and after giving birth.
None of this was legal, of course, or in keeping with any New York State law. But for a while, anyway, eyes looked the other way, deals got cut, and favors were called in up and down the food chain – if only for as long as it took to beta test the program.
That first year, 1966, even as the 15th Ward continued to crumble about her, Peggy Wood’s YMED program found itself with three rotating staff doctors, a handful of certified teachers, and twelve girls ranging from sixth grade to high school senior, all operating out of an abandoned school building.
Wood also urged each girl that first year to reveal the name of her baby’s father so that he might be invited to join her in her prenatal classes and be given a chance to embrace his responsibilities as a father. The young men were then enlisted to help those would-be mothers choose a name for their baby, something Wood believed would plant the seeds of a bond between the boy and his unborn son or daughter.
In time, YMED would begin to draw pregnant girls from not just the 15th Ward, but throughout the region, including many rural parts of Onondaga County and small towns from as far away as Oswego County. What’s more, the program almost overnight went from being 100% African American to one in which the ratio was virtually 1:1, black girls-to-white.
Within months, YMED had emerged as a shining beacon of hope in the city.
Yet, for all the good will that Peggy Wood’s program continued to generate within a small circle of parents and teenagers, it was far from smooth sailing for the ardent Walsh supporter and lifelong Republican. Some Central New York whites, for example, began circulating rumors that YMED was nothing more than a scheme to bring even more Negro babies into the world, babies that would then be used to secure even more Welfare dollars for the families of the pregnant girls.
Certain Catholics began to claim that, among other things, YMED kept a big candy bowl full of condoms near Washington Irving’s front door for anyone and everyone to take and use, and that Wood’s program was advocating, and at times even promoting, premarital sex among the city’s poorest school-aged kids.
Meanwhile, when Wood reached out to a friend in Bishop Foery’s office to try to secure a list of all the pregnant girls at Bishop Ludden, Bishop Grimes and the all-girls Convent School, along with the ten Parochial League academies, she was told – with the gentlest of winks and the wryest of smiles, mind you – that there were no pregnant girls at any Catholic school in Syracuse.
“Now,” said her contact, a young priest who Wood knew well, “Had you asked me about the girls who were forced to leave school because of mononucleosis or stomach ulcers, that would have been a completely different story.”
Regardless, during that 1966-67 basketball season, YMED continued to provide a flickering light at the end of a long, dark tunnel in Syracuse.
At the same time, Bill Chiles and Peggy Wood had almost impossible jobs to do as the twin heads of Bill Walsh’s Relocation Committee. To wit, no one in the Ward was ever going to like whatever it was that they had to tell them, however gentle they may have been in the telling of it. All the two could do was try to empathize as best they could, offer suggestions, take and provide information, and point those impacted in the right direction.
For their efforts, Chiles and Wood were sneered at and viciously called Uncle Toms by a number of people in the 15th Ward – otherwise good men and women turned bitter by having lost their homes, their neighborhood and just about everything they held dear. Others, whatever their reservations, somehow managed to maintain a level of respect for the humanity of Bill Chiles and Peggy Wood, not to mention their compassion and honesty, considering the no-win nature of the thankless job they'd had dropped in their laps.
* * * * *
Billy E was sitting in the proverbial catbird seat. His team was still unbeaten with just a few weeks to go in the regular season. His starters were the strongest in the ten team circuit and his bench, by far, the deepest. And with each and every win, his boys’ confidence seemed to grow in direct proportion.
They ran up 102 points in 48 minutes to trounce Assumption on the rock-hard, cream-colored tile of the Assumption gym. They went into the “pit” on the South Side – the tiny, sunken gym at St. Anthony’s, the one with virtually no out-of-bounds territory – and beat the Paduans so badly the bench played virtually the entire second half. They outclassed Bobby Hayes’ St. Pat’s Irishmen whose only hope that night was to go into an exaggerated stall, to hold the ball out near half court for extended stretches, and to shoot as infrequently as humanly possible.
Only two contests that second half of the season, in fact, turned out to be competitive affairs for the Hearts.
Against St. Lucy’s, whose starting forward was a long and lithe sharpshooter named Lloyd “Tookie” Chisholm (who, in many ways, outplayed Schmid), the Hearts were challenged throughout most of the 48 minutes before ultimately using their superior depth to wear down the outmanned Lucians.
Meanwhile, in a rematch against Billy’s favorite foil – that rat bastard Bobby Felasco and his always rugged St. John the Evangelist – the Hearts once again found themselves in a white-knuckled, down-to-the-wire affair. Fortunately, just as the kid had done the first time, lumbering Tom Sakowski yet again managed to play the “game of his life," allowing his mates to, again, eke out a close win.
Never being content to rest on a good thing or to look at a hot streak as anything more than that, while constantly peering just beyond the horizon, a small but meaningful part of Billy was already thinking of next season. For better or for worse, that was the nature of coaching in Bishop Foery’s odd little Parochial League. It was not just about coaching the boys you had on hand. It was about cultivating the ones who’d ultimately have to replace the kids currently under you.
In a sprawling city school or a massive county one, every year one or two kids would move into the area from out of town, or some scrawny, pimply teenager, seemingly overnight, would grow four or five inches and morph into a rangy thing of basketball beauty. What’s more, in such schools there would literally be hundreds of boys from which to choose, year in and year out.
But such things rarely, if ever, happened in the Parochial League, where, by 1967 in a few of the smallest, poorest and most at-risk parishes, it had become possible to count the number of boys in some of the lower grades on two hands.
Sacred Heart, fortunately, wasn’t quite at that point, at least not yet. But that didn’t stop Billy from regularly looking ahead and cultivating saplings that, with nurturing and careful pruning, might one day grow into oak trees for him and the Hearts.
Rich Dabrowski was one such sprig. Billy found himself almost drooling at the very thought of Dabrowski’s ceiling as a player. He loved his athleticism. He loved his heart. He just didn’t love his head or his decision-making. At least not yet.
Dabrowski, a gangly immigrant with long arms and square shoulders who’d actually been born in England, where his Polish parents had emigrated after the war, was a kid who didn’t think so much as react on the court. He was a kid whose attitude in game situations seemed, at least to Billy, to be a whole lot of “ready, fire, aim.” To the Hearts’ head man, his sophomore guard was the proverbial headless chicken, a kid whose body was still racing 90 miles an hour around the barnyard, even as his head and brain lay somewhere on the ground behind him.
But the young man was not without his upside; in fact, young Rich Dabrowski might have possessed as many raw skills as any backcourt player that Billy had seen at Sacred Heart since the remarkable Rich Pospiech a decade prior. He was just way too rough around the edges for any regular playing time, at least at that point.
For all that Rich Dabrowski may have symbolized the near future of the Hearts program in those early days of 1967, it’s also possible that no player on that year’s squad was any more reflective of its glorious past. Because the parallels between Dabrowski and the legendary Gene Fisch, the young Pole who a decade earlier had almost single-handedly put Sacred Heart basketball on the city map, were almost eerily similar.
Both had come to the country just before their eight birthday and both spoke nothing but Polish at home. Both had parents whose lives in their native Poland had been torn asunder by the bloody regimes of Hitler and Stalin.
Both had initially fallen in love with baseball, and through that sport – through America’s pastime – found a real sense of belonging in their adopted homeland. And both came to basketball almost by accident, because in the city that the fates would determine would be their new home, basketball, more so than even baseball, operated as currency and allowed any small boy, regardless of how humble his roots, or how long his odds, to matter in ways that exceeded his station in life.
In the case of Billy’s current young immigrant, he was the son of Joseph and Halina Dabrowski, who a few years prior had moved to the West End, where they lived among a bunch of working class Irishmen. Halina, a raven haired beauty, had been taken from her home by the Nazis at age twelve, when one day dozens of Nazis foot soldiers, all of them armed and barking instructions in German, descended upon her little Polish village, Rowna. After rounding up a few villagers from their homes and lining them up in the public square, the Nazi in charge proceeded to walk down the line of terrified Poles and shoot every sixth man or woman in the head until his pistol ran out of bullets. It was just his little way of getting the villagers’ attention and letting them know he and his fellow SS militiamen meant business.
Halina was immediately sent to a camp in Bremen and assigned the difficult task of welding. The Bremen work camp’s principal function in the overall German war machine was to weld together hundreds of parts, large and small, that, when assembled and launched to sea, served as the backbone of the scourge of the open waters; Hitler’s silent, insidious killers, his unterseeboots – or as they’d quickly (and infamously) become known to seamen and civilians alike: U-boats.
Joseph, on the other hand, had been a few years older than Halina and had lived, not in the eastern portion of Poland, like his future wife, but in the West.
In his case, the Nazis had come to his hometown and rounded up all the local young men and given them German uniforms and a simple choice; either put on the uniform and fight with the Axis army, or die immediately. Only, as Axis troops, they'd be fighting disguised as German infantrymen. The thinking was, such “soldiers” sent to the front would (a) fight for their lives and (b) serve as a buffer between the real Germans and all those Allied bullets and all that Allied shrapnel otherwise intended for Hitler’s blue-eyed Aryans.
Joseph was one of those faux German “soldiers” who fought under duress, if not the threat of death, for the glory of two things he hated more than anything in the world: Germany – Deutschland – and der fuhrer.
However, in his very first action, Joseph and his fellow Poles pulled a fast one on their “superiors.” Rather than aiming their guns and firing on the Allies, the young Polish boys threw up their arms and surrendered immediately to a regiment of Scottish foot soldiers.
But more than merely surrender and get taken as prisoners, those Poles switched sides altogether, changing uniforms and joining up with those very same Scots – fighting this time, not with the Nazis, but against them.
Later, with the war over, both Joseph and Halina settled independently of one another in a small city on the other side of the channel, Rochdale, a thriving little blue collar town north of London, between Liverpool and Manchester. That’s where the two met and fell in love. That’s where they got married. And that’s where, as husband and wife, they brought into the world two sons they named after legendary monarchs of their adopted homeland: Richard, followed six years later by a second son, Edward.
There was a measure of irony in having named their boys after a pair of English kings, because Joseph and Halina continued to speak nothing but Polish at home and eat almost exclusively Polish food. Nevertheless, the couple raised the older of the two, Richard, to be a proper British gentleman and a loyal British subject of the monarchy in every way.
Young Richie attended a primary British school with a prim headmaster, where he was taught impeccable manners, and each day he wore the traditional uniform of a classic British schoolboy, grey flannel shorts, white shirt, starched Eton collar, tie, blazer and cap.
Because Richie had been speaking two languages from the day he uttered his first word – English in public and Polish at home – he was not only bilingual, but spoke English and Polish without even a whiff of an accent.
Following her parents and sister, who’d come to America a year or so prior, Halina Dabrowski, along with her husband and two boys, secured passage on the Queen Elizabeth – steerage class, of course – and set sail for America in the Fall of 1957.
Halina’s extended family first settled in New York’s Southern Tier, near the Pennsylvania border, before moving to Central New York and the West End of Syracuse. That’s where Joseph, Halina and the boys joined them. Richie had started second grade in England, but his grade level hardly mattered because the British educational system, with its rigorous performance standards, had placed him two full grades, if not more, ahead of most American children his age.
Nevertheless, Halina Dabrowski was not about to be lax about the schools her boys attended. In her brief life, she’d grown to embrace the need for Richie and Eddie to attend the best schools in a way that, frankly, her husband still hadn't.
To Halina, getting her boys – especially the older one, Richard – into the finest school possible was vital. Richie was further along his educational journey than Eddie; who, after all, was still just a toddler. But by the time they’d passed through customs in New York, young Richie – at least in Halina’s mind – was inching his way toward junior high and needed the best elementary education she and her husband could afford.
Richie could have, obviously, gone to a public school in Syracuse. He could have, likewise, gotten into St. Patrick’s, a Catholic school just down the road and one that, for reasons of cash flow as much as anything, was a touch freer about admitting students than their deeper-pocketed Parochial League rivals, Sacred Heart and Most Holy Rosary.
But for reasons tied as much to ethnicity as educational quality, Halina Dabrowski determined she wanted her firstborn to go to Sacred Heart, the only truly Polish school in the city, even though she and Joseph – who were now staying at her parents’ house near Lewis Park – lived an easy walk from St. Pat’s.
So one Fall day in late October, soon after arriving from England, and after having set up a bright-and-early/first-thing-in-the-morning meeting with Monsignor Piejda – the no-nonsense “Boss” of Sacred Heart – Halina scrubbed her first born clean, dressed him in a fresh shirt and pair of just-pressed knickers she’d packed for the trip to America, and ran a dab of Brylcreem through his hair.
She then set out on foot, with little Richie in tow, for the monsignor’s office in the Sacred Heart rectory, just a twenty minute walk from her parents’ house on the other side of Genesee Street.
The meeting started off innocently enough, with Halina making an earnest plea to the monsignor to accept her boy into the second grade immediately, even though the school year had already started some two months prior. The Boss had seen it all in his day, from Displaced Persons and non-English speakers to insolvent, almost indigent immigrants just a step or two from the bread line.
Halina in her broken English spoke politely and almost humbly, aware that she and her son were in the presence of not just a great man of God but the powerful leader of what she hoped would be her family’s new parish.
Piejda’s first argument, which she quickly countered, was that the boy had already fallen behind and might never catch up, given that English was not his first language. Not only was Richard completely bilingual, she corrected, but he was a product of the British school system, one that was, just maybe, the most demanding in the world. He was likely ahead of the other boys and girls, not behind them, she countered.
Halina’s English was serviceable, but not great, and she fought to find just the right word when it was her turn to speak. Regardless, the Boss quickly moved on from his late-start argument. He had a more compelling card to play. “Your son looks like a fine boy,” said Piejda. “But it costs money to come to Sacred Heart. Do you or your husband even have jobs yet?”
“Not yet,” she confessed.“But we will soon. I promise you, Monsignor. And I will pay you in full as soon as we have the money.”
"What did you do in England?” asked Piejda, his patience wearing thin.
“I did not work,” Halina said, smiling defensively. “I raised my boys. But my husband, he worked in an asbestos mine. He had a good job. That is how we could afford to come to America.”
“We don’t have any asbestos mines in Syracuse,” the Boss deadpanned with a note of heavy sarcasm. He was a busy man, and it was abundantly clear the woman had no money.
“I am sorry, Mrs. Dabrowski," he said. "We simply cannot take your boy on the off-chance you might find a job at some point. The school year has already started and it costs real money to run a school like Sacred Heart, money that all other families have paid. Perhaps you should send your son to Porter School, near where you live. I hear it’s a fine public school, and I’m sure he’ll do splendidly there.”
He then added, “And, should you or your husband get a job at any point, or you can put a little money away, come see me before next school year and we’ll see if we have any room at that time.”
Halina looked into the Boss’ eyes and slowly seethed. It wasn’t just Piejda’s arrogance or his lack of compassion. It wasn’t just his skepticism when she gave her solemn word that she would pay him every cent she owed as soon as she had it.
It was that he could not see what she saw in her little boy. That he had the potential to do great things, and that boys with the potential to do great things – even boys with mothers with no money – should be treasured by a man in power, especially a man of God.
For all those reasons, Halina Dabrowski was no longer able to keep a lid on the anger that now bubbled just beneath the surface of her skin. She didn't even try to speak English as she unloaded, but instead spewed a steady stream of Polish at the priest – the very language in which prayed to God night after night in Bremen for the strength to make it through one more backbreaking day of welding for the very devils whose goal it was to kill her people and destroy her beloved culture.
As she took dead aim on the haughty pastor – not a priest to her any longer, but a flawed and imperfect man hiding behind a fancy desk and a starched and bleached collar, she thought to herself this man would one day regret this decision deeply.
Rising from her chair, eyes growing steely and determined, she spit, “My son and I come to you, a man of God, an important man. We treat you with respect and dignity and ask of you a simple favor that you could grant in a moment. And this is how you treat us?”
At that point, Richie, who’d been focusing on a dust mote dancing in the morning sun between two slats on the blinds above the priest’s head, abruptly turned and looked up. He’d only been half paying attention. But when his mother rose and started taking control of the conversation with the old priest, raising her voice in the process, all thoughts of dust motes disappeared in a flash. He now sat wide-eyed and slack-jawed, staring up at his mother who stood there erect, her chin thrust forward and her right arm cocked, holding her small brown purse by its strap.
“Do you not see what a good boy this is?” Halina said in her fiery, idiomatic Polish. “I know you are a great man, and I know you are very important in America. But can you not see that this is no ordinary boy? He is a hard-worker. He is smart. And he is a good and loyal Pole who loves his mother, his new country, and his Church with all his heart. How can you have the nerve to turn him down, when I give you my word I will pay every dollar I owe, even before I buy food, if that is what you demand.”
“You will regret this day, I promise you, Monsignor. You will regret your having sent my boy to another school when you could have had him here.” She then turned to her son, “Come, Richard. We're leaving now.”
With that, Halina Dabrowski turned, firmly placed her left hand on her son’s right shoulder and steered him toward the door.
The Boss was stunned. No one had ever spoken to him like that before, and certainly not a housewife, much less an immigrant housewife. He called after Halina in a tone much different and far more empathetic than the one with which he’d just been addressing her. “Now, wait just a minute, Mrs. Dabrowski. Let’s just talk about this, shall we?”
But Halina would have none of it. She didn’t even bother to look back. She just kept walking, her eyes set on the daylight pouring through the leaded glass of the solid oak door ahead of her. Richie looked up as he walked. He had never seen his mother like this. It felt almost surreal to him. He only heard the footsteps of the priest in the hallway behind them.
“Mrs. Dabrowski, please,” piped up Piejda in Polish from behind, the pace of his steps increasing as the urgency in his voice did. “Please, please…stop. Let’s just…talk.”
By the time the priest finally caught up with Halina and her son, they were already outside in the brilliant October sunshine, the morning traffic and a bus on Genesee Street wheezing past as they looked to cross the busy thoroughfare. The leaves on the trees near the church were a brilliant mix of orange and red.
“I’m sorry. I truly am,” said the Boss. “Please. Won’t you come back inside? I’d like to see what we can do about getting your son into Sacred Heart. Because if you do, it’s still early enough in the day that he might be able to start today, if you’d like.”
And that’s how Billy E’s youngest, wildest and most undisciplined colt had come to enroll at Sacred Heart. That’s how he’d come to sit on Billy's bench that season, as his single most intriguing Chinese Bandit. And every time Billy watched his raw sophomore with the wide eyes and big ears do something special in practice, he sensed – just as the young man's mother had predicted – he was looking at a kid who just might have it in him to one day do something special.
* * * * *
Peggy Wood was still on an emotional high from a moment she’d had earlier that week. Wood had recently become something of the go-to person in Syracuse (at least among certain well placed white locals) when it came to matters of race. She’d noticed a while back that none of the high-end specialty shops and department stores along Salina Street – all of which showcased their seasonal wares in large, well-appointed and prominent display windows – had even a single mannequin of color.
Focusing on the opportunity rather than the slight, Wood was able to convince one particular dress shop owner that turning his back on a small but deeply loyal segment of the Syracuse marketplace – namely, young and ambitious African American ladies from the 15th Ward – was bad business.
That shop owner told Wood, okay. Go to New York and pick out a couple of elegant, dark skinned mannequins that represent the market you’re telling me I’m missing out on. I’ll try them out.
Realizing the power of not only buying in bulk but in the ultra-competitive nature of the retail trade on Salina Street, Ward leveraged the fact that one of their own had already committed to putting a Negro mannequin in his front window and began shopping that little kernel of information up and down the strip.
Before long, two mannequins had turned into two dozen, all of them female, and all of them modeled on a beautiful young African American actress named Diahann Carroll. What’s more, such mannequins soon began popping up in the front windows of the some of the most prominent retail establishments in downtown Syracuse, including Dey Brothers, the Addis Company, E.G. Edwards, Flah & Co., the Lerner Shop, Madame Netter Hats and Baker Shoes. There were not a lot of dark skinned mannequins, mind you, but enough so that the most ambitious young ladies of the 15th Ward began to take notice.
But what made Wood proudest was the fact that earlier that week, as she’d been walking down that same Salina Street, she'd stopped and watched a young African American girl, probably no more than seven or eight, bent over at the hip and staring, eyes wide, into the front window of the S.S. Kresge department store. Staring back was a doll. Only it wasn’t just any doll. It was a doll, like her, with big eyes, dark skin and kinky hair.
Peggy Wood reflexively put her fist to her mouth as if to stifle something that had suddenly bubbled up inside her. Her work was truly making a difference, she thought, as the tears slowly began to fill her eyes. Her city was starting to integrate.
Later that same week, Wood was in the Ward making her rounds on behalf of Chiles and Mayor Walsh’s relocation committee, believing she was doing good for her fellow “Negroes” in their rapidly decaying neighborhood. Not only had she’d had that moment with that darling child in front of Kresge’s, but she’d convinced herself – just as the mayor and others kept telling her – that she was helping to improve people’s lives by getting them out of those wretched, horrible slums they called home and moving them into cleaner, safer housing.
That was Peggy Wood’s mindset as she approached the ramshackle house on Grape Street, one block west of Renwick Ave, a house targeted for demolition.
It was a Friday afternoon in the Spring of 1964. The house was a two-family upstairs/downstairs unit that from the outside looked abandoned. It hadn’t been painted in years. What remained of its white-washed fence had since fallen over, its slats strewn like dead soldiers among the overgrowth that had long since abandoned any pretense of being a lawn. The wooden screen front door, broken from its hinges and rusted to a sickly brown, lay against the house at an angle.
As though on cue, Wood saw out the corner of one eye a pair of large, gray rats scurry from a hole beneath the house and run across the cracked and weed-infested driveway.
As she approached the front stoop, Wood shook her head ever-so-slightly, as if to ask, “How can anyone live like this?” Even in a neighborhood where every house seemed beaten down to some degree, this one stood out.
The only sign of human occupancy were two pairs of white lace curtains that hung daintily and incongruously in the front windows of the downstairs unit. There was no doorbell, so Wood rapped loudly, once, then twice. Eventually, a woman probably fifteen years her junior answered. Peggy Wood could hear a child’s laughter in the background. “Yes?” the woman asked, a little guarded. “Can I help you?”
Peggy Wood identified herself and who she represented. The woman smiled a warm but slightly pained smile, then stepping back and to the side, saying, “Won’t you come in?” The women then introduced her four children, all of them it appeared to Wood to be under the age of seven.
The first thing that caught Wood’s notice was the sweet aroma of a large pot of greens slow-cooking in what smelled like a mix of fatback, ham hocks and spices. Likewise simmering was a slightly smaller metal pot, this one full of red beans, and it too was likely steeped in bacon and fatback. “Forgive me, ma’am, I’m in the middle of cooking supper,” said the woman, smiling and moving to the stove to turn down the heat on her beans and greens.
That’s when Peggy Wood, now fully inside, began to wrap her brain around where she was. She wasn’t just in some 15th Ward building on a collision course with Bill Walsh’s wrecking ball. She was in someone’s house. Someone’s home. What had moments prior seemed a dump so rundown that even the rats were bailing, was now a warm and inviting abode, full of the sights, sounds and smells of family.
None of the woman’s furniture was new, but it was all neat and well-maintained. The area rug was worn and fraying but recently beaten clean. There was no dust and the only clutter was from the kids’ few gently worn toys. And the curtains, which Peggy had noticed from the street, looked like they’d been mended, as though the woman had perhaps found them on the scrap heap, or maybe at the Rescue Mission, or perhaps even the cutout bin at the Easy Bargain Center. Regardless, that tiny apartment on Grape Street was an absolute model of home-making and budget-stretching efficiency.
As the woman poured Peggy a glass of sweet tea and offered her a seat at her modest table with four mismatched chairs, she made an apology for the exterior of the house and told her she’d written many a note and enclosed it with many a rent payment to her landlord, but he hadn’t yet done anything.
As the woman spoke, Wood pulled out a clean relocation form and placed it atop the pile of completed ones she had stacked on her clipboard. Just then, the woman rose from the table and asked politely, “Mrs. Wood, may I show you something?”
She then led the relocation agent into the front room to a beat up old upright piano that stood against one wall. “This is our pride and joy,” the woman said. Wood assumed that the “our” meant her and her children. “I can’t afford no TV,” she added. “So this here’s real important to me and the kids, especially at night after supper. Do you think wherever they move us, it will be to a place that’ll allow me to take my piano?”
For the first time in the weeks she’d that been doing this thankless job for her friend, Bill Walsh, Peggy Wood found herself at a loss. She'd been walking the streets of Syracuse's 15th Ward, going door to door, trying to convince residents whose color she shared that she was there to help them – there to improve their lives. But now, for the very first time, she began to consider the possibility that what she was doing just might, in fact, be working against the interests of the very people she was trying to help.
* * * * *
Joe Reddick and Len Reeder had picked up their girls in Reddick’s big brother’s 1958 dark blue Pontiac Chieftain. That car remained Maxie Reddick’s pride and joy and he had cautioned his little brother under the threat of a slow and painful death that if he knew what was good for him, he’d bring it back exactly how he found it – only with more gas.
Maxie, a born-again gearhead, had “souped up” his cherry ’58 Pontiac, adding wire hubcaps, a spoiler, and four mag wheels. It was the car in which he’d take his girl out on weekend nights, often to watch the submarine races on nearby Onondaga Lake – “submarine races” being a generation-old euphemism in the Salt City for a young couple parking on a spot overlooking the lake until they’d sufficiently steamed up the windows to the point where even if one could no longer see through them, it didn't take a whole lot of imagination to understand what was going on inside.
The fact that Reddick and Reeder were Black and the young ladies with them white was of little concern to any of the four kids. The fact is, the two couples had been dating for a while, something that was not unusual at Corcoran. In just its second full year, the school, with its mix of working-class white and Black kids from Vocational, along with kids from the slightly more upscale and decidedly whiter Valley High, made for a student body that was an almost letter-perfect cross section of the city itself. As a result, interracial relationships were quite common at Corcoran.
That’s not to say that such relationships were always embraced enthusiastically, especially by a certain type of adult. Both Reeder and Reddick had experienced incidents with city cops in Burnet Park on Tipperary Hill, a sprawling park close to where their two white girlfriends lived.
Reeder was parking with his girl one night on a hill looking south over the city lights, when a uniformed police officer who came upon the couple warned him that if he ever saw the two together again he’d take the young girl home personally and tell her father exactly what she was doing and who she was doing it with.
Reddick, meanwhile, in a separate incident, was told by a patrolman pretty much the same thing when he and his white girlfriend were caught alone in the park. This cop, however, wasn’t nearly so free with second chances. He told Reddick to take the young lady to her home and to do so immediately. He then followed them all the way, the flashing red light of his rooftop gumball throbbing in the Corcoran star’s rearview mirror the entire time.
When the girl’s father came out of her house and took a quick measure of the situation, he went berserk. The man snapped at his daughter to get inside, and that he’d deal with her in a moment. He then pointed menacingly at Reddick who sat there, wide-eyed, in the blinding glare of the cop’s flashing lights, his hands clammy on the wheel. The girl’s father, dressed in a blue cardigan, buttoned down shirt, and tie, leaned into the open passenger-side window of Maxie Reddick’s pride and joy and told Maxie’s kid brother that he’d never, ever amount to anything – even in basketball – and to stay the hell away from his daughter. The girl’s father then spit on the car’s windshield and struck with the underside if his clenched fist, as if his spitting were not quite enough of an exclamation point.
Some lessons don’t take, though, at least not right away – especially when young hearts and hormones are part of the equation. That’s why, one Thursday afternoon a few months later, just at Spring thaw, and just days after the Corcoran Cougars had beaten Fulton to maintain their paper-thin hold on first place, Joe Reddick and Len Reeder found themselves yet again in a car with those same two white girls. And once again they were in Maxie’s souped up car.
Reddick and his best girl sat in the front, where she continued to punch buttons between songs and commercials, alternating back and forth from WNDR to WOLF, while Reeder and his girlfriend sat in the back seat watching as the city sped past.
It was one of those rare but magnificent late-winter days in Syracuse. The day was certainly cold by any reasonable definition of the term, but it was also warm enough so that it energized many in town – young and old – gently reminding them of the better days ahead and that the sidewalks would soon be dry and warm and the crocuses would soon be poking their noses through the crusty remnants of what was left of the snow.
It was a brilliant day, in other words, and the four high school kids found themselves in a springtime state of mind, with an itch for ice cream.
Marble Farms Dairy on the West Side was one option, as was Marian Margaret’s on South Salina. But from the back seat, Len Reeder had a better idea. An all-new stretch of Interstate 81 had just opened between the Onondaga Nation and Brighton Ave, just south of the Ward. As much as he loved basketball (and the ladies, for that matter), the one thing Reeder loved as much as anything was speed: raw and unbridled speed. The young man absolutely adored fast cars and the sensation of barreling down the highway at breakneck speed. “Let’s go to that place in the Valley,” the fireplug forward suggested, referring to Bailey’s Ice Cream, “you know, the one down near the res.”
His plan, as he outlined it, was to get some ice cream and then see what Maxie’s Pontiac could do on that smooth, just-built stretch of highway now running through the heart of the Indian reservation and back toward the 15th Ward.
The kids never made it to the drive-in, though. Just a few hundred yards from Bailey’s, Joe Reddick looked in his rear-view mirror and saw flashing red lights. He swore under his breath and slowly pulled his brother’s car over to the side of the road, careful to signal his intention to do so.
It was not a city cop this time, however. It was a New York State trooper in a shiny new black-and-white Plymouth cruiser, likely working out of the newly built station a few miles south on Rt. 11. – just one more by-product of the billions in federal tax dollars suddenly being lavished on Ike’s ever-expanding network of interstate highways.
“It sure doesn’t take ‘em long, does it?” said Reddick, to no one in particular, forcing a laugh as he reached for his wallet. In reality the young man’s stomach was churning. He was scared to death.
The cop didn’t ask, nor did he wait for Reddick to hand him his license. “Get outta the vehicle,” he demanded as he reached the driver’s side door. Reddick did what he was told, his eyes wide, stomach churning, and mouth suddenly dry as dust.
“Turn around and put your hands on the top of the car.” Again, Joe Reddick obliged, trying not to show the fear now gripping him.
The trooper quickly frisked the teen, up one side and down the other. “Where you headed?” he demanded and he straightened up and rested his right hand on top of his sidearm. Reddick told him they were all just going for ice cream, at that little stand up ahead. He pointed.
The trooper leaned down and made direct eye contact with the two young ladies, who just stared back at the imposing figure in breathless, silent fear. “What are you two girls doing with these here niggers?” the officer said icily while staring directly at the two young Corcoran coeds. Reddick’s date spoke first. “Like he said, officer, we were just going to get some ice cream. At that place right there.” She too pointed.
The trooper froze for a moment stone-faced and staring, as though straddling some dark and unseen abyss between disbelief and disgust.
He stood back up again, pivoted slowly toward Reddick, and coolly told him to turn around. He then moved so close to the Corcoran star that their toes were touching. Reddick could smell the trooper’s breath. It reeked of cigarette smoke, coffee and what he could only imagine was evil.
“You’re a punk, you know that, boy?” said the trooper, enjoying Reddick’s obvious fear. “Hell, I oughta drag you over to those woods, take this here night stick, and beat the shit out of your nigger ass. As a matter of fact, I think that’s what I’m gonna do. You know that, boy?”
Just then the opposite side rear door of Maxie Reddick’s 1958 Pontiac opened. Out stepped Len Reeder. He too, like Joe Reddick, was scared to death. His stomach, too, was in a knot so tight he though it might betray him by squeaking. But he was a different person than his teammate, and he came from an entirely different place.
Leonard Reeder wasn’t from Syracuse, at least not originally. He wasn’t even from up north. He was from Alabama, a sweaty little half-industrial/half-farming excuse for a town on the banks of the Tennessee River known as Florence, a town just down the road a piece from Muscle Shoals.
He was born in the year of the Lord, 1948, in the very heart of Jim Crow’s Dixie, in a state and time where and when lynching “niggers” was still considered acceptable human behavior.
Len Reeder had been seven years old when a young black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till had been taken from his auntie’s home and savagely beaten to death and tossed into a river by a mob of angry white men just a few miles west of where he'd gone to kindergarten. He, likewise, had been seven years old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in the state capitol just a few miles south of where he learned to play baseball.
Like Joe Reddick, Leonard Reeder was scared to death at that moment, as he stepped out of the back of Maxie Reddick’s dark blue 1958 Pontiac Chieftain and found himself staring straight into the eyes of a larger-than-life, fully armed, and hate-filled New York State trooper. The difference was, Leonard Reeder had a whole different frame of reference than his friend and teammate.
He’d seen racial venom firsthand and knew full well its bitter aftertaste. He understood, and had been taught, that facing such hate and not blinking would only make you stronger.
He knew what it was like, for example, to help his daddy buy plumbing supplies at the local Sears on a hot summer day in Florence, only to be forced to drink from the filthy water fountain, the one with the dried spit, tobacco juice and who knows what else all over it, the smelly, cracked and rust-stained porcelain fixture marked “Colored.”
He knew what it was like to go to the Court Street movie house for a Saturday afternoon matinee of Old Yeller or maybe the Shaggy Dog, only to have to sit in the back of the balcony because you and your friends were not allowed to sit below where the white boys and girls got to sit.
So even though he was scared to death when that trooper looked across the roof and sneered at him, “What the hell you think you’re doing, boy? Get back in that car,” Len Reeder didn’t do or say a thing. He just stood and stared without blinking, his jaw clenched, his heart pounding, and his eyes fixed on the officer’s.
“I said get the hell back in that car, nigger!”
Len Reeder didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He just continued to stare in silence.
The one who did blink was the trooper – if only imperceptibly. While he was having all sorts of fun scaring the crap out of the piece of shit who’d been driving, the kid in the back seat, the one now staring at him over the roof of the car like a damn statue, was a whole ‘nother story. That kid showed no sign of backing down, and little in the way of fear. What’s more, he’d looked deep into that kid’s eyes and didn’t necessarily like what he saw staring back at him.
Sure, he could have just shot the two punk-ass niggers and claimed self-defense, but the presence of the two white girls complicated matters considerably. The trooper, for all his bluster and macho bravado, had just painted himself into a corner. There was now nowhere for him to go.
Realizing he had no alternative but to declare victory and retreat to his shiny new Plymouth, the trooper turned away from Reeder’s steady gaze and looked back at Reddick. “Get the hell outta here, boy,” he said as he spit on the ground at Reddick’s feet. “I never want to see any of you back down here again – especially together. You understand?”
“We understand, officer,” offered Reddick meekly and politely.
And that was it.
The entire way home, Joe Reddick, whose stomach was still a churning mess, did what he always did when he was nervous. He talked. And then when Joe Reddick was done talking, he talked some more.
Len Reeder, on the other hand, whose girlfriend had taken his hand and was now holding it in her lap and caressing it softly, simply stared out the window. He too was nervous. His stomach too remained in a giant knot. A measure of fear still ran through his body.
But unlike his friend and fellow Cougar, the one who scored all the points, made all the headlines, and got all the cheers, Leonard Reeder just sat staring through the glass into the half-light of the dying day and said nothing.
* * * * *
