If Billy E entered the 1966-67 season with something to prove, it was nothing compared to Kenny Huffman’s sense of unfinished business. A year before, his Cougars capped an otherwise magnificent year by playing in – and eventually losing – what was arguably the most talked-about high school game in the history of Syracuse. And the unfinished business wasn’t so much about the fact that Corcoran lost. It was how they lost.
Huffman’s Cougars had been fast, strong, deep and talented. Though not giants, they did list among their starters a 6’4” center and two forwards who stood 6’3” and 6'2." And whatever they might have lacked in height they more than made up for by being both strong enough to box out opponents and athletic enough to out-leap them. But because of the presence of three kids in particular, they may have been the quickest team the city had ever seen.
On that Corcoran squad were two youngsters who lived just down the block from one another. Howie Harlow and Joe Reddick were both 5’10” juniors. The former was a player with cat-like reflexes, who could seemingly strip the ball from an opponent at will. And the latter not only appeared as fast as he needed to be, he was pound-for-pound as strong as anyone on his team. A natural born scorer, Reddick could drill a 20-foot jump shot just as easily as he could split defenders and power his way up and over opposing big men. Indeed, Syracuse may not have ever seen a better high school backcourt, before or since, than Howie Harlow and Joe Reddick.
But of all the players on Huffman’s 1965-66 team, none oozed any more talent than a wiry swingman named Jimmy Collins, a 6’3” specimen who could run, jump, shoot and defend with the best players anywhere. Literally, anywhere. And though he often found himself under the basket battling for rebounds or defending opposing big men, his perimeter game, including his ball-handling and long-range shooting, was to many, simply breath-taking.
Collins had learned to play by squaring off against some of the best players the Salt City had to offer. As a youngster he was schooled in the game by Donnie Fielder, a mentor in the mostly black 15th Ward and, himself, a playground legend who ran the Boys Club on East Genesee Street.
Later, in junior high, Collins played with a touring team called the Junior Olympians that would regularly scrimmage against its senior counterpart, a team of twenty and thirty-something former All-Stars. During practice and pickup games, Collins would often find himself going head-to-head against the oldest and most accomplished of the Olympians, former Syracuse National and three-time NBA All Star, Paul Seymour, who laced them up on occasion for the team. Seymour, who'd retired and bought a liquor store on the city’s near West Side, was nevertheless still young enough and certainly tough enough to make lunch meat out of just about any young gunslinger foolish enough to take him on.
Then, during his high school days, Collins often found himself in pickup games at Thornden Park matched up against Syracuse University All-American Dave Bing, a guy who'd almost single-handedly put SU basketball on the map and who'd later be named one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history.
Many SU players would regularly play at Thornden, regardless of the level of competition. But Bing, given his talent and stature, saved himself for only the most competitive and highest quality games. And when he did play, he only wanted to guard the best player on the other team. Quite often that meant the gangly kid from Vocational High. And though Bing was clearly the class of whatever court he happened to set foot on, many who watched those Collins/Bing match-ups in the summers of 1964 and ‘65 would swear that the kid – then more arms and legs than refined ability – not only held his own, but once or twice might have gotten the better of Bing.
The long and the short of it was, Kenny Huffman’s 1965-66 Cougars were a match-up nightmare for anyone. As a result, they'd carved up the City League to the tune of 13-1; the only blemish being an 11-point loss to cross-town rival Nottingham. In doing so, they'd outscored their opponents by nearly 24 points a game. For that reason, when they were set to face St. John the Evangelist in the All City Game, many predicted the Cougars would make short work of the undersized (yet still undefeated) Parochial League champs.
The annual All City Championship, as a matter of background, was the brainchild of Frank Sammons, a Catholic priest who served as Bishop Foery’s right-hand man for all youth-related activities. The showdown, played every March at the Onondaga County War Memorial, pitted the winner of the Syracuse City League against the winner of the Parochial League, began in 1960 to great hoopla. Each year, however, despite its continued popularity, the game seemed harder and harder to schedule.
The problem was two-fold. First, the bigger and more-powerful public schools found themselves in something of a no-win situation. After all, any school with over 700 boys should regularly beat a school with, maybe, 50 or 60. And despite the fact the Parochial League had been the dominant league in Syracuse for decades, by the dawn of the 1960s that was no longer the case. In fact, three City League champs – Central, Vocational and CBA – had won four of the first five All City contests. As a result, in the eyes of many City League administrators, despite some still-strong play in the much smaller Parochial League, for them to play and win such a bragging rights game was a bit like treading water. The only way for them and their kids to make headlines was to actually lose.
The second problem was that the State of New York had recently determined that no high school team could play any more than 18 games per season, excluding the sectional and diocesan playoffs. Given that, and given the growing trend toward Christmas tournaments that, between the holidays, brought both revenue and prestige to schools, it became increasingly difficult to accommodate what amounted to an exhibition – even one as prestigious as the All-City game – when all but one team in each of the two leagues would be sitting in the stands watching it.
To willfully block out space for one game on an already tight 18-game schedule on the off-chance that a school might actually qualify for it, versus the certainty of a lucrative holiday tournament, was becoming more and more a deal-breaker for many coaches, principals, and athletic directors in both leagues.
Even so, and despite the fact the All City affair remained on life support, such sausage-making was of little consequence to Syracuse's basketball crazies. That year’s game promised to be a gem, with Bobby Felasco’s running, gunning and undefeated Evangelist's, led by his five hand-in-glove seniors, facing off against Kenny Huffman’s Corcoran squad, led by his once-in-a-generation supernova. Few, if any, fans – even the casual ones – wanted to miss it.
From the City League's perspective, while they respected Felasco and had heard great things about his undersized yet fluid squad, most in the league had never seen anyone quite like Collins and figured it was just a matter of time before his talent would trump Evangelist’s special brand of chemistry.
Billy E wasn’t so sure, however. He'd already lost to Evangelist twice that year, despite having a taller, stronger and, just maybe, better-shooting team. Plus, his boys had scrimmaged Corcoran on a pair of Sunday mornings earlier in that season, and the experience had taught him that if Huffman's team wasn't shooting well, or if they got even a little frustrated, they could be vulnerable to the non-stop passing, cutting, picking and overall artistry that those Evangelist seniors brought to the table every game.
Not only that, thought Billy E, there was also the Felasco factor.
To anyone who watched him, played for him, or competed against him, St. John's head man Robert "Bobby" Felasco was an absolute force of nature on the sidelines. A relatively short man of just over 5’8”, with a moon-shaped face, a flat-top haircut and a square jaw that shifted back and forth as he relentlessly worked a piece of gum or barked out orders, he had a way of impacting a basketball game like few coaches in the history of Syracuse high school sports.
There were any number of reasons for this. First, he doubled as a referee during the season and, as such, could influence calls by getting inside the minds of the refs working his games – all whom, it seemed, he knew personally. With a steady stream of comments, quips, barbs and personal asides, he could wear down just about any ref, even the toughest-minded and strongest-willed of them.
Plus, as a working referee himself, he understood as well as anyone the psychology of officiating – especially the fact that even the finest officials loved to make certain calls at certain key moments in a game. One such call was a player-control foul known then as charging, which occurred when an offensive player, often with the ball, ran into a defender and, often, knocked him on his backside. The key to “taking" a charge was once the defensive player summoned the fortitude to allow his face, stomach and family jewels to be exposed to some full-force/full-frontal contact with an oncoming player – without using his arms or hands to absorb the blow – he then had to be a good enough actor to flop backwards with enough realism to sell the contact as substantial, without overdoing it.
The call was one regularly fraught with anticipation, as the crowd – having seen the contact and aware a foul was pending – always seemed to wait with bated breath to see if the official would name the offensive or the defensive player as the guilty party. Felasco knew that deep down inside, almost every ref secretly loved calling charging. Most of them would blow their whistle, approach the players on the floor as the crowd quieted, and then dramatically slap the palms of their right hand against the backside of their necks (the official hand signal) as the crowd exploded, sometimes in delight, frequently in horror, but more often than not, in a raucous combination of the two.
And because so many of his colleagues relished calling a charge on a player, Felasco schooled his boys religiously on the art of planting their feet squarely in front on an oncoming dribbler, laying everything bare, including their manhood, and then allowing themselves to be steamrolled (if not kneed in the groin).
On top of that, though, Bobby Felasco had a way of making almost everyone in the gym, especially the other coach and team, uncomfortable. His sideline demeanor went well beyond cocky and communicated to all those concerned, this was his game and that everyone else in the gym, including the two officials, was merely a supporting player.
What’s more, Felasco’s combination of fire and intensity had a way of speaking directly to the opposing coach, telling him in no uncertain terms that if he and his boys were going to beat Evangelist that night, they were going to have to do something extraordinary. And frankly, relatively few ever proved up to the task.
Yet, intangibles aside, the reason so few opponents ever got the better of Bob Felasco was simple: the fiery, cocky and gum-chewing little ref-baiter from Syracuse's North Side could coach the hell out of a high school basketball team.
Felasco, a half-Polish/half-Italian kid, had starred at the old North High before heading up to S.U. where he'd earned a spot on the varsity. Though he mostly rode the bench at Syracuse, Felasco began to see for himself just how disruptive coach Lew Andreas’ up-tempo, fast-break style offense could be on opponents. It was Andreas’ balls-to-the-wall philosophy, along with the relentless conditioning required to run it, that Bob Felasco brought to the high school level in 1951, the year he was named head coach at St. John the Evangelist, a tiny urban parish on Syracuse’s near North Side.
Felasco’s true brilliance as a coach, however, lay in the fact that, unlike virtually every one of his contemporaries, who saw a court as having two separate and distinct halves, one for defense, the other for offense, he saw it as single unit. He expanded the dimensions of the basketball court and, by extension, the game itself; picking up its tempo with a relentless fast break and a non-stop motion offense, while instilling in his players a keen understanding that offense does not exist in a vacuum but is the by-product of defensive pressure, courage and play-making.
That's why Felasco’s teams regularly won five or so games for every one they lost. He stressed a brand of defense that mirrored perfectly his non-stop offense. What's more, he merged those two concepts into a single game strategy.
Felasco could also make a game (in a word) ugly by constantly disrupting his opponent’s offensive flow – in much the same way Hall of Fame college coaches John Thompson and Rick Pitino would do a full generation later. His well-conditioned teams ran both zone and man-to-man full-court presses and often scored as many as ten-to-twelve points a game off steals and turnovers in their opponent’s backcourt. For Felasco, defense and offense became, in effect, interchangeable, and each fed off the other.
Yet, of all the great teams Bob Felasco had ever coached, none embraced his almost holistic philosophy any better than his 1965-66 ballclub. His starters that season – five seniors who'd been playing together their entire high school career – a few even longer than that – ran his simple half-court offense to perfection. Like a great jazz combo capable of riffing for extended periods on a single musical theme, they had a sense of each other that allowed them all to make unexpected back-door cuts and no-look passes for easy lay-ups. In their hands Bobby Felasco's fast break offense – especially off a steal – became an orchestrated blur with the ball passing crisply from one boy to the next, whipping its way up court in seconds, and rarely touching the ground.
In fact, Felasco’s first substitute off the bench that year, another senior named Joe Russo, a great kid and a terrific player in his own right, only received a relatively modest number of minutes per game. The St. John's coach did that, of course, out of deference to the special, once-in-a-lifetime chemistry that his five starters possessed, Al Denti, Tommy Downey, Dave Guinta, Billy Jackson and John Zych. Though he'd coached better, more talented players in the past, and would do so again in the future, this was the unit – the team – that Bob Felasco sensed might forever define him as a coach.
Normally, Felasco always liked to ease one or two underclassmen into his uptempo system, giving certain youngsters brief but important minutes over the course of a season. He believed this would temper them to the intensity and speed of Parochial League play. But on this particular team, he was blessed with six seniors who defined just about everything he'd ever believed about the game. Those seniors were six kids from Syracuse, four from the east side and two from the west, who – as good as they might have been as individuals – were living, breathing proof that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.
For the first and only time in his coaching career, Bob Felasco mortgaged the future for the here-and-now. By not giving his bench many meaningful minutes that season, the St. John the Evangelist coach was like some steely-eyed poker player who, knowing the hand he's holding, pushes all his chips toward the center of the table and announces, “All in."
* * * * *
Kenny Huffman knew in the days leading up the '66 All-City game his boys would have all they could handle in St. John theEvangelist. Still, he wasn’t worried. To the contrary, he found himself surprisingly calm at the prospect of coaching his third All-City affair in five years. It wasn't until he learned Don Blaich and Henry Ponti had been assigned as referees that he began to feel his stomach tighten ever so slightly.
Blaich, a former St. John the Baptist star and tavern owner whose establishment was a popular joint just down from St. Vincent's, was a good ref and highly respected. His was a firm but understated style. Like any good official, he also had a remarkable ability to “see” a play.
In basketball, the best officials can subconsciously take a panoramic picture of the action while at the same time zeroing in on its specific elements: the ball, a player’s hands and feet, the out of bounds line, and so on. And he does this while keeping his ears alert for things like the sound of his partner’s whistle, the scoreboard horn, or a player yelling for a timeout.
And while some contended that Blaich suffered from a bad case of “rabbit ears” – that is, the tendency to hear specific hecklers in the stands – while others argued he sometimes seemed to have it in for certain teams and could be considerably tougher on them, Ken Huffman was no such person. In fact, for his money, in a city full of first-class refs, Don Blaich was one of the best.
In Huffman's mind, however, Blaich’s partner that night was a different story. He was someone who Ken Huffman always held at arm's length, a ref whose officiating style was, in his mind, a little different.
As a schoolboy, Henry Ponti's career never came close to measuring up to his passion for the game. As a lanky, hard-working swingman at Solvay High, great things were expected of young Hank Ponti – at least in his own mind. Unfortunately, while blessed with an angular and wiry frame and a heart like a locomotive, he never developed the physical strength or hand/eye coordination to sync up with all that passion of his. He tried, of course, and practiced for hours on end. After all, he simply ached for basketball greatness. But in the end, things just never clicked, so his playing days ended with a whimper – swept away in an undertow of unrequited love.
That was not, however, the end of Henry Ponti’s basketball career, and not by a long shot.
While in the service and stationed in Guam, Ponti began officiating basketball games between the enlisted men and a few officers. He found it a great way to keep himself involved in a game for which he continued to hold such a torch. Upon returning home, he began reffing at the grammar school and high school level. Plus, as someone willing to drive anywhere, anytime to call a game, it also wasn't long before he found himself assigned to a handful of college games as well. Henry Ponti truly had found his life's calling. By the late 1950s, he was the single hardest-working ref in all of Central New York, and officiated a number of historic match-ups, including the first-ever national TV broadcast of an NCAA men’s basketball game.
However, unlike the workman-like Blaich, Ponti’s style of officiating was, in a word, theatrical. During the early days of the National Basketball Association, when the league found itself struggling for survival in such relative dots-on-the-map as Ft. Wayne, Rochester and Syracuse, the NBA executives did whatever they could to make their product as attractive and entertaining as possible – particularly during their weekly nationally televised games every Sunday afternoon.
An important element of their strategy was the referee. Much like the actors who “officiated” Harlem Globetrotter games, such NBA refs as Mendy Rudolph and Richie Powers did not merely arbitrate the action on the court, they participated in it. The bulk of their calls were conspicuously loud and delivered to elicit raucous and often lusty responses, both positive and negative. At times, an NBA ref would blow his whistle and, much like an actor holding for laughter, wait for the entire arena to begin to quiet before making his call, a timing mechanism designed to elicit the most frenzied and fevered reaction possible.
Many NBA officials, likewise, developed their own style by making certain calls in trademark fashion. In time, many of those refs developed uniquely personal styles for calling just about every infraction in the rulebook, including palming, three seconds, and (most dramatic of all) Bobby Felasco's favorite, charging.
Around that time, it became popular for certain officials to single out a player who'd committed a foul by pointing at him in an exaggerated manner, almost like a fencer lunging at his opponent. Such a technique, while entertaining, had a way of putting the guilty player on the defensive. It also served to bring tension to an otherwise calm situation – or worse, heighten tension that had already been percolating.
As a hungry young official, and with the NBA in his own backyard, Henry Ponti, too, began to develop a style all his own. He often refereed scrimmage games of Syracuse’s hometown professional team, the Nationals. He constantly studied basketball's greatest showman, Rudolph, as he worked games and took note of the flair with which he made certain calls.
One day during a Nats’ scrimmage, Ponti called a foul on a player and in doing so mimicked how he committed the infraction. He liked how it felt, and noticed his impromptu imitation got a little reaction from those in attendance. Soon, Hank Ponti was incorporating mimicry into all his foul calls.
Yet of all his distinctive calls on the court, Ponti’s signature infraction became "traveling" or "walking (or, as a few called in the day, steps). When he detected a player moving his pivot foot or shuffling his feet, he’d blow his whistle in a series of short staccato bursts, while skipping toward the guilty party, his arms rolling rhythmically, one over the other, and his head raised skyward. Then, after coming to a full stop, Henry Ponti would stretch his lower body down to one knee, his back leg trailing, and announce in a long, drawn-out and almost-taunting voice, “S-T-E-H-H-H-P-S”
When he called traveling against a visiting team, especially at a key moment, the home fans would explode and the gym would rock to its rafters. For Henry Ponti, a middle-aged man whose playing career ended before he could know the singular joy of bringing the crowd to its feet with a brilliant no-look pass, a lightning-quick steal, or an acrobatic driving layup, being able to do it by simply blowing a whistle and making a call was not a half-bad substitute.
What gave Ken Huffman pause prior to the ’66 All-City game, however, was not so much Hank Ponti. It was his experience that certain referees had a way of becoming the centers of attention at key moments in particularly close games, as opposed to what all refs should ultimately be, inconspicuous arbiters. And the bigger the stage, Huffman found, the more likely such theatricality would find a way to manifest itself at the most inopportune time.
In addition, as the head coach of a team whose starting unit was 80% African American, Huffman was always wary of the temperament of any ref assigned one of his games. It was, after all, 1966. And, in 1966, there was still plenty of subjectivity at work in determining how certain games got called. Because, as the Corcoran coach could attest time and again over the course of a half-dozen seasons, there were still many refs in town all-too-willing to call games through the filter of their own personal bias. Hank Ponti wasn't necessarily one of them. Yet the possibility always lingered that a call, especially a late game call, could often boil down to something as basic as the color of a boy's skin.
When asked about it years later, few would go on record as saying that an arbitrary application of the rules by certain referees was contingent on race or ethnicity. But whether true or not, many African American kids from that era (and certain Polish ones as well) believed in their hearts that whenever they set foot on a basketball court in the 1960's there was always a chance the game could devolve into, in the words of one black player – Al Bullock, a former star at Central Tech – “seven against five.”
* * * * *
Each of the four years his teams competed in it, Kenny Huffman treated the All-City matchup just like any other game. In a sense it was. For Huffman, there were two goals each and every season: to win the City League title and to capture the Section Three Playoff crown. (There was no state-wide playoff in New York State in 1966; only playoffs within eleven different geographic regions or “sections” as drawn up by the New York State Public High School Athletic Association). For that reason, the All-City game always felt a little like an exhibition to Huffman – one played the end of the regular season and before the beginning of the sectionals.
For the most avid fans, however, the All City Game was far more than an exhibition. To them, it was the most important game of the year. Since the very first game of the series, way back in 1960, winning the All-City Championship meant being able to tuck citywide bragging rights in your back pocket and carry them around for a full year. It meant, too, that a basketball-crazy city got chance to see high school basketball at its finest, with two battle-tested teams squaring off for the right to be called "the best of the best."
However, over the course of its eight-year run – particularly its final four seasons – for a small segment of the population, the All-City game began to mean more than just bragging rights. Much of that had to do with the times. Because, while the All-City game may have started out being about end-of-the-bar talk and chest-beating, by the time it passed into history it had evolved into something deeper and more meaningful, particularly within the confines of Syracuse’s small but proud African American community.
By 1966, the subject of race was, arguably, the single most dominant social issue in the entire country – bigger even than the Vietnam War. Though Syracuse itself did not get caught in the crossfire of racism and civil rights like other cities, it was, nevertheless, hardly immune to the tension.
A rapid-fire series of four events – the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the murder of young Emmett Till, Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat, and the so-called Little Rock Nine – had played itself out in the national media in the decade just prior to the eight-year run of All-City Championship games. Though those events had all occurred miles from the Salt City, the more they made front page headlines in the Herald-Journal and the Post-Standard, the less they felt like isolated, distant events.
And that only became more and more they case. By 1962, the events just kept coming faster and faster and with greater frequency.
First, James Meredith, a black man, enrolled at the University of Mississippi – but not without protection of the Mississippi National Guard.
Then Medgar Evers, a civil rights worker, also from Mississippi, was killed with a high-powered rifle in front of his wife and children while in his driveway.
A few months later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his stirring “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Then, a month after that, four young schoolgirls were killed in the bombing of the all-black 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
In 1964, three civil rights workers, including two young white boys from New York, were murdered, again in Mississippi, and their bodies buried under the cover of night.
Later that same year the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were signed into law by President Johnson.
Then in February 1965, former Nation of Islam member Malcolm X was gunned down while delivering a speech in Harlem.
A month later, 600 civil rights leaders and workers were savagely attacked by local and state police with clubs and tear gas as they marched peaceably across the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Alabama.
And later that same summer, in Los Angeles, 34 people were killed and over 1,000 others injured as rioters set fire and destroyed much of Watts, a mostly black part of the city.
Meanwhile, in Syracuse’s 15th Ward, which for years had been home to the vast majority of the city’s African Americans, the entire neighborhood was being systematically razed in the name of what Mayor William Walsh and those under him within the confines of City Hall were now referring to as “urban renewal.” Family homes, small shops, churches, schools, social clubs and businesses, many of them still brimming with life and full of people, were being condemned and laid low as the government's wrecking ball continued to raze block after block of the still-vibrant Ward. Its old, ratty wooden structures were being swept aside to make way for what many politicians promised would be a more modern, more relevant Syracuse, complete with an all-new art museum, a new medical university, a new psychiatric hospital, a new county office building, and a brand new combination precinct headquarters, court house and city jail – along with the parking lots and structures needed to accommodate them.
What’s more, all this was happening just a few short years after that same federal government had descended upon Syracuse and (using the power of eminent domain) claimed a wide swath of the Ward for the all-new Interstate 81. By the time the highway was completed in 1967, that public works project of President Eisenhower would have destroyed the last traces of community the 15th Ward had, while unleashing a giant of a concrete snake – a heartless and soulless elevated stretch of concrete, steel and blacktop highway that for the balance of the century and beyond would serve as an unofficial line of demarcation between the proud and majestic Syracuse University, high on its stately hill, and the now wheezing (and physically detached) city below.
As a result of those two lighting bolts of urban upheaval – both orchestrated in the name of progress – thousands of black citizens in Syracuse found themselves stripped of their homes and exiled to scattered pockets throughout the Salt City. Many of those very same people, now feeling untethered from the very place that had long defined them, started to openly question white authority for the first time ever. Fueled by a sense of betrayal by Walsh and their city's mostly white political machine, and emboldened by stories of protest elsewhere, many former 15th Warders began to stand up and ask openly, why me? Or, more to the point...why not me?
This growing sense of anger soon found an unexpected outlet in the annual All City Championship, particularly during the game's final two years when a mostly black public-school team faced off against an all-white one from the Parochial League. As the issue of civil rights grew, that otherwise meaningless exhibition took on a heightened sense of importance. For some blacks in town – Negroes, as even they called themselves – it became as much about pride, dignity and the right to stand up and be counted as it did about putting a large round orange ball through a silly little hole.
And this undercurrent of racial tension only seemed to crystalize in 1966, something that led Father Sammons to make a decision in advance of it. Quite often in big games around the country, especially those at neutral sites, officials will recommend fans of one team use the entrance on one side of the arena, and fans of the other use the entrance on the opposite side. This accomplishes at least two goals. It minimizes the likelihood of confrontations between opposing fans and allows the respective cheerleading squads to direct their cheers and routines to one specific area of the arena.
But given the mood in Syracuse in March of 1966, the request by Sammons for the City and Parochial League fans to use separate entrances seemed to be as much about quelling potential racial unrest as it did logistics. In the March 4th edition of the Post-Standard, the city’s morning paper, a sidebar to Mike Holdridge’s pre-game story ran in large, bold type. It read:
Entries Designated
For Tonight’s Game
The Rev. Frank L. Sam-
mmons, director the Dio-
cesan Playoffs, requested last
night that Central New York
Cities League fans enter the
War Memorial tonight via
State St. entrance and sit on
the State St. side of the audi-
torium.
Parochial League followers
should enter via the exhibit
hall and sit on the Montgom-
ery St. side.
To many in Syracuse, black and white, Sammons might as well have said, “This could get ugly before it’s over. So we think you white folks ought to sit on this side of the War Memorial, while you Negroes probably ought to sit over there.”
* * * * *
