Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Penguin Football

December 3, 2016December 3, 2016 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

logo_of_youngstown_state_penguins

Today, Youngstown State’s football Penguins go up against Jacksonville State in the second round of the FCS Playoffs. It is great to see Youngstown back in championship contention. It was something we never saw during my years growing up in Youngstown and as a student at Youngstown State. Back then the competitive sports at Youngstown State were basketball and baseball under Dom Roselli.

Those were the “Dike” Beede days. It seems that Beede’s main contribution to football had nothing to do with winning. It was his idea to invent the penalty flag which was first used in a game between Oklahoma City University and Youngstown in October of 1941, at Rayen Stadium, where Youngstown played many of their games, even during the years we were students.

It’s not that there weren’t some players that went on to excel. Ed O’Neill perhaps made it the biggest. After playing for Beede, he went on to the Steelers, got cut in 1969, and then returned to Youngstown to pursue training in acting. He managed the Pub in Kilcawley when we were students before going on to Broadway, TV and Modern Family. While we were there, Ron Jaworski was the quarterback, known then and later as “the Polish rifle.” He went on to play for the Eagles and is still a sports commentator. Cliff Stoudt also was at Youngstown in the 1970’s before going on to play back-up to Terry Bradshaw with the Steelers. Ironically, Stoudt’s son Cole is currently an offensive assistant coach at Jacksonville State.

The closest we got to championships in our time at Youngstown was in 1974 when Ray Dempsey led the team with Stoudt at quarterback to an 8-1 record before losing in the first round of the playoffs. Dempsey went on to an assistant coaching job with the Detroit Lions the next season. For that season, I actually paid attention although few of us went to the games. There were often not many more people in the stands than on the field. Far more people in Youngstown went to high school games back then. The irony was that northeast Ohio is football country–all those sons of steelworkers! Thinking back, it just didn’t make sense that for so many years Youngstown State was uncompetitive.

Things got better after we left. Bill Narduzzi led them to a couple conference championships and a few playoff victories. But things really turned around in the Tressel years when they won four national championships and were runners-up twice before Tressel went on to coach at Ohio State. We live in Columbus and there were a lot of questions about Tressel but we talked about what he did at Youngstown. Sure enough, in 2002, he won another championship and went on to be the third winning-est coach in Ohio State history.

It was during this time that Stambaugh Stadium, also know as the “Ice Castle” was built. An internet search turned up no definitive answer to where this nickname came from except that the west side of the stadium represents the highest point in Youngstown, and in the blustery weather of late fall can be downright cold. It’s also fun to think of it as a place where the Penguins put their opponents on ice. Bleachers on the east side of the field added another 3,000 seats for a seating capacity of 20,630.

In his second season, current coach Bo Pelini has the Penguins in the second round of the FCS playoff. Here’s hoping that this marks the beginnings of a new winning tradition. Go Fighting Penguins!

Update at 5:40 PM Saturday, December 3, 2016. Youngstown State has just defeated Jacksonville State 40-24!

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Football

October 18, 2014October 18, 2015 / rtrube54 / 13 Comments

Friday nights in the fall meant one thing in Youngstown, as in so many towns across the country–football! In a town where hard physical work was the life of many, the brawny contests on football fields across the city were an integral part of the culture.

It began with pep rallies on Friday afternoons. Then there was the special homecoming game after elections of the homecoming king and queen. Those were always the cool, good looking kids. I never stood a chance! But you found a group to go with to the games, cheered the team on, and avoided the fights that sometimes broke out after games between people from rival schools.

But the big thing was the rivalries. One of the most famous out of Youngstown was, and still is, the Cardinal Mooney-Ursuline rivalry. These are the two Catholic high schools in the city and to this day is one of the most celebrated high school football rivalries in Ohio. We tended to root for Ursuline, where kids from the West Side went who didn’t go to Chaney (except when they PLAYED Chaney). So wouldn’t you know it–I go and marry a Mooney girl!

Scanned from 1970 Lariat–City Series Champs!

Our big rival at Chaney was Austintown Fitch. The Fitch game was usually early in the year and a good bellwether for what kind of team we had. Chaney and Fitch were in different football leagues–Chaney was part of the Youngstown City League, and most of our games were against other Youngstown City high schools (this was in the day when there were six public high schools in Youngstown).

Coach Angelo: Scanned from 1970 Lariat

Lou “Red” Angelo was the coach I most remember. Mr. Angelo was also my gym teacher and his “no nonsense” approach and willingness to push guys hard probably contributed to the number of winning teams he produced. His son, Jerry Angelo, was a general manager of the Chicago Bears from 2001 to 2012. Ed Matey took over coaching the Chaney Cowboys in 1971, the fall of my senior year.

The death of the steel industry and population loss in Youngstown also led to the demise of the City League as four of the six high schools (Rayen, North, South, and Wilson) closed and Chaney became a STEM-focused school. Only East High School now has a football team.

The demise of the City League hardly spelled the end of football fever in Youngstown. The Browns-Steelers rivalry is still alive, with Youngstown the “no man’s land” between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. While City League football was waning, Youngstown State came alive under Jim Tressel, winning four Divisional National Championships and building Stambaugh Stadium on the near north side of Youngstown–a prominent feature of the Youngstown skyline.

Football is a tough, physical game and a team game where no one can slack. That somehow fits working class Youngstown. That toughness is one of the reasons I remain hopeful for Youngstown. Someone knocks you down, you get up, and make sure it is the other guy on the grass the next time.

What are your football memories? Who was your school’s big rival (no trash talking here!).

[Click “On Youngstown” on the menu bar to see an archive of all the posts in this series.]

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Youngstown State

June 21, 2014December 7, 2014 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

I am proud to say that I am a graduate of Youngstown State University. I thought about attending other universities but kind of felt (or was made to feel) I really wouldn’t fit in. Not that I couldn’t compete academically. It’s just where I came from in terms of class. (I write about this in “What’s Missing from the Diversity Discussion?”, a post that was responsible in a way for this series as an answer to the question at the end of the post.) I also realized that if I went to one of these schools, I would saddle myself or my parents with significant debt. Debt wasn’t looked at positively where I came from, so I decided I would go to Youngstown.

Youngstown State had become a public university five years before I enrolled (1967) and that state support among other things made education very accessible for many of us. Tuition (in 1972 dollars) was $180 a quarter. Because of a scholarship, and savings in high school and working through college, I was able to graduate without any student loans. That was so for many of my classmates. Today, that is almost impossible.

One of the things that made Youngstown State such an interesting place when we were students is that we were there because we wanted to be. Many of us were paying for our own education. Many of us knew that if we wanted a different life from our parents that this was our chance. And one of the things that I was grateful for was that there were a number of professors who knew that as well, and gave of themselves and taught. My love of history came out of a couple required courses in history taught by people who made it come alive, not as lists of dates to be memorized but as a story of underlying causes, of competition for political power, and more that not only helped me understand the past better, but the present as well. A course on Romantic Literature introduced me to an English professor who hosted Lenten discussions on C.S. Lewis at his church, and allowed me and my girlfriend (now my wife) to come.

Jones Hall (Public Domain)

Yes, I met my wife at Youngstown–actually on the second day of our freshman year. She grew up in Brownlee Woods and went to Cardinal Mooney High School. That happened for a number of us as well. She worked on the Jambar in the midst of the Watergate era when journalism was big. She even had a chance to hear Carl Bernstein, who gave a lecture during that period.

The big sport when we were at Youngstown was basketball. This was during the Dom Roselli years and I think he had winning seasons throughout our time there. Football was generally pathetic. The Penguins used to play at a high school stadium. Obviously, this was before the Jim Tressel days. The brightest spot at the time was that we had a quarterback by the name of Ron Jaworski, who went on to an NFL career with Philadelphia.

Youngstown was a university in transition when we were there. For much of our four years, it was a mud pit as land was cleared and excavated for several new buildings including an expanded student union, Kilcawley Center and the then new Maag Library. Today, it is a beautifully landscaped campus, that is kind of an oasis of beauty in a city struggling to remake itself. One of its distinctive programs is its Center for Working Class Studies, one of the first of its kind in the country.

Maag Library (c) Robert C Trube

Youngstown is a working class university. Its graduates will probably not occupy cabinet posts in any national administration. Those mostly come from the Ivy League, which may be part of the country’s problem. But many of us fulfilled the dreams our parents had for us of a better life working in engineering, computer science, public service, business. One of the real questions in the era of rising tuitions, and college aid programs that have not kept pace, is whether this kind of opportunity will continue to be accessible to young men and women from the working class in the future or lower socioeconomic classes in the future. Perhaps it is up to those of us who had these opportunities to advocate and work to make it so for the next generation. That, too, is a Youngstown value. We want our children to have the chance at a better life.