The '63 Steelers by Rudy Dicks

PREFACE
    I grew up in the late fifties and early sixties in a ranch-style house at the corner of Rosewae Drive and Skywae Drive in a city that the
Saturday Evening Post
labeled “Crime Town USA” and that also came to be known as “Murder Town.” 1
    Some days my mother would hide the front section of our hometown paper, the
Youngstown Vindicator
, so that my brothers and I would not be exposed to the gory headlines and stories about guys with funny nicknames getting blown up in cars and their body parts being scattered across the neighbor’s yard. I didn’t find out about her protectiveness until years later, but I wouldn’t have minded anyway, as long as she didn’t take away the sports section. The only bombs I cared about as a kid were the ones quarterbacks threw.
    That ’63
Post
story said that there had been seventy-five bombings in Youngstown over a decade’s time, which, if accurate, means that the only person busier than the wise guys in town was my mother stashing away sections of the afternoon paper. But the world of Cadillac Charlie, the Crab, Tar Baby, and the “bug” (the numbers game) was far from ours in northeast Ohio. My view from the crest of the hill on Rosewae was filled with more innocence than Lake Wobegon: dads mowing the lawn, moms working in the garden, kids riding bikes, and the fireworks in the distance from Idora Park, where my dad would take my mom on Sunday nights in the summer to listen and dance to Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, and Woody Herman. You could phone us by dialing SWeetbriar 23065 or send us aletter using a new number introduced in the summer of ’63, something called a zip code, which replaced our old postal code, number 11.
    There were much scarier places, I knew, such as the Deep South, Europe, and Africa, because I had seen them up close, bigger than life, when my dad took us downtown to the Palace, Paramount, and Warner theaters, which showed
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
The Guns of Navarone
, and
Lawrence of Arabia
. Good thing, I told myself, that we lived someplace safe.
    The next-door neighbors had a son in high school who played catch with me, coaxed me to show off my basketball-dribbling skills in front of his friend, and one afternoon tried to teach me to play the guitar. Because of his hairstyle, he reminded me of Edd “Kookie” Byrnes from
77 Sunset Strip
, and I was sure that he owned a black leather jacket; maybe he even snuck Marlboro cigarettes like they showed on TV ads. After our family moved away a few years later, I turned on my transistor radio one morning and heard his voice booming out, singing the Isley Brothers’ “Nobody But Me.” It was Dick Belley, and for nearly half a century his version would remain as popular as it was in ’67. Music fans remember Dick Belley as a member of the Human Beinz, who played at Idora Park regularly, but I remember him as a decent older boy who took the time to befriend a kid.
    We played Wiffle ball in the backyard, and kickball and kick-the-can in a cul-de-sac, and we loaded kids into our station wagon to go to the drive-in with a cooler full of pop, but my favorite spot of all was the one right in front of me every time I stepped out the front door: a stretch of green lawn that looked as lush to me as any fairway at Augusta would to a golf fan. It was the biggest yard in the neighborhood, and the best for tackle football, and it was where the neighborhood kids always played.
    When we weren’t playing football, we were watching it on TV. Growing up in Youngstown, what was more intimidating than any mobsters was being a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and finding yourself outnumbered by Cleveland Browns fans. Youngstown’s equidistant location between Cleveland and Pittsburgh was convenient for the mob’s itinerary, but it didn’t mean loyalties were divided equally between the teams. Even I started out, tentatively, as a Browns fan. Without cable TV,