Last Team Standing (13 page)

Three yards and a cloud of dust, as the saying went. Passing was a last resort.

The T began to gain legitimacy after the Bears used it to crush the Redskins in the 1940 championship game, 73-0 (still the most lopsided score in NFL history). Greasy Neale, soon to be hired by Lex Thompson, was in the stands at Griffith Stadium that day, and like the rest of the football world, he was shocked by the result. Neale had never run the T formation in his long coaching career. He knew little about it. He was about to start a new job in a new league, and it seemed an unlikely time to radically overhaul his coaching philosophy. But after watching Chicago make mincemeat of Washington, he decided to give the T a whirl. “If that wouldn't convince you,” he said, “you'd be a very stubborn man.”

A few weeks after the game, Neale was having lunch with some old friends at a Manhattan restaurant. At the table was a man who worked for Fox Movietone News, which produced the newsreels that were shown in theaters before the main feature.

“I marvel at the way you fellows seem to catch the outstanding plays of every game in the few minutes you show on the screen,” Neale said naively. “How are you able to do that?”

“Oh,” the man answered, “we film the entire game and select the important plays from the complete footage.”

Neale nearly choked on his whiskey. “Would you by any chance have the entire footage of that Bears-Redskins game?” he asked.

“I can let you have a print for $156.”

“Sold,” said Neale gleefully.

For the next three months, Neale spent up to five hours a day holed up in Lex Thompson's New York apartment studying the
film. By the time he emerged, he had memorized every block, run, fake, and pass in the Bears' offensive arsenal. But Neale was not interested in merely replicating the Bears' T formation. He was determined to improve upon it. He added more running plays, incorporating the best aspects of the wing formations. In the fall of 1941, the Eagles joined the Bears as the only NFL teams using the T.

Some college coaches also embraced the T formation, notably Army's Red Blaik, Notre Dame's Frank Leahy, and Stanford's Clark Shaughnessy. But most coaches, college and pro, resisted it, often bitterly. They thought its use of deception was unsportsmanlike and its use of passing unmanly. In 1943, University of Minnesota head coach Bernie Bierman dismissed the T formation as a flash in the pan. He predicted, “I don't think the T will be any more widely used than the single wing, the short punt or any of the other old standard formations.” How mistaken he was: The T would eventually come to dominate football, though it would take a while. The Steelers didn't abandon the single wing for the T until 1952, becoming the last NFL team to do so.

The Steagles' summer practices ended on August 6, though Bill Hewitt, the former all-pro end who'd been coaxed out of retirement by Bert Bell, organized occasional workouts thereafter.

“As peppy as a college freshman just starting a football career,” wrote the
Philadelphia Inquirer's
Art Morrow, “Hewitt's enthusiasm has proved so infectious that it has spread throughout the squad.” Even persnickety Greasy Neale pronounced himself pleased with the results of the practices.

“On the whole,” Neale told Morrow, “I think we had a very satisfactory preliminary practice…. It is still too early to predict any championships, or anything of that sort, but I am convinced we benefited greatly by this early work.”

Neale's optimism was a tad premature. The Eagles and the Steelers hadn't even merged yet, at least not on the field. The real challenge would come later that month, when training camp
officially opened across town, near the campus of St. Joseph's College. That's when the Pittsburghers would be added to the mix. That's also when Walt Kiesling would arrive, and Neale would have to begin sharing the head coaching duties.

O
N
A
UGUST
25, 1943, just four days after Lewis Hershey announced that pre-Pearl Harbor fathers would be drafted beginning October 1, NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden decreed that team rosters for the upcoming season, which had been reduced from 33 to 25 players back in April, would now be increased to 28. Layden claimed the change was due to an “improved manpower situation,” but its real purpose was to allow teams to stock up on players before the beginning of the Father Draft, which would undoubtedly decimate rosters. (Some owners had wanted to increase roster sizes even more, to 35 players, but Layden feared running afoul of the Office of Defense Transportation, which had ordered the NFL to keep travel to a minimum.)

The next day, August 26, the Steagles went a step further to guard against the Father Draft.

“We're going to insist that every man work at least 40 hours a week in an essential industry, along with playing football,” said Al Ennis, the Eagles' publicity director. “We don't want anyone pointing a finger at our players and charging that they aren't contributing to the war effort, even though we think football has a definite place in the American way of life.” Ennis said many players were already working in defense plants anyway, and the team would help place the rest. He also said employers had shown a willingness to be flexible in allowing the players to moonlight for the Steagles. The team would run a “swing shift” training camp, with two practices per day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Players could attend whichever session suited their schedules best. Furthermore, Steelers co-owner Bert Bell said, “Pittsburgh gridders-workers who can't get away from local jobs will be allowed to appear on Sundays only.” That meant Steelers tackle Ted Doyle could keep his job building uranium-enrichment
components at the Westinghouse factory and still play football—just as he'd proposed in his June letter to Bell. It would make for a punishing autumn.

“In 1943 I lived in Pittsburgh all during the season,” Doyle recalled. “The team was in Philadelphia. I would take a train on, say, a Friday night or a Saturday night or whatever—the day before the game—and go into Philadelphia or wherever the game was to be and then I would get a little briefing before the game, any changes in plays and those things. Then we'd play the game. I'd take the train back home Sunday night. If it happened to come back through East Pittsburgh in the morning, I'd get off the train and go to work.”

Bert Bell first came up with the idea of requiring players to do war work shortly after Pearl Harbor.

“Why couldn't our professional squads be employed in defense work, cut down on the weekly practice, play on Sundays and thus combine the two and do double duty for the good of all?” he'd asked rhetorically in early January of 1942. “It isn't going to be enough to play, pay taxes, buy Defense Bonds and continue as before.”

Nothing came of it in 1942, but shortly after the Steelers and Eagles merged, Bell pitched the idea to his partner Art Rooney and Eagles owner Lex Thompson, both of whom enthusiastically endorsed it. (So did Eagles head coach Greasy Neale, who had worked full time in an airplane factory while coaching and playing for the Dayton Triangles during World War I.) Their motives were not purely patriotic. Section 5(e) of the Selective Service Act authorized the deferment of “those men whose employment in industry, agriculture, or other occupations … is found … to be necessary to the maintenance of the national health, safety, or interest.” By August 1943 nearly 2.4 million men had been spared induction through occupational deferments. (They were classified 2-A, 2-B, or 2-C, depending on their occupation.) While they were compelled to work at least 40 (and sometimes 48) hours a week in an “essential” industry, these men were free, in most cases, to play football on Sunday afternoons.

The task of determining whose employment was “necessary” and which industries were “essential” fell to Paul Vories McNutt, a former Indiana governor and chairman of the War Manpower Commission. President Roosevelt created the commission in April 1942 to mobilize the civilian workforce. In essence, McNutt was in charge of making sure war plants had enough workers. In August 1943 he issued two lists of occupations and activities, one labeled “non-deferrable,” the other “essential.” Workers on the first list were subject to immediate induction. Workers on the second were automatically eligible for deferment. The goal was to drive men from low-priority jobs to high-priority jobs.

The lists were marvelously detailed. Among the non-deferrable jobs: sign painter, taxidermist, florist, barber, bartender, gardener, soda jerk, lavatory attendant, and the manufacture of pinball machines, academic caps and gowns, and ornamental shoe buckles. (The “status of idleness” was also considered a non-deferrable activity.) The “essential” list encompassed 149 activities, from aircraft-engine mechanic to x-ray equipment serviceman.

“The time has come,” McNutt said, “when every worker must justify himself in terms of his contribution to the war program.”

McNutt's goal was to keep men working in essential industries—thereby keeping them out of the Army. This put him in diametric opposition to Lewis Hershey, the head of Selective Service, and inevitably led to conflict between the two men. To make matters worse, McNutt was Hershey's boss, since Roosevelt had given the WMC authority over Selective Service. (One of Hershey's subordinates joked that Selective Service's insignia should be “a Hershey bar with McNutts in it.”) Both McNutt and Hershey were Hoosiers, born and raised in Indiana, but their personalities were as different as Indianapolis and Amsterdam. Hershey was a blunt, no-nonsense military man. McNutt was a smooth-talking, silver-haired politician. Hershey believed McNutt's list of “essential” activities was too broad. After all, how critical were tanners to the war effort? He wrote McNutt, “I will not transmit any order from you for classification,” and notified draft boards that the WMC
chairman's lists were merely advisory and not binding, ironically citing the very autonomy that had undermined Hershey's efforts to draft fathers. A perturbed McNutt complained to Roosevelt, who reasserted the WMC's supremacy.

Occupations and industries that did not appear on either of McNutt's lists existed in a kind of bureaucratic no-man's-land. Men engaged in those activities—including bank and grocery store clerks, automobile repairmen, and tailors—were subject to induction when their draft numbers came up in the normal course of events. Among this group, too, were professional athletes. As far as Paul McNutt was concerned, they were neither nonessential nor critical.

“The usefulness of the sport is a separate question from the ‘essentiality' of individuals who play it,” McNutt explained cryptically. “Thus it may well be that it is desirable that Blankville have a ball team. But Blankville may lose certain members of that team to higher priority industries—even members that might be ‘essential' to winning the pennant. The pennant is not ‘essential.'” In other words, the only way for a professional athlete to secure an occupational deferment was to work a second job in an essential industry.

The Steagles were the only pro sports team to require its players to take war jobs. On the whole, the players did not object to the extra work. Most of them needed the money anyway. In the NFL, a salary of $200 a game was typical. At the Budd factory in North Philadelphia, experienced workers were commanding as much as $73 a week. Annualized, the factory job was more lucrative.

And the war plants were eager to hire the players. In 1943, demand for workers was so intense that unemployment fell to under two percent—still a record low. One third of the shipyards on the West Coast were behind schedule. Desperate plant managers began “scamping” workers—stealing them from other plants. In Buffalo, one factory sent telegrams to another factory's workers, offering them higher paying jobs immediately. One personnel manager complained that “the way to get one good man is
to hire four because three will quit.” Wartime employers were caught in a bind: as the number of soldiers increased, so did the number of workers required to feed, clothe, arm, and transport them, while the number of available workers simultaneously shrank. The United States produced a staggering amount of materiel during the war: 8,200 warships, 86,000 tanks, 300,000 planes, 15 million guns, 20 million helmets, 41 billion rounds of ammunition. It took an estimated 20 million workers to make it all—a force nearly twice the size of the military's. The war stimulated many changes in the American workplace, changes that were both momentous and contentious.

On June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which called for “the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color or national origin.” Black leaders hailed the order as “the most significant move on the part of the Government since the Emancipation Proclamation.” During the war, the number of African-Americans employed in the manufacturing sector rose by 600,000 to two million, and the percentage employed in war plants jumped from 2.5 percent to almost ten percent. The changes were not unanimously acclaimed. When the federal Committee on Fair Employment Practice directed Southern railroads to hire more black engineers and conductors, the popular syndicated columnist Raymond Clapper complained that only “mischief, disunity and further irritation of race relations” would result. The committee, Clapper wrote, was ignoring “the deep complex of human emotions bound up in the matter.” In early June of 1943, some 25,000 white workers at an engine plant in Detroit walked off the job to protest the promotion of three black workers.

Equally contentious was the reaction to the influx of women in the workplace. About six million women worked in defense plants during the war. Many took jobs long reserved for men. They were welders, electricians, toolmakers, plumbers, mechanics, and, yes, riveters. They contributed mightily to the war effort and discovered a new world outside the home. As a female worker at
the Puget Sound Navy Yard put it, “somehow the kitchen lacks the glamour of a bustling shipyard.”