In the Fall/Winter 2017 issue of The Fifth Floor, we announced our first-ever Cathedral Tall Tales contest. Our judge was Pitt Writing Lecturer Anjali Sachdeva, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, and Carnegie Mellon University before coming to the University of Pittsburgh. She also worked for six years at the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, where she was director of Educational Programs. Her story collection All the Names They Used for God was published early this year by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Penguin Random House. Sachdeva's winning selections, and their authors, are featured below.
First Place
Phantasm 42
By Thomas Scanlon (BA English Literature, 1997; BS Computer Science; MS Information Science)
The 1934 Pittsburgh Crawfords were a powerhouse in the Negro League, featuring five future Hall-of-Famers including baseball legends Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Cool Papa Bell. Yet, it was a peculiar newcomer to the team, Curtis "Popeye" Harris, who captured the imagination of many. At a time when Major League Baseball did not employ black players, Harris’ dream was to play at Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Forbes Field sat in the heart of the University of Pittsburgh’s campus in the shadow of the school’s famed Cathedral of Learning. Every chance he could, Popeye Harris would venture all the way to the Cathedral’s 42nd floor rooftop stoop and gaze into the Pirates games at Forbes Field. He was partially watching the games and partially dreaming of a life he couldn’t have. Harris continued this ritual for three years, spending nearly every summer day on that 42nd floor rooftop.
In 1937, the Crawfords cut Harris, and he signed with the Philadelphia Stars. After four seasons with the Stars, Harris retired from baseball and faded into oblivion. No one saw or heard from Harris for two years. Rumors abounded of his possible death. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Harris was spotted outside the Cathedral in the summer of 1942. A former Crawfords teammate tried to speak with him, but Harris entered the Cathedral and began his familiar ascent to the 42nd floor. The teammate waited for Harris to come back down, but he never did, and could never be found again.
Several years later, a Negro League All Star team played an exhibition game at Forbes Field with Jackie Robinson being the star of the game. A reporter informed Robinson that they were the first black players to ever play at Forbes Field and told him the curious tale of Popeye Harris. Intrigued, Robinson made the long trek to the 42nd floor of the Cathedral to experience the ethereal view of Forbes Field. Robinson went up alone and remained there for a considerable time but would never discuss what happened up there.
The next Spring, Robinson broke the MLB color barrier, playing second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He wore number 42 for the Dodgers, a number the multi-sport athlete had never worn before for any team in any sport. On Robinson’s first visit to Forbes Field as a Major Leaguer, a fan asked him why he chose number 42. Robinson gave no verbal response and instead offered a wry smile, trotted over to second base, stared to the top of the Cathedral, and tipped his cap. This is a ritual Robinson continued before every game he ever played at Forbes Field.
To this day, some say that on a cool summer’s eve, if you go to the spot where second base at Forbes Field once stood, look high into the sky at the top of the Cathedral, and tip your cap ... you just might see the faint shadowy image of a man on the 42nd floor tipping his cap back.
Judge's Comments: This story does what all great ghost stories do—convince you that it just might be true. Combining a historical account of Pittsburgh’s Negro League baseball players with a tale about shortstop Curtis “Popeye” Harris and Jackie Robinson, “Phantasm 42” brews a terrific mix of history, celebrity, and the supernatural centered around the Cathedral’s 42nd floor. This one may send today’s athletes looking for access to those upper reaches to see if they can grab a little bit of Robinson’s and Harris’ magic while overlooking the ghost of Forbes Field.
Thomas Scanlon currently works as a cybersecurity researcher for the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining CMU, he completed 10-plus years of industry experience with Fortune 500 companies in IT leadership roles. Even while working in technical fields, writing has been an essential part of his career as he has authored numerous research papers, journal articles, academic publications, and when time permits, non-technical pieces just for fun. He has also coached softball and baseball for many years, which somewhat influenced his story topic. Dr. Scanlon resides in the Pittsburgh suburbs with his wonderful wife Jamie and their four amazing children.
Second Place
Cathedral of Learning
By Darlene Kress (BA English and Psychology, 1971)
The great owl swooped overhead, dipping and rising, silently and swiftly.
The human figures moving around me melted into one transparent blob becoming silent as the great owl clutched me in his talons, lifting me from the wooden bench into the steel and granite arches.
Scenes flashed through my mind as the owl made an instant transferral of stories which would be etched in my memory forever.
An old lady appeared wearing a blue and white checkered house dress topped with a brown cotton apron with a deep pocket on each side. Her arms were strong as they gripped the shotgun. She reloaded and continued to fire at the rusty piece of abandoned farm equipment at the edge of the field. She would do this until all the bullets in the world were spent, leaving none to be used against another grandchild.
A fallen soldier’s skull was seen in the shrub beneath the colorful spreading maple tree in the city park. His hillside grave had further eroded due to the spring’s drenching rain, offering up its contents. The skull, dirty but not marred by the past hostilities of its soldier’s demise, had rolled into this eternal resting place. The skull remained untouched by the seasons, but could detect the mood of the world. The light, dancing footsteps of passersby became slow and heavy. Their garb turned from bright hues to ones faded and worn. Fewer and fewer were seen and eventually came no more.
Lying in his dark four-poster bed, a grey-haired aging man dies of his incurable disease, alone and uncomforted. The end came so swiftly; he was not given an opportunity to say farewell or touch his loved ones. Each night appearing as a light fog, his ghostly apparition is seen hovering at his front door. Waves of light and then dark weave left to right, dancing rhythmically without musical accompaniment. Satisfied with his farewell, the apparition rests unseen, awaiting his next nocturnal awakening.
The sun came walking along on his stick legs. His face was bright with small round eyes and a quarter moon grin. He waved with his stick arms and nodded his head in a signal of reassurance that, yes, these quick flashes of life would enrich and mold my future.
The easing of the talons of the great owl gently released my body to rest on the wooden bench.
The transparent blob gradually came into focus as I recognized my fellow students going about their daily business. The din of the crowd returned.
This great cavern with gothic arches holds the secrets of wisdom imparted between those who desire to learn and those who desire to help them learn. My life’s journey now begins in this Cathedral of Learning with much gratitude to the wise old owl.
Judge's Comments: This tale uses rich poetic language and a flight of fancy to explore the hidden mysteries of the Cathedral. The narrator is born aloft by an owl and given the chance to see moments from the past that will shape the future. Each ghostly scene is filled with beautiful detail and a sense of melancholy. After reading it, every shadow in the Cathedral’s arched ceiling seems filled with secrets.
Darlene (Dunn) Kress graduated in 1971 from the University of Pittsburgh with a double major in English and Psychology. She later earned an MBA from Colorado State University. Darlene resides in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, with her husband Herb and is a practicing CPA specializing in IRS tax matters. Her career has included the writing and instruction of income tax courses.
Third Place
Remembering the Friday Afternoon at Pitt When President John F. Kennedy Was Killed
By Jim O'Brien (BA English Writing, 1964)
Most people over 65 remember where they were when they heard that President John F. Kennedy was killed while riding in a motorcade in downtown Dallas.
It was a Friday afternoon, 12:30 p.m. in Dallas and 1:30 p.m. in Pittsburgh, November 22, 1962. That was 50 years ago. The anniversary brings it all back so clearly, like it was yesterday.
I was 21 and a senior majoring in English, with a writing emphasis, at the University of Pittsburgh. It was nearly 2 p.m. as I passed by The University Shop on Forbes Avenue on the Pitt campus. It was a store I frequented often and where I bought sport coats, shirts, and ties. I was a good friend of Jay McKenzie, the owner. It’s now owned by the University of Pittsburgh and deals in T-shirts, sweatshirts, ball caps, and pennants. Students don’t wear sport coats anymore.
One of McKenzie’s salesmen, a fellow named Phil Wertman, came rushing out of the door of The University Shop when he saw me passing on the sidewalk. “They shot The President in Dallas!” he shouted to me. He provided some details of what he knew, and I quickened my pace and headed for the Student Union about 70 or 80 yards down the street.
I went to the parlor off the first floor lobby, where I knew there was a television set. A crowd had already gathered to watch the news reports and the images that stay with us to this day. I don’t believe, for instance, that I have seen Phil Wertman in the last 50 years, but I can still see him in that doorway. He was probably 30 at the time and remains looking as he did that day in my mind even now. He had on a well-starched pale blue shirt and a dark blue tie.
Many years later, I was interviewing Marty Schottenheimer, then the head football coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, and I learned that he, too, was watching the television in the Student Union at Pitt that same day in November of 1962. He was coming from class at the Cathedral of Learning when he heard the shocking news. He went to the Student Union to watch the TV reports. Marty Schottenheimer was a junior linebacker on the Pitt football team. He had come to Pitt from McDonald, Pa.
Pitt was scheduled to play Penn State at Pitt Stadium the next day, but the game was postponed two weeks because of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Pitt had an 8-1 record at the time, losing only to Roger Staubach at Navy at mid-season by a 24-12 score.
It would cost Pitt a bowl bid. They beat Penn State and finished with a 9-1 record and didn’t go to a bowl game. Imagine that. This year’s Pitt football team had a 5-5 record and could become bowl eligible with one more victory in its last two games with Syracuse and Miami.
I had been the sports editor of The Pitt News, the student newspaper the previous two years, and was now an associate editor. We were scheduled to play our annual touch-tag football game on Saturday morning with the staff of The Daily Collegian, the Penn State student newspaper. We canceled the contest. I think we were more upset about that than the postponement of the Pitt-Penn State varsity contest.
We all grew up in a hurry that weekend. Being a student on a college campus can be an idyllic life, and suddenly we were thrust into the real world with all its challenges, triumphs and losses, good days and disappointments. We would later be told the President had died. So did our youth. JFK was a popular leader, embraced by most of us. We knew his family.
My days at Pitt were framed by two events one will never forget. I was into the second month of my freshman year in 1960 when the Pirates played the New York Yankees in the World Series at Forbes Field. I was in that same block on the Pitt campus, watching a TV in the Pitt Student Union, when Bill Mazeroski hit the home run leading off the bottom of the ninth inning in the seventh and deciding game to win it, 10-9, and the World Series. I have considered writing a book, Pitt Days: From Maz to JFK.
I took a walk down the same stretch of Forbes Avenue where I had walked in November of 1962 just two weeks ago. Knowing the 50th anniversary of the JFK Assassination was coming up, I thought back to when it happened.
I just finished this week teaching a two-hour class on Tuesdays for five weeks in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Pitt. The class is titled “Reflections on Pittsburgh’s Rich Sports History.” Our class is conducted in a fifth floor room in Posvar Hall, which stands on the site of
the hallowed grounds where Forbes Field once stood. I believe my classroom is located in the vicinity of where the press box at Forbes Field was located.
I find it a fitting place for my class.
The Steelers were scheduled to play the Chicago Bears on Sunday, November 24, two days after President Kennedy’s Assassination. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had checked with Pierre Salinger, a press representative who had been a close friend of JFK, and Salinger said that the President would have wanted the games to go on, to help in the healing process. But the nation was in grief, and it was no time for games. Rozelle rued the day he decided to play the games. He said it was the worst decision of his stay as commissioner. The American Football League cancelled its games that weekend.
None of the NFL games were shown on television that weekend. It was wall-to-wall coverage on every TV network of the events in Dallas. An hour before the Steelers-Bears kickoff that Sunday, a Dallas night club owner named Jack Ruby shot and killed Harvey Oswald—it was seen live on TV—after Oswald was taken in by police as the man believed to have shot and killed John F. Kennedy.
Pittsburgh’s Cyril Wecht, a forensic pathologist and once our city coroner, still argues that Oswald was not the only shooter that day in Dallas.
I asked my wife Kathie what she was doing the day JFK was shot. She was a junior at Grove City College. She says she was cleaning her dorm room to get it ready for a weekly inspection. Why was I not surprised?
When I walked that stretch of Forbes Avenue two weeks ago, I came upon Chas Bonasorte, who sells all sorts of Pitt paraphernalia at his stand at the corner of Forbes and Bigelow. Bonasorte was known as “The Kamikaze Kid” when he was a special teams demon for Coach Johnny Majors at Pitt in the mid-70s. Bonasorte was an altar boy at St. Stephen’s Church and served at the Mass when Kathie Churchman and I were married there on August 12, 1967. That’s another day I will never forget.
Maz’s home run, the death of John F. Kennedy, and the day I got married. Those are days you don’t forget.
Bonasorte calls me “Scoops” because that’s what the kids in Hazelwood called me when I was the sports editor of The Hazelwood Envoy from the time I was 14 till I was 19 and became the sports editor of The Pitt News.
Steelers owner Dan Rooney remembers Pete Rozelle’s decision to play the NFL schedule the weekend following the assassination. Rooney was against playing any games, but went along with Rozelle’s decision. He wishes now he had been more adamant about his opposition. The Steelers and Bears were both in contention for the NFL championship that season, a rare situation for the Steelers in their history.
Beano Cook, the Pitt sports publicist, and I had started a newspaper that same fall called Pittsburgh Weekly Sports. The Steelers permitted me to be in an auxiliary press box atop the roof in right-center field that day. I recently read a story in the daily newspaper here that Dan Rooney was on the rooftop before the game that same day. The best seats at Forbes Field for football were under me, in the seats in right-center field.
From that rooftop I had the best view of one of the greatest plays in NFL history. It involved Mike Ditka, the tight end of the Bears. Ditka had been an All-America end at Pitt. As a freshman, I remember being on the porch of the Pitt Student Union, on the Fifth Avenue side, and seeing Ditka in his dark blue Pitt varsity letterman’s jacket at the other end of the porch. Ditka was definitely the Big Man on Campus in those days.
The Steelers were leading 17-14, and the Bears needed a first down to keep a late drive alive. “It was the most amazing play, perhaps that I have ever seen in football,” wrote Pat Livingston, the sports editor of The Pittsburgh Press, who would be my boss there in 1979, in a column Livingston wrote when Ditka became the head coach of the Bears.
“For hopeless human effort, it was exceeded only by the Marines at Tarawa or Iwo Jima.”
Livingston could get carried away with his prose on occasion ....
Here’s what happened:
With the Steelers ahead, 17-14, and the clock spinning down, Bears quarterback Billy Wade threw one of those dinky passes to Ditka. At the Bears’ 30, Ditka brushed off the Steeler who was covering him. At midfield, he struggled to break free of a couple of defensive backs, including former Pitt star Dick Haley (the father of the Steelers’ current offensive coordinator Todd Haley), and he was chased by several would-be tacklers. He had zigzagged from one side of the field to the other. Somehow he outfought the Steelers’ defenders. At the Pittsburgh 40, hugging the sideline, Ditka broke another tackle. At the 25, he was reeling, staggering on limp, drunken legs. Yet he managed to lug the ball close enough for the tying field goal before collapsing from the effort.
“And that play,” wrote Livingston, “had something to do with George Halas hiring him to become the coach of the Bears.”
The Bears went on to win the NFL title that season. If the Steelers had beaten the Giants in New York in the final game of the schedule, they would have had a rematch with the Bears in the NFL title game.
It’s the closest the Steelers would come to winning anything significant until Chuck Noll came along in 1969.
Judge's Comments: In its nearly 100 years of existence the Cathedral has borne witness to many world-changing events. Few would have shaken the world of Pitt students as profoundly as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In this mini-memoir, the writer recreates that tragic day through the eyes of a student, describing not only the initial reaction but the widespread aftermath. This detailed account re-creates the past and shows how much Pitt, and Pittsburgh, have changed in the interim.
Jim O’Brien is the author of
29 books on Pittsburgh sports achievement, with
From A to Z: A Boxing Memoir from Ali to Zivic and
Looking Up: From the ABA to the NBA, the WNBA to the NCAA his latest. He has also authored
The Chief and
Remember Roberto. He is a contributing columnist for
The Valley Mirror and magazines in Mt. Lebanon and Upper St. Clair. He wrote a column for 18 years for
The Almanac, the South Hills weekly, and was also a columnist for
The Pittsburgh Business Times.
He was a sportswriter with The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, The Miami News, The New York Post and The Pittsburgh Press, as well as the founding editor of Street & Smith’s Basketball Yearbook (1970-1992). He has been teaching a class, Pittsburgh’s Rich Sports History, in recent years in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Pittsburgh. Myron Cope called him “Pittsburgh’s premier sports historian.” He appears frequently on Pittsburgh radio and TV, and in nationally televised sports documentaries.
He has been married for 50 years to Kathleen Churchman O’Brien and they have two daughters, Dr. Sarah O’Brien and Rebecca O’Brien, and four grandchildren, Margaret, Susannah, Jeffrey and Madeline.
