SRU ORAL HISTORY
"SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY IN THE SIXTIES"
INTERVIEWEE:

MR. ROBERT DISPIRITO SR.

INTERVIEWER:

DR. JOSEPH RIGGS

29 APRIL 1991

R:

Interviewing Bob Dispirito.

This is April 29, 1991.

Kind of our

beginning question, Bob, has to do with why Slippery Rock.

How did

you happen to come to these heights?
D:

I was at Bucknell at the time.
at Bucknell.

I was completing my second year

Prior to that, I was at the University of ' Bridgeport

for several years.

I was head baseball, head football, teaching

21 contact hours, and Director of Recreation for the the town of
Wilton, and had four children.

Sometimes I wonder why some of our

colleagues think that they are overloaded today.

But, neverthe-

less, I decided that it was just really too much, and I got
the feeling of not really being appreciated.

I was also the

head baseball coach and we had been into the NCA playoffs for
the first time in the history of the school.

We went up and

we got beat by Holy Cross and then we beat Boston College and
then we got beat by the University of Vermont in 14 innings.
So we had a good showing and everyone was very proud of the
fact that we were there.

About a week later, I was walking

on campus and the president stopped me, and he said, how you

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D:

doing?

How did baseball go?

I said, well, fine.

He said, I

understand that you're going to go on to the playoffs.
well, we've already been there.

He said, well, how did you do?

You know, I mean, that was probably the final straw.
funny story that I can recall.
sponsorship.
conference.

I said,

There's a

In that area we used to have a

Each week, each college would sponsor a news
Usually it starts off with Yale and then we go to

Bridgeport and the Coast Guard Academy and then there were
other schools in the area.

So I got the big game.

news conference before the Yale-Connecticut game.

I got the
That usually

drew all the photographers and all the sports personalities.
So I was talking to John Pont who was the head coach at Yale and
Bob Engles, the head coach of the University of Connecticut, and
in came our president and I proceeded to introduce our president
to both of them.
each other?

And he looked at them and he said, do you play

Well, I was kind of embarrassed, because this was

the big week of the Yale-U.Conn game and I said, yes.
are you the head coach?

I thought, oh my God.

He said,

With those kinds

of things I finally decided I didn't think they really cared in
terms of what I was doing.
when I decided to go.
University.

So I wasn't very happy.

Then that's

I had an opportunity to go to Bucknell

But during that time at Bridgeport, I was also

teaching and coaching.
I was just football.

I was faculty.

When I went to Bucknell,

I thought that's what I wanted.

After two

(3)

D:

years, almost two years, I found out that that was not what I
wanted.

For example, I had two meals with my family from the last

of August until Thanksgiving.

We were required to be with the

training meals and all that kind of stuff.

Anyway, I tired of

that very quickly and I felt that I was having no family life.
So when the Slippery Rock job opened up, somebody asked me if I
would be interested in it, and I said, well, shoots, yes, but I
don't really want to go to Arkansas.
Arkansas.

I thought it was in

I was thinking of Little Rock.

Up in the New England

area, Slippery Rock didn't get the notoriety that you do get out
in the west and other parts of the country.
didn't know where it was.

So anyway, I really

So I interviewed for the job.

The

interesting thing was when I was interviewing for the job with
Dr. Bill Meise and Pop Storer, who was the Athletic Director, in
the middle of my conversation and my interview, Pop Storer proceeded to get up and said, I'm sorry I have to go downtown and do
some shopping.

Well, the thought occurred to me at that time, I

wasn't doing too well on my interview.

I guess Bill Meise

saw the look on my face when he said that and walked out of
the interview, and he said to me, Bob, don't worry.
he really doesn't have any decision to make in this.

Actually,
I do.

So he assured me of that and then we continued our interview.

(4)

D:

Anyway, that was my beginning at Slippery Rock and I did get the
job.

We started, of course, to build the program from there.

But that's how I got there.
R:

And that year was?

D:

1967.

R:

Then you're a real residenter?

D:

Yes.

I'm almost a native.

Although the town doesn't quite

accept me as a native yet, but they think I'm going to stay
awhile.
R:

They're thinking about it.

D:

Yes. They're thinking about it.

R:

What were the changes corning from Bucknell to here in terms of
your schedule and pressures?

D:

I have to start with Bridgeport and then compare Bucknell and
then Slippery Rock because at Bridgeport it was a different type
of student.

They were weekend students.

They were primarily

from New York City and we didn't have our own field.

We had to

practice in a place called Seaside Park which was just across the
road from the ocean.

We used to run drills in the ocean and in

the water when it got warmer and that sort of thing.

So we had

to walk a mile to our practice field which meant we had to carry
all our equipment for a mile. We weren't on a scholarship program.
Matter of fact, Coach Bruno, who later came on here to Slippery
Rock, played for me there.

His wife, Donna, went to school at

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D:

the same time.

Then we went to Bucknell.

It was a lot more

sophisticated.

The young men were a whole lot smarter.

As a

football coach, when you had them do things, you could do more
difficult things.
retain it.

You could do a lot more things and they would

One of the biggest problems in coaching of any sport

is their ability to retain what you've been teaching them.

Just

like in a classroom, I guess, because that test comes every
Saturday.

I found a big difference, academically, from that

aspect and they were a lot more sophisticated, wealthier, and that
sort of thing.

When we got back to Slippery Rock, they were down-

to-earth, blue collar youngsters, who were used to working their
way through school. Didn't have all the fancy cars and clothes as
kids had at Bucknell. There was a spirit here at Slippery Rock
that I think I picked up immediately, and it was a caring.

I heard

this.

I hear the President talk about it all the time, but it's

true.

I built a following in football at Slippery Rock by

entertaining an awful lot of people after games and so forth, and
we developed our following.

People cared.

extreme from Slippery Rock to Bridgeport.
at Bridgeport.

They didn't care

That drove me out of there, because as hard as

you would work, nobody seemed to care.
know.

See, that was the

Nobody really wanted to

At Slippery Rock, everyone cared, and they're very curious

about your program, so it made you feel good.
I suppose, communication comes in.

This is where,

There are a lot of times

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D:

we don't take the time to give feedback.

Well, at Slippery

Rock we got feedback constantly.
R:

Instantly.

D:

Yes.

Instantly. It was good.

So it was that kind of atmosphere

where the youngsters were basically here playing because they
wanted to play.

They weren't on scholarship.

The little work-

study they had to do, they had to work for it.
different than any other student.
anything extra.
was different.

So it was no

So they weren't getting

Bucknell had full scholarship programs, so that
Bridgeport was also a work-study, but I guess,

what I liked about Slippery Rock is that the kids played football
because they wanted to play.

It wasn't because they were getting

any huge amounts of money. The big difference, too, was I was able
to see them as a student as well as an athlete.
me in a classroom.

Also, they saw

Then they saw me on a football field.

was a mutual respect there that was given, so I liked that.

There
I had

no more ambitions.

Once I got the feel of it, I didn't ever want

to move from here.

I felt extremely comfortable, because the kids

saw me as a coach on the field and they saw me as a teacher.
saw them as students and as athletes.

And I

The recent coaches that

they went to were just full-time coaches, and when I had my
heart attack in 1980, they brought on a full-time coach. It
didn't work out for him because he didn't teach.

He didn't have

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D:

any contact with the faculty.

He had no contact with the

kids in probably the most important phase of their life.
His demands on their time were unreasonable because he didn't
know what the academic demands were.

Where I did.

I couldn't

demand too much from them because, shoots, I had to get ready for
my lectures.

And all the coaches that I had, all my coaching

staff, taught as well.

I was teaching nine hours.

I was getting

three hours release time for the entire football program so you
know what that would be like.

The kids appreciated it because we

saw each other on both sides.

We just didn't talk about student

athletes.
R:

We lived it.

The teaching faculty, how widespread was that kind of thing? This
is the only institution that I was ever associated with where al l
the coaches were also classroom teachers.

At least they were

until a change must have taken place in 1980.
D:

Yes, there was.

R:

Before that, when I came here in 1971, I was amazed to find
all the coaches in the classroom.

Fully amazed because I

didn't even know that existed.
D:

Well, the whole system, the University system, has gone to
full-time coaches.

I think with the exception of Dr. George

Mihalek as the head coach who's teaching, I think there's only
one other in the conference.
R:

Everybody else is full-time coaches.

So there was a massive policy change? How in the world did that
happen?

(8)

D:

New presidents.
presidents.
system.

New ideas, with the changeovers and all the

We had a whole bunch of new presidents in our

The thinking was big time.

They wanted to go NCAA.

They wanted to build a reputation through athletics.
R:

What did that do to job security?

D:

They don't have any.

R:

So a coach can be here today and gone tomorrow?

D:

Absolutely.

R:

Like other institutions.

D:

They don't even sign a contract.

There is not even a

contract for one year.
R:

Somehow I didn't know that.

D:

Yes. No contracts.
word of mouth.

It's a year-to-year thing. It's all

Gentleman's agreement.

Whatever it is.

There's

no extended contracts.
R:

Then 1980 was the big transition year?

D:

Yes.

Just about that time.

here to replace me.

They brought a full-time coach in

They kept him in until I replaced him

seven years later for one year.
R:

Now with the football coaching staff in the off-season, are
they strictly recruiters and preparers?

(9)

D:

Well, there are five coaches that are full-time, that do
not teach.

Coach Campagna teaches.

Coach Mihalek teaches.

That's it.

Everybody else is a full-time coach.

R:

Under eleven month, twelve month contracts?

D:

Yes.

He has about eleven coaches.

That's another thing.

The staffs have gotten big and very specialized.

When I took

over in 1987 again when Don Ault left, Dr. Aebersold asked me
if I would take the season.

I brought in some part-time people.

That part-time person became full-time.

Joe Kopnisky, who was

the head football coach at Grove City College, was out of
coaching, and I brought him back in and he has been here ever
since.

Pat Kuber who was with us for three years, and now

he's left the coaching field.

Right now they have two part-

time people, high school coaches.

Joe Walton, who's the head

high school coach at Slippery Rock High School, is now offensive
line coach here at SRU. I'm trying to think of one other one, but
he is part-time and the rest of them are full-time coaches who
don't doing any teaching.
R:

Was it President Carter who hired you?

D:

Yes. That was a fun thing.
that happened then.

There were some interesting things

I first arrived here in March and I went

(10)
D:

through spring ball and then the first faculty meeting in March, I
believe.

I went to a faculty meeting and they called for his

resignation. No vote of confidence, if you remember.

I don't know

if you where here or not.
R:

I know of it, yes.

D:

And I said, my God, this is the most unusual meeting I've ever
been in in my life.
of the president.
time.

I mean they're calling for the resignation
That's when it was.

It was just a very crazy

As a matter of fact, for example, in order to try to help

unify the football team, I had church services on Saturday morning,
and I had arranged at the Newman Center for a Catholic and
Protestant service where the Protestants would go one section and
so forth, and I

just felt that that was a good idea.

I got a

call from Dr. Carter to meet him at the Union, and when I walked
in he had his brain trust with him at the time and sat down.
Immediately, I knew I had a problem but I didn't know what it was.
He asked me if it was true that I was having church services for
my team.

And I said, yes, it's not mandatory and I make it

available to them.

I thought it was a good idea. He said, I

want you to know, in front of everyone here, that I'm agnostic
and I don't believe in this sort of thing.
were two things I could have done.
anything or I could have gotten mad.
job very long.

I suppose there

I could have just not said
I got mad and I wasn't on the

I looked at him and I said, Dr. Carter

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D:

are you telling me that I no longer can have these services?
He said, no, I'm not going to tell you you can't. Then I
said, before you answer anymore, I want you to know that I'm
going to continue unless you tell me I can't.
I won't order you not to.

I just want you to know that I don't

really basically approve of it.
stand that.
too.

He said, no,

I said, that's okay.

I under-

But, I said, I hope you understand my point of view,

So that was one of the obstacles that I had to overcome.

But that's one of the only times that I think that I ever had a
problem here. I had support for everything that I did, and not
just football.

The thing that I tried to do all the time I was

here was to serve on as many committees as I could, whether it was
faculty council, department chairs.

I didn't want anyone to be

able to say that as the football coach I was just doing what I
was supposed to do in football. I was completing my obligations
as a faculty member, and I was not a one-dimensional faculty
member.

I wanted them to know that I was a multi-dimensional

faculty member.

And it paid off, because I developed a lot of

respect from my co l leagues because there wasn't anything that they
did that I didn't do.

So they looked at me as a faculty member.

They didn't just look at me as the football coach.
helped a great deal.

I think that

(12)

R:

I know that all the years I was here, the academic tracking
with your athletes was a thing and it was a constant. We were
always getting word from the coach, would you tell us how
people are doing.

That was very successful, I gather?

D:

And they still do that.

R:

Once in a while, someone would refuse, I'm sure.

D:

Oh, yes.

R:

But not often.

D:

Not often.

R:

Because when I was at a larger university, anytime a football
coach approached a faculty member the fur flew, because that
was encroachment on that academic territory.

They didn't

care about athletics and they translated it as pressure.
D:

Well, you see that's where being a faculty member helped.

R:

Yes, I think that's exactly what that's all about.

D:

Sure, being a faculty member, there wasn't anything that they
were doing that I wasn't willing to do.

Matter of fact, I went

to the University of Rhode Island for an interview.

That's my

alma mater and they called me in to see if I would be interested
in the head coaching job.

I was just coming up for full

professor, so it was a decision I had to make.

I went there

for an interview and in the process of the interview, the
president of the University of Rhode Island could not believe

(13)
D:

that I was on faculty council.

He couldn't believe that.

He

couldn't believe that I served on council. He said, when do you
have time to coach?
coach.

I said, well, we have plenty of time to

It's just like anything else. You budget your time and you

try to develop quality time, not just spinning your wheels.
could not get over that.

He

He said, it's the first time we've ever

interviewed a coach like that.

And the thing was that it

worked because I had just won four championships out of five
years.

So you couldn't say it didn't work.

It worked.

He

said, he didn't think that it would play at the university.
I really wasn't interested in the job.

I was more interested

in developing some leverage to get my full professorship here.
As a matter of fact , in the same year, I was also chosen for
the Distinguished Service Award.

The president had to write

me a letter saying I was outstanding so, therefore, I was up for
promotion and he couldn't say I wasn't outstanding because he just
wrote me a letter.

Everything fell in just right.

I sat

down with my youngsters and we talked about it and about the
move and that sort of thing. The big thing, of course, was at
the University of Rhode Island they were going to give a three
year contract and I said I'm not interested in a three year
contract. I have tenure.

I'm up for full professorship.

If

I come here, I come here with my tenure and I want my coaches
to teach, and I want to teach a class, too.

Well, this was very

(14)
D:

foreign to them.

They said, no, you can't do that here.

I said, okay, the only difference is we've proved it works
at Slippery Rock.

The University of Rhode Island hadn't had

a winning season in about 18 years.
time to win after that, too.

It took them a long

I think they've had two winning

seasons in the last 22 years or something like that.

They've

had their problems, and I just think their philosophy is wrong.
I think that our philosophy at the University was very sound
because we got the faculty support.

We were one of them.

I

don't mean we have to teach nine hours, but I thought that one
class would be fine.

I wanted faculty rank and I wanted

faculty privileges and there are benefits that go along with
them and they weren't willing to do that.

I said I would not

trade my tenure for a three year contract. The other guy was
Bob Griffin, it was between the two of us.
the job if I really wanted it.

I could have had

I had people who were in the

right places, but each one of them said, you don't really want
this job, Bob. You have a good job where it is. They kept saying,
it's different.

It's not the same. You're looking at it like it

was when you were in school, and I want to let you know that the
university of Rhode Island is no longer like it was when you were
here.

It was a very small school, so you would find it different.

But, anyway, Bob went from a one year contract to a three year
contract and that was like tenure to him.
since.

He's been there ever

Bob's done a good job but he's struggled.

(15)
R:

Back to the question about teaching faculty and tenure.
widespread is that kind of program?

How

I've never seen it before.

Do they have it in other school systems?

Tenured coaches are

really very, very rare, I gather.
D:

Yes, I was tenured at the University of Bridgeport.

I was tenured

there.
R:

And teaching there?

D:

Yes.

I was teaching 21 contact hours.

load there.

We were teaching a big

At Bucknell, you had to be there for nine years before

they even considered you for tenure.

And of course, here.

In our

state system there's this big evolution that they have come into
in terms of full-time coaches, I think it was around the 1980's,
that the majority of the coaches don't even have a contract for a
year.

So I don't know what they have.

word of mouth.

It's strange.

I mean they are hired on

I would never take a job in the

state system unless you give me at least a three year, four year
contract.

It's crazy.

But they are taking it because it's a

stepping stone, and this is one of the fallacies that I see this
system is involved in.

People see it as a stepping stone and they

don't really care a whole lot about the system, I mean about the
individual schools.

They just want to do well and get on with it.

And sometimes coaches who are very ambitious take some shortcuts.
They play kids who are injured.

They play kids who shouldn't be

(16)
D:

playing.

For one reason or another they discipline kids using

preferential treatments, destroying morale on a team.
kinds of things.

I just think it is derogatory.

detriment, I think, to the entire system.

All these

It's a

One of these days, I

think, they're going to get back to the fact that people like
Coach Mihalek, for example, who's an associate professor, tenured,
would probably be the thing to get back to, to stabilize the
programs.
R:

Does the NCAA have a position on that business of teaching
faculty and tenure?

D:

No, they do not.

R:

They don't strike a position there?

That's probably because

it's such a minority thing.
D:

Probably.

R:

I mean it just doesn't exist for that many places.

D:

In Division 2 and Division 3, you may find it.

R:

Nowhere.

D:

Well, I shouldn't say nowhere.

R:

Paterno's staff is faculty?

D:

Yes. He's a full professor.

Penn State.

Not in Division 1.

They're faculty.

His long time staff, I got to know

a number of them, yes, they are all faculty.

One of the few

major colleges, maybe the only major college, that offered
faculty.

(17)
R:

Wonder whether Engle did that beforehand?

D:

Yes.

R:

Good man.

D:

Oh, yes, he was.

Absolutely.
Spectacular.
I knew him.

When I was a freshman at

the University of Rhode Island in 1949, the big cry was, nine
for nine in '49, and that was Brown University's cry. Joe
Paterno was the quarterback and Engle was the coach during
that period of time.
They left.

But anyway, that was their last year.

Engle left Brown University in 1949 to take over

Penn State's program.

But Joe was the quarterback and I

remember I was a freshman and I remember him as the quarterback.
That's one of the few schools. I don't know where it came from.
think maybe it was just western PA.

I don't know.

I

Maybe it was

our Pennsylvania school system, because the state schools have
always been that way till lately.
R:

Sounds like a bad move.

D:

I do.

R:

What about the championship years?

I don't care for it.
When I came here you won 1973,

1974?
D:

1972, 1973 and 1974. And then again in 1976.

R:

Was there a special reason why all that happened?
had that string?

Why you

(18)

D:

Yes.

I like to think of it in terms of stability.

I had my

staff. All the years, the 14 years I was head coach, I only had
one turnover.

We had that continuity and respect for one another.

My job was to pull it all together.

Their job was to coach.

Although I coached the offensive line along with them, I treated
them like colleagues.

Never treated them any other way.

were faculty, colleagues.
times.

They

They were treated with respect at all

We used to, contrary to what they do now, we used to have

to do our recruiting between classes.

We used to fight to try to

get a three day class schedule so we could spend two days on the
road.

Yet when we went on the road, it was never to any great

distance because we had to be back the next day to teach.

We

didn't mind that, because everybody in the country comes to
western Pennsylvania to recruit, so why should we go anywhere else?
We were probably in the most fertile recruiting areas in the
country. We did stay within a 50 mile radius and did our recruiting.

When you find people like Stan Kendziorski, who's the

Director of International Studies, he was without a doubt my
best recruiter. He worked so hard and diligently.
did a super job, and Paul Bruno and Ron Oberlin.

Doug Clinger
All these guys.

When the faculty went on vacation or at the Christmas holidays,
we were on the road recruiting.

Whenever we stopped teaching,

we were on the road recruiting.

So with that continuity, not

(19)

D:

only in our recruiting but when on our staff, there was so
little turnover. Everybody knew what their job was and what they
had to do to get it done. I was very blessed with good people.
They weren't people who were trying to use this as a stepping
stone to get to somewhere else.

Everybody, in a sense, was here

to do the job and most of them stayed here during that time.
With the good recruiting and the good rapport, I think, our
coaches had and the kind of coaches they were and the stability
that we offered, it's just like a kind of family.

I think that

when you raise a family and you provide stability for them, they
usually turn out pretty good.
program did.

That's what I think our football

It turned out pretty good.

I remember those

championship years, the athletic director would say, we won one.
I'd come in and we'd be talking and he'd say, you're talking like
you're going to win again.

I said, yes, I think we can.

two. And then he said, you're not thinking of a third?
yes.

Matter of fact, we're better than we were.

We won
I said, oh,

We won a third.

In that fourth year, we got a bunch of young spoiled kids.

These

kids were being carried by an awful lot of prior ball players and
paid a price.

So we were not successful.

what it really took to win.

They didn't know

These other kids did.

They were

like the rich kids who were pampered and get all the goodies

(20)

D:

that they wanted and all the respect and the trips and the
championships, but they never truly had to work.

They were

just corning in to the program and we had to reeducate them,
to be honest with you, and I think the best coaching year that
we probably did was in that following year in 1976 when we ·
took the team that didn't do anything.
R:

Was that a bowl year?

D:

In 1972, we were in the Knute Rockne Bowl.
City. In 1973, we did not go to a bowl game.

We were in Atlantic
We won a state

championship again but we were not chosen to go.

That angered

me because that was probably the best team that I ever had.
Then we went again.
R:

Ithaca?

D:

Yes, but it was at Cornell Stadium.
game. I remember seeing you there.
Stadium, if you remember.

You and Ted went to the
Yes, we played at Cornell

We played Ithaca.

You're right.

The

The following year was the year the kids didn't really know what
it took to pay the price to be as successful as these other boys.
They had a bad year.

So the next year we came back and won our

division. But because we had won it the year before last, then
Shippensburg, since they had never been in to the playoffs, they
were given the right to go in.
but that's the way they did it.

It was a strange way of choosing

(21)
R:

Were there some rivalries within the university structure of
14 teams of the western division?

Are there some rivalries

that have been more important to you or have grown stronger
or some less strong?
D:

Yes.

Clarion and Edinboro were just dog fights.

fights.

Just dog

During the good years, the years that we won the state

championships in 1972, 1973 and 1974, the schedule was not a
rotating schedule, and we, I must admit at this time, that we had
the break in the schedule.

We always had Clarion the last game,

and it was always for the western division championship.

We beat

them three straight years for the state championship. Matter of
fact, we had beaten them for seven straight years. But we were
driving them crazy and they were coming close, but yet we were
beating them.

So they were coming into the game never convinced

that they could ever beat us.

It took them eight years to

decide that they could beat us.

But, yes, that one always

created a great rivalry and Al Jacks, who I respect enormously,
was a former Slippery Rock coach.

He went over to Clarion and

probably has, percentage-wise, the best record in the history
of the state colleges.

Bill McDonald, who's the head coach at

Edinboro, who today is a very close friend, where we go to
each child's wedding and all that, we hated each other.

I mean,

we wouldn't hardly talk to one another. There wasn't anyone
that I could really talk about in my coaching career that I

(22)

D:

really didn't care for except for Bill McDonald.

He was

such a competitor and I was a competitor and they would
always beat us and yet when we would beat them, we would just
beat them.

When they beat us, they murdered us.

Yet, Clarion,

who would then handle Edinboro easily, we beat them handily.
Yes, those two schools were it, without a doubt. Boy, when we
played Edinboro and we played Clarion it was a knock and sock
ballgame.

Records didn't mean a thing.

We developed great

friendships and respect for, as I said Bill McDonald, and Al
Jacks.

Yes, you're right.

The other schools like Lock Haven,

since they've never had that great many teams that were
successful, there was never a real great rivalry.

Shippensburg

was really basically too far away, and that never became a reality
in terms of a rivalry.

But Edinboro and Clarion were so close

and yet we were always fighting for the championships in those
years.

Those three teams.

bystanders.

The other people were just

That's were the rivalry was and it still is today.

R:

Were you meeting the recruiters on the road all the time, too?

D:

Oh, yes.

It was a question of who would get to what school first.

We were always fighting each other for the same type of student
athelete.
same boat.

Basically, we were all financially in about the
Not like today, where Indiana, for example, is so

far ahead of everybody, financially, that we can't even compete
against them.

But other than that, there's a real parity in the

league, financially. So we were always fighting for the same kids.

(23)
R:

What about the alumni as scouts or supporters?

D:

Alumni have not played a whole strong part in this whole activity.
I wish I could say differently. We've had some individuals, a few
individuals, that have supported the programs through the years.
From the 1963 teams, where they had great pride, where they won.
The 1962 teams where they won.
was great pride in that.

They won championships and there

I look back like just this past weekend

when we had the spring game, and we bring the alumni back now for
a flag football game prior to the green and white game with the
varsity.

We had 22, I guess, return. That's not a very good

turnout for alumni.

We have some real great supporters.

Dennis

Tilko, for example, who runs the meat packing place. He always
provides food for us free and he's always there with his billfold
to help us.

He's been a great asset to our program. He started

four years and he was a great athlete here.

John Ross, who's a

captain for USAir, has been very, very helpful with us in
financial support as well as moral support.
owns a construction company.

So has Dan Parr who

A lot of local kids.

We don't do a

whole lot with our alumni.

I wish we did more.

criticism of Sally Lennox.

It's just an observation, to be honest

with you.

It's not a

It's not very support oriented and yet the athletes

usually are the ones who come back and support, to a great
extent, the University.

(24)

R:

Is there a prototype institution in this system that does
that really well?

D:

I think Indiana does.

R:

Does it have something to do with size maybe?

D:

Probably.

Also, the direction in which the alumni directors go

over the period of years. I don't mean to lay this on Sally
Lennox, because she certainly hasn't been the only alumni
director. I think there've been some attempts.

I think Dr.

Reinhard made a real effort to bring alumni in, but they've
been struggling.

I know that Dr. Aebersold goes all over

Florida or whatever and he has to go and try to drum up
support.

They get some.

But we're a state school and they

say they don't support state schools because the money
should be coming out of the state taxes and if we're going
to give money we should give to the private institutions.
That's a fallacy because I come from the University of Rhode
Island and that's a state school and they have fantastic
fund-raising efforts.

A lot of participation.

You look

at the makeup of this school and we're basically teachers, so
the salaries have never been great.

We don't have a whole lot

of doctors and lawyers and engineers as a lot of the big schools
do, and they are the people who have the big money to give.

So

(25)

D:

I think that has something to do with it too. I wish we had more
alumni support.

I don't think it's anywhere near where it should

be.
R:

I saw Dennis Tilko when you had your heart attack.

He was

beside himself.
D:

Is that right?

R:

Yes.

D:

Is that right?

R:

It was really unbelievable.

You'd have thought he had the heart attack.

I saw him and he was just as low

as could be.
D:

If only we had more kids like him who have been very successful i n
their businesses.

R:

Who was the guard along side of him?

D:

Tom Yacksik?

R:

Yes, that's right.

D:

Tom has been very good to us, too, financially.

Tom Yacksick

has diabetes. He's diabetic and he's lost a tremendous amount
of weight.

I mean he looks like a running back now rather than

that big guard that you would envision.
one of the outskirts of Pittsburgh.

He owns a family bar in

He's very successful.

He's

doing well.
R:

I like Tom a lot. I see Denny every now and then.

He slimmed

down after he graduated.
D:

Denny is learning how to relax and plays some golf now, but

(26)

D:

he's built the thing from nothing, his financial base.

He's sold

cars and all that kind of thing. Saved his money and then bought
into a partnership with the meat packing and then he slowly bought
everybody out.
R:

Good heart, but he works 18 or 19 hours a day.

But you wouldn't have thought that, that he was going to be an
entrepreneur.

D:

Well, that's right, but yet when Dennis first arrived here they
didn't claim that he was going to doing anything academically.
They never thought that he would even get into college.

Denny

proved them all wrong because when he finished he had better than a
three point average.

So he was just not motivated at some

point in his life, and as you know, people mature at different
levels.

Sometimes some kids who are not very successful

or show a whole lot of ability at a certain age may blossom
years later.

One of the biggest things for us as coaches at a

school like this is that we've got to try to get athletes
who haven't quite achieved the peak of their ability, because
if they did the other other schools would grab them.
to try and find those kids and get them here.
How would you recruit a Myron Brown?
basketball.

We have

Take Myron Brown.

Myron Brown and

Well, he was voted the number one basketball

player in Division 2, and right now he's ready to sign a
multi-million dollar contract in the NBA.

(27)

D:

Now how did we get him?

People weren't quite convinced that

he was good enough to play in the Divsion 1 level, and as a
result they stayed away from him.

Bobby Barlett was smart enough

to see it and lucky enough and fortunate enough to get the kid
here, and he's built the program for us.
R:

How do you make a decision that you have a comer?

That

that person hasn't peaked and he's left over from the
Division 1 schools.
D:

No.

Is it intuition?

Some of its funny, but it's true when you say it.

I want to meet the parents first.
big they are.

I want to see how

That's one of the things I want to see.

If I go in and I see a father who's six feet five and
a mother who's probably six foot and that boy is six
three, I know that guy's going to be about six seven,
about 240 by the time he matures.
true.

It's funny but it's

All the recruiting years, we always had to get

into the house and the first thing we're doing is sizing
up the parents.
their abilities.

To answer your question, we look at
A lot of times, the youngsters show ability

but are not getting good coaching.

So they are not exploited.

They don't know what to do, but you can see that.

When you're

evaluating a boy on a film, you're looking at his speed.
either has speed or he doesn't.
he doesn't.

He

He either has agility or

Or he's aggressive or he isn't aggressive. Usually.

(28)

D:

It's hard to make someone aggressive who isn't aggressive.

You

look at those three and if you can find those three qualities,
then you evaluate their coaching.

If those youngsters show those

three abilities and you know that they have had lousy coaching,
you've got a comer.
R:

That kid is going to come.

So you're also making some kind of a measurement of the high
school they came out of.

D:

Absolutely.
against.

And their competition. Who are they competing

It's just like the pros right now.

They very seldom

try to go after a player from a small college.

It's because,

well, the competition, of course, is never as competitive as
Ohio State or Notre Dame. But I'll tell you a real quick story.
I was recruiting and scouting for the Denver Broncos for five
years after I got through coaching, and I used to scout the
Steelers for them.

So I used to follow the Steelers in the

preseason games. And we're at Washington, D.

c.

stadium and

the punter that we had at Slippery Rock was number one in Division 2.

A punter.

He could punt them off the wall.

Steelers picked him up.

He's punting that night.

The

I'm sitting

next to this guy from the Dallas Cowboys, and we're talking and
he said, yes, I went up to see your kid.

A matter of fact it

was a very miserable day and it was cold and rainy.

We're

going through this whole thing, and I said, what do think?

(29)

D:

He said, he'll never make it.

Boy, I got mad.

him, I said, what are you talking about?
statistics in Division 2.
these years.
60,000 people.

I looked at

He's got number one

I mean, I've seen the kid punt all

He said, yes, but he has never played before
You wait till the noise gets to this kid.

What

we're going to find out is, is this kid unusual and can he take
the pressure?

Because in the four years in a small college, you

get maybe 1,000 or 2,000 people at a game.
factor.

Noise is never a

So I said, I don't know if I can agree with you on that.

Anyway, as the game progressed, lo and behold, the punts started
to go off the side of his foot and then the final coup de grace was
when he was in the end zone. The place is going wild.

It's just

before half-time and our kid is standing in the end zone trying
to punt out of the end zone and the ball comes back to him.
It was like his hands were made of stone.
dropped.

They fell on the ball.

Hit his hand. Just

Washington scores. The guy

turns to me and said, I don't want to tell you I told you so,
but you see what I mean.

And he was right.

So it's unusual

for our kids to even get up into that league. Myron Brown surprises
me that he is doing so well.
R:

I'm very happy for him.

All the stuff that is happening to him now.

Because you read

about him everyday.
D:

Yes.

R:

Scouting for the Broncos.

How did that come about?

How do you

(30)

R:

get a job like that?

D:

In my class, I show statistics on how you get a job.
number one factor is who you know.
throughout the country.
is ranked number one.

And the

That's what the statistics show

How do you get a job?

Who you know

The receiver coach, Nick Nicolau,

was the first guy I hired at the University of Bridgeport.
He had just gotten his doctorate and I hired him at the
University of Bridgeport.

He was the receiver coach.

I

was out of coaching, so he evidently told them and they called
me. They wanted to know if I would do some scouting and then
do some signing during the draft, which I did for several
years for them.

It was a fun thing to do.

I had never been

up in those beautiful press boxes and the great meals they give
you.

You have a telephone and you have a set in front of

you, and anytime you want a replay you just pick up the phone
and say give me a replay, and they'd send the replay back to you.
It was just exciting.

It kind of grew old after a while.

Then the demands got to be greater.

For example, on signing,

they'd want me to go into say Penn State and stay for like
three days.

Well, I couldn't do that when I was teaching.

I couldn't take three days off.

They'd want me to go up

to Philadelphia to time a kid.

I couldn't just leave my

classes and go.

So I finally told them.

I said, for

everyone's benefit, I think I better not do this anymore.

(31)

D:

It was getting too demanding.
in the night before.

Before, I'd just go

I used to make phone calls.

I'd have

my kids that I was going to try to sign, say out of Penn
State or West Virginia or some place like that, and I would
be in touch with them for over a period of three weeks. I would
call them and talk to them.

At that time you couldn't be in

touch with for any extent of time.
eat that night.

You could take them out to

That was about the only thing you could do.

That was my first year.

So everybody would hide the athletes.

They'd go in and take the kid and they'd hide, so some other team
couldn't call them and try to talk them out of it.
eliminated that.

The NFL

You could go to the kid's apartment.

So,

therefore, you'd go out and buy the beer and buy the sandwiches
and buy all the nibs, and you would take it to the kid's apartment
and you'd sit down and watch the draft on TV.
sitting.

That's basically what it was.

So you did baby-

So you had to stay there

until approximately three o'clock in the morning which was when
the draft was over.

So you had to stay up all that time and make

your final call in to headquarters to find out if, say Joe Riggs,
was drafted.

They'd say no, Joe Riggs has not been drafted.

He's on my list.

So, therefore, I pick up the phone immediately,

and I'd already prearranged that I'm going to call you as soon as
the thing is over.

I'd say, now I want to meet with you and your

(32)

D:

agent at nine o'clock in the morning.

That sort of thing.

Then you would make your arrangements.

They would come in.

I

would give the pitch in terms of this is how much money I can
give you and a signing bonus.

Everyone that goes in the NFL every

year, except the extended contracts, sign a standard contract.
Then they have the addendum sheet where all the incentives are.
That's how you would get in.

I never signed anybody. Every time

I got to that point all their agents would say, we're not satisfied
with that.

I'd say, well, fine, I'm not authorized to give you any

more than what they told me.
headquarters in Denver.

So I'd pick up the phone.

Call the

They'd say, well okay, let me talk to him

and then they would take it from there. I would leave.

That was

the next day, so I used to take a personal day and it was never a
problem.

Then they wanted me to spend three days so I decided

not to do that.
R:

Pretty glamorous on the front end.

D:

Yes. It was fun.

Oh, I'm glad I did it.

It was really fun. They

would send you coaching shirts, the hats and all kind of different
things.

Going to Three Rivers Stadium and not have to to through

the hassle of some guy spilling beer over you and cussing and all
that kind of stuff.

You were in a very professional environment.

It was fun. It really was.

I liked getting to the stadium early

because it wasn't crowded and afterward, by the time we got all
the statistics which we had to mail out immediately, by the time

(33)

D:

all the statistics would be mimeographed off, everyone was gone,
pretty much.

Then you would never have any trouble getting in

and out of the stadium.

It was never a problem.

Then you

developed camaraderie with the guys you'd meet over the years.
You kind of looked forward to seeing them again.
R:

Our school was never accused of any unethical behavior or
anything of that sort.

D:

No.

R:

By anybody. That was pretty true of this entire college
system around here, I gather, and of the private schools
that you played.

D:

Yes.

We're not involved in the big money.

the problem.

It's always money.

That's always

What can Notre Dame offer

financially that Ohio State can't, or Michigan State can't,
or Penn state can't?

They're all regulated by NCAA rules,

so they all give the same amount of money.
the difference?

Now what makes

Years ago when I was at Bucknell, it was

what kind of an alumnus can I attach you to who will take
care of all your clothes, take care of all your vacation
money, your summer money. And you would find an alumnus to
do that.

Then the NCAA really started cracking down on this

business.
R:

But it was common practice then?

It was what everybody gets.

(34)

D:

It was common practice.
in a motel.

For example, you would house a kid

When he walked in the room and opened up the

clothes closet, it was full of clothes.
Nobody ever said anything.
a car to drive around in.
clothing store.

They were all his.

They were his.

He would have

He was told to walk into a

Somebody wanted to meet him.

wanted to meet him.

An alumnus

When he went in, they would meet him

and they would say, oh by the way, here's the suit you
ordered.

So it was who could do what and give what.

They

developed a breed of youngsters who expected this.
R:

The perks?

D:

Exactly.

It made it difficult for coaching because you started

out on a very negative note.

You were cheating. You were

breaking the rules and regulations.

Then all of a sudden I

bring you into my program and I say you have to abide by rules
and regulations and here they've watched me break the rules and
regulations.

It's just like, I guess, when we're trying to bring

our youngsters up and saying we should always be honest and
never cheat, but yet we're at a dinner table and we'll talk about
how we beat the government on our income tax.
teaching?
family.

Okay?

What are we

We talk about Uncle Jim who's the alcoholic in the
He's always drunk.

He can't hold a job but when he's

around, I want you to respect Uncle Jim.
doesn't work.

Double standards.

It

(35)

R:

Yet coaches rarely, even when they knew there were serious
violations, they never blew the whistle on each other very
much.

D:

You're right.

R:

That was an unwritten rule.

D:

Yes. That's right.

R:

That was part of the brotherhood.

D:

That's about right.
you're right.

The code of the hills.

Unfortunate. It sounds very negative but

Once in a while, coaches would complain about one

another or break the bad news to get them in trouble. It didn't
happen very often.
R:

I remember Paterno unloading on Switzer and Jackie Sherrill once
upon a time.

D:

Yes.

R:

I'm sure the A. and M. faculty all unloaded on Sherrill when
he got that two and a half million dollars. Truly unbelievable.

D:

Right. Unbelievable.

I think he was the first publicized million

dollar football contract, but nobody said anything about Johnny
Majors.

They said, okay, Johnny.

$80,000 salary.

We're going to give you an

However, you're going to have ten percent

ownership in this building.

You're going to have ten percent

ownership in this shopping mall.

Incidentally, you have a million

dollar insurance policy all paid up.

I mean, all these perks.

Before you knew it they were making all kinds of money.

They

talked about, for example, Ishmael, the rocket from Notre Dame

(36)

D:

going to Toronto.

Anywhere from 18 million to 28 million dollars?

How can anybody be worth that much?
off return.

That's specialist.

a quarterback.

He's only a punt return, kick

That's it.

I mean he's not even

I don't think he's a franchise.

Then they also

said they gave him ten percent ownership in the team.
R:

He denied that.

D:

I know. But, you know.

R:

I did, too.

D:

I did because I know that they have done these kinds of things

I believed it.

with coaches.
R:

I remember when Cliff Wittig went to Knoxville. When they wanted
him to come down there.

When they met him at the airport, they

had a brand new orange Oldsmobile.

They said, now, Cliff,

you take the job, this is one of things that goes with it.
Of course, Cliff did go with Knoxville.
D:

Right.

This is small time stuff, but I got a call when I first

got here.

I got a call from the Jacksonville Quarterback Club.

I had no idea what the Jacksonville Quarterback Club was all
about.

They said, we would like to have you come down as the

Slippery Rock coach to speak at our dinner. We have a weekly
luncheon.

So I said, when?

said, what will that entail?

It fit in the schedule and I
They said, to start off with,

we'll fly you and your wife down, first class, and we'll give
you a home at the Ponte Verde Country Club, which was one of

(37)

D:

the most exclusive country clubs in that area.

We'll give

you a car and we'll put you up for about three days and you
can do what ever you want during that period of days.

You have

all the rights to eat in the dining room at Ponte Verde Country
Club, and anytime you want to have a meal in your cottage you just
call.

They took care of everything.

I didn't want any money.

I

just said as long as I can take my wife that's enough for me.
That was a great holiday for us.

So we're at the cocktail hour

prior to the luncheon and this guy comes over and he wants to
meet me and so forth and he said, I betcha they paid a lot of
money to get you here?
said, what?

I said they didn't pay me any money. He

I said, no, they just took care of everything.

reached in his pocket and gave me a hundred dollar bill.

He

He

said, don't you dare leave this room without this hundred dollars.
You should have had more.

He was really upset.

have taken care of my wife and me for three days.

I said, they
I mean I had

to speak for fifteen minutes and I got three days' holiday, first
class at one of the nicest places. That's just touching the tip
of the iceberg.
R:

It's impressive.

D:

Yes.

These major coaches, they get so much.

Matter of fact, when we were at the Knute Rockne Bowl in

Atlantic city where we stayed at the hotel, the hotel manager

(38)

D:

came up with compliments.

He had some refreshments and fruit for

the family and everything else.

He said, I want you to know that

we would like to have your team in our hotel at any time. And why
don't you come back in the spring, you and your wife, and spend
four or five days here as our guests?

We'd like to show you all

the things that we can do for your team.
perks that you get.

Those are the kinds of

We didn't take advantage of it, incidentally,

because I was teaching and I couldn't do it.
perks.

Guys like Johnny Majors and those people just make so much

money and it's all undercover.
R:

Those are the small

Lou Holtz and Joe Paterno.

Talking about administrative support, in the years that you
coached, did it matter who was president or who was athletic
director?

D:

The chain of command, did that matter?

Well, let me put it this way.

In my tenure of 14 years as head

coach, I went through seven university presidents.
it's quite the opposite.

Usually,

Usually, one president of a university

goes through seven football coaches. I remember making this
comment at my testimonial dinner right after my heart attack when I
had to give up football, that I had been through seven presidents.
So that says something about the place.

To answer your question

about the individual who made the difference.
hired me.

Of course, Carter

The reason why I know I got hired here is because I

was coming out of Bucknell.

He was a Bucknellian.

I was told

{39)

D:

from the people at Bucknell that I would be a strong candidate as a
result.

Out of how many people applied for the job, I'm sure one

of the things that certainly didn't hurt me was the fact that I
was coming from Bucknell and President Carter was a Bucknellian.
That was my start.

The individual who did so much for this

school is Big Al, they call him.

Al Watrel. He was here at,

I think, the time at which there was the biggest period of
growth here at the University, in terms of, not just the physical.
He brought in the faculty.

He developed the liberal arts

program.
R:

So it got bigger as the teacher education school shrunk a
little.

Of course, when I came here physical education had

fifteen hundred.
D:

Right.

It was a huge, huge program.

He was here, I would have to say, to be honest with

you, he was here during the biggest growth both internal as
well as the physical growth.
R:

His presence had a lot to do with it.

D:

Yes.

He built the program.

I wasn't.

I was very close to him but yet

I wasn't as close as some people thought I was.

was an absolute football nut.

Such enthusiasm for football.

would come down to the office and you'd look up and he would

He
He

{40)

D:

say, initially he would say this and I thought he was kidding,
you want to trade jobs?
I knew he did.

He said it so often that after a while

He would have preferred to have been the football

coach rather than the president.

He was not suited for the

presidency, I think, in terms of the pressures.
down on a Sunday night.

He used to come

This is not an exaggeration.

He would

have all the newspapers from the state of New Jersey and they were
all underlined.

Red, green and yellow.

He coded all the athlete

prospects in terms of the best athletes, from what leagues and
so forth.

He would give that to me every Sunday.

I mean that

must have taken him hours to do.
R:

That's an amazing story.

D:

Hours to do.

He would bring them in.

I'd walk into my office

and he's sitting at my desk and he's already opened all my mail.
I'd walk in and I'd say, anything interesting, coach?
call him coach.

He'd say, no, nothing too much.

I used to

I'd say, you

want me to go up to your office and open some of your mail?
He'd just laugh and that was the end of that.
him.

He was never offensive.

We really liked

His enthusiasm ·was genuine.

was the one who would always say to me, what do you need?
allowed the program to grow considerably.

He
He

The one thing I

never, never forgot was that I would never take advantage of him.
I never, never did.

I could have.

I think that man could have

(41)
D:

been fired years earlier if I had taken advantage of him.

I

could have broken every law, because his enthusiasm for athletics
was unprecedented.

It was a genuine one.

for me and I think I was good for him.

Anyway, he was good

I kept him under

control and he gave me the things that I needed.

That's why

we won. And we had a good staff who then was able not only to
go out and recruit the kids, but he gave us the means to recruit.
We set the standards for the league.

One of the nicest things

anybody had to say about me, I guess, when I ended my career was
that there wasn't anyone who had furthered the progress of the
league any more than I had in terms of developing programming.
We had more aid than anyone else.
anybody else.

We were better organized than

When I was at Bucknell, we had developed a

computerized program of scouting which I took here.

All the

time I was here and to this day we are the only team that had a
computerized scouting analysis which basically would just extract
a philosophy of an offense or a defense.

People knew that

after a while and so, therefore, when they played us they would
try to stay away from the things that they were successful with,
because they knew we knew what it was and we forced them in to
doing something they really didn't want to do.

Psychologically,

it was a psychological head game as well as a physical game.
We stayed ahead of them, the entire league. That computerized

(42)

D:

program was so far advanced. We were getting a complete anaylsis
of breakdowns for every down distance situation, passing, running
and all that kind of business.

One time I was going to Oklahoma.

My wife is from Oklahoma.We were going to be out there for two
weeks and I said to myself, what am I going to do for two weeks
in Oklahoma?

So I wrote to the University and I said this is

the program we have at Bucknell.
what kind of program you have.
don't have that kind of program.
I'd be glad to.

I would like to come in and see
I got a call a few days later.
Would you stop in?

I said, yes,

I didn't want to sit around for two weeks in my

mother-in-law's house.

I didn't know what I was going to do. So,

anyway, I spent three days at the University of Oklahoma.
up their computer program.

I set

I brought in my computer program, not

mine, Bucknell's computerized program which we got from the
University of Maryland, incidentally.

We brought that in and

I showed the head coach at the time how it was done.
fascinated by it.

He was

But he said, you know, I'd rather have

pictures rather than all that word analysis.
you do that?

We

I said, I don't know.

tried to explore that yet.

He said, can

We've never expanded or

So we called their computer

programmers over and they said, oh, yes, we can do that.
So what they did was, we fed the same information.

The only

difference is, the computer would make the X and the three

(43)

D:

O's and then list every play that they ran at every home
and they would list every pass that they ran in every zone.
And all of a sudden you just opened this thing up and it
says, picture.

And you could see from a wing right formation

on a right hash mark the

o is run to the right, and from this

formation and this position in the field they always did this.
So when we were doing analysis on our teams, this would all
go in the computer.

And we would have a game plan that on

first down and five we were going to go this direction because
this is what they did if they were in this formation.

It

was absolutely fantastic, and they knew it and we were so
dominant.

You asked me earlier what were some of the things

that made us strong.

Along with all the things I mentioned

the computer program was probably the thing that helped
us out the most.

Because it told us what to do, when to do

it, how to do it, and then we out-psyched them because they
knew we knew.

So they would change, and by changing they were

doing things that they weren't doing very well and that
weakened them.

They used to think that they could beat us

when they came in, and you don't beat anybody if you think you
can beat them, you only beat them when you know you can beat
them. With that kind of confidence. The kids knew it.
them the computer program.

We'd show

We'd show them what they were

doing and what we were going to do.

Then we'd match it up in

(44)

D:

our pregame films and every time they get it in this formation,
we'd say, okay, the defensive coordinator, that was the linebackers, we'd say, well now what are you going to call?

Well,

we're going to call this and see what they do and they would go
right to where we were going. All of sudden we developed this
confidence and they were having fun out there because they had
an advantage that they didn't have.

Interesting.

R:

Very interesting.

D:

But the computer program that we brought in was extremely important.

But, anyway, the support that we got was great.

Of course Dr. Aebersold came in as a freshmen coach for me,
his first year.

Then he was freshman baseball coach and we've

had a friendship that started from the very first time.
been close friends for 24 years because of this.

We've

As you might be

aware, he got involved inofficiating. I mean big games. He had the
Bear Bryant's last game and all that kind of stuff.

He'd get

through a local game and the guys would say, well, why don't you
hang around we're going to go out and have a sandwich and a drink
and he'd say, no, I've got to run. I have to go back.

I've got to

make the party after the game. They'd say, what are you talking
about?
home.

He'd say, we always have a party after the ball games at
And this is where our wives where fantastic.

over a hundred people.

We would feed

I mean feed them and our wives are the

(45)

D:

ones who did that.

I would take a week and somebody else would

take a week and another coach would take a week.

Our own money.

It wasn't corning out of any football budget, but we felt it was
very necessary.
to throw one.

Before you knew it the president said, I want
Then the admissions director said, I'll throw the

next week, and then the team physician said, I'll throw one.
After a while, we didn't have to throw any.

It was always

somebody doing it for us, but it was bringing everyone together.
We went five years without losing a game at home, so we had some
pretty good parties.
supports the program.

That helped.

He's done a lot for George [Mihalek].

They got a whole new office complex.
programs.

Dr. Aebersold, of course,

He has 11 coaches.

They got a new weight

Sometimes Bob might be criticized

to the point where he's not giving them enough money, but then
again, what's enough?

To say that Bob Aebersold, if somebody

asked me, is he supporting the program?

I'd say, yes.

Yes,

without a doubt he's supporting the program.
R:

Was it hard for you when President Watrel was forced out of
office?

D:

Yes, a whole change of philosophy.

There was a change. Matter of

fact, at the same time there was also a change at the dean's
position and that made it very difficult for us.

I think Dr.

Haverstick became the dean while Bill Meise was away on sabbatical

(46)

D:

or finishing up his doctorate, I'm not sure.
scious about the lack of money for women.

She was very con-

So all of a sudden she

started taking all the money away and sharing it with the women.
Well, you don't do that immediately because all of a sudden all of
these kids that were promised money and guaranteed money out of the
football team, I had - to go to a football meeting and say, we
were only kidding.

You don't have it anymore.

R:

Was that when Title IX was taking place?

D:

Before that.

R:

Before Title IX?

D:

Before that.

So we had some bumps there.

You know sometimes

when you're successful, sometimes people get a little embarrassed
by your success, and they begin to apologize for the success.
Like Al Watrel used to be badgered, but he didn't care about it.
They'd say, hey, you gonna win another championship?
say, you're darn right.
championship.

He'd

We're going to win a national

He never cared, because he felt that he was

doing enough for the academic aspect of the University.
The one thing I think people fail to realize is that it's very
difficult for a student here at Slippery Rock or at any
other school to identify just with a program.
happens to be some outstanding program.
need to have something to identify with.

Unless it

But otherwise, they
It's hard to

(47)

D:

identify with a math class versus a football team or a basketball
team.

To make kids feel good about the school gives them a

good feeling in general, and they take pride in being a
Slippery Rock University student. And what is wrong with doing
that with athletics as long as it's academically accountable?
If your program is academically accountable, then I think that
you can allow your programs to be successful where the kids
will identify with it and feel this pride, and as a result all
the spirit of the campus improves tremendously.
this campus go from one extreme to the other.

I have seen
I have seen

kids having no pride at all, and athletics plays a very important
role.
R:

And it's kind of an attack on any form of racism as well, I
suspect.

D:

That's true.

R:

Yes, I've felt that. That the black athletes, the black
dancers, the black actors, all of those kids who are out there
and become a part of that whole morale thrust. It softens
other kinds of things.

D:

That's a very good point.

I agree with that.

feels good about the school.
that for years.

Everybody just

You know, Notre Dame's been doing

Ohio State's been doing that for years.

State's been doing it.

Penn

What's wrong with saying I'm proud and I

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D:

feel proud about the institution because football is successful
at Penn State.

That's not to say we're watering down the

academic aspects at all.

That's why Al Watrel never felt

intimidated, because he knew he was doing a lot for the academics.
People were saying, you're doing everything for the athletics
and not enough for others.
R:

He certainly was accused of that. That press box thing and all
that business.

D:

That was nonsense.

They use it all the time.

Now it's condemned

again.
R:

Was all that just a lot of focus that just ought not to have
taken place?

D:

Of course.

It was absolutely ridiculous.

Al Watrel was the best

thing that's happened to this school in a long time.

He was here

at a time when we had tremendous growth and I don't think he
impeded it one iota.

I think someday he's going to be given

the respect that is due to him in terms of what he accomplished
here at the University.

It wasn't too many years ago, I get

a phone call and it was Dr. Watrel.

He was in town.

His

father-in-law was living in Butler and they were visiting.
talked.
you.

We

We hadn't talked in years. He said, I'd like to see

I said, Al that's great.

Why don't you come over to the

house for lunch. We'll sit down and have a chat.

I said, why

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D:

don't you bring Carol, his wife.
been on the campus.
campus.
know.

Well, he said, she's never

I said, you don't have to go on the

Come on out to the house.

So he said, I don't

But anyway, they both showed up.

warmest reunion.

Well, we had the

He's a big lovable kind of guy, at

least from my perspective.

I mean I got to know him in many

ways that possibly you and a lot of other people didn't
get to know him.

So we talked for maybe three hours.

talked ourselves, about catching up on everything.

Just

He was

going to upstate New York to a presidents' conference of
some sort.

I said, Al, why don't you come back on the way back,

and I want you to stop again.
here.

I said, let me have some friends

Who would you like to have?

He said, that would be great.

So he named some people that he wanted to see again.

So I

arranged this party, and when he came back he met everyone at the
door.

It was the warmest, touching scene that I've seen

since I've been here.
there.

The warmth and the feeling, it was still

They were hugging each other.

for a period of time.

We socialized

I don't know what made me do it.

were sitting around in the living room.
odd people there.

It's funny.

We

There were about 20 some

I said, you know, I hate to interrupt you but

with Dr. Watrel here it brings back so many memories. I said, let
me tell you my fondest memory.

I went through and told my fondest

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D:

memory about Al Watrel.

Well, that went right around the room.

Everyone did the same thing.
talked about it.

All the way around the room we

He was in tears.

I felt so good about that meeting.

He was absolutely in tears.
There was so much warmth. So

much love. So much respect for one another and just good feelings
about one another.

It was a great, great time for us.

Didn't say a whole lot.

He left.

He just couldn't say a whole lot.

The

next day we got the biggest bouquet of roses with this note that
he and Carol were able to write.

Because they left this campus,

if you remember, in a very negative, negative atmosphere.
R:

Yes, I know.

D:

They didn't think anyone cared for them anymore.
found out that that's not true.

Well, they

He still had a hell of a lot

of friends here.
R:

I knew there were a lot of detractors and I knew we were getting
a lot of very, very bad publicity about the athletic program
and the press box and all that stuff and the food services.
I was in some meetings with him at that time when we were doing
the leadership conference at Bloomsburg, and one of the things
that impressed me was that he was not an abrasive personality.

D:

That's right.

R:

Of course I was not around him a great deal, but I never saw
him angry.

(51)

D:

No. That's him. You're right.

R:

I think his gentleness, is that fair to say?

D:

Absolutely.

R:

To see a man in a heavyweight confrontational situation that

You absolutely captured it.

he didn't want to be in and didn't really have the gut response
that others might have had, that is, to become terribly angry,
he didn't do that.
D:

He was a big gentle bear.

I don't think he ever should have been

a president.
R:

Did you ever see another temperament.

D:

Never.

And I was with him for many years. No. I never saw him get

angry.

Matter of fact, whenever you got into some confrontation

with him, he would back off.
R:

He'd always tend to back off.

I've heard real horror stories about him as a personality. Bob
Carter, another matter entirely.

D:

That situation, I mean that's another thing, but as far as I'm
concerned it was all misrepresented.

There were facts that were

given to the Secretary of Education who later apologized for the
whole affair because he was fed that information. And he made a
decision, a very rash decision, a very quick decision which he
should never have made.

This is something that is on record that

Dr. Pittenger, who was the Secretary of Education at the time,
has admitted.

He was fed the wrong information by certain parties

(52)

D:

at this University that wanted to get rid of Al Watrel and just
nailed him.

Really nailed him.

It should never have happened.

If he had been more forceful, if he had been somebody like Herb
Reinhard, they would never have pushed him around like that. Herb
Reinhard would have stood his ground and taken care of anything
and everything that came his way.
Al wasn't.

He was that kind of person.

Al didn't like to confront people.

He didn't like

those kinds of situations.
R:

How about the Michigan Stadium stuff?

D:

That was fun.

R:

That was good? Great stuff.

D:

Yes, that was. It was the best thing that ever happened.

That has

to be in the top 10 of whatever happened here at the University.
To be able to appear before 60,000 people and to be treated by
the University of Michigan administration as a big league team.
They didn't think of us as a joke.

They didn't give that

impression at all.

They made sure I had all the best equipment,

whatever I needed.

Everything was given to me just as Bo Shinblack

would have gotten on his Saturday.
at the end of the game.
there.

They had the news conference

They must have had 15 or more reporters

They had the news conference the night before and that was

packed with news media.
half-time at one time.

We had 10,000 musicians on the field at
It was really spectacular.

But that was

(53)

D:

part of many things that we did that only could have happened to
Slippery Rock. We traveled to Seattle. We traveled to New Orleans.
We traveled to Texas.
east.

We traveled to Michigan.

We traveled up

We did some great, great ball games, some great traveling

for a small college where normally you don't get to do those kinds
of things.
games.

Then throw in the state championships and the bowl

It was a very rewarding kind of experience for me

personally and certainly for the University.

We weren't just

the general run of the mill kind of program.

We did some great

things.

We went down to New Orleans, the first great trip we

took and we were down there for four days.
did all the things that a tourist would do.

We walked around.

We

Took the boat rides

and played the game.
R:

Was that Nicholls State?

D:

Yes.

That's exactly right.

first time.

It was Nicholls State.

That's the

They were so gracious to us until the game started

and it was the war between the north and the south!
came out. The officials.

The flags

I remember Carol Watrel coming up to

me after the game and saying how furious she was because she
had walked in near the locker room and there was so much cussing
going on.

Anyway, their President sent us a letter of apology

for the manner in which their football team had conducted
themselves.

They were the greatest people in the world until

(54)

D:

the game started, and all of a sudden the war between the north
and the south broke out all over again.

It was crazy.

myself, I never want to play in the south again.
This is a football game, you know.

us out for four days.

This is crazy.

This is not a revival of the

But yet it was a great trip.

It's crazy.

Civil War.

I said to

Went through the Boeing plant.

kinds of publicity pictures with our kids.

Seattle took
Took all

They took all the seats

out of a 747 and lined us up in offensive and defensive settings
to show how wide it was. Had the kids stand in the jet wells and
things like that.

I did four shows when I was there.

T.V. and two radio shows.
the place.

I did two

They had our kids at dinners all over

I guess in a very short period of time we experienced

some of the things that small colleges never have, simply because
we were Slippery Rock. I did show after show after show out of New
York, Rockefeller Center.
show every Friday night.

For two straight years I did a radio
They called me and I had to be available

for them and I would talk for about 10 minutes. His brother-in-law
is a member of our faculty.

His name is Dave Shaw.

His

wife's brother has been producing the Good Morning America show
on Channel Four.

He's been doing that for quite a long time.

Prior to that he was doing all kinds of shows out of NBC prior to
joining ABC.
practice.

Because of our connection he would come down to

If we played in Connecticut, he would show up.

He was

a great fan of ours, and I was doing all kinds of radio shows
with him.

(55)

R:

By telephone?

D:

Yes.

R:

Yes, exactly.

D:

For two years I did a show out of Rockefeller Center.

No

other school has ever been able to demand that kind of
publicity.

If Coach Mihalik ever gets successful again in

terms of wins, all of a sudden it comes out of the woodwork.
All these people will be over.
the Detroit Free Press.

At the Michigan game we had

They spent three days with us and

he wrote an article every day from Slippery Rock, on how we
were preparing for Shippensburg. And there was another reporter
at Shippensburg doing the same thing for them.
just like the big time.

It was

The guy was at our practices, at

our coaching sessions and all kinds of stuff and he's taking
all kinds of notes.
R:

Like having George Plimpton there.

D:

The interesting thing was the first article. You know what the
first article was about?
in downtown Slippery Rock.

It was about the 99 cent breakfast
He couldn't get over that.

He says, I

had two strips of bacon, two eggs, toast and coffee for 99 cents.
That was the lead story out of Slippery Rock.
R:

Do you have a scrap book of all that?

(56)

D:

Oh. yes. I have a great scrapbook.
I have a lot of pictures.

I was a collector.

collector while my wife kept books.
and all those kinds of things.
R:

I have all kinds of scrapbooks.
I was a

I have stacks of books

It's a great history.

Can we talk about some of the players you've had in terms
of walk-ons, rags to riches, people who did the unexpected,
went far beyond themselves?

D:

I think that's what keeps us in the business the period of time
that we stay in it.
can't buy.

These are the kinds of rewards that money

These are the kinds of rewards that I know friends of

mine who have made all kinds of money, wish that they could have
had that same kind of experience.

Because I guess just making

money is not the same as making over someone's life and the
effects that you have on kids.

Probably the greatest rewards, when

I look back at the number of youngsters that I've had, are
the ones who haven't necessarily been the ones that have been
successful on the field.

I have had a young man, for example,

Donny Leverich who was a starting tackle for me and came
down with leukemia and was really on his deathbed in Pittsburgh.
We couldn't even go in to see him.

I remember calling the

President in, Dr. Reinhard, his first year.
come down to my office.

I asked him to

I wanted him to talk to one of my

(57)

D:

boys who was dying.

He came down.

He spoke to Donny over

the phone because that's all we could do because we
couldn't get in to see him.
very sad times.

I mean it was just one of those

I don't know what it was, but I think God

gave him another life, and all of a sudden he turned around. He
beat it.
to him.

Of course, he got out of the hospital.
He was very, very weak at the time.

We talked

He went home.

Never heard from him again till he walked in the office again
in August.

He had put his weight back on.

He had been lifting.

He said, Coach, I'm ready to play football again.
believe it.

I just couldn't

I could not believe it. This transformation was

unbelievable before my eyes. I said, of course, Donny.
problem.

No

He said, I want you to know today that I'm still on

chemo and I have to take these pills. And whenever you see me at
practice, if you see me going off by myself, don't bother
coming, just let me go by myself.

I'm probably getting sick.

might have to chuck up or something.
about me, I'll be all right.
you'll know why.

I

But he said, don't worry

If I don't show up to practice,

I said, Donny, don't worry about it.

You run

your own schedule. It turned out in the game he would play up to
the point he could.

I would always start him.

long as he could play.
the game.

He would play as

He would take himself in the game, out of

I never told him when to go in or out of the game.

That

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D:

was his thing to do. Well, a football season, in a so-called
normal season you have players with all kinds of hurts and all
kinds of injuries.
practice.

They have one excuse or another to be out of

Not that year.

All of a sudden they noticed it.

Kids were coming to practice all the time.
missing for the little things.

They weren't

I began to realize why they

were no longer a typical team who had the hurts and would
stay out of practices for a day or two just to rest up or
something.

What was happening was that they saw what this

kid was going through.
Taking the chemo.

They saw this kid trying to practice.

Going through a deathbed scene.

vomiting here but he was always working hard.

He was

All of a

sudden the whole team captured this whole spirit of Donny
Leverich.

That's the team when we came back in 1976.

Matter of fact, I was chosen coach of the year because we
weren't expected to be anything that year.
to Donny Leverich.

I attribute it

Believe me, I don't even hesitate.

wasn't me, it was Donny Leverich.
season at his own pace.

That kid played the whole

Practiced at his own pace. And our

injury report just dwindled to practically nothing.
the morning report in the army.
morning report.

It

It's like

Nobody wanted to be on the

Because what they were going through was very

minimal compared to what Donny was going through. It was a

(59)

D:

great tribute to what the kids saw that Donny was going through.
So Donny went through the season and he was given every accolade
that you could think of.
sort of thing.
He died.

The courageous awards and all that

Then we got a call in August. Donny was dying.

We had to open up our season with Lehigh, and I'll

never forget going down to Lehigh.

The team went down to

Lehigh, and that night the coaches and I went out to his wake.
The night before the game.

We damned near beat Lehigh that

day and we shouldn't have even been on the field.
complained.

But nobody

The only complaint was don't take me out of the game.

It says a whole lot about human nature and the psychological
effects on things.
is money to win.

Sometimes we think that maybe all we need
Sometimes we just need equipment to win.

Sometimes we just need skills to win.

No.

Those things are

important but you've got to have the guts of it and that's
something else that's so very hard to find. You say, who are
you most proud of?
that.

Donny Leverich comes to mind just like

I've had some very successful kids.

played in the pros.
on our staff.
program as

A sweet kid.

Ricky Porter who

Great kid.

He's now coaching

I don't think anyone contributed as much to this

Donny Leverich did with his strength and his

inspiration.

That's what this game is all about.

kept me in the game.

That's what

Those kinds of guys. Then we had some of

(60)

D:

these guys who came into the program who were burns.
I mean lousy attitudes.

I mean burns.

They used to call me the godfather.

I set the rules and they knew that.

When they crossed me there

was no doubt as to what was going to happen.

They knew.

There

was no backing off because you were first team or so forth.
Every now and then, I guess maybe God gave me a gift, but every now
and then, I would see some good in some kids when nobody else did .
I remember one particular kid.
through.

The staff said, no way.

He's

I said, okay, I appreciate your input, but I'm going

to go against you. I really think we ought to do this.

That kid

turned around and nobody could believe that he turned around. It
wasn't probably anything that I did other than the fact that I
I gave him the support that he needed to have at that time.

And

he turned around and today he is a very successful businessman,
but he is going through a very difficult phase of his life.
Somebody recognized it.

Those are the true success stories of

what my programs are all about. It's not the wins and the losses.
It's how the program was made up.

It's the guts of the program.

There are many, many stories like that.
for example.
dummy.

When he got out of school they said, oh, the kid's a

He'll never make anything of himself.

sell lots of them right now.
R:

I'm proud of Dennis Tilko,

He was good in speech class.

Well, he can buy and

(61)
D:

He liked to talk, right?

R:

Oh, yes.

D:

He sold cars.

That's where he got his money initially.

But

he saved it and then he took the money and invested it.

The

youngster was no dummy.
rate.

Sometimes kids mature at a different

The biggest motivator in my personal life was a Spanish

teacher who told me that if I promised him that I didn't go to
college, he would pass me.
He passed me.

I said, okay, I'm not going to college.

Then I went to college. Then when I came back, I

came back in my senior year, I was senior class president.

I was

I was over a three point average and

president of my fraternity.

I spoke at the dinner and he was sitting there.

That was one of

the proudest moments I have ever had in my life.

That happens.

People motivate at different times in their lives. At that time I
was just thinking of athletics.

That was all that was important

to me.
R:

So after a loss, you have a team that's on the move and the
morale is high, the expectations are high and then you lose
one. That kind of puts the stopper on things.

How do bring

your folks back?
D:

I can probably explain that.
had here, Dr. Larry Park.
Very close friends.

The interim president that we

He and I became very close friends.

Of all the presidents, really, he was

probably the closest friend I had.

He was just new.

I

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D:

didn't even know him and I never met him so I didn't even know
what he looked like.

That's how new he was.

We opened up our

opening game against Millersville with a T.V. game.
handily.
decision.

We got beat

We walked in the dressing room.

I had to make a quick

How I was going to handle it.

When I looked up, there

was some strange looking guy that Inever met and I never saw him
before, and I said to myself, I betcha that's Larry Park.
know.

Didn't

Wasn't for sure. I said to myself and I don't mean in this

the wrong way, I'm going to put a show on.

I'm going to try and

do something really good here because I was angry.

I was ready to

chew them out. Instead, I went the opposite way. I went to delivery
of encouragement, of hope.
Didn't yell.

Whatever.

Spoke very quietly.

I went totally different.

You could hear a pin drop.

Evidently whatever I said, and I don't even remember what I said,
it was from the heart, extemporaneous, as I think sometimes some of
your best stuff comes out. I got the nicest letter from Dr. Larry
Park, and I was right.

That's who it was.

He was very impressed

in terms of the way I handled it and he wanted to meet me.
that time on, we were great buddies.
R:

Where you there for his first speech to the faculty?
you weren't there then.

No,

You missed that because you would

have known him had you been there.
D:

I didn't know who he was.
get to see him.

I was at practice.

I didn't

From

(63)

R:

You should have heard that opening address to the faculty when
he came in as interim president.

The thing he said is, one

of the things I want to tell you folks is, I don't want to hear
any Al Watrel stories.

He said, I've heard the Al Watrel stories

and I don't need any more of them.
let's get on with it.
that speech.

We have a job to do here,

Terrific speech.

I wish I had a copy of

So beautifully done. It was let's heal up our

differences.
D:

I was very impressed with that man.

The last night he was on

this campus, he was at my house for dinner.
don't really want to leave.
either.

He said, Bob, I

I said, I don't want you to leave

But, he said, I made a commitment.

It took me years later

to truly understand that, because I thought, you can change
your mind.

In 1987, Dr. Aebersold called me and said, Bob,

the football coach just resigned.
there.

They have problems down

The athletic director has told me all the problems and I

think you're the only one who can turn it around. Do you
think you can physically handle this?
to talk to my wife about this.
back.

We talked about it.

I said, well, I want

I've never thought of going

In the meantime, I wrote up a

Christmas list of all things that I felt the program needed.
And I said to Dr. Aebersold, I will meet with you only if the
Vice-president of Academic Affairs is there, the Athletic

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D:

Director is there, the Admissions Director is there, the
deans are there.

That's the only way I will meet with you.

I want you all to hear the same story at the same time.
I don't want anybody to translate the stories.
all to hear this story the same way.

I want them

They sat down and I

explained the list of things that I wanted.

And if they were

willing to abide by my wishes and they would do for the program
what I asked them to do, then I would give it an attempt.
They all agreed.
R:

Good strategy.

D:

Interesting.

R:

Yes.

D:

I didn't have to do it twice. Someone tried to change it once,

You didn't have to do it twice.

and it was no because everybody else heard the same story.
There was no translation.

I wasn't being unfair or unreasonable

in any way. I just felt that these were the needs.
as simply as this, I don't need to do this.
I'm taking my life in my hands.

I told them

Matter of fact,

I'm not being dramatic about this.

I don't know if I can handle this or not.

I can do the physical.

I've been running and walking. But I don't know if I can handle the
emotional aspects of this game.

What they don't understand is

that when you start football, it's three practices a day.
from 7:30 in the morning to 10:30 at night.

You go

Well, I wasn't used

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D:

to doing that anymore.

I told them I wanted a tent out there so

I could be under it from time to time.
in that heat all that time.

I couldn't stand out there

From then on it's been a tradition,

because now it's where the kids who get injured are able to go
under.

That's where they keep the warm-up.

they never did before.
my deal.

That's something

New football office.

That was part of

The number of coaches he has, that was part of my deal.

A number of other things.

I had never been in a card game where

I held all the cards before.
accepted that.

I guess I was reasonable.

With that I was able to come back.

didn't make it a couple of times.

They

Do it.

Almost

Matter of fact, we were in a

game in central Connecticut. My first grade friend, Edward B.
Hunt, Jr., who was my friend for the rest of my life, his son had
played for me.

He had just died of cancer.

him, Gary, before he died.

I had been in to see

Talked to him for about a half an hour

which is the longest he had ever talked to anyone.

Then he died in

the meantime. And we're coming back to central Connecticut, and I
want that game ball, and I invite his parents.

Eddie Hunt was my

lifetime friend, his wife and his family, and I want to present
that ball to them.

Now a ball for non-athletes or someone like

that, it doesn't sound like very much, but it's symbolic more than
anything else.

R:

We won the game by one point.

I was at that game.
at the end?

19-18 or 18-17 or 20-19?

They were driving

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D:

I was exhausted.
didn't make it.

They tried for two points at the end and
I went over and between trying to talk to the

Hunts with the ball and my exhaustion from the game, I turned
to Dr. Aebersold and I said, Bob, you have to do it, man, I
can't do it.

He took the ball and he presented it to the family

and did this whole thing for me.
know if I can hack this.

Right then I said,

My heart was beating.

I don't

I felt that I

was taking a chance and I felt I should be rewarded for it.

I

don't mean personally rewarded for it, but I think the program
ought to be rewarded for it.

So that's what I felt about having

the cards, and that's another episode that we got through here.
Interesting.
the gipper.

Football can be so symbolic at times.

Win one for

People don't understand that unless you played

football or played in a sport or been in a fraternity or some kind
of group.
R:

It doesn't have to be athletics.

It can be anything.

Let's talk about the demands on an athlete in terms of
homework for the sports program, learning plays, all of the
things a person has to be able to do today.

I don't know how

much it has changed to be able to play football in a very
complex sport.
D:

It's getting more difficult to play year by year because the
game is developing.

R:

Yes, but you've got to have some brain power to pull this off.

D:

No, you can't be dumb and play football.

When I came back,

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D:

there was another thing I did.

This is something I had done

earlier but I had to renew it.

We had Parents' Day, and we

always had parents come in and we would give them a breakdown
of the offensive game plan and show them what we were doing.
I did that as kind of a lark because I had this one parent when I
first got here.

He was yelling at me.

We were up at Thompson

Field which is a very small field. It was like he was in your back
pocket.

He was on my back constantly, constantly, constantly, all

year long.

Mr. Ambrose, I'll never forget the man's name.

decided to have the parents in and give the game plan.

So I

But the

reason I did it was when I got through the game plan I turned to
Mr. Ambrose, and I said, Mr. Ambrose, you've been yelling at me all
year long.

Now you've seen the offense and defensive game plan.

Is there anything you want to change now?
can be off my back for the game.

That way you

He just laughed and we've

been great friends from that time on.

I didn't know if

the guy was going to poke me or what, but I felt that I had
to give him that lesson.
R:

But he took it well?

D:

We're good friends.

It was funny.

From that time on he said, I will not be

on your back and he wasn't.
R:

Faculty support has been very good, I gather?
exceptions?

With some

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D:

Yes.

The faculty support has been a combination of our taking them

into social circles after games and involving them in quarterback
club meetings and things like that.

I think the image that

I had to present along with my staff in that we served, as I
told you earlier, we served on committees.

I didn't sit back

and say, I'm not going to serve on any committees.
faculty council.

I was on

I was on a number of all-university committees.

Nobody could accuse me of being anything other than a full fledged
faculty member.

I was doing not only as much as they were doing,

but in fact, if they would open their eyes, I was doing a whole
lot more than they were doing. I don't know if it's true, but I
think I gained the respect of a number of people here because of
that. I never thought I was anything special.

I was just

a member of the faculty doing his job as I was given the job.
think a lot of people respected that.

As a result, people like

Ted Walwik would write notes to me, letters to me, glowing
letters.

He was so appreciative.

R:

He was so proud to be president of the Quarterback Club.

D:

You're right.

He's been a Quarterback Club president for a

number of years, different years.
happens.

I don't think it just

This is why the people who came in as full-time

coaches never had contact with the faculty, and they could
never develop that rapport.

I

(69)

R:

One of things that impressed me for those 20 years was the
coaches were all kind of low profile and always gentlemen.
The coaching staff I had seen at Memphis State, that wasn't
true.

Those guys were out there badgering people, if they

thought there was a faculty member who could change a grade
with pressure.

I saw a lot of strange practices go on and they

never did become a winning football team.
did pretty well.

Their basketball team

But I was always impressed with the coaching

staff here.
D:

They were professionals.

They were all professionals.

They were professional educators I should say. I think I
had better say that.

They weren't just football coaches.

were teachers first and we were coaches second.
told our kids.

We

Just as we

I don't know how that would sound to some

people, but it's true.

Our kids were students first and athletes

second because they were not on scholarships, and the only
way we could motivate them was the desire to play the game and
play for us.

We didn't have the money to give them.

work-study money.
work for it.

It wasn't any outright money.

They had to put hours in.

you still had to be there.

We had

They had to

Some jobs were easy but

I don't know. I agree with you. I

was very blessed with some very fine people who probably weren't

(70)

D:

the most knowledgeable coaches in the world, but they were hand l ers
of human beings and they were educators and that translated here
a lot easier.
met.

Here's a story.

There was a line coach that I had

He was at the University of Maryland.

session there one time in spring ball.

I watched a practice

We were making a spring

tour of different college campuses to learn.

I saw this kid go

against an offensive lineman in what they call the one-on-one
drills or the Oklahoma drills, where they block and the back runs
through.

Well, this defensive player kept beating the offensive

lineman that he put in front and the offensive line coach, a friend
of mine, who was so enraged kept putting this same kid,
defensively, because he wanted one of his offensive lineman to
beat him.

Nobody could beat him.

What that translated to was

this kid probably took on about ten different kids.

He was

exhausted and they finally carried the kid off the practice field.
It was brutal. I don't know how logical it was.
think of doing that but it was brutal.
went out to eat.

I wouldn't dare

Later on that night, we

I asked the coach about this kid. Is he okay?

They carried him away.

The ambulance came in and everything else.

He said, I don't know.

I don't care.

He's just a number.

I said

to myself, if this is big time football, I don't want any part of
it.

I was still at Bucknell at that time.

any part of this kind of thing.

I said, I don't want

To make a long story short,

(71)
D:

this guy's career bounced all around.
he was in the pros.

He went to Duke and

He ended up as the head coach at

California State, here, in our conference.
He was the offensive line coach for the Steelers.
Matter of fact, he's still with the Browns right now.
Good coach but very brutal.
was getting killed.

Couldn't win.

They couldn't win.

California State

He asked me at

a conference in Pittsburgh, would you come up to my room?
I've really got to talk to you.
hours.

We sat in that room for

He wanted to know what the secret was to win in

this conference.

He had been in so many big time colleges

and there were so many short cuts and total disregard for
the kids that he was a misfit.

In a small college, you

don't have everybody doing things for you.
yourself.

You do it

The only way you are going to motivate a kid

to play and you can't do it through money because you don't
have it, you have to motivate them so they really want to
play for the sake of playing. This was foreign to him.
He had only dealt with full scholarship kids.

He got fired.

He had a miserable record here in four years at California
State and got fired.
in the pros again.

He couldn't hack it.

Now he's successful

It says something about our whole system.

I always used to tell the kids this. If you hear me swearing

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D:

on the field then you can swear. Not until then.
cussed on my field.
the field.

Never.

I said, if you fight,

Save me the trouble.

Those are my rules.

Nobody ever
just walk off

In a game as well as practice.

I'm the head coach and those are my rules and

if you can live by them, fine, and if you can't then you are
perfectly free to leave.

And it's funny, the kids are always

trying to find out how much they can push you and how far they can
push you, so they know the parameters in which they have to operate
I used to try and set them as quickly as possible.

I had very few

discipline problems on my team simply because, I think, that
we went to a policy of a freshman, a sophomore, a junior and
a senior and our captains as our discipline committee.
wanted all their actions judged by their peers.

I

I had known

through years that the peers were tougher on them than I
could be.
coach.

You can't fool your peers.

I'm not around.

I don't know what's happening in the

dorms and all that kind of stuff.
fool your own teammates.

You can fool the

The kids know.

You can't

The most effective thing I ever did

was to bring in this disciplinary group, and I had the right to
change any opinion that they may have arrived at, but I never
once changed it.

As a matter of fact, they were tougher than I

would have been. Our kids responded to their own kids. Interesting.

Again, playing the psychological game that motivated. And

George [Mihalek] has continued it that way.
good method.

Let the kids handle themselves.

I think its a very

Robert Dispirito Interview
R.D. I am helping to coordinate homecoming and I've established
the homecoming theme this year which is the parade of
champions, bringing back all the championship teams, which
includes tennis and soccer but it includes 7 football teams.
We have been wanting to do that for a long time so we have
that going and I'm trying to put a pep rally out here and
we're going to have a laser show to try to revive
homecoming. I've reserved a hundred rooms down at Days Inn,
Butler, and a couple of big rooms for a dance, and have a
post game tailgating down there bring a truck right in and
put the tailgate down and have all the food, kind of neat.
Just trying to revive homecoming, it's kind of dead to be
honest I think some get involved in the work and don't care
to do the work.
It just doesn't work. They don't work at
it. At least I don't think so.
J.R. Needs a new approach.
R.D. Yeah. That's right Joe. It needs a new approach and a we've
got to, I think, maybe the word isn't right, stop recycling
our alumni and try to go after new alumni. We always get
the same people back that's usually 50's, 40's, 30's
I realize this, so I've also started another program which
is a mentor program and what I did was, I requested
information from all alumni, through the Rock magazine, to
see if they care to either adopt a student as their mentor
or to have them come into their place of business, accept
them as a practicum or intern student, and we received a
hundred and thirty replies from a large variety of places
and all we are doing now is trying to plug kids into those,
so that's another exciting program which is getting the more
recent alumni involved. Actually the parade of champions
started out with my trying to develop and renovate the
McGill rose structure above the stadium.
I envision putting
a 90 foot deck out front opening it up so people can come
out onto a deck with tables and that kind of thing, which
could be used by any other department in the university for
any kind of seminars or whatever. So I'm doing a fund
raising from the 1970 teams and the 1960 football teams and
I'm asking them to give basically five hundred dollars for
two years of the renovation of McGill Rose. But you know
that is what people can see. But what my intent is, is to
get an awful lot of guys from the 60's, 70's and the 80's to
get involved in giving.
L.B. Get back connected.
R.D. Get them back. Giving them something that they can hang
their hat on. All those kind of things, that's what I do
over there. Plus try to get the president club membership

which is basically ten thousand dollars, a thousand dollars
for a ten year program, and we are looking for people who
have or work for a company that has matching funds. Like
the other day, a boy I got played for me in the 1970's and
he's good equitable. So for five hundred dollars from
equitable, we are getting a thousand a year for a ten year
pledge, but then in terms of a tax break, it really only
costs from about $436 a year because it get's that tax
break. So when you try to present it that way, it's really
not too bad. And they are getting it to the salary range
where they can afford to give four or five hundred dollars,
but nationally, athletes are the worst givers.
J.R

I had no idea.

R.D. You wouldn't think. I am looking at it from a small college
prespective. A lot of these kids couldn't have gotten
through school unless they, number one, weren't receiving
the money that we were giving them, work study money, and a
lot of them wouldn't have gotten through unless the coaches
stayed right on them. I mean you talk about guidance,
you're talking about advisement. There is no better
advisement than an athlete gets. They have study halls. As
soon as the grades are at a certain level they are placed in
study halls, faculty tutor them so a lot of the young men
and women would not get through school unless they have this
close monitoring and yet they don't give. So I'm trying to
give them something to hang their hat on. Give them a
reason.
L.B. Remind them what they got.
R.D. Yes. Well that's what I do when I go and talk to them.
This young boy by the name of Sam Debona that I'm meeting
with today comes from very humble beginnings. He got
through school. He's done well.
I think he's a CO of Penny
Saver. I don't know if you've ever heard of the newspaper
Penny Saver. Anyway, it advertises a lot of the
businesses.
I could find out what he is, I don't
know whether he is the CO or what.
J.R.
If you get a copy, there would be a mast head, I suppose.
R.D. I don't know.
I'm going to see him today, I'll find out.
I've done a background check on him but it doesn't give me
that kind of information.
J.R. A lot of people got into that business early and then sold
their franchise I mean sold those papers. A lot of
investors who really knew what was going on in terms of
marketing started those little news papers and then sold out
for a bundle. There's really some big money in that stuff.

R.D. One other funny thing that happened. The school is trying to
raise money for the lab school. They are trying to get
sponsorships. I guess the lab school is about ready to fold
financially. A former fraternity brother of mine that
played football at URI, he was a senior when I was a
freshman, Vince Saudy, he is the CEO of PPG. The guy makes
tons of money but also PPG does a lot of things, but doing a
background check on him I found out that his wife has gone
blind. As a result he is very partial to handicapped
situations or handicapped programs. So Dean Morsink knows
about it so they jumped on it. Hey Bob, write him a letter.
I'm going in that direction too. I don't know when I'm
going to retire Joe I don't have time to retire.
J.R. You shouldn't.

There is no point to it.

L.B. This is your third or fourth career.
R.D. Yes.
J.R. So it is an exciting thing.
R.D. I guess I'm the eternal optimist. Anyway, I get involved and
I get very optimistic about things.
L.B

Well people respond to that, that's great, it works.

R.D. I hope so.
to go in.
JR

Well I don't know in what direction you want me

Oh, well.

R.D. The other day, I sat down in the office and wrote for a
couple hours just thinking and writing in between phone
calls and interruptions which are very annoying. In writing
I figured I said to myself, does anybody really get serious
about writing. I can see why they put themselves in a room
and don't come out for weeks because when stuff starts
pouring into your head, you just don't want any
interruptions at all. It's amazing how out of a few phone
calls here and there and all of a sudden thoughts were
going, they were leaving me.
JR

It gives me a good idea. I've got a lovely little portable
tape recorder. It's voice activated and it's a battery or
also plug in, and if you just had that in your briefcase
somewhere, so that when stories cross your mind that we may
lose, as we all lose them, you can just flip the button on
that thing and put stories on tape.

RD

I have one just like that, the one you described.
I used it
for when I was doing radio for the school the last couple
years.

JR

If you just have that handy at whatever time at home, or
wherever you are, and then all of a sudden you think, I
should have included that story, and one's in your mind when
your talking with your wife or something and just flip that
recorder on and put that thing on tape. And label the tape
so that if you use it for some other reason you can put in a
fresh tape, and then use it as part of your material.

RD

Matter of fact, now that you remind me I've got to get the
tape. A friend of my son's got hit in the eye playing
racquet ball. He wasn't wearing glasses, and I guess he
seriously injured his eye and he couldn't go to class. He
couldn't write very well. Anyway, I suggested why don't you
take my tape recorder and bring it to class and even when
you can't go to class give it to someone else who can record
it, and he has used it.

jr

Good.

rd

He's got over a 3.0 average, best average he's ever had.
I
said to his dad, buy him a tape will you please, I mean a
recorder.

jr

Have you ever had student record you in class, blind
students.

rd

Occasionally.

jr

It's kind of an experience.

rd

You know what is interesting, Joe? My daughter was having
problems with a class, and I asked, well I checked on her to
be honest with you. I had called a colleague to find out how
she was doing. I said do you mind if I give her a tape
recorder and she brings it into your class which would help.
It's a form of study obviously. He wouldn't hear of it. You
know it was almost like I was shocked when he said that to
me.

jr

Absolutely.

rd

Because I wasn't expecting that kind of answer, and I'm
being very embarrassed when I say, well I do it all the
time, I said I do it all the time I said I think it's a
great form of study but if you feel it's an invasion of your
privacy, how else can it be? They are listening to what you
are saying. I mean if is he going to say something that he
shouldn't be saying he shouldn't be saying it in the first
place. I don't know. I mean I don't understand, but he said
no. I just thought it was a good idea because I used it all

the time. I have a lot of students who do that a lot. Matter
of fact, I encourage the students to do it. I really do.
It is one of the things, two things I ask them to do, do
that or get into study groups. Those are the two things I
always try to tell my classes that work.

jr

I've had blind students who ask to use a tape recorder and I
say absolutely. And then I think about them carrying out my
lectures and I think I ought to shape up a little.

rd

There you go, not bad.

lb

It helps both.

jr

so I started to function in a more orderly fashion.

rd

Exactly.

jr

Yes. And it was interesting.

rd

Not that it is going to change a lot but it does organize
you a little better.

This is Joseph Riggs and Leah Brown interviewing Bob Dispirito at
Bailey Library on 02 June 1992 and this is the second in the
series of oral memoir tapes that we are going to do with Coach
Dispirito and this one is pretty much about the early years so we
have a title. Is there a beginning you'd like to make?
rd

I tried to make some kind of a connection between my fathers
immigration to the United States, for example, and how I
perceived him, and how it has affected me. I sat down the
other day in the office and just wrote. May I read this?

jr

Absolutely.

lb

Sure.

rd

Just let me kind of read it. It's awkward. It's one writing,
but as you've said before, Leah, I'm sure you'll clean it up
for me, correct all my grammar, all that sort of thing.
Anyway this is what I wrote. Matter of fact it was very,
kind of exciting trip of nostalgia for me.
My father immigrated to the United States at the age of nine
in 1902 from a town near Naples, Italy. He proceeded to
work in a mill as well as practicing his tailoring trade
that most Italian youngsters learn in the old country.
He
grew tired of working in the textile mill and saw little
future in it, so he learned the barbering trade at an early
age. After serving his apprenticeship he had an opportunity

to buy the business. This again was the new challenge for a
young man with good work ethics. He expanded his business
from men's hair cuts to women's hair cuts which eventually
lead him to mastering the trade of hairdressing. So it was
logical for him to expand his two chair barbershop to
include a separate floor for lady's hairdressing. His goal
was to now cater to the wealthy people of the city so he
just simply charged high prices to attract the clientele.
The shop was the in place to go so he accomplished what he
set out to do.
I mention all this because I feel I have
acquired my dad's work ethics which sustain me in my life
time. Sports is what kept me in school from high school,
prep school, college and graduate school.
I learned from
my dad that in order to be successful one must appreciate
what one has, but not satisfied. He taught me to reach for
my dreams by setting achievable goals that will lead one to
the eventual goal of success, and even more, as a young man
I always looked to improve my skills even if it meant a
sacrifice beyond what I was accustomed to making.
In my
early days, playing baseball meant going to the high school
games, waiting in the woods behind home plate for any foul
balls that might come in our direction. Of course the team
had their managers, there too to retrieve foul balls, but
we were better organized then they were. We had a relay of
three or four guys and when the ball came in our direction
we then threw the ball to the next person to the next
person to the next person and the last guy did the
sprinting. He was the fastest guy we had. Actually the
high school coach, Gus Sevarium was providing us with
the tools to improve our skills and eventually most of us
went on to play for him anyway. Actually I thought he
realized this because by the time we entered his program
in high school he knew our names and what we did with the
foul balls. However, there were times when we were not as
successful in getting the foul balls so we did the next
best thing. We would place a new cover on the ball by
taping it with white tape. The only problem with that was
then after many layers of tape the ball became as hard as a
rock and it was either stinging your hands when it hit you,
and Lord, if you got by it you were really in trouble.
Learning football skills also came a bit different than now.
We didn't have the advantage of little league, or midget
football coaching, as a boy's of today do. But the desire
was the same or more. Football playing consisted of little
or no equipment or coaching. The neighborhood west side or
east side or whatever had their teams and by word of mouth
every game was scheduled. We didn't have the advantage of
adult leadership. It was just between the kids to arrange
the time and the place. Whatever each individual had for
equipment is what they wore. One kid might have a helmet,
another one might have some shoes, another might have
shoulder pads. But most of us simply showed up with two or
three layers of sweaters in place of pads and a stocking
cap over our heads. The time of the contest was

determined by injuries, darkness, or a fight or just pure
exhaustion. What I just described for baseball and
football holds true for basketball and hockey which was
popular in our early childhood. The reason for my
mentioning my early sports participation was that we played
and participated in our rate of interest. We did not get
burned out by all the stress and adult supervision young
kids of today get exposed to. Matter of fact one of my
earliest thrills was when I first participated in high
school sports and was issued my very first uniform. That
has to be one of my greatest thrills. That's where I
stopped.
I don't know.
I don't know what direction you
want to go in, dates, times, it was fun doing it.
It was a
lot of recollection.
LB

That's nice. We'd like to have those notes too, or make
copies of them.
I'd like to hear more about your family
your dad and brothers,
I know one brother, he was here for
a while.

RD

My brother Don.

LB

Yes, great person.

RD

Thank you. He was here for several years as the public
relations director. He is now at Washington. Well, we come
from a fabulous family of nine children. My dad obviously
was the hair dresser, barber, whatever. Probably one of the
smartest men because I admired his common sense and that is
something I hope I tried to acquire from him. He had very
little formal education. He eventually became the head of the hair dressing board in the state of Rhode Island, and so
he moved even in that direction. He had to give tests and
correct tests and he did all certification for the state of
Rhode Island. But to go back, yes, coming through a large
family is quite an ordeal. Sometimes it is the matter of
survival. The older boys, my brother Ernest and Nada, for
example, were the disciplinarians. My dad was working all
the time, six days a week, and then we would all go on
Sunday and clean the beauty parlor, you know wash the
floors, paint, do that every week, but the discipline was
pretty well handled by my older brothers. You would think
that there would have been some animosities, but there
wasn't. To this day I respect my older brothers to the
extent that there is a very loving connection there. It will
always happen and that will never change. But we came
through. We had six boys and three girls and the only
professionals were a brother Angelo, who has since died. He
was a lawyer. Then I went to college and my brother Don also
went to the University of Rhode Island. One of the kind of
thrills going through there to is the fact that when I
played football at URI I was a senior when my brother was a
freshman, and he wore the same number and he played as a
freshman and I was just finishing up as a senior, he went to

the same fraternity, those kind of things, but the family
has been a very close family. It has lasted. It has survived
the test of time.
Because two years ago we had a family
reunion, we always have a family reunion in the summer in
Rhode Island, my brother and I at this point always rent a
cottage, but we always owned a cottage. Or we lived in a
tent. My mother, God bless her soul, she would have nine
children in a big tent for the entire summer down at Point
Judith, which is the tip of Rhode Island. Living in a tent
and cooking over a Coleman stove, wash boards, I don't know
how she did it, but she always said it was good for the
kids. My father would come down on Saturday with his car
full of food and we ate good for about four days, and then
all the food was eaten and we couldn't wait till he showed
up again on Saturday. That bond I think was also realized
two years ago, as I started to say, because we had what we
call a master family reunion and everyone was there but my
brother Angelo who has since died. We had a three day
reunion and we were allowed as members of the family to
invite any ten guests that we wanted for Friday night. We
hired out a hall. So I invited ten guys that I haven't seen
for fifty years.
It was better than any high school
reunion, and, incidently I got lost in the high school
reunion. I have never been to a high school reunion. I've
never been invited to one. I kept saying, hey, I'm here and
the paper at home was usually filled with my coaching
accomplishments, but for some reason I've never been invited
to a high school reunion. There is a mistake there
somewhere. We had maybe two hundred and some odd people at
the reunion and it was just as nostalgic a time as I'll ever
spend in my life; and then Saturday, was at my brother
Arthur's home. He has a big farm, swimming pool, so forth
and we had family games, family contests doing the games,
the bocci relay games, the whole day was filled with those
kinds of things and then Sunday everybody came down to the
beach which is in Point Judith, and where my brother and I
always rent two cottages, and we had the third day there.
You know when you think of all the children, all the
grandchildren and all the brothers and sisters, I mean,
Dispirito clan's a real gang, a real gang of people.
But it
survived the test. It's just wonderful. I had a niece who
coordinated all this, she sent out newspapers and briefs and
updates and she finally did a book. I'll have to look for
it. But she did a book on the history of the family, gave
all the names, contacts, the phone numbers so that we can
never say we forgot the address, or the phone numbers. She
brought everything up to date, the children, the names of
the children the birth dates, and all that kind of thing.
So to answer your question we've had a, at least I've had a
wonderful life with my family, and I tried to emulate that
as closely as I can with my five children, but that is the
kind of family we came through. My dad, I had two brothers,
two sisters, and my dad were all hairdressers and they
expanded that to two beauty schools and it wasn't until just

recently that they got out of the business. My brothers
retired, but I washed floors from the time I could get on my
knees every Saturday night or every Sunday I would wash
floors and we would take turns as we grew into the job, and
it was one of the reasons we hated to grow older, because we
knew we were getting to be the next in line to wash the
floors of the beauty parlor. My dad always had this white
strip down the middle, this big "A''· The name of the place
was Angelo's House of Beauty. It was a big "A", a big white
stripe right down the middle, he had fourteen booths, so it
was a big beauty parlor, and that white line had to be
perfect.
I'd scrub that thing. I hated that white line, I
thought at times of painting it black. That was the family
affair on Sunday that we all went to the beauty parlor and
cleaned it up. That place was spic and span on Monday's.
Other than that we as children spent the entire summer at
the ocean at Point Judith at Rhode Island. We lived in a
tent and progressively built a little cottage in a
campground at the very very tip of Rhode Island. The light
house was right next door to us. We spent a great childhood
there. So we took our shoes off and wouldn't put the shoes
back on until we returned three months later. That was the
kind of life that was a very simple, a very secure life. The
thing that I probably think best about everything was that
my mother was a house wife, never worked outside the home,
but worked her hands to the bone in the house, but the
important thing was when we came into the door, it was
always, hi mom, where are you mom, mom, and if she wasn't
there, I mean it was almost threatening, I mean she was the
security we had all the time. You talk about the Peanuts
group carrying the little security blanket around with them.
You know about three year's ago at this reunion I decided to
do an oral history of the family, so at that big reunion I
took my video camera with me and I sat all my brothers and
sisters down and we just started talking about our family,
what it was like when we grew up, stories that we heard and
so forth and I video taped the whole thing. It was two and a
half hours, three hours long and I copied it and sent one
each to my brothers and sisters. It is a real treasure
because I captured it. It was just of those spare of the
moment things. I don't what made me think about it other
than the fact that I'm always kind of thinking of those
things. I record everything that my kids have done. I've got
film upon film upon film of our kids growing up and whenever
we go places I'm always the guy with the camera. r thought
that at the time it was a neat thing to do and it turned out
to be fantastic because we talked about our childhood; and r
remember, for example, a story, and it was threatening to
me. My father was a barber, a hair dresser. He wasn't
earning much money, and nine children. I don't know how the
story got to me, but it got to me that my dad and mom
couldn't handle the nine children financially and that they

were thinking about putting a couple of the kids up for
adoption. Well that always bothered me, you know, all these
years it bothered me and I never said anything about it, but
when we did this oral history we started talking about
different things. I said I got to get this off my mind, so I
told the story to the group and they proceeded to tell me it
was absolutely nonsense. It never happened. I don't know
where I got it, they wanted to know where I got the story, I
said I don't know where I got the story, it is something
that was in the back of my mind. Isn't it funny after all
these years, this threat or this imperfection, so to speak,
was erased you know, interesting.
JR

One of my topics was things that haunt you through out your
life and that's a haunter there.

RD

Yes it was, and I must admit that it took a little bit of
courage even to bring it up. Maybe I didn't want to know if
it was true, I don't know. I did bring it up anyway and they
all said it was nonsense, it was not true. Other than a
very large family, I used to call it the large Italian
family. We always had spaghetti on Wednesdays and Sundays. I
never ate anything other than spaghetti on Wednesdays and
Sundays, the point being that it seemed that every time we
sat down to eat somebody would walk in the house, and it was
always, sit down, make another place, you must eat with us,
and I must admit it sometimes it got to be very annoying you
know because every time we seem to be sitting down to eat
I'd say I wonder who's going to pop in now. That
was the kind of household my mom and dad ran. People
from the neighborhood came in, it wasn't just
family, and they were always welcome. There was
always a pot of coffee, there was always a little Annasette,
which was called coffee royal, which they would put into
their coffee, and a little pastry was always there. So
whenever you popped in it was always sit down have a cup of
coffee, have a pastry and if you didn't do it they were very
upset, they were insulted. They did that with the meals too.
Sometimes I'd wonder whether we'd have enough food at the
table, but they'd invite people to come in, so our house was
the house where a lot of the neighborhood kids felt very
comfortable in coming in and as I look back that is very
important because that's the way I ran my household. I never
ever let my children feel as though when they brought people
to our home, that it was an imposition in any way, whether
it was for dinner or whatever. Matter of fact a good friend
of mine who spoke here is a Lieutenant General who is just
retiring. He is a fraternity brother of mine, Rocko Negress
and he was a Commandant at Fort Dix, and the ROTC people
know about it and said, do you know Negress? Yes. I played
ball with him in URI and he's a fraternity brother. could
you get him to come up for commencement to speak at the
commissioning ceremonies, and I did. He gladly accepted
because we haven't seen each other
for 35 years and so

he was my house guest for three days, and one of the
greatest kicks he ever got was as we sat down to eat my kids
would come in with other friends or other friends were just
popping in and he said to me, Bob this is like Grand Central
Station, and I laughed because that's the exact words of my
mother. We used to say, what is . this?
Grand Central
Station. Anytime you want friends to your house, put food on
the table, everybody shows up. So it was funny, we had a
great reunion with General Negress.
LB

When your dad came here, you said he was a little fellow,
nine years old. Did he come with his family?

RD

He came with his mother and his brother. From Ellis Island
they went to Brooklyn, New York. It was pretty in those
days, for example I'm reading Gay Folices Unto the Son right
now. He's written many books on Italian migration. Anyway
this is his life and he talked about his dad going through
the apprentiship of being a tailor, and that was a very
common thing, and I'm saying gee that is what my dad did as
I'm reading the book, and I've gotten a lot of common ground
that I've remembered a little bit of, and my morn and dad
very seldom spoke of their background. It's not until
recently, and I say recent as 15-20 years, that I've really
learned the history because my brother Don really did some
research into it. My grandmother I knew as a child and she
died I guess when I was probably 7 or 8 years old. I was
just learning how to speak Italian because she couldn't
speak English, so as children we had to learn how to speak
Italian. When my mother and father didn't want us to
understand what they were saying they would speak in
Italian, which always annoyed me. In those days you see if
you had an Italian accent or any other it wasn't very
popular. People worked very hard to get rid of accents. My
grandfather came, didn't like it and went back; and his
wife, my grandmother, decided to stay and that was one of
the sore spots, the separation, so he died in Italy. She
died here. She didn't want to go back to the old country;
he didn't want to come back to the United states. So that
was one of the things and they were very embarrassed because
in those days if you had a divorce or separation or mentally
retarded child you put them in closets. Those are the things
you don't talk about. As a result I have learned more about
the history of my family in the last 20 years than I did
prior to that but they just didn't speak about some things.
It wasn't until I really got into this oral history of the
family that a lot of this stuff was corning out. I learned
more in that oral history listening to my brothers and
sisters relate stories and things that happened to them, my
dad corning over corning to New York and then migrating to
Rhode Island as a tailor, and I used to remember my dad
always sewing his pants or doing something. It was one of

those silent things I use to say, isn't that a great skill
he has. I wonder where he got it. But I never thought to ask
him how did you learn how to sew. He was a tailor but I only
new he was a hairdresser and a barber. As I look back,
reading Gay Salees' book Into the Son(???) which is a
history of his father and migration into the United States,
it's very interesting. I could relate in many ways to things
his father did and my father did. He did come here and met
my mother. She was not born in Italy, she was born here, and
I knew nothing of her side because there was a separation on
their side so they didn't speak of their family. We have a
large family, a very close family. There was a chain of
discipline that was handed down from the oldest to the
youngest. My brother Ernest was my disciplinarian and as a
kid I used to some day wish I could get big enough so I
could punch him in the nose. He was tough on me. He made me
do all the chores around the house, but I dearly love the
guy and I call him at least once a month, but it is funny
how those things develop. Well, all during the rest of the
family years, I think of the history in terms of cousins,
the big Christmas parties. In those days when we had
Christmas, all my relatives from Providence, Rhode Island
and nearby areas would come to our home, and we would sleep
in shifts. There was not enough beds and we had about 30 40 people and the big banquet tables. We put up special
tables, we ate in shifts, played cards in shifts, everything
was done in shifts. Those were good times and at Easter we
would go to my cousins and do basically the same thing in
Providence. Now going Providence which is the capital of
Rhode Island, that was going to the big city. We would go to
the big theaters, the big stages, that was always kind of
special. Then it was the ocean, and as I look back I think
of what my mom and dad did; they sacrificed their time. My
dad worked six days, would show up Saturday night, spend
Sunday at the beach, and be back at work on Monday, and my
mother mamaged this with a big army tent and nine kids. I
don't know how she did it, and yet in this camp ground
everyone became a family, a connecting family.
Some of the
greatest friendships we had resulted from the campground. To
this day, we still meet some people that we grew up with.
Every Saturday night was a camp fire big bon-fire, didn't
call it camp fire, they were bon-fires on the beach.
Everybody would bring tires on Saturday and we'd stack these
tires up, then when the boat came by the point going to
Newport we would shine the lights and it would throw it's
light's out on the beach to us and that was time to go, that
was the end of the night. Soon as the lights came up from
the New York boat everybody had to go back go to bed so it
was kind of nostalgic too. We grew up, we had a great life
it was a very simple life. We really didn't know how poor we
were until, years later, when we saw what other people had.
Then we realized we didn't have too much but what we did
have was a lot of security a lot of security,. and I think
most of us learned the lesson and provided that to our

children. Our place has always been a place for them to come
back to. People ask me when are you going to retire, sell
your home, and leave? Not me. That home is stability to my
family.
To the day I die I'm going to own that house. It's
a place for them to come to and it's big enough to handle
all of them, and it's something that I've learned from my
family. That's one of the mistakes that my brothers made
with my morn and dad. In Rhode Island, it was very
traditional that the homes in Rhode Island were all three
story apartments, and it was always whoever lived on the
ground floor was usually the owner. We had the whole
downstairs and then the two stories up, the two apartments,
one on each floor, so there were four apartments that you
would rent out. In the house that we lived in there was like
five bedrooms, so it was always enough for us when we did
move out, get married, and we could always come back. My
brothers decided that it was too much for morn and dad to
keep and convinced them to buy a new piece of property and
move into one of the apartments of the property that they
bought, which again was three other apartments, and they
always believed that by having the apartments or duplexes it
paid for itself and you didn't have to pay for the rent, so
it made sense. It was the biggest mistake they ever made.
Because when they moved to the apartment, the apartment was
not large enough to house Bob Dispirito when he came in with
his five kids.
That really upset my mother very much; and
I said to myself I would never allow my kids to make that
mistake with me. So if my house is a place of security and
some people feel that their homes are just a house they
could sell it and live in some kind of condo, but a house
means a lot more to me than that. It symbolizes a lot more
than just the physical structure. That's one of the lessons
I learned from my family too. So my kids are always
welcome, they can bring anybody they want, they know they
never felt inhibited in anyway to say to one of their
friends, come over to the house for dinner. They always
knew there was always an extra plate. If there wasn't we'd
make up something, that kind of thing. But I think that's a
security, sometimes a mistake I think some parents make
with their children. They don't provide that security or the
opportunity to feel very comfortable at home.
I don't at
least.
JR

Well it surely happens because some kids grow up and they
simply don't come back, you know, and they don't have that.

rd
That's a good point Joe. I think sometimes in measurement of
what you've done is sometimes measured by the desire of the
kids to come back.
jr
Sure, a fair-sized tragedy is when you see brothers and

sisters who don't speak, or brothers and sisters who don't
see each other at all, and it happens, it happens far to
often obviously
rd
Yes, I know a friend of mine was recently was talking about
his lack of feelings for his mom and dad. They gave him a
lousy childhood, he has no respect for them. They are in a
nursing home, and thanks God he doesn't have to bother with
them anymore. I'm saying, wow man, you missed so much in
this life time

They sacrificed, it was constant sacrifice. My mother
sacrificed for my dad;, there wasn't anything she wouldn't
do. I mean the meals were ready at certain times, and that's
it. If he said they were going to eat at five o'clock, that
meal was there at five o'clock because he was always on a
tight schedule. Even with the beauty parlor he would always
work an average day and then go back for two or three
appointments at night. He wouldn't get home until 10:30 11 o'clock doing special favors, and he was dealing with the
wealthy people in town. He was getting twenty-five dollars a
permanent in the 1930's. That's a lot of money.

jr
Good night!
lb
That was a lot.
rd
They loved it. They used to say they loved it because it was
exclusive. The only ones who could afford that were the
wealthy, and they had enough of the trade. I guess in
hairdressing you get accustomed to an operator and some of
them would stay with an operator for 25-30 years.
It's
amazing and my dad had seven booths upstairs and three down
stairs, there were ten booths. He had 14 operators. All 14
weren't operators. He had a couple of barbers and
pedicurists and all that kind of stuff. He had a sizeable
but a very loyal following, but there wasn't anything he
wouldn't do if someone or something came up and it was a
Sunday. He'd do it.

jr
Did he work for the funeral homes also?
rd
Oh yes, they always did those.
that.

jr

I could never understand

I know beauticians and that's were they draw the line.
lb
But someone has to do it.
jr
Of course.
rd
That's right and not only that, they were their customers.
lb
Sure.
rd
They wouldn't do it, they only did for their customers Joe.
jr
I see.
rd
I recall that, it was just their customers. You know, they
all, I guess, developed a real good life style as a result
of being hairdressers and barbers. It wasn't for me
obviously. Sports was my world. That's what motivated me to
even stay in school.
I don't care whether it's that or
becoming a doctor or engineer, what is the difference. It
was something motivating my brother Angelo, being a lawyer
as I said, and Don ended up getting his doctorate. We are
the ones that stayed in the education field. The rest of the
kind of stayed. My one brother worked for IBM for many
years.
lb
It is fascinating that your dad was so expert in management
and marketing without a degree.
rd
Common sense.

Tremendous feeling for people.

lb
But to manage this large business and school.
rd
When something went by him, passed by him, he would learn
from it. He didn't have to go through it two or three times
and he acquired buildings and land, so he did other than
just his beauty parlor. He went beyond that and he had the
foresight to develop a cottage for the kids buy all those
kinds of things, but Mr. Angelo was very well liked. I mean
he was very, very well liked. He was very accommodating to
people and people were not condescending to him. He would
say funny things and I used to sit around him sometimes and
I'd think you didn't pronounce that right dad, but I didn't

have the courage to correct him. One of the things he would
say would be a cartoon of cigarettes and I'd always think,
dad it's a carton of cigarettes, it's not a cartoon of
cigarettes, but I never had the courage to correct him.
rj
Good for you.
rd
And rightly so, so insignificant now as you
he did have great loyalty in his clientele,
was the success of his business. He was not
accommodating, but a very good man.
Didn't
people.

look at it, but
and I think that
only
try to exploit

rj
When there are nine kids, were there behavior problems? I
mean, did you have some mavericks from time to time? Who
kind of violated the schedule?
rd
No, my brother Ernie was the disciplinarian and if I didn't
do it I'd get whacked or something like that, if I didn't do
the yard work I was suppose to do, you know things of that
nature. Well we never had drinking problems, drugs, you
know that today's families have to cope with, we didn't have
any of that kind of stuff.
Nobody ran away from home, we
never got to the point where, even though I resented my
brother Ernie, I wouldn't dare tell him because he'd beat me
up anyway. I wouldn't tell him, so we always got along.
But
you know it doesn't make much sense to you but to me it
does. The point being that he was my father, because my
father was working all the time, he was the one who would
discipline us and I've never held any animosities. It was
just one of the things. I don't know if I'm saying it right,
we never had the inner problems in the family and to this
day that same feeling prevails. With my five kids, Lisa
being a caboose, Lisa was the one who was like seven years
later and the others were like a year, fourteen months
apart, but I've never had any problems.
People say did you
have problems with your kids. We didn't ever. They developed
a bond, and I credit this to my wife Marilyn because I
wasn't around that much because I was coaching and holding
two three jobs, working seven days a week trying to get
ourselves through financially. To get in the car, you know
when you hear about the car's they get in and the kids fight
the kids were so close and to this day to this day they are
very close.
I mean they can't wait to see one another. We
are waiting for the birth of our first grandchild this week
everybody is on pins and needles you know. I said, that poor
child, that poor child, because it's going to be so spoiled
it's going to be terrible. I'm amazed by it and I don't know
what we did special, maybe it.was the interaction between my
wife and I. I don't know but it was always a give and take

situation and we never raised our voice.
I don't think I've
ever raised my voice to my wife. We've never had any
arguments that I know of. We've had disagreements and we
disagree but it's always been very private, and it was never
in front of the kids. Maybe that's what it was, I don't
know what it is, but our kids, thank God, are extremely
close and they can't wait to be with one another. Never had
any problems. The only one is Lisa, she is spoiled rotten.
She is the spoiled one right now. She's a lovely girl.
She's the head of the rocklettes, she's captain of the
rocklettes this year, but sometimes she forgets to study.
All my other kids I no problem with, buzzed through school
and so I don't know what it is other than the fact that my
wife's done a super job. Sometimes I think that that's the
way my family was. I do know kids in school that had a
terrible home life. They were arguing, they couldn't say a
decent word to one another, they were always at each others
throats. I think one of the worst things that ever happened
to my family was when one of them came home smoking or they
found out that Ernie smoked. That was terrible. Nobody
smoked except my dad. He smoked his White Owl cigars after
dinner, which I can't stand now. Champ Storch, my buddy
downstairs, I played golf with him yesterday, I was riding
in the car, and the cigar smoke, I'm saying, Champ, get on
the other side of the car. It's not an exaggeration. I tend
to think that people don't believe me but it is true.
I
don't know that I touched the bases that you think I
should.
jr
Do you have music at home?
rd
Yes, Dianne was a music major here at the University. She
taught voice. She studied with O'Bannon for many years and
Dianne is a lovely singer.
jr
Oh yes, I've heard.
rd
She's done well. Jimmy started and he's in a Doctoral
program in musicology. He studied the taubla. He's been to
India three different times. He has this love for India and
the taubla which is a rhythm instrument, and he is one of
the few Americans that can play like he can play, and he's
constantly sought after in the Indian communities in
Pittsburgh for either teaching their children or him playing
when they have a big time singer coming in, Indian singer,
they always call for Jim to come in and play the taubla.
And his roommate played the sita, the long sita, and he
became a member of the family. He called me dad, he called
Marilyn mom. He was a wonderful kid. He got his doctorate.

An extremely bright boy and in computers and science and
works at GE makes about $80 thousand dollars a year. He's
done well. But those two guys go around playing in the
Indian community, matter of fact Jim right now is traveling
throughout Canada with a guy from Grove City, who is
originally from South Africa, doing puppet shows. They spent
eight weeks in Canada doing high schools, grade school
puppet shows, and Jim runs one of the puppets. Jim is a
drummer, he's played all kind of drums so, Robbie played an
instrument. Robbie played the trumpet. David would have been
a super drummer, but his brother was a drummer. We do have a
strong background.

jr
Tradition to that when you were a child?
rd
I played the piano.

jr
Do you remember your piano lessons?
rd
Never had a lesson in my life.
I had an operation, an
appendix operation. My sister always played the piano, my
sister is Dick Mannings mother.
Dick Manning, the
recreation director, that's his morn, my sister.
End of Tape #3

Robert Dispirito Interview
rd
I learned how to play by ear. And Marilyn plays piano.
Whenever I would get nervous, or something was bothering me
my wife always new because I'd go to the piano and play. It
was very relaxing to me. I always felt that playing the
piano took total absorption of my thoughts and I couldn't
think of anything else.
I would be totally absorbed in
playing. I'm not a good player, I just play by ear, I just
play for my own enjoyment. I wouldn't play it before anybody
but I play. But Marilyn is a good pianist. So then again
Jimmy would bring all his band to the house and they would
practice in our living room, our ears oh God and I taped it.
It's wonderful now to look back and say, there they are.
Jimmy and Diane have been the real music majors in our
family. A little background, as I said, my sister, my wife,
but we've always encouraged that kind of thing.
jr
Can we go to elementary school. When you first started your
formal education? What town was this all taking place in
when you were?
rd
It was the town of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and I remember
first grade very much because I stayed back. I stayed back
in first grade and from that time on I was always onward but
I stayed back in the first grade I guess I was not
emotionally ready. You look back and you remember, I don't
know if you can remember all your grade teachers but I know
them all. Mrs. Lucy, who used to give me the strap when I
would do something wrong. I'd get slapped, oh boy she could
hit. Mrs. Jones, people like that, elementary school was
pretty average for that time. We went to school in the
morning, break, go home for lunch, come back in an hour.
That break was always great. I was never in a hurry we'd
walk, I could walk, it was a neighborhood school. I'd walk
home, have lunch, be back by 1 o'clock and be out by 4. And
other than the interesting teachers we had I don't remember
a whole lot, other than getting the strap occasionally
because we were talking in class or something like that.
jr
Was it a Catholic school?
rd
No, it was a public school. In those days you could get the
strap. You could get the strap by your teacher or the room
you are involved in. First grade, second grade, third grade
but if you are really bad you went to see Mrs. Lucia, she
was the principle. She was a big woman, and man when she
gave you the strap you weren't supposed to cry because that
was not the sign of a man if you cried. It was tough

sometimes not to cry. But in those days, if I recall, it
was interesting versus some of the experiences that I've
seen since I've gotten to the teaching field, in those days
when I got the strap, if I dared went home and they found
out, because I certainly wasn't going to tell them, but if
they found out Mrs. Lucie gave me the strap then I got a
second strap when I got home. Okay. Today, when that
happens, they come with their lawyers, they want to sue you
for touching their child. It's a totally different concept.
It was a very tranquil time, very pleasant memories the
elementary school, great friends. The only tragedy of the
whole thing was the first grade. I think one of the things
that helped set me back was that my brother accidently shot
me. That was one of the only things that ever happened in my
house. We were painting the house, redecorating the house.
My dad always had a big safe, one of those floor safes, and
for some reason it was left open. I never found it open
because we used to always see if we could find him and get
in and see what was inside. He would never show us or once
in a while he would show us some of the coins. He collected
coins and things like that. But it was open one day and he
had a revolver, he kept a revolver in there, and my brother
Angelo, I was doing a somersault, it was a hand stand,
that's what it was on the bed. He said I'm going to shoot
you, and bingo he did. There was no clip so he thought it
was fine. He was too young to know there was a bullet in the
chamber, he shot me and he hit me in the arm, maybe about
four inches more and it would have hit me right through the
heart, but he hit me in the arm. It went through my entire
arm came out below my elbow, went into a ceder chest into my
brothers suit that he had in there. He had a wallet in the
pocket of the suit and the slug lodged there. To this day I
have that slug, but it went through my entire arm without
touching a bone.
jr
Unbelievable.
rd
It really is, especially the joint, and the only thing that
saved me was I remember running out to the kitchen and
saying look what Angelo did to me, and the thing was just
spurting. My mother was peeling potatoes, for some reason I
remember that, and she looked up and she didn't know what to
do so she called for my brother Ernie, my disciplinarian
brother, whom I dearly love. He was in ninth grade and he
had just learned first aid and he new how to put a
tourniquet on, so he put a tourniquet on, that's what saved
my life. That blood was just flying out you know and the
worst part of it all was after my dad got home. The ride to
the hospital was so frightening, the guy was on two wheels.
I forgot about my injury, I was worried about getting to the
hospital safely. That was probably the only tragedy. It was
purely an accident. My brother jumped out the window, and

the kids, my brothers, were in the yard. They heard the
shot. They saw my brother jump out and go running so they
chased after him, and brought him back. They didn't know why
he was running from something, and they brought him back. He
stayed under the bed for days. He was ashamed to come out
because he shot his brother. It was all purely an accident.
But I think that is the only tragedy we ever had. We lived
around the ocean all summer, nobody ever came close to
drowning. They did leave me on the beach one time. They all
left. I woke up and there was nobody on the beach and I
didn't know what to do. I was probably four or five years
old and this policeman came along and he asked me my name
and the only thing I knew was Bobbie. I didn't know my last
name so he took me to the police station and bought me an
ice cream cone. In those days that was quite a treat to get
an ice cream cone. Hours later they came back looking for
me. They finally realized one of them was missing.
lb
There's an empty seat at the table.
rd
They went to sit down, who's plate is empty. So they ended
up calling the police and they found me. But you know it is
funny when you think back. We were traveling as a family,
Marilyn and I and the five kids, and we drove away from a
restaurant. It was miles down the road and somebody said,
where's Diane. We had left her back at the restaurant.
lb

There is a movie Horne Alone, based on a story like that,
very popular.

rd
Yes, I saw the movie, interesting.
rj
With nine youngsters and a mother and a father, three meals
a day must have been an enormous volume of food that had to
be prepared. I gather she had help in the kitchen.
lb
With three girls.
rd
Well, I guess she did to some extent, but I guess for
periods of time she didn't. But the two girls were of course
hair dressers and they were off working too. I guess as
kids, our whole staple was coffee and toast, maybe some eggs
in the morning, and that was breakfast. Lunch was always
soup. To this day I love soup. My mother would come up
with every kind of concoction you could think of. It had
left overs in it, but she made great soups, and that's what
we had for lunch.
It was soup. That was it, soup and
bread. Dinner was the big meal.
I remember we were at
points where I don't know if you know what poelenta is,

poelenta is like a corn meal, it's a ... help me.
lb
Like cream of wheat.
rd
Yes, it's that kind of texture, only it's yellow and
poelenta is made and covered with sauce. And that was many
times all we had to eat. We'd all eat from the main dish.
You'd fill your plate with poelenta. To this day I love
palenta, I buy instant palenta though. It only takes two
minutes to make, but it's something that when it's left over
you'd slice it the next morning and then fry it.
jr
We call it mush.
rd
Exactly. You know as I look back, cholesterol, fat, who
thought of those things? We just ate good. Right? But as I
look back, soup for lunch, there was all kinds of
nutritional soups and then for dinner my dad would have what
we called colonsolad - the lettuce. He always had a huge
bowl of lettuce and he could eat the whole thing himself. He
just loved lettuce. So we all were very accustomed to eating
the salads and we always cooked with olive oil. Never. I
can't ever think our cooking with animal fat or lard. It was
always olive oil. The calories were there probably, but the
animal fat wasn't there, and I guess when she made some of
our favorite meals like veal cutlet or something of that
nature, a lot of veal cutlets had to be made, but my mother
always made a huge pot of sauce, spaghetti sauce on
Saturday. That was very traditional and she always put in
tons of meat balls or other kinds of chunks of meat and that
was our Saturday night meal. Either that or the pizzas she
would make, but that was the meatball sandwiches and then
we'd have the spaghetti and meatballs again the next day.
She was also wise too. Those big pots she'd put out in the
unheated porch area, then all the fat would be on top and
she would always scrape the fat off. Today I do that but
nobody told her to do that it was just good common sense.
lb
Never heard of cholesterol but protected you anyway.
rd
Right, sure.
I mean as I look back, we ate you know
probably within the standards of today's nutritional
understanding that we know in terms of cholesterol animal
fats and all that kinds of stuff.
jr
Were clothes handed down?

rd
Oh gosh yes.
jr
That's a dumb question.
lb
Did you ever have a new suit.
rd
I'll tell you, yes. The first new suit I had was my first
pair of long pants. That was the very first suit and it was
for a confirmation, and I got a pair of long pants. My
Lord, I could have pranced right down the street. But it
was always nickers and to find socks that didn't have holes
in them was unusual and we were always embarrassed because
we didn't like holes in those argyle socks that you had all
the way up to your knees, but there was an awful lot of hand
me downs. But you know here's what my dad use to do, again
a smart man, he was a merchant himself of course, a
hairdresser barber. He knew the merchants and he'd always
tell them, hey, when you run a sale, let me know first. I'll
come in and I'll buy. So before they'd open the store for
sales, my dad would go and buy ten pairs of shoes, he didn't
care what size. He brought it home. Who could fit into it,
good; if you didn't it was tough luck. It was as simple as
that and he would buy clothes, pants, shirts, sweaters, a
lot of it was brand new; but you had to grow into it, you
couldn't wait to get a year older to wear the new stuff.
That's the way he always bought. He bought food the same
way. We didn't have big grocery stores as we know today, but
he would go to Providence to Federal Hill, which is the
Italian district in Providence, and he would buy crates of
spaghetti, boxes of tomatoes and what ever he could get, but
he always bought it by the case because he always said it is
always cheaper to buy it by the case. Shoot, he was feeding
eleven people he had to buy it by the case. We had a stock
room downstairs and you know people during the war years,
you know to hoard food was not to be very popular in the
neighborhood, because you were depriving someone, but we
always had it, we always had that closet down there I mean
before the war. My dad always had that stock and he
continued to stock, I mean there was no change and after we
wouldn't talk about that room downstairs because during the
war years because people would interpret that as we were
hoarding food. He always bought everything by the case and
we had this room. It was like a little well-stocked grocery
store, it's the way he always bought. He bought shoes,
cloths, everything. They made their own wine, so they were
okay.
Every two years the truck would come in the yard.
One side of the truck would be red grapes, the other side
would be white grapes, and we had the big squeezer and that
was our job as a kid to turn this big wine squeezer, grape
squeezer and we'd make two barrels three barrels sometimes

and whenever it would sour, it would be the greatest wine
salad dressing, but it would be a whole barrel.
lb
That's a lot of salad.
rd
Made our own pop.
lb
Rootbeer?
rd
Rootbeer. We used to hear every know and then bang! Bang!
We used to tell my mom and dad, we need to drink this right
away because it's breaking downstairs. We didn't have the
availability as we have now but we made our own.
jr
Did the family take wine with meals?
rd
Always.
jr
And how old did a youngster have to be to participate?
rd
I was just, like I always did it. But with the kids, all
they did was add it to water. They would put a little bit a
wine in it to make the color, so we were thinking we were
drinking the wine obviously, but it was so diluted and I
think what we learned was sensible control of liquor. Hard
liquor, it was there, my dad had it, none of us ever touched
it. Only on special occasions, like wakes or funerals or
weddings would hard liquor come out, but they always had
anisette. I don't know if you have ever had it. Anisette was
what they put in their coffee, for coffee royal.
It was
always a bottle of anisette with the coffee and but wine I
can't remember a meal without wine, ever, and I think we
just learned how to drink responsibly. It was available. I
could go in the house anytime I wanted and have a drink, but
we just obviously didn't. Sometimes when you withhold from
people, that increases their desire.
I guess.
lb
It was no big deal it was just part of your meal.
rd

It was no big deal. The philosophy that they arrived at was
that in Italy the water was so poor you didn't drink the
water, and even when I visited there a few years ago,
everybody buys bottled water. They don't have ice cubes.
That's another thing about Europe that I found, very few

places with ice cubes because they don't like their drinks
cold. I remember one time in Italy we were staying at a
pensione, which our family owned and I said you wouldn't
happen to have some ice cubes would you; and this kid who
was running the pensione in Italy also owned two shoe shops
in Chicago so he could speak English. But the family owned
the pensione. He said, yes, I'll get you some ice cubes. I
put them in the drink I was going to make myself, and I
realized I'm not supposed to drink the water.
I don't want
to get sick, so I obviously threw it out. But everything,
that was the way they were brought up, the village. He came
from just south of Naples in Delacopine which is a district
in the city of Delecoponia. Matter of fact, we had some
Italians here on campus recently. We had a display of
Italian art pictures about a month and a half ago and they
brought in the Italian delegates from Washington and so
forth. I was invited to the dinner. We had a dinner at the
president's house and I went up to this man and I introduced
myself and I said, you wouldn't happen to come from
Delecoponia. He said, that's my home town.
I said, you got
yourself a friend.
I want to talk to you. That's where my
father came from, so anyway it was interesting. We have
some relatives still there. He's what they call a
commodore, a commodore is a poet, writer, journalist and he
has a title of commodore, and he's done history of that
area, because that was a summer residence for the king. It
was in the same town so he's done a lot of history.
jr
Do you have a spelling for that?
rd
Yes, if I can find it. This is what my little niece put
together. This is the family and this is the whole thing.
This gives the whole background, the whole family.
She put
that together. I thought that was kind of neat. They looked
up the seal, and what it meant, that kind of thing.
jr
We should xerox, and have a copy that we could take a look
at.
rd
Sure.
jr
We can take care of spelling and dates as well.
rd
The reason why I was able to say to you that my dad came
over when he was nine years old was that my dad was born in
1893. So when he was nine year's old he came here. That's
how I figured the date he got here. It didn't say the date
other than the turn of the century. It would be 1902 anyway

that would give you the whole background.
jr
In elementary school, do you recall activities or sports or
things you did of an extra-curricular nature? You know, like
what did you do the first eight grades, then four years of
high school? No, you had a prep school.
rd
We had a junior high school. We had six grades and then we
went to the junior high school, seventh, eighth, and ninth
grades, then high school. Then I went to prep school, then I
went to college, the big deal from elementary school of
course was the graduation, to go from the neighborhood
school to the junior high school which was on the other side
of town, and it was by itself almost like the system we have
down here in the middle school. That was kind of big time, I
mean you had to either take the bus or walk. That's another
thing. We used to walk to school to the junior high and
high school everyday. We weren't wealthy enough to buy
bicycles or anything, so we'd walk, and certainly didn't
have the money to take the bus. So we walked to school. It
was nothing, it was about 4 miles, We walked every day,
rain, I didn't care what it was, we walked to school.
Occasionally my uncle, who lived right next door, used to
take his kids to the same school, but couldn't give us a
ride because he had other children that they used to share
rides with their families, so therefore there was no room
for me so we had to walk. It was like four miles every day.
We walked, thought nothing of it, and a you know once and a
while we could borrow a bike and it was kind of fun to go to
school by bike. Other than that it was the thing to do,
right, the rich kids rode the bus and all of us walked. No
big deal.
lb
Nobody worried about being attacked on the streets in those
days?
rd
That's interesting, I'm glad you brought that up. When I
told you that when we would get in that house my mother was
the security blanket, and "ma, ma", and if she didn't answer
man, we were in trouble. She was always there. She always
seemed to be there. She was always there for us, but in
those days it was go out and play, come back for lunch. She
didn't know where we went. It was always don't stay in the
house it's a nice day, get outside. They didn't know what
we did. We learned an awful lot of dependence to some
degree, but we also became very independent, and we learned
to fend for ourselves. In many ways we developed a lot of
confidence in ourselves and what we could do, and in those
days it wasn't the traffic obviously, it was considerable,
not like it is today. We didn't worry about, I guess, the

molesting, and so forth, which triggers another story I got
to tell you Joe.
I remember in the very first grade walking
to school, and a I was about halfway between the school and
my home and there was a car parked. In those days they had
the old cars with the shades. You could pull the shades down
in the back of the cars. I was walking and I said, isn't
that strange, he has the shades down, and a guy opened the
door and he had candy. He said he wanted to know if I wanted
candy and would I come in the car, and I started, I took
about one step and all of a sudden I had this sensation that
went through me which was fright, I guess, but I didn't know
what it was. All of a sudden I just got scared and I ran
down the street and I said to them I realize--and those are
the days of the Lindburgh kidnapping and all that--I came
very close to probably being kidnapped, I don't know
molested. I don't know, but that is the only time that ever
happened. Other than that we were on our own. We'd go out
and play. We lived near woods. We had our own camps. We
played cowboys and indians constantly. We built our caves,
our shelters, lived in our worlds, cooked our meals out
there, all those kinds of things. I guess it all kind of
went by. I remember when my dad would say to me, either when
I was participating in high school athletics, which he never
saw other than my last game in high school, and my last game
in college, because they were working all the time, they
couldn't afford to take the time off, and he didn't
understand the game but he was always proud of his sons, but
he always asked, the only thing he ever asked us was did you
have fun? Never asked me how many hits I got and that used
to annoy me and I'd say yeah I had fun but don't you want to
know what I did. If you want to tell me yeah, what did you
do. I got four or five hits. Oh, that's wonderful. It was
never very important in terms of how many hits I got, which
is kind of reversal sometimes, because I coached Little
League and I've been in coaching all my life and I've seen
parents who are so involved and mean well but yet they live
their lives or their expectations of what they could have
been through their sons or daughters, and the stress and the
pressures are fantastic. With me it was, did you have fun?
And I read Joe Paterno's book and his father said the same
thing to him. I said isn't it something I could relate to
that because his father always would say, Joe did you have
fun? Yeah. That's all he wanted to know, did you have fun?
Even at the beach you can't stay in a tent. In a tent, for
example, we'd play cards and go to different tents and all
that, but we were on our own. They •didn't worry about things
we worry about today because you want to know where your
kids are today. I don't know why it is so different. The
world has changed that much, it's amazing. I don't know.
jr
Did you have to learn to fight?
rd

I mean fights were common?

Oh sure. School yards, recess, those were when you were
challenged, at recess. If somebody wanted to challenge the
bully, or the leader of the school yard, that's when the
fights occurred. Very seldom did we have fights after
school. I don't know why but it was during recess. The only
humiliating time I ever had in my life, there was nothing
more humiliating that I can think of right now than when we
were at the ocean, and we used to be there all summer, and
there was a little red headed young lady. She was from East
Providence. I can't remember her name, red headed girl. She
was the toughest of the lot. She beat me up one day. I get
into a fight with her and she actually just beat me up; and
I couldn't face the guys for days because she beat me up.
Boy she was tough. We had our fights, battles, but there was
so much freedom. We had so much freedom to do what we wanted
to do in those days and I guess it was a good foundation for
us all to depend on our own judgement and sometimes we over
protect our youngsters today. In those days we kind of, we
had a lot of security but yet we developed a lot of
independence.
lb
Was there a problem, being an Italian kid in this town?
rd
No, because I lived in the Italian neighborhood.
In a sense
it wasn't all Italian, but there was a lot of Italians in my
neighborhood.
It wasn't a problem, but in those days it was
the parents who had an accent that were not accepted. My dad
was accepted, and yet sometimes I always felt maybe he
wasn't accepted because he had an accent. He would say
cartoon rather than carton. You might have ten doller, that
was the French district. In my neighborhood, in my city,
there was the French neighborhood, the Irish neighborhood,
the Italian neighborhood. They all kind of joined because of
common interest, acceptance. New York City is full of
Harlem's, Italian Harlem, Polish Harlem, Black Harlem,
Spanish Harlem, they all tend to gravitate because of
acceptance of language barriers, food, customs, and all
those kind of things. Now that you mention it to some extent
although it was a mixed there was a distinct districting, I
guess, in the city. Fairmount was the Irish, Providence
Street was the Italians, and we had the French district, and
so forth. I remember French was the big thing and I always
remember it was down the street the band would come marching
up. That's what they would think in terms of their language,
speaking in French, but it would come out in English and it
would come out funny because it was in French. I guess if
you were translating it into French it was down the street
the band comes marching up but when you say that in English
it doesn't sound very good. Or a big thing was always,
they'd always say ten doller, it was never dollars, never
put an "s" on anything. I always thought that was funny. We
all went to the Italian church, St. Anthonys. One mass was

said in Italian, the children's mass was in English which
was at 8:30 A.M. In the French church only French was
spoken. Sacred Heart was where the Irish kids went. That's
how we used to play baseball as I mentioned earlier,
football, baseball. Fairmount played Cold Spring Park. Cold
Spring Park would play the Providence Street group, and even
though we always seemed to show up and play the game, we had
no leadership, we had no signed contracts. It was okay. This
week Providence Street is going to be playing Cold Spring
Park and we'll be playing at Cold Spring Park this week.
We'd all show up and we'd play; and we'd play for hours
until we got tired or somebody got hurt or a fight broke out
or something like that, and that was the determination of
the game. Sometimes I feel like today's living is so much
more restricted than we did. We didn't even have umpires.
But the greatest thrill was for people like myself growing
up playing sports, I loved sports, was to finally get to
high school where they gave us uniforms. God that was a
thrill, and today, they give uniforms out to five year
old's. The glove is bigger than the kid. By the time they
get to high school they get burned out. Many times as I sat
in the office, the football office here, when a young man
came to me and was gracious enough to tell me he was
quitting, I always encouraged them to come and talk to me
about it. The question was why. Was it something with the
program, something we can change, improve on? They'd always
say, I'm just burned out;, and I'll tell you what, I totally
understand. Because when you go through the midget
football, the junior football programs. We waited until the
day we got into high school so we could get a uniform. It
was fantastic you know, fantastic, but I think to some
extent we were deprived, but I think to some extent the kids
today are deprived of some of the things we had experienced,
too.
jr
Was there a family car?
rd
Yes, a big Studebaker with the monkey seats in it. Do you
know what a monkey seat is?
jr
The little seats on the side.
rd
You know these big funeral cars where they spring up, come
out of the front seat. They fold up in front of the back
seats. In order to put us all into the car my dad always had
a big Studebaker with the monkey seats, that's what we used
to all get in. And we had so many in the car, Joe, that
whenever we hit a hill he would put it in neutral and coast
for about two miles because that was saving him gas. Do you
remember that? We'd coast, we used to have a contest as to

how far we would coast.

jr
Who got to drive the car?
rd
Just my daddy, as I remember.

jr
When did you learn how?
rd
When did I learn how?

In the back yard, I guess.

jr
Sixteen, I mean did you get a drivers license?
rd
Yes, by backing the cars around. My dad would finally let us
back the car out of the garage, bring it to the front door
so he'd get in it and go to work. And that was a big thrill
for us to be able to learn how to back it out and bring it
to him. Getting on the road was quite an experience too. My
brothers and sisters all taught one another, we all taught
one another how to drive. My dad didn't have the patience to
do that sort of thing. It was always either the big
Studebaker or do you know what a rumble seat is? Remember a
rumble seat? We had a two door coupe. Rumble seat, and in
those days the rumble seats were very deep. We used to go to
games, football games at the high school. We'd pile about
twenty kids in the rumble seat and close it and lock it and
then when you go in you'd pay for two tickets or one, get in
the game, open the rumble seat and all these kids come
pouring out.

jr
Alright
lb
Just like the circus.
rd
It's the truth.

jr
Dangerous things, those rumble seats, when you hit a car.
rd
True, but those are the funny times, but I guess we all
basically all taught each other how to drive.

jr
How many bedrooms did you all have, for sleeping eleven
folks?

rd
Four bedrooms, and my two brothers slept upstairs with my
grandmother. She lived up on the third floor; she had an
apartment up there. My dad provided her the apartment and
my uncle next door owned a grocery store right next door,
Dispirito Groceries. We would bring the meals up every day
to my grandmother. That was their routine, so two had to
live up there and we all hated to move up there, not that we
didn't like our grandmother, but everything she had was in
moth balls. Food smelled of moth balls, cookies smelled of
moth balls, everything. Those were funny times, but every
time you walked into grandma's apartment, the moth balls
would kill you. No moth would dare go into that house; it
was dead, just coming to the front door.
jr
So the bedrooms were almost like dormitories.
rd
No, so we had two, four, six, eight, two upstairs, and one
lived downstairs in the family room. We made a room
downstairs in the cellar. Then, of course, we got some
breathing room; the war came and brothers went to war, and
so that opened things up. Nobody had to stay with grandma,
and that was funny.
jr
What about early romances?
along the line?

Did you discover girls somewhere

rd
I told my wife she was the only girl I ever dated in my life
and I'm going to stick with that story. Of course it's a
lie, but you wont tell her will you.
I had girlfriends in
the first grade. Used to go get peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches. That was when you knew she liked you. You could
go to her house and she'd make peanut butter and jelly
sandwich for you, oh yeah.
rj
It was like getting engaged.
rd
Oh, that was the big move.
If you could get a peanut butter
and jelly sandwich, you were in. I loved to dance, matter of
fact in my senior year one of the nicest awards I ever got
was the best dancer in the senior class. I loved to dance,
so, my mother would always encourage me, push me out the
door, to go to dances, at times we didn't want to, but she'd
push us out because my mother used to love to dance. In
those days, Joe, there very few personal involvements with
any one individual. We kind of hung around in packs. We
dated in packs, went to the movies in packs, we went to the
beach in packs. There were always three of four couples. We

never really paired off.
But we all kind of moved around in
packs; I guess that's probably the best way to describe it.
The YMCA always had the Saturday dances and then from the
YMCA's we would graduate to Sacred Heart dances and that was
one of the churches that had the older kids. They were
beyond high school kids so once you got out of high school
you graduated from the YMCA dance to the Sacred Heart
dances, and you never had a date, very seldom had a date, we
went there and we danced with everybody.
jr
That happened clear through into high school? So a steady
was something that wasn't, that only happened to some
isolated folks?
rd
Matter of fact, they were in the minority. Even proms, the
prom was always the big thing in those days. We'd go,
listen, go to after prom dinners to Vaughn Monroe's Place,
which was a place in Massachusetts, just across the border
from where we were, with the Meadows, which is where Vaughn
Monroe owned. Do you remember him?
jr
Oh, very well.
rd
And Lake Pearl, places like that. The prom was the big
thing; and again at proms we always kind of went in packs. I
guess you might call them cliques. The athlete's kind of
kept by themselves, and other people did, the guys who had
cars kept by themselves. None of us had cars. I think the
only time I really first got involved, I thought I had a
steady girlfriend. We went to a nearby lake; and one of the
skills or the macho things for us to show off to the girls
was to get on top of the slides and dive off the slides into
the very shallow water. The idea was as soon as you felt the
water was to arch your back; if you got scrapes on your
chest and stomach that was kind of a badge of courage
because that was how you escaped? Well, this young lady
that I was dating at the time was a terrific dancer, and
that's the reason why. We very seldom dated because of sex
or anything else, it was because she was a great dancer. So
you know you wanted to capture her time at the dance. Her
brother as he went to dive his foot slipped on the slick
metal slide and he fell the wrong way. It broke his neck and
he died and that was a very difficult time for us. The week
before it happened to me; that's why it was so dramatic.
When I went to dive I slipped and I realized what was
happening and I put my two arms out in front. And I went
wham. I went in. They had to pull me out. I mean I actually
I think I dug a hole. I would probably have drowned because
I was stunned. But I didn't panic. The next week her
brother died doing the same thing.
Isn't that wild, but

those are the kinds of crazy things that happened. It was a
very crazy thing to do.
jr
So you went out for football when you were a freshman? In
the tenth grade? Junior high you didn't play football?
rd
Well, we played football all the time in the neighborhood,
the pick-up stuff. I played in high school for a year, then
I transferred to Catholic school, St. Charles, for one year,
and then I transferred. I said I made a mistake. I didn't
like the disciplines and the things that were going on
there, it was run by the brothers, some brothers and they
were tough. I mean they'd put you against the walls, crack
your head against the wall, all those kinds of things. They
were very tough disciplinarians. I just didn't care for it,
so I transferred back to high school. I was mature when I
was in the ninth grade, physically, enough to play. As I
think back it's almost unbelievable that I played for a
semi-pro team when I was in the ninth grade.
I was a
running back. I played one year and then I went to the high
school and played the years in high school; and then I
played semi-pro on the weekends when I was in college; and
boy in those if you ever got caught doing that it was your
eligibility. You know we were always looking for some ways
to earn some money. It was always the big rivalry, we never
played during the season but after the season we always had
these big rivalries between the Slatersville Bulls and the
Mules, whatever they were, and they would draw 10,000 people
to a game. We made good money to play after the season under
assumed names. They all knew who we were but we were, of
course, all under assumed names, and that's how I got
recruited for college. The college coach came down and saw
me play semi-pro. He said, I got to have this kid, and I got
a scholarship to the University of Rhode Island by playing
as a ninth grader in semi-pro.
jr
That's when he saw you? As a ninth grader and then three
years later when you finished high school he was waiting for
you?
rd
Isn't that something. I impressed him so much because of the
early age and then I was successful in high school, so that
just solidified, and then I went to prep school before I
went to college. He didn't see me until four years later,
but he still wanted me. _ _ _ _ (#189) _ _ _ coach from
Rhode Island, I went to Marianapolis Prep because I needed a
second year of a language to get into the University. I had
one year of Italian, one year of Latin, one year of French
and Spanish, but I never had two years of anything. We
didn't have any counselors in those days. There was somebody

designated but that was about all, if you went to that
person, but we got no direction at all. So I have one year
of all these, so I had to go to Marianapolis to take a
second year of French to get into the University of Rhode
Island.
jr
Do you recall how much you were paid by the semi-pro teams?
rd
I didn't get paid in the
the Mules. We played the
Slatersville Red Raiders
because in those days we
was a lot of money.

ninth grade, but I did get paid for
games. I played for the
and it was a unique experience,
got about $75 to $100 dollars which

lb
Per game?
rd
Per game. Yes, plus all the beer you could drink at half
time.
jr
At half time, what a terrible time.
rd
Well we had to drink something at half time. They were
drinking beer, I said, well, I might as well drink beer too.
They were crazy, practice and drink beer after. Crazy. There
were three of us from the University of Rhode Island that
played and we were all from the neighborhood, from the area,
so they all knew who we were, but we played under assumed
names and we played two or three games after the season
right on through Thanksgiving, and we'd make ourselves two
or three hundred dollars.
jr
10,000 fans, wow.
rd
Oh God it was packed, and they would steal us blind. The
promoters, when they would come to dish out the money,
they'd say about five hundred people were there. What are
you talking about the place was packed, 10,000 people out
there. We got so mad at the guy. I'm not saying who because
I wasn't a part of it, but his car was rolled into the
river. He was unbelievable, he stole us blind. We were the
only three college guys that played the rest of the guys
were guys that never went to college but wanted to continue
playing football. We played at night, night time in
Blackstone, Massachusetts, which was just over the border
from Nounsocket. Nounsocket was right on the Massachusetts
border.
I mean we would draw all kinds of people, the place

would be packed. That's how we earned some money for
Christmas other than the big job at Christmas time which was
to work for the Post Office delivering mail in high school.
Everybody would take off two, three days from high school
and deliver mail. It was an acceptable thing, the high
school knew that, and all you had to do was show a slip that
you were working at the Post Office. We'd work like five
days and that was big money delivering mail. One kid was
caught. He used to get done early. He would sneak out early
and weeks later they caught him. He was throwing his mail
down into the sewer. I'll never forget that.
jr
I used to do that with hand bills when I was kid.
rd
Imagine that.
jr
Merchant would pay to take them to the house.
rd
This was mail, I mean kids didn't know, they should have
gone to jail, right, federal offense.
jr
That's a felony.
rd
They let him off.
It was the same kid, matter of fact, he
was a Jewish boy, and the reason why I bring it up is
because one Saturday we were playing and once the game
started these people came walking out in the middle of the
game, right on the field. You can imagine, this is a high
school game, hundreds of people, all of a sudden these two
people walk right on the field, grab this football player
and escort him right of the field. It was the Jewish kid, it
was high holiday, and he wasn't to play. He couldn't play,
so they ran on the field, grabbed him pulled him off the
field. The kid was so embarrassed. We couldn't figure out
what they were doing, but that's what it was; it was one of
the high holidays, Jewish holidays, and he was not supposed
to be playing that Saturday. They took him off the field
right in the middle of a game, crazy.
lb
I worked at the Post Office but they didn't let girls
deliver the mail. We had to work in the Post Office and
sort the mail.
rd
Is that right? I didn't know any girls were hired. It was
all the guys, I mean that I was aware of, and you were
picked. You had to go up in a waiting room and we happened

to know Mr. Shevrolin who is our mailman, whose son played
with us on all the teams we played on, so we were the
privileged few.
jr
The fix was in.
rd
The fix was in. Mr. Shevrolin would pick us out. It was
kind of hard work because you'd have to make two deliveries.
It was good money.
jr
So in the tenth grade you went out for all the varsity
sports in high school?
rd
Yes, football, basketball, baseball, played all three.
jr
Did you make varsity, did you get some playing time fairly
early? Football, yes?
rd
Basketball, I was a starter in all three.
jr
In the tenth grade?
rd
Yes, I had this maturity because I played semi-pro in ninth
grade, and I thought I was going to be a big guy. I just
stopped growing. I think, gee, you know ninth grade when you
think about it, playing with guys who were beyond high
school and beyond that. I had no problems even at the
University of Rhode Island. I started at football and
baseball, the two sports I played at the university.
jr

I was ninety-eight pounds in the ninth grade.
rd
I was 185 pounds.
jr
Wow, good night,
rd
In the ninth grade, I thought I was going to be.
lb
So you reached your growth early.
rd

I did. I was one of the few kids at that time did any weight
lifting at all. It was purely by accident because in those
days it was not the thing to do because you become muscle
bound and you wouldn't be as agile and flexible. I used to
lift weights down at the Y, not to any great extent, but I
probably had about a 2. fat fold on my whole body. I just
didn't have very much fat, I was lean. Of course you can't
tell now, but I was lean in those days.
jr
You know John L. Sulliman and his top weight was only 185
pounds.
rd
I played college football and 195. See I only changed about
10 pounds from the time that I was in ninth grade till I was
in college. Amazing.
jr
Amazing.
rd
Yeah I matured, some kids mature physically obviously at
different ages, as well as mentally and psychologically I
don't know about the other two but physically I did mature
at that time. I had no problems as an athlete; my only
problem as an athlete at the University of Rhode Island was
in those days it was a two platoon and you were only
supposed to play offense or defense, and I was very upset
because I always was able to play 50-60 minutes and I had a
verbal disagreement with the coach, Vic Palladino. I'll
never forget his name. He said, I suppose you think you are
better? I said, yes I am. If you give me an opportunity,
I'll prove it and he said, okay big mouth, I'll give you a
chance, and I played 60 minutes from that time on. I proved
myself and I was a two way performer, played offense and
defense, kicked off extra points, field goals. I always had
those skills. I was a catcher in baseball. Those are skill
positions; we had to have good eye hand coordination.
Obviously I matured physically early so I had no problems
with that at all. Even when I went to prep school, for
example, Marianapolis Prep School is run by the Marian
fathers, a Catholic prep school, but they were very strong
in football. They played nothing but college freshmen,
Boston College, Boston University, Yale Freshmen, we played
most of the big schools. University of Rhode Island
freshmen, University of Connecticut freshmen. So prep school
at those times were strictly farm systems for the colleges,
and the coach from the University of Rhode Island sent me
there for a tryout. In those days, it was the tryout. You
went there for three days and you played football for three
days.

Robert Dispirito Interview
This is Joe Riggs and Leah Brown interviewing Bob Dispirito on
June 9, 1992. This is our third in the series of tapes about
Coach DiSpirito's career. When you got out of junior high and
went into high school you were talking about how you played semipro ball, and then you started playing high school ball. Was it
the kind of the transition from being a kid to being a man
playing big time football, amd was it gradual or was it sort of
an instant thing?
rd
I don't know how I can define that Joe. It was just kind of
a natural move into the transition of playing that one year
which is kind of unusual at that stage really. A tenth
grader playing and a they accepted me, and I didn't think it
was any big deal, and it was just kind of a natural
transition. My size was and my abilities, coordination, was
set at that time. Some peoples coordination comes later;
mine came obviously a little bit earlier, and it was just a
natural transition into it.
jr
Had you played more than pick-up ball previous to that, in
the junior high years, formal football?
rd
No formal.
jr
It was all pick up style.
rd
It was always east side vs. west side and that kind of
thing.
jr
Playing Saturdays and Sundays.
rd
Saturday, right.
It's surprising everyone would show up.
We'd make arrangements. Next week we are going to play Cold
Spring Park, and they would show up.
jr
It was tackle football?
rd
Oh yes.
jr

The whole business, that was when you were talking about

everyone had a little piece of the uniform or extra shirts.
rd
We all had to get there a little bit early in order to get
the lines on the field. We played near a sand bank and we
use to get the light sand; that's how we made our stripes
for the football field. So we had to get there about a half
hour before game time to line off the field. It was done
with sand not chalk as you know it today.
jr
And you had referees?
rd
No.
jr
No referees.
lb
Just arguments about.
rd
Yes, who made the first down. It was amazing, very few
encounters, fights.
Usually we ended the game because of an
injury; someone broke his arm or something like that, or a
shoulder pad. I look back at it today and I wonder as to how
we survived all that, yet how much we enjoyed it. I guess
being a coach the rest of my life later on. I used to have
young men come into me and tell me they wanted to drop out
of football because they were burned out. It was quite the
opposite for us, the expectation of playing on a team and
getting a uniform was just burning inside of us. It was
quite the opposite. We played so much informal athletics
that we did not burn out and we were not over supervised,
that sort of thing. My father would say, what happened, what
did you do today, play football, did you have fun, yeah I
had fun, that was all he'd want to know. He'd never come to
see us or anything like that.
jr
So the first year of formal football was the tenth grade?
rd
Yes, it was.
lb
When you played the semi-pro you were really a kid and the
rest of the team much older.
rd
Older, high school graduates.
lb

How did you manage or what kind of effect did those big guys
have?
rd
I knew so many of them because they were also part of that
growing up period; we all kind of played against one
another.
lb
Age didn't matter.
rd
Age never mattered, size never mattered, and I used to play
with the big boys, in a sense. So they knew of my abilities
and asked me to play. I think I only played like three
games, and actually that was the first time I ever put
equipment on.
jr
Then that was the first time you were ever coached, in
football?
rd
No they didn't coach. You just played a position, nobody
really coached it.
jr
Was it platoon?
rd
In those days?

No.

jr
Where did you play on defense?
rd
I was a line backer.
jr
Aah, I know.
rd
I was a line backer and an offensive guard and fullback.
Most of my high school days I was a fullback offensively; I
didn't play the line until I went to college. That's another
story.
jr
We'll get to that. You had the same coach in high school for
all three years in football?
rd
Well I played at Monsacket High School, which is a public
school for one year, then I transferred to Mt. St. Charles,

which was a Catholic school for one year, I didn't like that
so I transferred back to Monsacket High School. So I played
with Coach Savaria for two years. But with a year in
between at Mt. st. Charles.
jr
And you had a different, obviously different coach there.
rd
Yes.
jr
Were you at Mt. St. Charles because of your athletic
abilities?
rd
They sought me.
jr
They hustled you then?
rd
Yes they did.
today.

Typical catholic school.

They still do it

jr
Not uncommon.
rd
Not uncommon. No. The catholic coaches go around and scout
a lot of young kids and will offer them scholarships to the
school. That's what I had.
jr
And in those cases it didn't have anything to do with
districting I mean,
rd
Oh no.
jr
No.

You could live anywhere.

rd
I also played on a hockey team in high school at Mt. st.
Charles and they, today, they've won five consecutive state
titles. They are still very powerful. It's a boarding
school and they brought a lot of young men in from Canada;
so when I played we had a front line of all Canadians and
then they had the goons back there, that was me, and whoever
else. I remember Brother Elard would say, Dispirito, don't
worry about the puck just hit the man. So we were goons and
we would get the puck to these Canadians and they could
skate up. That's why I thoroughly enjoy watching the

Penguins because I played hockey all my life, not very good
but I did know how to body check.
lb
Transfer from one sport to another.
rd
Very little transfer of skills.
jr

I refereed high school basketball for several years and they
had goons, they had some large people who were football
players fundamentally and were second stringers on the
basketball teams until they wanted to injure the other teams
star player and then they'd send the thug in, and as an
official I had to deal with some semi-violent people, of
course I kept my eye on them and once I'd refereed in the
circuit then I knew the coaches who would do that kind of
stuff.
rd
I don't think I've ever encountered that in basketball, you
know from my experience.
jr
It was in the deliberate fouling stuff and hurting people.
Well West Virginia what do they know.
rd
You're right.
jr
Were these coaches significant influences on you for later
years?
rd
Oh, yes. My high school coach, Coach Gus Savaria. He was a
Lehigh graduate. He was a physicist and he taught Physics.
He was an engineer and a very bright man. Matter of fact, he
always called me Rob rather than Bob, and that's what I
ended up calling my son, because I always liked that. I
always preferred to be called Rob than I did Bob, or Bobbie
which was basically what most people called me in New
England. He was a great influence. Because I respected his
academic as well as athletic abilities, I kind of followed
in the same path. He was a very interesting man. I think the
last time I did get to see him was so disappointing. When I
got home to Rhode Island it was usually a very fast two
weeks at the ocean with the family so all the family came to
the ocean rather than us try to see people in Rhode Island.
I kept putting off seeing coach and I understand he was not
feeling well and he was declining so I went over to see him
and it was so disappointing in that when I walked in his
wife said he won't recognize you, he doesn't recognize

people. And when he came out that's the first thing he said,
Rob how ya been? Good to see ya fella.
That's the way he
used to talk. I was ,kind of thrilled and taken aback by
that. We were playing Lehigh, I say "we", I was at Bucknell
at the time, and we were playing Lehigh. No, I'm sorry I got
to go back, that's wrong. It was here we were playing
Lehigh. We were going to play Lehigh but that fell through
when I was at Bucknell but when I was here at Slippery Rock
we played Lehigh. That prompted me even further to see him
because that was his alma mater. We talked and his wife said
it had been years since he had been that coherent. We
discussed football, we discussed Lehigh, we discussed all
these things, but it was sad to see him in his declining
years. I remember taking him in a car. He loved to be taken
and driven around town looking at the old spots. We'd go up
to Berry Field which is where we played our football and
baseball. That's the last time I saw him, he died shortly
after that, but he was a great influence on my life without
a question. He was never just a jock coach, if there is such
a thing, he was an academically oriented man, very bright
man, and I think that always kind of stuck to the back of my
mind, that that was the way to do it. I never really wanted
to go to big time football, because I didn't want to just
coach, I wanted to teach and coach, I think he was the
influence in that.
jr
So you played four sports, hockey, basketball, baseball, and
football.
Did you have the same passion for the other
sports as you did for football?
rd
Baseball.
Baseball and football were my two passions.
Coach Savaria coached both, and we were very successful in
both. My senior year we only had six points scored on us the
entire season that was against LaSalle which was a catholic
school which was a class above us; and they were the only
team that ever scored six points or any points on us the
entire year, so we had an unbelievably great football team.
And then in baseball we won the class B championship and won
the state title, so we had some great athletes corning
through at that particular time. Obviously we have great
memories of going through, it was funny it was the sane
group of fellows who went through pretty much the three
years. I remember my junior year. Bob Dispirito, BD. I
remember the newspaper sports editor writing Bob Dispirito,
Big Disappointment. I was never so crushed in my life. I was
so embarrassed this was in the paper. I wasn't having a good
year in my junior year. I wasn't hitting up to expectations.
I always felt it was very cruel of him to do that. That
always stuck in my mind, and I would never do something like
that especially publicly, because I remember how embarrassed
I was. That really motivated me. The second year I hit well
over 400 and made all state. I had to go back and thank Greg

Green later for motivating me in my athletic career. He
didn't know what I meant but I knew what I meant. He said,
well, thank you. I could have said if you hadn't written
that article on me I wouldn't have been as motivated.
lb
But you don't approve of that kind of motivation?
rd
No, I never once ever as a coach tried to embarrass a young
man, never. In football I was not a yeller, not a screamer
and I could take a young man next to me during a game, we
could be talking on the sidelines and I could be literally
chewing him out but you wouldn't know it. There was never
any show of emotions. It was just dealing with what had to
be corrected. I always tried to keep the emotions out of it
because in order to solve any problems you've got to deal
with the problem not the emotions. As soon as the emotions
get in the way it clouds the issue so you never really solve
the problem. That's always been my philosophy, so a lot of
those little seeds that were planted way back became part of
my philosophy. I can't ever think of embarrassing a young
man. I just couldn't do it, it's just not the way I like to
be treated, so I didn't treat anybody else that way.
I
think sometimes when you get carried away with your position
or your importance and you think that people you are dealing
with are not as good as you are or they are not in the same
class as you are, therefore they tend to abuse them but I
think if someone deals with anyone on the same level as they
feel they are on and I think the treatment will be the very
same treatment a very humane kind of treatment. Most people
don't like to be called idiots so why do I feel I have the
authority to call somebody else an idiot. In football we
used to call them animals, studs, those were very offensive
to me. I don't use those terms.
lb
Do coaches who act in that way are they feeling the
pressures from above? Is that why the behavior?
rd
Well, I suppose so but I have pressures too.
I have the
same pressures. I've seen see Mr. Savaria and I can't ever
consider him calling him anything else but Mr. Savaria or
coach; but he was so bright and so humane. He'd do the same
thing. He'd very seldom explode on anyone, but his look and
his feelings would penetrate you. He didn't even have to say
a word, but he also knew that when you made mistakes that
you probably felt as bad or worse than anyone else that
makes mistakes, so why remind you. Why chew somebody out in
baseball if they made an error? They know they made an
error. It's not going to do any good; it's over. It can't be
rectified so why embarrass someone. In football, things
happen so fast I don't think you have time for the emotions.

Of all the time we used to have, just a little bit of that
time was used to correct what had to be corrected. After the
game you can pull somebody into the office and discuss it,
but very seldom during the game. It was very distracting to
see a coach running up and down the sideline yelling and
screaming and he's got everybody confused. Looking at Mr.
Savaria, all the years that I played with him, and in my
career, a team is pretty much a reflection of the coach. The
temperament of the team, the way that you approach it, if
you allow somebody to play dirty. Kids knew on my team that
if you threw a punch you were out for the game, period.
Not for that play, you are out because that was a reflection
on the entire team. Everything they did I told them as soon
as you join my team you lost your individuality. Your
identity was with the entire team, the entire program. I've
always felt very strongly about that. The only rule I ever
had for my players was that if you embarrass the university
or the team, then we will provide some incentives to correct
it. That was the only thing I ever told my kids. I never
said these are the do's, these are the don'ts. That kind of
hogties you to a certain decision making process that I
didn't like; therefore I used to always set up a group of
players which represented the freshmen, sophomore, junior,
and senior years, and my captains, and they were my
discipline group. So if anybody got in trouble they had to
go through that group. I had the final decision but I never
had to change it, never had to change the decision that the
kids made, but I had the final decision. They knew that I
would listen and nobody else, no one from the rest of the
staff would be allowed to be in on these meetings, but I
found out that the players themselves, the peer treatment
and justice was tougher than anything that I could have
given them. I always followed that philosophy. I didn't have
any trouble with my boys because of that. I had to let them
know what we were all about when representing us as a
discipline committee. They assumed that responsibility.
jr
Was the upshot of that through your coaching years the
people who really couldn't make the team effort usually quit
before you had to kick them out, from the peer pressure? I
mean when they weren't putting out, you know, giving it
their very, very best and playing up to their talents, the
guys they were playing with all knew that and they would put
pressure on them.
rd
You knew guys were drinking during the season, smoking
during the season, carousing during the season not taking
the games very seriously. I think, at least in my experience
at the University of Rhode Island, was that the peer
pressures were the ones who I think solved most of those
cases. I happened to be in the position. I was fortunate in
the four years at the University of Rhode Island I was

freshman captain. I was appointed a captain for one game
against Springfield, I remember as a sophomore, then I was a
captain my junior and senior years so I was always in a
position of authority in a sense dealing with disciplinarian
problems, and I always took that very seriously, so as
captain if some of my teammates were making a fool of
themselves in some way or breaking the training rules I felt
I had an obligation to talk to them and I did. I probably
would not have done that if I hadn't been their captain, but
I felt that obligation, so I transferred that into my
philosophy of coaching so my ball players my kids would do
the same thing.
jr
So it was very clear that they knew who was breaking
training. Were your training rules absolutely ridged or was
there some flexibility to them?
rd
Always flexibility. I never liked to put myself into a
corner. I would just say that if you in anyway as a
representative of the university or the team acted in an
adversary manner then we would deal with the problem. That
was all I would tell them. They would go before a committee.
Sometimes it was a first offense. sometimes it was a second
or a third, and you dealt with it differently.
jr
Is it fair to say that coaches with personality problems,
the ones who explode on the side lines and are always
berating the youngsters in public, that they are an
exception in the coaching ranks, or are there a fair share
of those people?
rd
There are a very fair share of them, especially in Division
One, where there is big money. The pressure is there and
usually get those kinds of reactions from the very young
coaches who are trying to make it and trying to make an
impression on the coaches. Again the head coach sets the
tempo. The way the program should go. if he tells, like I've
already told my coaches, I don't want any swearing on the
field. I just don't like it. When you hear me swear then you
can swear, I just don't like it. Now I'm not talking about
being a holier then thou, but its very demeaning. I never
liked to be sworn at. So that way I set the tempo right off
the bat, and if some kids would come out with a swear word
they took a lap immediately. I wanted them to know I
wouldn't tolerate it, a fight and they were gone. What I
tried not do, where some coaches, I think Joe, fail is that
when the ball player makes a mistake they pull him out
immediately and then kind of chew him out on the sidelines.
I always felt that it was almost like a gotcha. Everyone was
thinking mistakes. Since they were afraid to make mistakes

they were thinking mistakes and I thought that was a very
negative way to think about your performance that if I make
a mistake he's going to pull me right out. If somebody made
a mistake I would make a play or two, if it was consecutive
then we'd pull them out.
I think Slippery Rock University
was very fortunate to have the staff that was put together.
I can't think of one staff member that I ever had here who
treated anyone other than very humane They were super guys.
They were all teachers. This is why, the different concept
of a full time coach, they have no bridges with the faculty
and the academic program, and that's why I enjoy this kind
of system vs. the high pressure coaching that goes with the
big programs. It's funny how these little seeds that were
planted as I go back way back in my high school or junior
high school or whatever.
jr
When I watch athletics on the television it seems to me that
whoever is guiding the cameras will always give far to much
time to the explosive coaches and that the camera is on the
coach when he takes someone out and chews them out or he
like Bobby Knight throws the chair across the floor or
whatever, that it really takes away from the game and the
abilities of the kids. And it becomes a kind of negative
side show of some kind when you watch the NCAA tournaments.
You know, say the coaches who are famous for explosion get a
lot of camera time and I think that's terrible, personally I
think its terribly unfortunate.
rd
I do too.
It takes away from what the game is all about.
High publicity, big money. They're paid high salaries,
extended contracts. They get paid well and they feel that
since they're being paid well that they can abuse them like
that. I'd rather be low paid and be respected than go
through that nonsense, but coaches that are on that level do
get an awful lot of money, they get compensated quite well
financially compared to what we were making. We were making
subminimum wages compared to what they were.
jr
Was there preferential treatment for athletes in high school
or college when you were there as a student and player, no
one working out any deals or cutting students any breaks or
anything, because some institutions were kind of notorious
for that where they had selected teachers and those teachers
passed the athletes and all that sort of thing. It's a rap
that athletics have had for a long time.
rd
I really first saw that for the first
Western Pennsylvania football. That's
in the high schools as I recruited in
because Western Pennsylvania has very

time when I got into
where I first saw it
western Pennsylvania,
high profile football

programs. One time I got three all-state athletes from one
particular high school. It was my first year here and the
president said go after them and I did. Their academic
achievements up to this point weren't very sound. We were
going to take them into a special program and we did. They
obviously all flunked out. It was a waste of their time, a
waste of my time, a waste of school time, and we never did
it again. That happened my very first year here. I remember
one of the coaches, Bill Yeomans, who was working with the
defense at Bucknell with me. He was a central Pennsylvania
native.

He used to tell me, because I was new to Western
Pennsylvania, he had to get out of high school coaching
because of the pressures. I said, Bill you are very
successful, and he was very successful, but he said, you
know they begin to bet on the games, and they were betting
on the games in terms of whether you won or lost, and then
once you developed a good football team then they began to
bet on point spread, so even though you won if you didn't
win by enough points it wasn't enough. He said things like,
I go down for coffee before the game or meet the boys just
informally before the game down at the restaurant, and
people would say, don't forget, Bill, I got my mortgage bet
on this game. I'm sure they were just kidding, but there was
a lot of money placed on it and there were a lot of
pressures. He decided to get away from all that and he got
the job at Bucknell and then decided to go back to high
school and got extremely frustrated. I guess he got into
some trouble mishandling a young man and he got out of
coaching. The next time I see Bill he's an insurance
executive, very successful, and I said, Bill how did you
make the transition? He said, it was no transition. He said,
the hours are the same, you got to go out and recruit the
right people for your district. The only difference is in
insurance you get paid for your time, in education you
don't, so now I got a lot of money. He's very successful but
it was interesting to see where his career went.
jr
In the high schools when there was a youngster who was a
good athlete was there money around to get his dad a job and
move him closer to the school?
rd
No, we didn't have that kind of football program. Matter of
fact very few football players or baseball players went on
to college when I was in high school, very few. The great
years that we had in high school we were not only undefeated
but we only had six points scored on us, and that's unheard
of in football circles. I think of that team five of us went

to college, which was probably the most they've ever had. I
think three of us finished, but it wasn't that kind of
football as you see it today, where people were moving
families into districts. I've seen it even here in Slippery
Rock where a family was moving in the district to improve
the basketball program, for example, and that sort of thing.
They didn't do that in those days. The only rewards you got
for playing athletics in high school when I went to school
was the little recognition you would get from the community,
from the girls. You could get more dates, but it wasn't
thought of in derogatory terms. In some way some athletes
and football players are thought of today studs or whatever
they want to call them.

jr
Was the support for all varsity athletics kind of uniform in
the community, that is to say did they attract crowds for
hockey and baseball as well as football?
rd
Yes they did, because that was ' before television, so if you
wanted to see a football game you had to go see a high
school football game. A Thanksgiving football game was like
five thousand people. You couldn't put anybody else in the
stadium, and most of your high school games were always well
attended, especially by students, which is not always the
case today. That's one of the problems we have here at the
university, for example, to get students interested enough
to go to football games. They support basketball.

jr
The same thing is true of cultural events here.
stunning stuff.

We've had

rd
That's worse.
It's unbelievable and I know people over in
the dance department are constantly frustrated because they
put in so much work and they have great shows and the
student turnout, unless it is required by a class, it's hard
to get them there.
I agree.

jr
I taught at Lehigh and at Lehigh football games didn't
attract very many folks, basketball didn't attract anybody.
rd
But wrestling.

jr
You couldn't get in if you wanted too. To watch the
wrestling match you had better get there very, very early
because eventually the place would fill up with standing
room people, and you couldn't get into the building. But
wrestling was wow, of course they won NCAA Championships.

rd
Oh, they were outstanding actually. But even at Bucknell,
even on our best attended days, at halftime they were all
gone. They were gone to their parties. They'd come for the
half and then they go to their parties.
It was hard.
jr
I was at West Virginia University as a student when Hot Rod
Hundley was a freshman. The field house seated four
thousand, and at six- thirty or six o'clock, when they had
the freshmen game, they'd have four thousand people watch
Hundley because of his reputation in high school; and then
when the varsity played at eight o'clock there would be five
hundred left. Thirty five hundred would take a walk after
they saw him because if you had seen Hundley you'd seen it
all.
rd
That's amazing, but you know it's one of the things that I'm
trying to work on very hard this year for homecoming. I've
been very involved. This years homecoming is the parade of
champions. I'm bringing back thirty-six champion teams,
football, the sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three, seventytwo, seventy-three, seventy-four, seventy-six, football
teams back, plus the championship teams in tennis, women's
tennis, the championship team in soccer, plus the original
Rocklettes. Some people tend to think that pep rallies are
dead, it's passe, it's corny, and I look at it from a
different aspect. I look at it as a great tool for
motivation to get people interested in your programs. So I
worked very hard on this. Matter of fact, I'm going to a
meeting today on homecoming. They're meeting all during the
summer. The point I'm trying to make is that when we had the
good teams and we were winning, we were like 34 games at
home in a row without losing, kids would graduate from here
who never saw us lose so that has to be a positive influence
on the attendance. Again it has to go beyond that. What we
are planning for homecoming is having it in front of the
library. It's going to be in front of the quadrangle here.
We have a laser show. I'm trying to bring back members of
the past teams. I want them to speak. We used to have
Shirley Comstock. She was one of the original cheerleaders
and she would get before the groups during those days up at
the stadium, that's like five thousand people, I mean that
stadium was almost full and she'd go out and she'd lead the
students in cheering. I said to myself initially this is not
going to work but the kids loved her and they couldn't wait
for Shirley to come back year after year. It was nostalgia
and it was attractive. Then we brought in the entertainers.
That was entertaining at homecoming. I guess what I'm trying
to do is to provide some motivational factor. People just
don't come because you ask them to come. They have to want
to come. I can ask for a hundred percent from an athlete,
and until the moment he decides to give me a hundred percent

of his effort, there is not much I can do about it. So we
are trying to bring champions back this year. It's going to
be interesting to see how this works out. The people are not
turning out to games. A third of the people at the games are
students, the rest are parents and friends.
lb
That's a big change I know when I was in high school and
college we always went to the games. I didn't know that much
about football and sometimes we froze to death, but we went
it was a great social occasion.
rd
There are so many alternatives today. It seems to me that
they have so many other things to do. TV is so saturated
with football. If you are a football fan, for example,
between high school as well as college as well as pro unless
you give them something to identify with, I don't think they
are going to come around. That's what I'm trying to do this
year, see if it works. We are working hard at it to see if
we can reestablish that; that's what we had here. In high
school on a Saturday afternoon that was the place to be.
Unless you were working that was the place to be. You went
to the game. Thanksgiving morning if you weren't at the game
you were kind of left out. But there are so many other
alternatives. I didn't have a car to drive around in. I
didn't have any money in my pocket to that extent. Life was
a lot more simple.
jr
Do you remember teachers from your high school years?
rd
Yes. I remember the one who told me that if I promised not
to go to college he would pass me in Spanish. I said I'm not
going to college; and four years later I was a featured
speaker at the sports dinner, and he was sitting there. It
was one of the greatest achievements of my life to see him
there and have him see me and I was the featured speaker. I
was president of the senior class. At the university I was
captain and all those kind of things, and here is the guy
who said he would pass me in Spanish if I would not go to
college. There was also another one sitting there. He was a
speech teacher that said I wasn't college material so it was
interesting they were both there.
You know sometimes you
need a negative motivation. Sometimes a positive. They were
negative. I remember those two in particular but I also
remember some very good ones.
jr
Do you remember some for their teaching style who are just
excellent in the classroom?
rd

Yes, and I think I reflect that today. I think that in order
to be a good teacher you've got to show a lot of motivation,
same as coaching or whatever. It makes no difference to me.
I think I always felt that when I walk into a classroom, I'm
on stage. I've got to be interesting. I've got to make it
interesting, and I change the pace as much as I can. I can't
stand at the podium and just drum on and on and on because I
hated those kinds of lectures. I tried to break it up as
much as possible by getting class participation. I put them
in circles. I don't like rows in classrooms. As soon as I
get in I say, get some space. I want to see everybody's face
I don't want these people hiding behind people in rows.
Those are the people that I enjoyed being in their
classroom, the ones who made it interesting. Some with
stories I could relate to and entertaining. There is nothing
wrong with telling something humorous once in a while to get
their interest and that's exactly the what I've had in my
teaching career.
jr
Did you see any science teachers that were ham actors?
rd
Yes, Coach, Mr. Savaria, physics. I hated physics. He got us
through physics but he would make it so simple for us. He
would relate it to things that we could relate to and
understand. Obviously he didn't give us grades. I can assure
you coach didn't give us grades because he felt that
education was number one. He was a Lehigh graduate. He was
very proud of that. But he was so good. I found it very
difficult.
lb
So he was a master teacher as well as coach?
rd
Oh yes.
lb
Were there any subjects that you did enjoy in high school?
rd
That I did not enjoy?
lb
That you did, anything new.
rd
I had an language teacher. One that I thought was
outstanding. I can't even think of her name right now. A
French teacher who I enjoyed tremendously because she never
spoke a word of English, and would give all her assignments
in French. We'd come in saying we couldn't understand the
assignment. She taught us after a while .then if we didn't
start understanding our assignment we were just going to

fail this class cold. So she forced us to think French, if
you will, because down the street the band comes marching
up. When you're structuring French it's not in the same form
as we know English today. Anyway everything was in French
and I enjoyed her. We thought she was really eccentric and
she used to laugh; but by midterm we all loved her. She was
a great individual. But she was persistent; she persisted
and prevailed.
jr
Di d everyone take languages?
rd
Yes. As I look back I had Italian, Spanish, French, and
Latin. And I think we'd better start doing that in our
education today. I think we need to be bilingual to some
extent.
jr
Were there classes that the athletes steered clear of or
males steered clear of like typing?
rd
No, it was not in our curriculum, that was in the business
course.
I was in the general studies class course. Typing
was not a part of it.
jr
In high school you mean?
rd
Yes, it was not a part of it.
jr
So you sort of majored in something in high school?
rd
Yes, you were in business, you were in general. Business and
general, and college.
I think college was the third. I went
through the general and still went in to college. I don't
know exactly the name. I don't think that was the term. The
title that they used, but there were three classifications.
We never learned how to type, but we had to take chemistry,
physics and biology.
jr
So there was a core curriculum?
rd
We didn't have any electives. This is what you take. When I
went to college it was exactly the way it was when I went to
high school. I went through four years of college at the
University of Rhode Island and never had one elective, not
one elective. I tried to get into one elective, an art

class, and the class was so jammed he said, if you are not a
major, you're out. When we were in Physical Education at the
University of Rhode Island, we minored in Biology and
Psychology, a double minor with a major in Physical
Education. That was it. It was all set for us. I never had
an elective but I survived.
lb
Probably more than a hundred and twenty-eight hours.
rd
The hardest thing was that in zoology, for example, and in
kinesiology and even physiology we were in with some of the
medical students; and some of the guys were grading on
curves, and we were getting killed. I guess the one memory
I'll always have about zoology is when we were all given a
cat right from the beginning; and by the end of the semester
there was nothing left of this cat because we dissected it
section by section from the digestive system right on to the
nervous system. We used to take it back to the fraternity
house and work on it there. We all had a cat name and by the
time we ended up dissecting it that was the end of it, but
it was a it was difficult in a sense there were a lot of
pre-med students and they were hurting us I mean to get a
"C" was to be like a triple "A". To get a "D" was
satisfactory to get through these classes but we had no
choice as to what we could take.
jr
I went to a catholic university night school in San Antonio
and same deal. They had all these professional people taking
these basic English courses for refresher courses, and when
they all walked in you say there goes the "A's". Another
group comes in, all these professional women, there go all
the "B's"; and there were just "C's" left if you were good
enough to get one.
rd
There was a certain amount of stereotyping too. I remember
going into an English class and the English prof asking how
many physical education majors or phys. ed. majors as they
would say and we'd raise our hands. He'd say, only two of
you are going to pass this class. He'd say, how many
engineer's? I don't like engineer's either so only a couple
of you are going to pass. This is from the very beginning.
You know he was right, and he was tough.
jr
He had a lot of experience but he should never have said
that. That's terrible, terribly unprofessional.
rd
Yes. There was one educational prof. I remember him very
distinctly. His name was Dr. Casey and he disliked football

players and athletes in general and physical education. They
were kind of all bundled into one, and he said that he's
never known a physical education major or a football player
to warrant more than a "C" in this class, so we're fighting
to get through the "C". But we had to take him like three
times, and the third time, the final time was the senior
year course. He knew who we were by that time. He'd already
had us twice and we'd already gotten our two "C's" from him,
and he said, this is the last class and I'm going to give
you an opportunity. If there is something on your chest and
you'd really like to get it off next class period instead of
meeting I'll have office hours you come in. I want you to
talk to me about it. So we talked about it. Four of us, and
it's funny, out of the four that went in there I'm the only
one that didn't end up with a Ph.D. The rest of them did. We
went in and we told him. I remember John Colly who ended up
at the University of Connecticut, head of one of the
department's there, very bright man, he said, do you mean we
can say what we want? He said, no problem. Well, Jack lit
into that man like I've never heard before, and he just
laughed. He thought it was funny. He said, don't worry guys,
you're going to get "A's" this semester, and we all got
"A's". I don't know what that says about our education
system. It's kind of weird but there are some of those kinds
of people.
jr
Coaches at Rhode Island monitoring all the athletes like you
do today?
rd
No.

jr
Beause today faculty all get little pieces of paper and are
asked for midterm grades and progress reports and all that
stuff. At Slippery Rock have there been faculty who have
refused to do those things--they see it as special
assistance or something--where they see it as something they
shouldn't do for athletes?
rd
No, I've never experienced that simply because I kept my
role as a faculty member quite visible. I served on all
kinds of committees and that sort of thing.
jr
It was a sincere effort to help?
rd
Yes. I didn't have that problem. The one thing that I didn't
do that they do now, and again it is probably a reflection
of what I went through, that I didn't have study halls. I
didn't have my grades going out. I only did it a few times,

but I didn't have my grades going out to the faculty. When I
spoke to my ball players I told them they were here as
students first and I'm here as faculty first, academic
faculty first, my other job happens to be coaching football,
and your other responsibility happens to be playing
football. They would see me in a classroom and I would see
them in a class room and they would see me on the football
field and I would see them on a football field. There was a
difference and there were different responsibilities, and a
I never felt I had to have study halls. I felt the kids had
to learn how to develop that maturity to become students.
They knew the game plan. They knew what they had to have in
order to participate, and I never went to a professor and
spoke to them in behalf of a kid that was failing. If a kid
was failing that was his problem. Maybe it was part of the
growing up that I went through and that the responsibility
for my education was laid in my lap, and I laid the
responsibility in their lap and that's the way I always
proceeded. That's not to criticize Coach Mihalik because
they have study halls and all those kinds of things. I went
through a private school system, too, and I also coached in
prep school, and I used to go through study halls. You can't
force anybody to study. Most of the kids were either writing
letters or falling asleep. I remember in these small private
schools that I taught in, at Cheshire Academy, for example,
which is an Ivy League prep school, and they all had a
certain grade level where you had to be in study hall. Kids
were tired. It was after dinner, and all those kinds of
things. I never felt it was very a productive time. So that
was kind of a carry over into the kind of responsibility
that I laid down. We had for the longest time, and I'm not
going to mention the boy's name, which is the one boy I
remember, he was the only boy who didn't graduate. They went
through. It may have taken five years, but in those days
when I was coaching here everybody was getting out in four
years. Now it seems you have got to have a fifth year to get
through college. Most of my ball players got through. A very
small percent did not graduate, and yet I didn't have study
hall. I just felt that they had to grow up and assume that
responsibility which was what was given to us in the same
way. Coach Savaria, even when we were in his class, we
either did the work or we failed, and Coach Carp at the
University of Rhode Island was the same way.
jr
Was he a big influence on you? Carp?
rd
Yes, he was as a motivator. He was probably one of the best
motivators that I have ever known in my life. He helped me
get my first job in a private school system at Cheshire
Academy in Connecticut. I see him every summer. He has a
cottage down in Rhode Island where I go. So I always call
him. He had a stroke two years ago. He was doing the color

for the radio for the university for years; and now, I
think, this is going to be his first year back. He is a
legend down there. He is a tremendous motivator. We were
eight and one my senior year at the university and we
started out with only twenty-two ball players. By the time
the season ended we had close to forty. That was the first
time that I ever saw a team grow in number, motivating
people to keep coming on the team. They don't do that today.
But we went 8-1 alumni year, first time we beat Brown in
thirty-five years, so we had a real good year. He was a
great motivator. I learned an awful lot from him. It's like
I always tell my students in the classroom, unless you live
in a vacuum of some sort it's impossible not to learn
something. I've been in situations where, very negative
situations, you know coaching. I've seen a lot of bad
coaches, but I've learned from them. I learned not what to
do. It's impossible not to learn. Although I doubt it about
some of the kids in my classroom where they didn't learn
anything. Maybe they are in a cocoon, I don't know.
jr
Teachers that you particularly remember in Rhode Island, did
you have a major advisor and all that sort of thing?
rd
Coach Paul Seraso, he was our instructor in the Physical
Education Department, but he was also football coach. He was
also my house father in the fraternity and he and Mae and
the two children lived in the fraternity house, and they
were like surrogate parents for us. That's what I talk about
here at the university. In order for fraternity systems to
succeed, I think they have to have a house parent in there.
I mean it's just because when we did anything got to loud,
Paul would knock on the door and he'd say, ok guys, cut it
out and that would be the end of that. But he was very kind,
we all loved him. He came in and talked to us, you know,
evenings and social times, because we always had study hours
from seven to ten in the fraternity house. There was no
noise at all. Nothing. Those were study hours. Then we had
the social hour from ten o'clock on when sandwiches were
brought in. We had our own kitchen, and that's when he would
come in and socialize, but he was a great influence I think.
If I had to name anyone, Coach Searaso. Matter of fact, a
good friend of Paul's today is, he is the CEO of PPG, his
name is Vic Santy. He was a senior when I was a freshman. He
belonged to the Beta Si Alpha fraternity that I joined.

Robert Dispirito Interview

R:

Were there other teachers that you remember from college
particularly and for any special reason?

D:

Not really. Other than some of the teachers in the Physical
Education Department which we had most contact with The head
trainer at the University of Rhode Island, I got to be very
close with him in terms of what he would have to do, but
other than that I don't think so.

R:

Did your sports that you embarked on at the University did
they overlap in terms of practices and games and all
that stuff?

D:

I was the only football player that played baseball. So
therefore, I didn't go to spring football. Fortunately
enough I had established myself well enough in football
where I really didn't need to be in spring practice. I
remember there was a big article in the paper at that time
that I was the only football player that was playing
baseball. So that was the only overlapping in seasons.

R:

And hockey was your winter sport?

D:

But that was in high school. I only played hockey in high
school I did not play hockey in college.

R:

And then basketball you didn't play basketball in Rhode
Island?

D:

Not college.

R:

That would have been impossible.

D:

In those days, I think you might have alluded to it earlier,
but every now and then they would get a football player on
the basketball team to be rough off the boards, to be strong
off the boards, but once you got into college it was almost
impossible to do both. I don't know of anyone that played
football and basketball. I don't know how they do that
academically in high school. I knew it was hard for me, but
the increase in demands of education today, an athlete who

can go play consecutive sports and go from one season to the
other and carry off some very, very high grades is a very
unusual young man or young lady, and yet they do it. Some of
them do it.
B:

Were there some good fraternity experiences?
house?

You liked your

D:

I loved fraternity. I loved them. I had the greatest four
years of my life in college and a lot of it had to do with
the fraternity. There is no resemblance of what fraternity
life was then and what it is now. It seems there's an
emphasis on drinking in fraternities that was never present.
For example, I joined an all Italian fraternity and it was
Beta Psi Alpha and it was formed because Italians were not
allowed to go to fraternities for a long time at the
University of Rhode Island. So they decided to have their
own fraternity. We had the Jewish fraternity, the Protestant
fraternity. I mean they were known for all the Protestants
would go here and all the Jewish kids were going there. It
was because of the discrimination at one time. When I was
there that was not the case at all. But when we joined the
fraternity I had an opportunity to go to four other
fraternities. I was pledged, rushed I'm trying to say, and I
chose Beta Psi Alpha not because it was Italian because that
had no bearing on it for me. As a matter of fact it was kind
of an embarrassment for me. It was a very academically
oriented fraternity. I mean most of them were pre-med and
engineers. These were very serious kids and I figured I
needed all the help I could get to go through college; so I
decided that would be the best influence for me. I could
always go socialize with the other fraternities anytime I
wanted, but I needed to go home and study. There were a
number of other fraternities I didn't think I wanted to go
into for one reason or another, but the fraternity system in
general at the University of Rhode Island when I was there
was the center of all campus life. The dances, the social
events, everything was there and there were very few
students living in the dorms at that time. In answer to your
question, with Paul Searso as the house parent I enjoyed the
fraternity. There were twenty-two of us, which is the
largest class they ever had. Thirty-four living in our
fraternity. We had a beautiful home, southern brick, white,
a gorgeous home. We decided to open it up to non-Italians.
The alumni were going to withdraw our shares, close the
house down. We said, go ahead close it down, we'll work it
out somehow. We had many meetings with our alumni and then
we opened it, so we brought in two non-Italian's and from
that time on it was open. I can understand the feelings they
had because they were discriminated against, and they
decided they were very proud of this fraternity, probably
the nicest fraternity house on campus. I mean they put a lot

of money into this beautiful fraternity. Everyone of the
pledges had a daily duty to do plus every Friday I had to
wash and wax the master's room. We were all assigned to
another upperclassman, we'd call them the master and we had
to wash and wax their rooms which were study rooms. In
fraternity we had the social, but below that in the basement
was the eating areas. The first floor was social rooms,
the second floor rooms was study rooms, the third floor was
the sleeping deck. That house was spotless. I mean what
a contradiction. I went into the fraternity house. I'd
driven onto campus many, many times. Two years I decided
to stop in and actually stop and go into the fraternity
house. I went into and the place was devastated. It was
terrible.
It just made me angry. I've stopped donations
to it. I don't give them donations anymore. The place
is a pigpen. I couldn't believe it. What a contrast
from when we lived there. The influence of Coach Searso
and his family plus the academic atmosphere that prevailed
in the fraternity was conducive to a real good education.
They were good for me. Fraternity sings were very popular.
Everybody worked very hard on that. We had social events.
Every fraternity at the University of Rhode Island would
have a theme dance, a theme affair, once a year. It was
the big thing. Ours was the Basin Street___
It was
always New Orleans sytle. We'd have the black band, and
we'd have the costumes. Phi Garn would have the Blue
Hawaii. You had to go dressed Hawaiian. Somebody else
would have a western. I mean that was the center. It
was just great.
I really thoroughly enjoyed that.
I
feel that our students today miss an awful lot.
B:

Innocent times.

D:

The fifties. No drugs. Very little liquor. Beer was the
worst thing you could do. Nobody decided to go to
fraternity affairs to get smashed. I've had students in
my class tell me what a great weekend. They'd say, yes,
what you'd do? I don't remember a thing. That was their
version of a great weekend. I was so smashed. What a
great time I had.
I don't remember a thing about it.
I'm glad a grew in a life of innocent times.

R:

You dated through college?

D:

I didn't personally date.
In order to teach us how
to develop some social skills, we used to have sororties
over for teas and dances. We would have to serve them
as pledges and all that. We would have to learn what
spoon to use and all that kind of stuff. So we learned
some of the social graces. We ended up a lot like in
high school. There were very few studies in high school.
We ran in packs. The girls and the guys were all kinds
of packs going to Y.M.C.A. dances. Nobody really gets
that emotionally involved, seriously involved. We

travelled with them because they were super dancers.
Because you loved to dance with them more. They were
just good time gals or good time guys. But the jocks
because they were jocks. College was pretty
much the same. We travelled in groups. We'd have a dance
and we didn't necessarily have a date. The sororties
were invited over. The fraternity guys were there and
that's it. It was a different kind of time.
I've
heard that expression so many times, the age of innocence,
but you're right.
I never heard of anyone ever using
the drug, marijuana. That wasn't part of our vocabulary
at the time. I didn't even know what marijuana was.
The biggest word we had was the Korean War. In my senior
year the Korean War had broken out. A lot of fraternity
brothers had gone into the service, and some of them
got killed. The Korean War was our biggest worry, but
by the time we graduated, my senior year, the Korean
War was over. Most of us were ROTC guys anyway and
to commissioned. We were going down to Fort Benning for
our training. We figured we'd get to Korea, but Korea
was over by that time. But that was the biggest concern
that we ever had. Other than that it was a pretty
carefree kind of life. A great life. Greatest four
years of my life.
I think that anybody can say less
than that has been cheated. College has to be it. You
don't have any responsibilities of family, jobs, all
those things.
R:

It's a greatly romantic adventure.

D:

Camelot. As a matter of fact, that's what they refer
to the times here at the University for Al Watrel.

R:

Is that right?

D:

Everybody was winning. Everybody was having a good time.
The President was happy. We were happy. They called it
Camelot. A young president with a young family.

R:

You were in high school through the World War II years?

D:

Yes. The prep school was the only change in between high
school and college. I went to a Catholic prep school,
Marion _ _ _ , run by the Marion fathers. That's when I
think I related earlier in terms of the tryouts. That
saved my hide in that I was able to get my second year
of French so I could get into the University. I needed
two years of a language. I had all these languages, but
I didn't have a second year of any of them. But the
University required two years.

R:

What did you play in baseball?

D:

Catcher.

R:

Catcher.

D:

That's all I was good at. I was boring at any other
position. I think all the time I played in college, I
played one game in the outfield because I had split a
finger. Couldn't straddle.

R:

Did you have any injuries in football?

D:

No.

R:

Never. Didn't have any problems.
of that.

D:

I was very fortunate. All the years I played. I played
semi-pro, high school, college, service, never got hurt.

R:

What did you do your summers?

D:

Worked construction.
of money.

B:

Good pay.

D:

Alumnus had a construction building bridges, and they put
us on the job. Three of us. It was hard work though.
We worked from seven o'clock in the morning until four
o'clock.

R:

Big bridges?

D:

Just open passes.

R:

So you wheeled concrete and stuff like that.

D:

I was what they call a carpenter's helper. I would lug the
lumber up to them and then clean up. Then when they did
finally do the pouring, we used to put our boots on we used
to have to get into the cement. It was hard work. But
it's funny when you think about it because I had to leave
by six o'clock and get to the job and you worked from
seven to three, and then on the way back they would drop
me off at the baseball field, and I would play a baseball
game, and I would get home about nine or nine-thirty and
get dinner, and get up at six o'clock the next day. Long
days.

B:

But you were young.

D:

Tuition was only a hundred dollars a semester so we could
work our way through college. I'd wait on tables for my
meals. I got a scholarship for $200. No big deal, but that
was tuition. I worked in the fraternity. They gave us
jobs. I mean I made enough money during the year with

Oh, boy.

Nor baseball outside

Five dollars and hour. That was a lot

They weren't huge.

work study to pay for it, but the summer was always bonus.
I made a lot of money during the summer. But today a
youngster can't do that. How do you earn ten thousand
dollars. How do you earn twenty thousand dollars in the
summer to pay for your education.
B:

You borrow and end up with a big debt.

D:

That's true.

R:

Did you have two scholarships?
in baseball?

D:

No. It was just one. Just football. Just to pay the
tuition. That was all. They gave us $180 for a room.
That_______
We'd wait on tables for our meals.

R:

Where there many black youngsters in college then?

D:

One.

R:

At the University of Rhode Island?

D:

He played football.

R:

Running back?

D:

Yes. Always ran east and west. Never north and south.
Maybe he dreamt that way but never on the field. There
goes Slick. Don't give Slick the ball, he's going to
lose yardage. He created a real stir on our campus because
Slick was an outstanding athlete, and he was dating white
girls. Well, in those days it was a scandal. He had a
rough time because of that. I see him from time to time,
and I enjoy listening. He's one of those guys who always
has a smile from ear to ear. Very personable. He was the
only black. No, I'm sorry. There was one other kid. He
was a tight end, but we didn't see him very much. On
campus, period. About as many as what I got here at
Slippery Rock. I think there were like 40 or something
like that. Very few blacks. Still you wonder where they
went to school.

B:

Or did they go to school.

D:

Or did they go to school.

B:

On the teams with the athletes, he was accepted?

D:

Yes. He was loved on the campus. Everybody. We never
looked at Slick as Black anyway. He happened to be Black
but we never gave it a thought. There was a young man
named Wylie, Black, George Wylie. Excellent student,
chemist. He was freshmen, sophomore, junior class

Did you have scholarship

Slick Pina was his name.

president, and my fraternity wanted me to run against
him my senior year. I did and I beat him for senior
class presidency, but we became very good friends as a
result of that race. It was a very close race. George
got his Ph.D. when I was _ _ , and went out to Washington.
He was one of the national leaders. As a matter of fact
my brother Don worked in Washington for Representative
There was a big disturbance out in the corrider
outside the office of the House of Representatives. He
said, there was George in his overalls, and he was trying
to make a statement. He was really deeply into the
Black movement for equality. But he was out fishing in
the Potomac and the boat tipped over and he was drowned.
That was the other. There weren't very many Blacks, but
they were outstanding Black students. His brother preceded
him as one of the big judges in the state of Rhode Island.
Excellent students.
R:

Back to World War II.

D:

I have to go back to one more story about George. We never
thought black, white.
In our junior year we went to camp,
ROTC camp, in Fort Meade, Maryland. We drove down from
Rhode Island. Well, being from Rhode Island, a little
state, that was a big trip. An hour from here to wherever
you wanted to go in New England. And when we drove to
Maryland, we had to stay in a hotel. Every time we went
in they said they were filled. We looked at three motels,
and every one said it was filled. We said, there's no
sign out there saying we don't have any room. George
finally said, as long as I'm in this car, you're not
going to get a room. He said, drop me off at a motel
that says it accepts Blacks. That was our first
experience of Black___
Really. And we did. We
went back to the other motels and we got rooms, but we
had to put him in a black one because we were in Maryland.

B:

This was about 1950?

D:

1952. The summer of 1952.
that he was Black.

R:

For me, I taught at Memphis State in the mid-fifties and
the southern speech convention was never held. It was
always held at at segregated hotels, and the Blacks could
not stay at those hotels and they couldn't ride the
elevators to the mezzanine for the meetings. So they had
to take the stairs. We put a stop to that. We just
outlawed all segregated hotels. I mean legally. We
passed all kinds of stuff. That was going on all over
the South, and at conventions, segregated. That was really
so uncivilized.
It was hard to go around and tell people
that.

That was the first realization

D:

It's really hard to understand it, and you really don't
understand the impact until you're involved with it
yourself. It's always somebody else's problem.
It's difficult.

B:

That was your friend.

D:

Yes. And we were so naive. We just didn't even think.
The guy who told us you can't have a room because there's
a Black with you, we never thought of George as anything
but George. We had gotten so close that
It was just crazy. Other than that we didn't experience
too much of that. On the teams we didn't. There was
no problem there. We never traveled south. In New England
there was never a problem with Black athletes. Interesting.

#7

Robert Dispirito Interview #7

B:

This is the next interview with Bob Dispirito which will cover
his years after college and before Slippery Rock.

R:

There's nothing before Slippery Rock.

B:

That's pretty many years.

R:

This is Joe Riggs and Leah Brown doing our fourth session
with Bob Dispirito on June 16, 1992. We're going to pick
up with graduation at the University of Rhode Island and
where you went from there and why.

D:

There was a decision to be made at that time.
I was
commissioned as a Second Lieutanant, ROTC.
I had a
choice of either going into the service immediately or
stay out for a year.
I thought it might be best to
try to get a job first and then have something to come
back to rather than going into the service. So I did
get a job at Cheshire Academy in Cheshire, Connecticut.
It's outside New Haven.
It was kind of a prep school
for Yale. So I went there as an assistant coach and
had baseball coach. Assistant football and then
baseball coach at a private school.
It was a very
interesting experience. It was an experience whereby
I was brought up in the public school system all my
life and this was nine in a classroom, six in a
classroom. I had to eat all my meals at the tables
with the boys.
It was an all boys school. study halls.
Your time wasn't very much yours at all. It was kind of
confining. After serving a year, I had to go into the
service.
I had a two year obligation with the ROTC
commission. That's when I went to Fort Benning went
into the service. Again I kind of lucked out.
I even
thought I was in the infantry.
I was given an opportunity
to become A&R officer which is the athletic and recreation
officer for the regiment. So I had myself a gymnasium that
I was running.
I think the funny experience of it all as
I look back was day that I reported to Fort Dix, New Jersey.
I had to go to regimental headquarters to report in and
get my orders and so forth. I walked in and met the colonel.
His first words where, so you're Bob Dispirito. Oh, my God,
I felt like I could fall through the floor.
I mean I had
never met this man.
I'm nervous enough as it is going into
my first assignment and he's saying, oh, you're Bob Dispirito.
He said, a lot of University of Rhode Island former ball
players are here. They said that you went out and coached
for a year, and we need a coach for the regimental football
team. So he said, Lieutenant, you are it. So I became a
head coach at Fort Dix for one year until such time that I
had to go in the service, but the very first game that we
ever played which was hilarious because an awful lot of
Yankee Conference football players were dispersed throughout

the base.
In the very first game, guys from the University
of Massachusetts and Springfield were guys on the other side
and they were laughing at me because I was the quarterback.
I'd been an offensive guard all my life in college.
I was
a linebacker. I never played backfield in my life in college,
and here I am. I'm the quarterback simply because we didn't
have a quarterback. At least I knew the fundamentals since
I coached for a year what to do at quarterback, and we won
six to nothing on a pass.
I was selected player of the
week. It was my first and only time ever to play quarterback
at the base.
It was an experience because I guess as you
get older, and I was only two years out of college, the
injuries don't respond as quickly as they did when you where
in college and you're in good shape. Because when you're
in the service, you have your regular routine to go through,
and you weren't lifting weights. You weren't running. So
the injuries stayed with you a longer period of time.
But after spending that year. _ _ _ _ Walter Reed Army
Hospital for quite a while and coming back from that so
I had to leave the base and coming back I was reassigned
again to an A&R position. So my experience in the service
was one in which ____ in my area, but it was an experience
that was holding me back career wise.
I just couldn't wait
to get out. After the two years, that's when I returned to
Cheshire Academy.
I had been in the hospital for quite a
while.
It was good that I do something physical to get
back in shape, and the head coach at the Cheshire Academy
was one of the head counselors at Camp ________ in
North Conway, New Hampshire. He said, I need a counselor.
Why don't you come along. So I did.
I did the canoe
trips for the whole summer. I was just in fantastic
shape because we go for four days out on the river and
camp out and all that thing, and it was something that
was absolutely beneficial to me at that time. But in
the meantime, I got a call from Mr. _ _ , who's the
headmaster of Cheshire Academy. He said, Mr. James has
resigned as head football coach at Cheshire Academy, do
you want it? I said, well, yes, but I'm here with Coach
James and he's not said a word to me that he resigned.
I
said, I think that very odd. He said, well, if you have any
problems, you can call me back. So I went to see the coach.
I said, Coach, you didn't tell me you resigned. Well, he
hadn't. Oh, my Lord. He was all upset. He said, would call
Mr.___
This is my job. I don't have another job. It's
in late July. What would happen if you called back and said
that you want me back as the head coach for at least another
year.
I was naive enough to that. So I picked up the phone
and I called Mr.____
I said, Mr. _ _ _ _ , thank you for
the offer, but being in a situation where Mr. James should be
returned as the head coach for at least a year.
It's short
notice. He just simply said, no, we've made our decision. I
remember him being very kind. We've made our decision, and
if you don't care to be the head coach, he said, then we'll
get someone else. The one thing we do know is Mr. James is

not returning as head coach at Cheshire Academy. So he says,
you make your decision right now.
I said, well, Mr.
,
if he's not going to come back then obviously I'll take the
job. So then that was a very difficult last two weeks in our
relationship. There wasn't anything that I did because I was
just getting out of the service. But anyway, that was my
first experience at becoming a head coach, and we played the
West Point plebes in our opening game. The West Point plebes
had been in training constantly, and Dr.
, who's a legend
in football was the head coach.
I was in awe of him.
I was
awe of West Point. They brought us in on Friday night.
Everybody was in awe of the whole situation, and they
absolutely annihilated us the next day. But it was an amazing
experience. We survived the season. Then I went to graduate
school.
I went to teacher's college next. Because the
coaches that were coming through since we were servicing a
lot of the colleges and prep schools. A lot of the football
players were going to the Ivy League or other schools.
I
asked them, how do you get into college coaching? They said,
well, the first thing you need to do is get your master's.
So I decided to give up the head coaching job to go to
teacher's college in Columbia for a year. I held down the
job for one year at Barnard School for Boys. I taught
until four o'clock. I got on the subway. I was in class
from five until ten forty-five. Five days a week. Then
I went from eight to twelve on Saturdays. I got my
master's in one year because I didn't feel that I could
stay out in the field more than one year, and I didn't.
Upon completion of that then I was offered the freshman
assistant football and head baseball coach at the
University of Bridgeport, and I took the job, and I
got married that year. That was my break into college
football. I only served the second year. I was moved
from the freshman coach to the assistant coach, varsity,
my second year, and the third year I was made head
coach for both football and baseball. That's what
launched my career. Seven years at Bridgeport. Five years
as head coach of football, and seven years as head coach of
baseball. One of the most exciting things for me was to
take the University of Bridgeport to the NCAA playoffs
in baseball. Baseball was also one of my loves, and we
went to Springfield, and got beat by Springfield, but
beat Boston College, and got beat by Vermont. But,
anyway, being in tournament for the very first time was
very exciting for us, but the one lesson I did learn
was that I'm walking on campus very proud as a peacock
because we came back. This was the very first time we
had been in the playoffs, and I bumped into Mr. Littlefield,
the president of the University, and he said, how's every
thing going? Fine. He said, when were the playoffs? I said,
well, Dr. Littlefield, we've already been there, and we
did this and that, and he said, oh, that's very fine, and
with that he walked away, and that was the kind of climax
that kind of was climatic in terms of my decision to leave

Bridgeport because nobody really cared. One of the
experiences up there in New England. They're a very
tight comaraderie, and it's very good with football
coaches in New England. In otherwords, once a week we
would go to a different school. Yale would host one
week. Bridgeport would host another week. Coast Guard
another week. Wesleyan another week. And all the schools
in New England would meet every Monday, and the reporters
would show up, and they'd have a nice cocktail dinner or
luncheon, and then they would ask questions of all the
coaches. It was a very nice deal. The last year that
I was there which was also the year of the baseball thing,
too, I was very proud to be able to get the opening
session, and that meant the Yale-Connecticut game. And
in that area the Yale-Connecticut game was the big
thing. It was the big game of the state. What I thought
was really fantastic was that we got the luncheon that
day because that meant a lot of reporters would come to
that. So we were getting ready for that, and worked on
that, and the president, Littlefield, came in and I'm
talking to John
, who's the head coach at Yale at
the time and Bob Engles who's the head coach at
Connecticut and I'm speaking to both of them and the
president came in and I introduced the president to
Coach Engles and Coach
. He looked at them and
said, do you play one another? I almost died. I mean
this is the big game. I said, yes. He said, and where
do you coach? ___ said, I coach at Yale. He said,
oh, that's good. Bob Engles said, I coach at Connecticut.
He said, oh, do you play one another? I wanted to fall
through the cracks in the floor. But that was the kind
of attitude. They really didn't care about athletics a
whole lot. So I decided I needed to get out of there.
That's why I got out of there and went to Bucknell
University.
R:

Did the students support it?

D:

No. The University of Bridgeport is a commuters college.
Most of the students were made up from either New York
or New Jersey. With the expressway in five minutes they
could be home. Although we were located on Long Island
sound, the campus itself is located right on Long Island
sound. I used to practice right next to a beach. We used
run the boys in the water on the beach on real hot day.
It was kind of neat, different. But our facilities were
terrible. We had to carry our dummies and all our equipment
almost a mile. We had to carry it out to the practice
field. so there wasn't too much concern for athletics.
And it was very difficult to survive in that kind of
setting. As a matter of fact, the school has been bellied
up recently, and the Hari Krishnas have now taken over,
I believe. Either that or Reverend Moon. I think it's
Reverend Moon is now the owner of Bridgeport University.

D:

I don't know what they're going to do with it, but it's
a different kind of a place. But the student support is
dead now. There wasn't very much with the students, because
kids were not in and not only that but they were kind of
scattered. The faculty were scattered all over the place.
There was very little comaraderie within the faculty. It's
not like Slippery Rock where everybody ________ in
town.

B:

So it was coaching, not teaching,

D:

Yes. As a matter of fact, I started and headed up the
recreation department at Bridgeport. I
They didn't even give us release time. I taught fifteen
hours which turned out to be 21 contact hours, and I
was head of baseball, and head football coach. People
they tell me they're overloaded teaching twelve hours
and that's more than they can handle. And I hate to
say, in the old days I used to teach fifteen hourse,
had 21 contact hours. Head football. Head baseball.
And I was also recreation director for the town of
Wilton because I wasn't earning enough money at
Bridgeport. My salary there was $2900. The advantage
was we lived in the dorm, and we had free rent. That's
the only advantage. So I have very little patience
with my colleagues today who say they are overworked.

R:

It must be something in the water or the air.

D:

The transition to Bucknell was quite different. I was
looking at a different caliber of student. Intellectually
as well as their social backgrounds. Completely different
than Bridgeport's. At Bucknell we went in and won the
championship the very first year that we were there.
So we didn't have a problem with that. We were considered
successful immediately. I went there as a defensive
cooridinator. The student body was totally different
especially from the coaching aspect because a Bucknellian
student was a better prepared student. They probably
have a whole lot more intelligence to be honest with you
than what I was to working with so as a football coach
as you them what to do, they didn't make that many
mistakes. So you didn't have to constantly go over and
over and over the mistakes that the kids would make.
Usually the Bucknellian football players are either
engineers or business majors or something. They were very
intelligent kids to get into the school in the first
place so they grasped pretty much what you wanted them
to do immediately. From a coaching point of view, I
found it very much easier in that I didn't have to
constantly go over repeated mistakes. It was the type
of job that just wore you down because it was interesting
intially because I used to teach one class eight
o'clock in the morning. Coaches taught one class from

D:

eight to nine. Then we were in the football office from
nine to about eleven at night. Point meaning was that
we never got home. We had to eat our meals with the
football team. So as a result I think I ate three meals
with my family from the 28th of August until Thanksgiving
because the coach felt we should eat all the meals with
the team. My youngsters were so young that by the time
I left at seven o'clock in the morning they were still
asleep. Obviously they were asleep because I didn't
get home till after eleven at night. So I very seldom
got to see my own children, and certainly didn't have
much time to spend with them. You say, well how about
Sundays? You were tied up with the game on Saturday
but Sunday you're tied up in the office all day. Films,
reviewing the films. We were there early Sunday morning.
He allowed us till ten o'clock to go to church, and after
that we were in the office from ten o'clock to eleven
or twelve o'clock at night. So I tired of that very quickly.
I felt it was too much of a price for me to pay. Seeing
my kids grow up. I was tired all the time. It was not the
kind of life for me. So after short of two years I left,
and got this job here because I felt I'll call the shots
from now on. So I went from a head coaching position to
an assistant to a head coaching position. It's okay if
you're working for somebody that you agree with, but if
you philosophically disagree with someone, you know, I
need to get out of here. So I was fortunated enough
to get this job here. At the time it was President Carter.
He was a Bucknellian so that kind of helped out a little
bit. So when I applied for the job, and I guess I didn't
you know, that helped. He never said so, but I think it
did. That I was from Bucknell. Plus, they were starting
a recreation department here, and I had a degree in
recreation so that helped, too. Everything kind of fit.
But Bucknell was good. It was quite an experience.
I just have one story on Bucknell that really stays
in mind. I'll never forget it because I was the defensive
cooridnator. We played University of Pennsylvania, and a
week before, that was always the big game. The week before
we're playing Temple. Temple with, I guess Bucknell had
beaten Temple like thirteen years in a row, so nobody
took them real seriously. We prepared for them as we
normally do. On Thursday the head coach called the
defensive coaches in and he said, I don't like what
we're doing. I think we ought to do this. We're going
to change the game plan. Which in football sense he
was going to go from a three deep to a two deep secondary
which meant the middle was wide open, but we were going to
cover man to man so he felt this was the way to do it.
And we looked at the defense and we said, well, you
know what? If their quarterback, if the backs ever
flair out and we're all man to man and there is nobody
in the middle and the quarterback keeps the ball in a
quarterback sneak, he going to go in for a score. He

D:

got very mad at us. He said that's the most ridiculous
thing he'd ever heard and if they don't do it blah, blah,
blah. Well, what do you think they did the very first
play? The very, very first play. They flaired their backs.
They knew we were manned two deep. The quarterback took
the ball and went 82 yards for a touchdown. Nothing said.
We're all fuming because we know what had happened. He
changed this on Thursday. What do you think they did the
second time? Same play. Quarterback sneak. And he starts
yelling at me upstairs. I'm saying, Coach, you changed it
to two deep. We don't have a free safety back there. There's
nobody in the middle, and everybody's man to man. There's
nobody on the quarterback. The quarterback is not accounted
for. He's the only man, and they're smart enough to see
this. He says, well, what are we going to do? I said,
we have to go to prevent. Prevent was our only defense
that we had with a free safety. He thought that was
sarcasm. He chewed me out for that. I didn't like this.
I didn't like getting chewed out for something that I
thought was not my fault. It was ridiculous. The eventual
score was 82-28. Everytime they threw the ball it was
a touchdown. It kept hitting the middle. There was
nobody in the middle. So anyway, we come back on Sunday,
the head coaches door is closed. We don't see him. So
we do what we have to do. Get the game plan. Come in
Monday, door is closed, don't see him. Went out to practice,
no coach. He did that for three solid days. Sunday, Monday,
Tuesday, and Wednesday. Didn't see him. The door was
closed. He didn't come to practice. Thursday I think he
came out to practice. He just stood around, and didn't
say a word. He hadn't spoken to the entire coaching staff,
and we're putting this whole game together, and we're
playing the University of Pennsylvania. A big game right?
So we leave Friday for the University and we upset them,
but before we upset them again warmup and all that, he's
out on the field. The team comes back in. He doesn't
come back in. We're waiting and waiting. He doesn't come
back in. So Coach Oberlin who's on the staff at the time
at Bucknell with me, we looked at one another, and I
decided to say something to the team. We had to say
something. So I gave the pregame talk, and I was furious.
I must admit I gave a very firey speech that day. A
very emotional speech because I was not upset with them.
I wasn't upset with the game. I was upset with the head
coach. We went out on the field and we upset them. We
beat the University of Pennsylvania after getting beat
by that crazy score. So as we come back in as most lockers
go all the reporters gather in the room and that's where
he was. He was telling them how a thrill it was to beat
Pennsylvania, and he gave the whole speel to the reporters,
and didn't ask us one question. So I said to myself, I
think it's time to leave. But that was quite an experience.

D:

That taught me that if I'm going to go down ___ making a
mistake, I'd rather it be my mistake only because of what I
do not because of someone else. So that was interesting.
But overall Bucknell was a great experience. It's a very
fine school academically. Nice community. I would love to
have stayed there, but not under those conditions. Then
the job opened up. The athletic director said that I had
told him that I wanted to leave and he said that he had
a friend who was president at Slippery Rock University and
they were looking for a coach, and I said, I don't want to
go to Arkansas. I was thinking Little Rock. Up in New
England Slippery Rock is not a household name. It really
isn't. Out west, I guess, _ _ _ . So honestly I had never
heard of Slippery Rock, and I was in coaching _ _ _ . I
had no idea where it was, and they told me it was
. So I came up here for an interview, and I got the
job, and I'm glad I've been here ever since.

R:

When you were doing your senior year at Rhode Island, where
you then planning to become a coach and a teacher? Was that
in your mind?

D:

Yes. Always was. From physical education. I was a physical
education major, and the natural thing to do with me was to
coach. I was offered the head coaching job in my hometown.

R:

That was Port Chester?

D:

No, this was in Winnsockett, Rhode Island.

B:

In the public schools?

D:

In the public schools is that what you mean? I'm sorry.

R:

Yes. When you graduated from Rhode Island. You were offered
a job there?

D:

When I got through at the University of Rhode Island that's
when I moved to Cheshire Academy.

R:

What's the story on the job in your hometown?

D:

Oh, now that was when I graduated. When I graduated from
college I was also offered the head coaching job in my
hometown. I was glad I never took it because they will
always remember you as who you were, and I wasn't the
best student in the world because I didn't care about
academics. I was just interested in athletics when I was
going through high school. No interest at all. And I
just did what I had to do to get through. Remember what
I told you earlier about the teachers who said, I'll
pass you as long as you _ _ _ _ . All of a sudden I would
have had to be on the faculty with him, and I don't
think that would have gone over too good with him. It

D:

was not a job that I wanted. I didn't want to go back to
my hometown. Fortunately, I got the prep school job.

R:

And at Cheshire you were teaching?

D:

I was teaching biology. No, the first year I was teaching
elementary math in the lower school. They call it a middle
school. I guess it was middle school. It was sixth, seventh,
and eighth grade. And that's interesting. You talk about
motivation. Again, somebody must have told me about this
years ago, and it always kind of stuck in my mind in terms
of people generally don't do anything or perform well unless
they're motivated, I guess. I was teaching math and in order
to raise the grades because there are only five or six in
a classroom so you could really get into substance, but they
weren't too motivated, and in order to motivate them, I
started a club. I was dating a girl that worked for the
electric company. You know the redi-kilowatt figure? She
used to get me these and I formed this club called Rho
Kappa Kappa, the redi-kilowatt club, the Rho Kappa Kappa,
and in order to become a Rho Kappa Kappa I would have secret
messages placed throughout the middle school that they could
read. Then we also had a ceremonial kind of initiation where
they dressed in all kinds of weird costumes. It caught the
imaginations of the kids, and in order to do that they had
to have a certain average in the math classes and then an
overall average, and it raised grades. Just raised grades.
It was unbelievable. I don't know. It was something that I
just happened to do that just caught on. So that was my
first year of teaching to motivate the kids into Rho Kappa
Kappa's and it was the redi-kilowatt and they wore those
pins. That was the badge of honor in middle school. It was
a secret society because I would put the messages like the
Jack Armstrong's of years ago where they gave you a key and
they'd give these special messages over the radio when I
was growing up. Well, that's what it was like. I remembered
that.
Then the second year when I went into the service for two
years and came back as their head coach and I was a biology
teacher. That was my minor, biology.

R:

So when you first started teaching math, was that a surprise
to you what you were going to do there?

D:

Oh, sure. I didn't know what I was going to do and they said
you'll teach math. I said, okay. It was no big deal. It was
addition, subtraction, multiplication and get into the
fundamentals of algebra. Well, I had no problems with that.

R:

So you put together your own lesson plan and tied into it.

D:

Yes I and tried to imporve the grades. We started
the secret
•
•
society of the Rho Kappa Kappa's, and I still have a picture

D:

to this day of all the kids in all their outfits in the secret
initiation, and that really caught their imagination, and the
head master was really enthused about it. That's why he
offered me the job to come back, and actually fired Jim
James. I found that out later. They wanted me back.

R:

He fired James because he wanted you?

D:

No, that wasn't it, but that is the reason why they offered
me the job. No, they had other problems.

R:

So how many youngsters came out for football at Cheshire?
They were playing a high school schedule?

D:

No. They played a college freshman schedule at prep school.
It was usually the athletes that Yale, Harvard, Princeton
were sending to the prep school for a year, and we were
getting these terrific athletes, and we didn't have to
recruit them. They were being sent to us, and they would
perform for us for a year and then they would prep them.
Obviously try to raise their grades or whatever to try
to get them into ____________ . So we were getting
terrific _ _ _ _ athletes. We played the Army plebes. We
played the University of Connecticut freshmen. We played
the University of Rhode Island freshmen. We played Southern
Connecticut freshmen, and then we played a very big high
school, st. Aquinas, in Rochester, New York. I don't why
I remembered that, but I did. They were the top high school
team in the country at the time. We would go out and play
in the big Red Wing stadium in front of thousands of people
and it was a thrill. They played just top teams because we
had the top athletes. Most of our kids went to Yale.

R:

So the athletes that were going to go into the Ivy League
came to Cheshire for a year. Were they already high school
graduates?

D:

Yes.

R:

so they were kind of post graduate high school people. Was
your football team made up of these people or where you
playing juniors and seniors alongside.

D:

All post graduates.

R:

All post graduates?

D:

All post graduates.

R:

A lot of people then?

D:

Not a lot. We only had maybe 28 to 30 guys on the team.

R:

So you weren't a platoon?

D:

Oh, no, they were going both ways. In those days, it was
both ways.

B:

Regular Cheshire students didn't get to play on the team?
Did they have another team?

D:

Yes. They had another high school there. They had a high
school team, and they had a junior high school team.
It was like in baseball. I coached baseball team at Cheshire,
but I was the high school and prep school coach with another
level in baseball, but I had the top level in football, and
the second level in baseball. Again, those are the things
that helped me in my career because the University of
Bridgeport, for example, was looking for a head baseball
coach and I had the background for that, and for recreation
I had the background for that and I football thrown in.
Even when I arrived at Slippery Rock, they were looking
for someone with experience of head coaching which I had.
They wanted to start a recreation program, I had that. So
you know things sometimes just fall into place. And I was
at Bucknell, and the president was a Bucknellian so I think
that helped.

B:

They only fall into place when you've got it. When you've
had the experience.

D:

Right. As I used to tell a lot of the young men that I
recruited here at the University. They just place themselves
in the position of choice first. They have to be accepted.
In recruiting a young man here at Slippery Rock, I'd say,
where have you been accepted. Well, I haven't been accepted
yet, but so and so and such and such school is interested in
me. I'd say, you really don't have a choice until these three
schools accept you along with Slippery Rock. Now once you
have four schools accepting you now you have a choice, but
right now Slippery Rock is the only school that accepted you
so you really don't have a choice. Any other place but
Slippery Rock. It's the same kind of concept whether you're
dealing

R:

Did you have a lot of support at Cheshire?
assistants?

D:

I had as many assistants at Cheshire that I had at Bridgeport.
I had one. I coached a college team at the University of
Bridgeport as head coach for five or seven years and there was
only one assistant coach. Amazing what you can do. I look
around here and I see Coach Mihalek with ten assistants, and
I'm saying, phew. Times have changed. Yes, two of us. One
would handle the offence, one would handle the defense. When
defense wanted to work, our offense had to supply the offence
and vice versa. So it wasn't as much work to accompish, but
what it did accomplish for us is that it kept it simple.
It couldn't get very complicated. We had to be very simple,

Did you have

D:

and we really had to know what we were doing, and by keeping
it simple we were able to accomplish what we wanted. When I
became the head coach of Slippery Rock I carried that same
principle here. You watched our teams for years, Joe. We
were a very basic, simple team. We knew what we wanted to do
and we would force our opponent into certain defenses that
we wanted because we wanted to run certain things. That's
the game you play. For example, in football there's a lot
of shifting around, and they give you one look and they
take it away and they give you all these kind of things.
That's if you split an end, but I was taught and I knew
that if I didn't split my ends and I kept two tight ends
they had to be very basic. They couldn't shift around. so
in order for me to attack them defensively I always put
two tight ends and they couldn't fool around, and the kids
up front knew how to block the basic things, and what we
did was out execute teams. I think we had better personnel
and we out executed that's why we won, and we were smart
enough not to try to out smart ourselves. To this day it's
still true. Every time Coach Mihalek gets in trouble he
goes to two tight ends then they can't fool around over
there. That's the basics.

B:

When you have ten assistant coaches, you've got another
team to take care of you besides your players.

D:

It's interesting. When you become a head coach and you have
a staff of that size, your job is to keep them happy and to
provide them with the tools in order to get the job done. So
you have to be an administrator basically. This is what
Coach Mihalek is. I didn't find that out before in the sense
all I knew. I knew this. I didn't have the luxury of building
it. I used to have to coach the offensive line. All the years
I coached, I coached the whole offensive line. A lot of
responsiblity along with all the other responsibilities as
head coach. But when I came back, Don Ault left, and the
president asked me to take over for the year before Coach
Mihalek took over, I was not going to do any coaching. I
was just going to be an administrator. So the very first thing
I did was I met with the staff and I told them, you all have
your assignments. I've talked with you individually in terms
of what I want you to do and in terms of philosophy. I even
set my philosophy and these are your responsibilities,
coaching responsibilities. If there's anything that has to
be told to the president or to the athletic director, to
the admissions or to the alumni that is my job. I don't want
you to interfere. I don't even want you to think about it.
I want you to coach on the field. That is your job. I'll give
you the best equipment. I'll give you the best uniforms. I'll
give you a tent for the injured. On the hot days, I'll give
you all the drinks you want. I'll take care of all of your
needs, but you do the coaching, I'll do the administrating.
The first thing I did was I met with the coach's wives. I
met with the coach's wives at a luncheon at my house, and I

D:

told them that this is what I will be doing with your
husbands come Sunday. Sunday afternoon and night they're
mine. Other than that, Sunday morning they're yours. Monday
night they're mine. Tuesday night they're mine. Now once
the game plan is in Wednesday after practice they're free.
Thursday after practice they're free, and all day Friday
they're free. Now you plan your doctor's appointments,
your dental appointments, and everything you have to do
on that basis unless there's unusual circumstances, and
then of course we'll deal with it. But I wanted the wives
to know because prior to that Don Ault never let them
understand when the meetings were going to be over and
what their times where and there were things that the
husbands should have done or tried to help out, but they
didn't know schedules. So I thought it was very important
that they know the schedule and what the philosophy was,
and they could count on their husbands on Wednesday
after practice, Thursday after practice and they had all
day Friday and all morning Saturday morning till such time
as the training table if we were playing at home. So by
letting them know that morale just _ _ . But that's what
a coach does. Coach Mihalek has to do that. He has ten or
eleven coaches now, maybe nine. I think two left and they
didn't replace them. But he has a very difficult job in
keeping them all happy, and giving them the proper time
and tools to get the job done, and giving them space to
operate in in doing it their way, and not interfering, but
keeping it within the realm of varsity.
That's the job. Some coaches learn that. Some coaches never
learn that. It's amazing.

R:

Was that your first time to have that kind of a meeting with
coache's wives or had you done that before?

D:

First time.

R:

But in the years that you were head coach before that you
knew your coache's wives very well so on an informal basis
those things were all said previously.

D:

Sure. I always let the coaches know when the meetings where
so I didn't have that problem. When the other coaches came
in they didn't follow that philosophy and coaches never knew
when they were going to have time off. Coaches spend more
hours than I would in the office. I've always felt that it's
very important that they have a family life and not be
interrupted as much possible.

R:

Because you had experienced this?

D:

Because I wanted time to be with my family. I learned that
at Bucknell. For almost two years I never had any time with
my kids. My wife never knew when I could be home. It was
extremely frustrating for us. I knew that when I became the

D:

head coach I wasn't going to let that happen again. So I
didn't let it happen again. My philosophy for time off
_ _ __ plus when I was coaching we were all teaching. So
I had to schedule meetings and operate my program around
everyone teaching nine hours. Coach Clinger was teaching
kinesiology. Coach Kendzorski was in allied health. Bruno
and so forth and so on. Their number one priority here was
teaching. So was mine. Football was secondary. Now when you
bring in a full-time coach who doesn't teach priority is
football and now you are dealing with some faculty members
it drives them crazy because they're not aware of the
problems of the classroom. That's why the philosophy of
this University has always been very sound. Not because I
was here with it, but I think our philosophy fit in.
That we were here academically first and our program had
to be academically accountable. So therefore, the students
saw me in the classroom, and I saw them in a classroom.
They saw me on the football field, and I saw them on a
football field. So I knew them as a student athletes, and
it was good for them. And we were not unreasonable because
we had to put nine hours in. To just get three hours of
release time is not a whole lot. They're a little more
generous now. I used to teach six hours during the season
and nine hours in the spring, but it was good academically
for the kids and it created a good academic atmosphere for
the kids because it was very sound. I think this school
operates best in that manner. It was proven because after
me they brought in two full-time coaches, and they both
failed, and now Coach Mihalek has got the program running
on all cyclinders again. Because again here's a guy teaching.
He has his Ph.D. Some of his faculty teach. Some of them
don't. He has a nice balance there because he has three
members of his staff that are on the road full-time which
we couldn't do. We used to try to squeeze our recruiting
in between our teaching schedule, and we weren't even
given preferred teaching schedules. Every department did
what they wanted to do, and we had to work around that.
It was on a sound basis because we were academically
accounted for. The faculty, people like you and Ted
and so forth, I think, I hope, this is what you saw that
I was a member of the faculty. I served on committees like
everybody else. I didn't shirk my responsibilities. So
I wasn't that kind of different guy over there. I mean
I was part of the faculty. I did my thing, and I got a
lot of faculty support. The Quarterback Clubs in those
days were always packed. We built the following that way.
We did a lot of entertaining. The wives did a lot of
cooking after games. We had people over. We did a lot
of that at our own expense, but it developed a following.
They didn't do that anymore. So when I took over again
I said, _ _ _ _ _ . I started with the luncheons. I started
with the after game parties and all that kind of stuff.

R:

When you were at Cheshire, were you a part of the recruiting

R:

process there?

D:

No, everything was sent to us.

R:

I see. Then at Bridgeport you were in charge of recruiting.
Whatever recruiting you could get done.

D:

Yes. We didn't get out on the road very much because we had
too much of a teaching load. So everything kind of would come
to the University. We would make the local runs within a
thirty, forty mile radius.

R:

A local run means to see the kids play?

D:

Yes, plus visit the high schools. I never had a free day.
I couldn't take a whole day and go out to someplace other
than vacation time, other than Christmas time when we had
semester breaks. When everybody else was on semester breaks
the coaches were on the road constantly trying to visit
high schools try to get to as many schools as we possibly
could hit to make up for the inability to do that during
the regular semester. So coaches were always working, and
then I became the recreation director of Wilton, Connecticut.
Gosh, that was a full-time job because whenever I wasn't
involved at the University I was involved as the recreation
director. I didn't have a vacation for five solid years
because I was running recreation programs.

R:

Was that out of economic necessity?

D:

Oh, sure. When you have four children and you're not making
a whole lot of money, yes.

R:

When you recruited at a high school, did you predetermine
the players you wanted to meet with and talk to or did you
go in and address an entire team?

D:

What we do is a whole lot of homework has to be done. For
example when I was at Bucknell, my territory was New Jersey.
New Jersey is a very productive area for football players,
and usually pretty good students at well. So that was my
area, and I would go to say northern New Jersey, and I used
to get the papers from the cities, and I would constantly
follow the all-stars and the kids who were the good football
players and then I would call the high school counselors and
find out what their academic. In those days, you could do
that. They would give you. They'd say, well, the kids did
this or that and this is his grade. Now they won't give you
that information. But anyway, I did a lot of homework so
I knew when I went into northern Jersey, I knew exactly
who I was going to see, whether they could get into
Bucknell or not, because I did not waste my time with any
football player that could not get into Bucknell. So
when I went into a high school, in those days you had to

D:

go into the office, get permission to get into the high
school. The coach knew you were coming and who you wanted
to see. So you arranged that. But most of the time a real
top athlete you wouldn't even bother to do that other than
finding out whether he could get into Bucknell or not.
The arrangements where then made at the youngster's home.
Take him out to dinner. So a typical day for say like
nine days. We'd go out for nine days at a time basically.
I'd be up at seven o'clock. Catch a quick breakfast. Be
at the school at eight o'clock, and I would be running
schools all the way until evening, and take out an athlete
and his parents for dinner and then visit another one
that evening. So the day was like seven o'clock in the
morning till like eleven o'clock at night. You did that
for nine consecutive days, and if there was any break
in between you looked at the films that you were getting
from the high schools that you were bringing back. So
it was an exhausting nine days. Then you made arrangements
for them to be at campus two weekends down the road so
when you're coming off the road you'd walk into the
house, give your wife your laundry and say, hi, give
her a kiss, kiss the kid, and then back off to the college
entertaining these kids on Saturday and Sunday. Getting
them back on the plane or wherever we had to take them,
and then in some cases I was back on the road on Monday.

B:

Had you seen these kids play?

D:

No, we'd get the films. Everything was done with film.
Viewing films. Now if I either had the films in advance
which was probably more times than not then I would find
out whether he could get into to Bucknell. If I found out
he was a good ball player, saw him on film, got his grades,
SAT's to get into Bucknell, then I'd arrange my recruiting
trip, my visits and then recruiting. The other thing was
to tie in alumni in those areas and they would host us.
We were trying to save money. So if I could get Joe Riggs
who's in an area to take me to the country club with the
parents and the youngster then we were saving money at
Bucknell. So we'd try to do this as much as possible.
Trying to get the alumni to pick up the tabs for these
dinners which was not an NCAA violation at the time.
It is now.

R:

In the recruiting wars, they call them recruiting wars
________ • What in most cases causes the youngster
to choose one school over an another? Does the recruiter
have a lot to do with that?

D:

First impressions are extremely important. You've got
to have a lot of background on the youngsters as well
as their parents in the background in terms of what they
do. What their lifestyle is. As much information as
you can get in. To illustrate the point that you just

D:

asked, I remember when I was at Bucknell there was one
young man who was an outstanding linebacker and he came
from Allentown, and I went to the home. Visited with him
at his home. I knew the parent was on welfare. It was a
single mother bringing the child up and they were on
welfare so I didn't know what to expect. I walked into
the home. The house was immaculate. You could have eaten
off the floor. It was just a very well kept home. Mother
was extremely, highly intelligent, and I was trying to
get this boy to come to Bucknell of course. Well, it was
between Bucknell and Syracuse, and as I began to talk
to the mother she said, well, let me ask a couple of
questions. She said, what would you do? You know that we
are on welfare. _ _ _ _ _ _ and she was doing an excellent
job at bringing this child up, and keeping the right
environment for him. She said, Syracuse has offered him a
full ride. They also have given him a sponsor and that
sponsor has agreed to buy all his clothes, all his shoes,
and make sure he gets home. He'll get him a job in the
summer to make sure he earns enough money. She said,
can Bucknell match that? I said, no mam. She said,
well what would you do? I said, I would send him to
Syracuse if he was my son. I mean she had me I had to be
absolutely honest with her, and she was so sincere. She
had no problem sending him to Bucknell. The difference
was somebody was going to sponsor him. His shoes, his
clothes and get him a job _ _ _ _ . Then she asked me the
question, what would you do? I think if the head coach
had heard me, he would probably have fired me, but I
had to be totally honest with her. I said, absolutely,
I would have done the same thing. And he did. He did go
to Syracuse, and he played three years as a starter at
Syracuse. _______ . Now the recruiting wars that
you're referring to, I could've lied to that kid or
that mother. Oh, no problem, I'll find an alum ...
Maybe I could've. I don't know. And we could have done
this and that, but at that time I knew we couldn't
do it ______ and besides ______NCAA violations.
I could have gotten fired over that if I had answered
differently, but everything was under the table. But
the wars that you're referring to is that there's an
awful lot of lieing going on. They don't care how they
get a kid as long as they get a young man to play they
don't care how they get him. You've heard the stories
about the young man going into the motel where he is
being kept the night before and opens up the closet
and there's all clothes, suits, jackets, everything
else was there. They're his. Things like that.

B:

That happens now?

D:

Yes.

R:

But once the people are pedaling are well known across

R:

the high schools circuit and the high school coaches know
them, do they run out of gas pretty soon or does this
stuff catch up with them?

D:

See the kids hear all these stories so when they go to a
school they'll say, well, where's my closet or where's
this because you know. They're expecting this because what
can Notre Dame offer more than Michigan according to the
NCAA? Nothing. The NCAA dictates exactly what you're going
to do. So therefore the athlete should make the decision
based on the academics of the institution or the environment
of the institution, the team records or whatever. That's
what should be what the younster has to make his judgement
on. But if you're trying to be competitive, there's money
under the table. There's clothes. There's women. All these
kinds of things incentives for these young men to come,
and they expect it after while this mentality permeates the
high schools and the top athletes go and say, well, you know
what else are you going to offer me. If you don't, see you
later. I'll go to somebody else because they'll offer.
Then you have the institutions who are trying to catch up
to the Michigans or the Notre Dames, for example, they don't
have the reputation and the history. So they're breaking
rules constantly. It's just a question of whether you get
caught or not.

R:

The only crime in America is if you get caught.

D:

It's only a crime if you get caught. Exactly. It's not as
prevalent as it used to be, but it still exists. j

R:

When you say the word women in this context, that means that
there will be dances and social gatherings, and pretty girls
will be there with the guys as escorts?

D:

Escorts. They provide them escorts for the weekend. That's
what they provide. It's as simple as that. At Slippery Rock
when the recruits came on to our campus, we spent very little
time with them. We would put them into the hands of our ball
players, and we would let the ball players do that. Because
we felt that our program was sound enough for our own ball
players to sell other kids. When a boy wants to know about
the coaching staff, he's not going to ask a member of the
coaching staff, he's going to ask a player, what are these
guys like. And from time to time, we used to have Rocklettes
and cheerleaders come in and do the same thing and we'd have
lodge groups. In those days, we used have maybe forty boys
at one time come in, and we used to bring the parents in as
well. Then we used to go down to the bookstore

ROBERT DISPIRITO #8
D:

That's when we used to use a lot of the football players
and cheerleaders because we wanted the kids to be able to
be in a position to ask other students, what's the school
really like? What's the social scene like? But we were
not obviously providing escort services, but we used our
own ball players extensively because we felt very good about
our program. We felt it could sell itself.

R:

When the recruiter goes on the road, they have to have some
notion about the various ways or the things you can major in
at Slippery Rock or at Bucknell to the extent where they could
talk about a degree program.

D:

Yes, they have to. In my case, we were all faculty so we were
very tuned to it all so it was never really a problem, but I'm
sure Joe Kopnisky, who's a full-time coach and defensive
coordinator, for example, is well versed in exactly what our
curriculum offered, and that's one of the things that you
have to sell. At least make that information available to
them. I would say for the vast majority of coaches the worst
part of their job is recruiting. Nobody likes it. It's hard
work. Your on road hitting four or five schools. You go from
one school to another. The point I was going to make was
this. If you're in a situation long enough you get to know
who to trust in terms of coaches in high school. When a
high school coach at a certain high school says, this is a
good one, and he'll play for you. I don't even have to look
at the film because I know from past experience that he
knows what we're all about. What a lot of the high school
coaches today with a school like Slippery Rock, you know
we're a second or third choice in terms of Penn State and
Pitt. They'd never probably ever come on this campus, get
to see us play a game, and they'll say, this young man can
play at your school. And my question to him is, have you seen
us play lately? If they say, no, then I'll say, then how do
you know? Well, he can play in _ _ _ . How do you know that?
I mean there are certain coaches that in sense you almost
have to give them a bad time because they're going to pawn
off as many kids as possible on you, and we have so very
little money to give when we make a mistake it's terrible.
We don't have a lot of money to waste, but we can't afford
to make mistakes. So what the good coaches like Coach
Kendziorski, I'll use him as an example, he was probably
the best recruiter I have ever had. He had his area well
organized. He knew the coaches that he could trust. We
all do a lot of viewing of film before we go on the road
so we know who we're looking at. We do check their academic
records to see if they can get into Slippery Rock. Then they
go out on the road and do their job of selling as much as
you can to get that youngster to come to this campus. We
used to do it in terms of sometimes small weekends, other

D:

times large weekends. It's a lot of hard work, and it's a
lot of selling. It's a selling yourself concept. It's not
easy. It's not easy to constantly sell the University versus
another university. You have to look at the advantages.
Wherever we could get an advantage over Indiana we tried to
exploit that. So we have to know what Indiana is doing.

R:

So are the recruiting coaches and the assistant coaches who
are out there recruiting, they're in some sense competing
against each other to come up with the better ball player.

D:

Constantly. Repeating. We're going after the same ball player.
We may have six schools within our conference competing for
that same ball player.

R:

And the coach's skill at recruiting has a lot to do with
what happens to his career a lot. PR is such big stuff.

D:

Usually when you recruit assistant coaches, you usually
recruit assistant coaches based on their personality and
their ability to express themselves because you know
coaching is like any form of teaching the better the
teacher the better informed the kids are the better you
can bring out their skills. Well, when you are on the
road it's the same thing. I very seldom looked into
what we call the x's and o's. Whether they know the
football game or not because usually when they are at
this point, they all know the x's and o's. That's
usually not a problem. And even if it is a problem you
can teach them your own philosophy anyway. But I've
got to have the personnel. I've got to have the person
that has an outstanding personality, can sell themself,
and I go see how he fits on my general staff. Does he
fit into the mold we've created? Is he a person who
is more personally motivated or self-motivated or
has goals for himself? Goals that they are going to benefit
from rather than the school's goals or the team philosophy
which are secondary. Then I can't deal with you like that.
You won't operate very well. We've got to deal with people
who are sincere, believe in what we're trying to do
and believe in our system and have a personality where they
get along with everyone. To this day all the coaches that
I've had one of the greatest accomplishments that I think
I've had in my coaching career we're still friends. We're
still socially good friends, and we do things and we never
forget one another. Whether it's a grandchild, I'll call
them. It's that sort of thing. One of the nicest compliments
I think that they paid is they still call me Coach. Well,
that doesn't mean a lot to some people but in our profession
that's the ultimate respect people give you when they call
you coach. Your own coaches call you coach.

B:

Back to the business of money for recruiting. You're not
allowed I mean there isn't money to give kids for clothes

B:

how about living when you're out on the recruiting run?
Is there decent support or do you have to spend two
dollars for breakfast, and is there support for this kind
of activity? Reasonable support?

D:

Well, for the most part most of the meals come out of own
family budget. There's a rule that you have to be overnight
or something there's some kind of rule that would never
fit into recruiting so we ended up we had coaches were the
money was coming out of their own pockets. Whenever we
could help them out, obviously, we would. We would use,
for example, University cars. Well, you know, when your
on campus and you're trying to get cars and everybody
else is trying to get cars a lot of times when we go out
there are no cars available so you use your own car.
So what most of the coaches were doing in my day we were
using those tax right offs. I didn't even file half
the time. I could never get a car. It was always such
a hassle to get a car on campus. I'd use my own car, and
I'd keep track of the mileage. I'd keep track of my lunches,
and that was deductible on my income tax because it was
such a hassle to do that. In contrast, friends of mine who
are on the University of Kentucky staff, they're head coach
at the time insisted that they never have less than two
hundred dollars in their pocket, or buy somebody lunches
or whatever might be and everything obviously was paid
for. Even the pro coaches, the guys who are on the Steelers
staff, when they go on an away game even though the staff
meals are provided in the room, they are provided in
advance, they are given three to four hundred dollars
pocket money just to be a good guy when you need to buy
somebody a drink or a dinner or whatever you want to do.
So that's in contrast to Slippery Rock. Well, we're taking
it off our income tax. That's the level we're at. We do
what we have to do. I still think they do a lot of that
today. But the large schools always have. When I was at
Bucknell I could go in and say I need four hundred dollars
for the short trip, and they'd give me four hundred
dollars in cash. All I had to do was come back with the
receipts. They always gave me money in advance. They can't
do that anymore. That's why we always use credit cards
all the time. Most faculty do when they go to conferences
because by the time the state reimburses you it's like a
month later. Hopefully, that's about the time your money
comes back and your credit card bill and the state has
paid you.

B:

Actually we just got you here to Slippery Rock. Dr. Carter
brought you in and we didn't here much about what happened
then.

D:

Well, I arrived here March 15. Two weeks before spring
practice. I was just getting my staff. I hired Mr. Oberlin,
Coach Oberlin, and Larry Pasquale, who played for me at

D:

the University of Bridgport, who is now with the Philadelphia
Eagles on their coaching staff. Then I hired Coach Clinger,
and I didn't know much about Coach Clinger only the fact that
he was on the staff earlier, but Coach Clinger was the only
one who knew western Pennsylvania. He was a high school coach,
and he was from this area. He's from Oil City. So I just
handed him _ _ _ _ _ . President Carter did a very strange
thing. He was so upset with the previous coach that when he
got fired and in the process of my getting hired in that
interim period all the reports are coming in from high schools
in terms of their athletes, and what positions they played,
things like that and you know they went to the President's
office and he collected them. So when I got the job, when I
was hired, matter of fact it's the office where Bruce
Rossiter is now. That was the President's office downstairs
in the Advancement Office there, and when he hired me, he
gave me this big stack of cards. He said here are your
recruits. Well, this is much. It's very late to start with,
and nothing had been done in the interim period. So that's
when I said to Coach Clinger, you want to be hired? You want
the job? Yes. Okay, here's your cards. In the meantime the
other coaches really are ready for spring practice. So I
went into the equipment room here that you mentioned. There
were 19 green away uniforms and 22 white and that was it.
Everything else had been stolen. So I had to order everything.
I had to order equipment. At that time the people said, well
we had this equipment down at the other cage. Want to use
the football equipment. Well, good, let me take a look at it.
And it was equipment they were using for the physical
education classes, and it was inferior equipment obviously.
Something I wouldn't use, and they were astounded when I
said, I can't use that. It's not standard. It's substandard.
They said, well, we're using it for the football class.
I said, well, first of all you shouldn't be, and second of
all I won't use it. I will not place myself in that position
to allow the kids to use _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ . So I had to buy
all this material, all the equipment, and so I had a
tremendous two weeks of trying to get to talk to kids, and
then there was an attitude. You know when you first walk
into a room as the classroom teacher, or whatever and
it's pretty important at the time, ______ . It's a
pretty good starting point. I knew from other people that
they had problems, morale problems and so forth. So I
had to go in with the attitude that the first one who steps
out of line he's going to get it real good. I think I fired
about five or six guys right off the team just like that
because of attitude, cussing, all those kinds of things.
I told them I just couldn't stand for that kind of stuff.
I said the stuff from a discipline point of view, and one
of it was their attitude on the field, fighting, using
bad language. I wouldn't accept these things so I ended
up firing one of the co-captains, and that got their
attention. But I had to let them know that they were going
to do it my way, and as long as I was to be the

D:

head coach they were going to do it my way. I wasn't going
to do it their way at all. I would listen to them and I'll
try to do whatever I can. So, anyways, that was a very hard
period of time to develop the attitude or the philosophies
that I wanted, but I was firm with them. I think from that
time on they called me the godfather because I was the boss
and they knew that, and I wanted them to know that I was the
boss. Then again I also wanted them to know that I was
concerned about their problems as well, but that comes a
little bit later. Anyway, that's spring was a very hectic
time. We got through spring practice. Kids were joining the
team late. Ball players who wouldn't play for the other
coach were now coming out. If they didn't have the
experience, then I fired a few guys because of their
attitudes. Their philosophy didn't fit in with my
philosophy. So we opened up the season. We got ready for
the season. We got beat 61-7 in the opening game by
Waynesburg. Waynesburg went on to average 59 points a game,
so it wasn't just us, but we won, I think, three games.
Then it was just a matter of my being consistent with what
I was trying to do. If I was consistent, they knew what I
would do. I would tolerate this. I would not tolerate that.
They knew that. Then in order to develop discipline on the
team and strength for my position, that's when I started
to develop a group of ball players that dealt with the
discipline problems of the team. That's when I brought in
a member from each one of the classes plus my captain, and
if anybody broke any of the rules that we had set, we had
them appear before this committee. I found out that the
peer evaluations were a lot tougher than what I would do.
They weren't fooling the kid. They could con me a bit
because I didn't know what was really going on in the dorm
but they were not going to con their own ball players.
You know it's funny. Once that responsibility, at least
the ones that I chose, assume that responsibility, and
by assuming that responsibility they would _ _ _ , and
that helped tremendously. Then as you go along you've got
to try to show improvement as you go along, and your
philosophy has to keep coming out. I think it has to be
consistent. I didn't have one set of rules for first
and another set for second teamers and so forth.
Everybody lived under the same umbrella. Once they began
to get that idea, it was
We recruited better athletes. It just got better. And
we had a very good staff. I was very fortunate. I think
I only had one turnover in the first ten or eleven years.
I had the same staff all the time we were building
The championship years. We were building foundations.
And the school was very supportive. Dr. Watrel was very
supportive of what we were trying to do. So was Dr.

R:
R:

Do you remember how scholarships for athletes when you
came?

D:

We didn't have any.

R:

There were none.

D:

No. We didn't have any. We just had work study.

R:

Work study. Was that again a twenty hour a week possibility?

D:

You got it.

R:

Yes.

D:

Maximum of twenty a week.

R:

At minimum wage whatever minimum wage was.

D:

That's all we had. It wasn't until we started to develop
a booster club, Quarterback Club money, getting some support,
that we started to have some money that we could give as
scholarships. What you would call an outright for not
working money that they didn't have to work for. As a matter
of fact, Rick Porter was the first full-scholarship boy that
we had here. I think the very first. He played in the 1970's.

B:

Full scholarship meant tuition, rooms, board?

D:

Yes. We would pick up his tuition, room and board, and some
money for the books that's what the NCAA allowed. We had one.
In order to win in that kind of situation you had to have a
sound program that motivated them. You had to find other ways
to motivate them, and you motivated them by treating them
like human beings to start with. I would do little things that
turned out to be important later on but at the time it was
a good idea to do it. If they had a good practice, I would cut
practice short. That's enough. You've done the job. You've
done a great job. See you. Things like that. Fifteen minutes
off practice is a big thing. Some days I would just call
practice off. I felt they were tired. I was tired. I was
physically tired. I was mentally tired, and I felt the
team knew it. So I decided take the day off. Things like
that. It refreshed us many times. I think the reason why
as I look back on my coaching career the reason why I think
I was successful is because I like people and I respect
people. That's something I learned from my father, mother,
in corning through all my experiences. If you're treated
like a human being, you react like one. It's worth it with
my kids. There wasn't anything I couldn't do. They knew
there wasn't anything I wouldn't do for them, but they
also knew what happened if they stepped out of line that
they had to answer to me for it. It worked. It worked for
me.

B:

So they live up to expectations? I liked your peer
team discipline that the cases went to first. They felt

that responsibility.
D:

D:

They assumed it immediately. It was amazing. As a matter
of fact, there was one time I let a young man who was a
problem, a discipline problem, drinking and whatever,
and I appointed him on that committee, and a coach would
say you are crazy. I said, I don't think so. I think he's
going to assume the responsibility. He turned around and he
didn't drink the whole season. He was a model ball player.
I never _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ . I had a young man, for example,
when I came back six years ago, he was a terror.
I mean nobody could seem to handle him, and I'm saying this
with pride because we did handle him, and that young man
wanted, he'd been thrown off the team, wanted to come back
on, and I made that young man wait, and wait, and wait. Come
back in the office. I'd say, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ talk.
You're going to have to make an appointment. You're going to
have to talk to the staff. You've got to convince the staff
that you should be a member of this team again. He came in
and talked to the staff, and then he came in and said, how'd
I do? I said, I haven't made up my mind. I made him wait and
wait. Then the last thing I made him do I made him
and explain to the captains why he should be on this team.
He did that, and then he came back and said, how'd I make
out? I said, I haven't made up my mind yet. I made him wait.
I made him wait. The last thing I had him do was at the end
of a practice I had him come out onto the field because he
wasn't practicing, and I took all the coaches. I told all the
coaches to go in. I was the only coach there, and before the
team I said, now you plead your case to the team, and after
you give your case to the team and then you leave, and then
the team is going to vote whether you come back on this
team or not. He did it, and he left, and the kids where tough
on him. I mean they were hitting him with all kinds of
questions, and he left, the team voted him on, and the kid
was a model. I said to myself, if I've done anything in my
coaching career, if I've saved just this one kid from going
in the wrong direction, it was worth it. That's the
of what coaching is all about. That's what coaching is all
about as I see it. Wins and losses. You could be a bum, and
being a terrible influence and still be a winner because
you've got the talent and everybody considers you a quality
person. I'm a product of the small school system. I think the
products and the values that we get from our coaching is what
we do with our kids and that's probably one of my, I think,
without a doubt in my mind, my crowning achievement here at
the University with turning this kid around. To this day, he's
playing Canadian football. But boy, did I make him sweat.
Oh, geez. He loved me after that. I thought he would never
speak to me again. I made him really work at it, and he knew.
we had a rule. The first time you get in a fight in the game
you' re through. That's it. We don't even talk about it
anymore because we've already talked about. Never get into any
fights. He wanted to, and he was big enough, and he was bully

enough, but he used all his energies in a very positive
manner. That was probably the greatest achievement, I think.
I've had some good times here, but that was unbelievable. I
was amazed myself that this kid turned out so well.
R:

You know you forbade fighting and the nature of football,
college football, any football, is that you can lose your
temper very easily from a foul or just from playing with
hard nose folks and for a guy to play football for three or
four years and not blow up and retaliate is extremely
difficult for a young student to do.

D:

Good training for him though isn't it.

R:

Oh, I think it's superb.

D:

Good training for him to learn how to control himself in
adverse situations.

R:

Especially with the frustration of losing at the same time.

D:

Well, you know it prevents probably down the road an awful lot
of young men burning a lot of bridges. You know yourself as
you get into the profession as you begin to burn a lot of
bridges some of those bridges are the same bridges you've got
to come back and try to go across, and if you can't control
your temper it could really hurt you down the road, I think.
I think the basic achievement or the crowning achievement of
any coach is to be able to have his or her players play at
their potential or above it. That's what coaching's all about.
There's a lot of kids out there with a lot of talent. They
know to play to their potential. Even their discipline is the
same way. You just can't allow it. There's so many lessons to
be learned in playing football and that's the ability to
get up. As they say, if you get knocked down 12 times, you get
up 13 times. You've succeeded. This is what it is. We've all
had setbacks. We didn't get a job we applied for. So what are
you going to do? We've been fired, so what are you going to
do? We've met some setbacks. Whether it's a setback in terms
of a death in the family or a lose or whatever, we have to
learn to get up that thirteenth time, and that's what
athletics is basically all about, as I see it. They talk
about good citizenship and all that. I think it's your
ability to respond to adverse conditions, and to respond to
them in a positive manner. This is what we try to do as
coaches. We try to reflect that, and they say a team
reflects the personality of the coaching staff. I think
that's extremely true.

R:

So the morale has to be relifted after a big defeat that you
didn't expect or weren't emotionally ready to handle, and the
coaching staff has everything to do with that.
Yes, it's very important what you do the next day. As a head
coach it's very important what you say after a defeat of that

D:

nature. That's where I had that experience with one of our
former presidents here. Walked in a locker room after a very
stunning defeat that we had. We were on television. It was a
nationally
televised
game.
ESPN.
We
were
upset
by
Millersville. I debated what to say to them. I was so furious
because we did not ___ off our potential. That's when I
really got mad. Anytime we got beat and we performed up to our
potential it never upset me one bit. I just believed that
they were better, but when I walked in and saw that strange
guy in my locker room I wasn't sure if he was the new
President or not, and at that time, I think the psychology
of it came out and I said, maybe it is. So I went in a
totally different way. I talked to them in a very encouraging
manner, and I got the nicest letter, one of the nicest
letters I've ever received from the President stating how
impressed he was in terms that I didn't go in there and
yell and scream and accuse everybody. He looked at it in
a very positive manner in what we had to do. So the next
week is just get on with the job. There's no sense in
screaming. There isn't anything you can do to recapture the
moment. I think one of the lessons I remember reading an
article on the Dallas Cowboys and Tom Landry. Within the
realm of his philosophy.
He only showed the positive highlights. He cut out the
rest of it. He never wanted to reinforce the negative play.
Only showed them the positive things.
R:

There's a success story.

D:

And he succeeded.

R:

Twenty-six years.

D:

He succeeded, yes. I used to think, I wish I had the
facilities and the man power to do that. I'd have done
it too, but we didn't have time to breakdown the film
and do all those kinds of things. Those are the things that
were done, but it was an interesting philosophy. So you
do the next best thing. You don't go down on Monday morning
and start yelling and screaming at the ball players because
it's not going to change anything. So you just get on with
your time. And this is what the kids have got to learn.
That's what young men and young ladies have got to learn.
You know that through defeat if you learn something from it
count your blessings because now you have to get on with
the job. Maybe you can correct it, but there isn't anything
you can do about it other than the fact that you're going
to correct some of things that went wrong. See in a very
positive manner you try to progress and try to continue to
reach their potential, but what I said before, in a contest
or anybody, I think, in any endeavors, if you've done
everything you possibly could have done, and you were defeated
or you didn't win or you didn't accomplish at least you feel
good about the fact that you did everything you can. One of

D:

the coach's philosophies, a good coach's philosophy, I think,
is that when you walk off the field in defeat that if you had
done or you did everything you possibly could the previous
week for that week to prepare for that game and it wasn't good
enough then at least you feel good about yourself and know
that you've done everything you possibly can. It's when you
come off the field and you don't think that you have done the
job that you should have done or the kids did not play to
their potential that's _ _ _ _ . At least it bothers me. I
think most people are the same way.
R:

Were fans or alumni ever much of a problem for you in terms of
wins or losses or stuff like that?

D:

No, not in this situation a whole lot. I was very seldom used
with alumni. Some schools would take the football coaches or
basketball coaches around and utilize them in their programs,
but that was not part of the philosophy of this school. So I
very seldom was used along those lines which I think should be
the opposite. I think over all the years I've been here the
great success we've had in wrestling and football and
basketball and baseball, mens and womens, should be used.
They're great ambassadors for the University and I don't think
they've been used enough or if they were used they should have
been used more. I don't think you can use them enough.

R:

In terms of public exposure?

D:

Positive images.

R:

Alumni chapters?

D:

Yes. I don't think that's been exploited. I know I certainly
was not exploited. I have never been invited to an alumni
meeting in the 25 years that I've been here. It's just
something. It's an observation. Maybe someday that observation
may change because
I
think the coaches as well as
administrators as well as faculty present some very positive
images. I think faculty have got to be used as well as
coaches to go to alumni meetings because some of the strongest
ties, bonds, that were created on this campus were by
faculty and students and they should be utilized.

R:

What about your sons and daughters, do they ever have anything
to say to you about the game?

D:

No.

R:

They knew you had given it your best shot.

D:

No. Never did. They grew up in that
never got too much. It's funny. Out
was here. We had been on string for
game in five years at home. I think

D:

whole atmosphere. No, I
of all the years that I
wins. We hadn't lost a
that string was 34 games

at home, and we got beat by East Stroudsburg, 7-6, in an
opening game, and corning off the field as I was going to go
in that little runway that players go in this father started
yelling at me, you idiot. You dummy. Well, I was upset enough
because it was the first time we had lost in a long time, and
I looked up at him, and he was spitting, and he was raving.
Well, I started to go up in the stands after him, and the
coaches had to restrain me. I lost it. I mean I think it was
the only time in my life I ever lost it, but fortunately my
coaches were there. I couldn't believe this guy. I mean we
had won like 34 games in a row. We hadn't lost in five years.
We lost one game by one point, and this guy's screaming at
me because I don't know what I'm doing. So that was the only
time. It's funny.
B:

You were ready to take him on?

D:

Oh my, yes. I lost my cool on that one.

R:

That would have been 1976, 1977? Right after your 1976 game.
1972, 1973, 1974, 1976.

D:

It would have been the 1975 season. Beginning of the 1975
season.

R:

Oh, 1975 season? Yes. In between

D:

Yes. Because we had won three championships there, consecutive
championships. I couldn't comprehend this man.

R:

As there are 14 schools in the statewide conference, are there
any non-football schools? Do all 14 play?

D:

Yes, they do.

R:

So there are seven in the western conference and seven in the
eastern? Is that the way it works?

D:

Yes.

R:

So you have six conference games. My question really was. You
had four state championships in five years.

D:

We had four western division championships, but we had three
state championships.

R:

Are there other schools who have dominated our conference that
way?

D:

Nobody's matched that record.

R:
R:

Yes. Now IUP, I gather, has what would you call an unfair
advantage because of their size? They have 15,000 or 16,000
students. Does that have something to do with all that?

D:

Well, they have more money.

R:

Yes, but that's translated into more money.

D:

Right, they have more money. Their scholarship program is
extensive compared to ours. I think somebody had told me at
one time we are ranked down in the middle of the schools in
terms of what money were available for scholarships, but
Indiana right now has scholarship programs that far exceeds
anyone in this conference, and my only problem is that I'm
envious of them. It's a program that they've developed.
They've created, and at one time when we were winning, we
were in that situation. We certainly had enough, we didn't
have scholarships, but we had enough work study to take
care of all our needs.

B:

That was from alumni donations?

D:

No, just the college. Work study on campus. We very seldom
got any money from alumni.

B:

How does IUP finance all those scholarhsips.

D:

I don't know the exact, but I do know that they have excess.
So much money from every student goes into the athletic
fund. They have a larger budget to start with in terms of
student enrollment. They do an awful lot with fund raising.
More than we do. That's one thing that they do. They have
an athletic _ _ _ _ _ _ _ for that scholarship purpose, and
it was _ _ _ _ , it was just accessed. Right now they have
what they call a red shirt. A red shirt in football is a
player who practices with the team, but is not allowed to
play. At one time you could complete your eligibility,
your four years eligibility, within five years. Well, today's
ruling is you complete your four years eligibility within
no boundaries anymore. So it could be five years. Six years.
You can still play as long as you just use those four years
eligibility. So they have an extensive program of what they
call red shirts. These are the young men who practice but
don't play, and they're either maturing them or saving
them because they have a wonderful quarterback right now, and
this quarterback is almost as good as he is so why have
them compete against each other so they hold this one
back for a year. Let this one use their eligibility, and
then move this guy in. So it's a complicated program like
most schools in the country use, and Indiana uses it too.
Not that Slippery Rock uses it very minimal. We have a few,
but they have 30 guys or so in their red shirt program.
So they're always good. One of the reasons why we were very
good in our program was that for every senior, we were
graduating an average of 14 seniors a year, but we were
winning so consistently that the backups were playing as
much if not more time than the regulars. So when we would
lose 14 seniors they would say, oh, oh, Slippery Rock is

D:

going to be vulnerable because they are losing 14 stars.
Well, I had 14 other guys that probably played just as
much as these and they weren't starters, and that was
how we perpetuated our program. We played a lot of people.
We weren't interested in building scores. We were interested
in building the experience of the team to develop that kind
of continuity, and it worked. We dominated four out of five
years. We dominated the league.
R:

If you hadn't gone into coaching and teaching, did you have
alternative careers back there that you gave thought to?

D:

Well, since my family were all hair dressers. My father was
a hair dresser. My brothers and sisters. I don't know if I
would have gone into hair dressing. I never really thought
of anything else. I always wanted to be a teacher. Coach.
Teacher. I admired my high school coach a great deal. He
was my role model. Never really cared a whole lot for
academics until I got into college. My very first semester
in college I did my _ _ _ after that I had no problems.

R:

And grad school. Was that fun?

D:

Yes. I enjoyed that. I went to Teachers College in Columbia.
Living in the big city was fun. That's where I met my wife.
We had a ball. I was going to class until ten forty-five and
she was studying with Martha Graham, dance. At Martha
Graham's she wouldn't get out until about the same time so
we'd go out and have dinner about eleven or eleven-thirty
at night. By the time I'd get home it would be about two
o'clock in the morning, and sometimes we wouldn't get home
until six o'clock in the morning so I could change my
clothes and go to class. That was amazing how you keep your
what you can do with your energy when your young, but it
was an exciting time. New York City was an exciting place.
She lived in Greenwich Village, and I lived at the other end
up by _ _ _ Park which was the very end of the subway line
up by Manhatten College. So we were at opposite ends. We
were teaching right there at a private school. That's were
we met.

R:

At Barnard?

D:

At Barnard School for Boys.

R:

What was she teaching?

D:

She was teaching English, and I was teaching physical
education. She was studying dance with Martha Graham and I
was doing my thing at Columbia, and then we would meet for
dinner because we didn't have time because we were running
from the teaching job to graduate school. It was exciting
times.

D:

R:

It was a twelve month program there? You went through
Columbia in twelve months?

D:

Yes. Not really. Almost less than that because I just went.
Yes, I went to the summer session. The summer session was the
last. I needed four more hours, and I took my four hours
during the summer session, but it was exiting times. It was a
safe time. Matter of fact, the fifties were the last good
years.

R:

The Eisenhower years.

D:

Well, you know, there wasn't so much drugs. It was young.
Plenty of jobs.

B:

No crime on the subway when you took those long rides.

D:

Long? I used to go from one end to the other. My only problem
was that every now and then they would express 116th Street
where Columbia was which would drive me crazy because I would
have to go all the way to the next stop get on the subway and
come back. I never understood New York as to why they would
spontaneously express a stop. I remember one professor I had.
He was very renowned. He had written many, many books and so
forth, and he said, if anybody comes in late one more time
in this class, and that includes you, Dispirito, and I tried
to explain to the guy I was just getting out of my teaching
job at four o'clock and I had to make the five o'clock and
the subway sometimes it would express, and I'd be late. So
sometimes I didn't go to class and I would be late, and he
wasn't going to let me come in.

R:

Better to be cut than to show up late.

D:

D:

That's true, but it was a fun time. She lived in Greenwich
Village which was a very exciting place. A very safe place.
It was the only place where you could cash a check. Nobody
in New York trusted anybody. I lived in a garage apartment
on a big estate overlooking the Hudson [River] right across
the street from the bridge Ambassador. I had a nice set up.
It was country. If you've been in New York where they do
alternate side parking, you had to get up by seven o'clock
in the morning and change your car from one side to the
other side because otherwise you would get a ticket. It was
crazy. When I got this other apartment out on the estate,
I didn't have any parking problem, but the subway, you're
right, the subway. You know, corning back at five, six, or
four o'clock in the morning, I never felt threatened. I
never did. I probably should have, but I didn't. Washington
Square at NYU was a very exciting place on Sunday. Performers,
all kinds of performers. It was just an exciting place. I
loved it.

R:

Can I ask how you met your wife?

D:

We were both teaching at Barnard.

R:

So you just started dating?

D:

Well, she used to giggle at me. I would bring the kids out.
I'd be in the back leading this whole row of either fifth or
sixth graders. She used to get a kick out of that. I obviously
noticed her at lunch, and then I got the courage to finally
say to her that I was tired of eating by myself, and it was
true. It really was. I was so tired. I always went to a
restaurant or a cafe and eating by myself. New York can be
extremely lonely, and if you don't know anyone. I didn't know
anybody. So I told her, I am awfully tired of eating by
myself. Can I buy you dinner? And that's how we started.
She was broke. She didn't have much money. I was always buying
her dinners. That's how we started.

R:

What did you teach at Barnard?

D:

Just physical education. I would be given all the trouble
classes. A private school and sometimes they tend not to be
as aggessive with their discipline because it's a private
school and if they get to aggessive with their discipline,
they're going to leave, and that costs you money. That costs
the school money. So a lot of times a lot of the discipline
is overlooked to keep the kids happy, but when they did get
out of hand, they would give me that class, and I would have
to shape them up.

R:
D:

That's about right. Because one boy who was really a problem,
I remember, he just brought me to the brink, and I put
him up against the locker. I grabbed him by the shirt, and
drove him up against the locker, and spoke to him in a very
loud voice about one inch from his face, and he got
frightened and he turned around. He was my helper for the
rest of the semester, and he just loved me after that. He
was looking for that kind of discipline evidently. He wasn't
getting any. He was very sarcastic and very undisciplined,
but I threatened him. I could have been in trouble. I should
never have touched him, but I did. _ _ I didn't hit him,
but I just brought him up against the locker and spoke to him
in a very loud manner about an inch from his nose, and after
that he was my buddy.

B:

He didn't go home and complain to his folks?

D:

No. One other kid did though, and I was brought on the carpet
for it. Fortunately, I was in a position where I had to deny
it because I knew I would have a lawsuit against me. What I
did was, it was crazy as I look back. You know sometimes when
you're trying to be forceful with the kids, get back in line,
I hit him in the rear. He went home and said I struck him.

D:

Well, literally I guess I did, but it wasn't in the frame or
the content that I would strike him in anger or anything, and
I didn't hit him that hard anyways. Anyway he came in
because I knew they were going to nail me. They were looking.
It just happened. But it's hard. I spent a year in private
school, and I taught two years in private schools, and I
so I had some idea of what private schools are all
about, and a lot of the kids are undisciplined kids. Kids
that mothers and fathers can't control so they send them to
private schools. A lot of them are because they are traveling
and they really don't want to bother with their kids so
discipline becomes a problem. A lot of times in private school
systems a lot of young men because I always went to or taught
at the boys school, they were looking for someone to show them
some discipline. In that case at Barnard, one of them was.
He did. He became my helper and my confident. He always
brought all the equipment out. There wasn't anything he
wouldn't do for me. The other kid and that was a much younger
kid. He was like a fifth grader or something like that. The
one that complained. But private schools are different.
B:

It wasn't a boarding school?

D:

No. This was a day school. Cheshire was the boarding school.
Private schools are a whole different world than public
school systems. There are some advantages, and there's some
disadvantages. A lot of problems. A lot of homosexual
problems. Real problems. You have to deal with it.

R:

The Army was good times? You didn't have any shortage of
equipment.

D:

I never liked the Army. Never cared for it. I had some good
times, obviously, but it was hindering my professional career.
I had to put my two years in and didn't take an early release
because I did not want to be called up again. I stayed to the
very end to make sure I had my two years in. Anybody at that
time they gave you a window so if you went out six months
before, but you had to serve x amount of times in the reserves
I didn't want any of that. I did not care at all for being in
the Army. Just didn't. That was not my world. I didn't care
for it. A lot of my time was spend in Walter Reed so that
was a different thing, too. Funny when you're in the service
like that you don't have the freedom of choice. If I wanted
to stay an extra day at someplace I couldn't do it. You had
to be there. You had to be where you were supposed to be. You
had no choice or freedom. That kind of freedom. And I felt
very closed in, and I didn't like it.

R:
R:

When I was in the Army and Air Force in San Antonia, we used
to have great admiration for the guys who ran the field house
and the athletic director and all those folks because they
looked like they had the gravy train to end all gravy trains.

D:

They did.

R:

And they did.

D:

When I first went in, I was the exec officer at a training
company and we would go through cycles. Beginning cycles,
advanced cycles. It was at boot camp, and you were always
out in field. When you got an advanced group, it was a lot
of night problems, and you were out all night. It was not
my ... I couldn't get too excited about it. There are a number
of things that would happen, but it wasn't until I became
the ___ officer that life became the good life in a sense.
I still didn't care for it.

R:

You could make your own rules pretty much?

D:

Oh, yes. You had your own gymnasium and you ran it, and you
ran it the way you wanted to do it. Make sure you catered to
the colonel and all his needs and that kind of thing, but I
never cared for the service.

R:

Did your teams travel when you coached in the service?

D:

No. It was all on base.

R:

All intermural.

D:

It was like every battalion had their teams. I'm glad you
brought that up because after a year of that, I was asked to
become the base coach. They were going to have for the first
they were going to have a base team that would do the
traveling, and I remember doing an inventory of all the
equipment, and the buying of the equipment and before I
accomplished that I was assigned to go to Walter Reed Army
Hospital. I had a problem that had to be corrected in so
I was sent there. So I never became the head coach. I was
there for 20 weeks at Walter Reed. So when I got reassigned
to get back Dix.

R:

You went in at Benning?

D:

Yes. I had to go through Officer Candidate School there. Even
though you were commissioned, you still had to go through the
Officer Candidate School, and if you didn't pass or you didn't
meet the qualifications, they decommissioned you and you were
then drafted into the service as a private. So just a little
pressure there.

R:
D:

Well, you know. If had my choice, I would still go back in as
an officer because there are certain advantages like putting
your civies on and going to the Officer's Club and have a nice
meal at night. Okay? You didn't have everybody jumping on you.

You had enough people jumping on your back, but you didn't
have the enlisted men jumping on you at least. When you're a
private everybody jumps on you. You're a nothing. At least we
had a gold bar and it helped considerably. I wanted to go
overseas very badly. I wanted to see Europe, and that was my
problem. When they gave me the physical. We went through
Benning, if you can believe how the Army works sometimes, we
went through the Officer's Candidate School, and they forgot
to give us a physical. It was scheduled, and things didn't
work out, whatever it was. So here I am at the next base and
they discovered in my record that I haven't had a physical.
So they put me through this extensive, everybody was in my
company, and they come up with something that had to be
corrected for me. So that's when I was send to Walter Reed
Army Hospital. That's how I got out of as I said I was going
to be the head coach of Fort Dix, but by the time I got back
they reassigned me to ___ . I don't look on it as a very fun
time. I met a lot of fine people, but I didn't like their
restrictions. I had to be back at camp at a certain time.
Things like that. It was crazy.
R:

At Bridgeport did you have some really outstanding athletes?

D:

Yes. We had a boy by the name of George Dickson who went on to
play in Canadian football, and won their, what is their MVP of
the Canadian football. I forget the name of the trophy. He won
it twice. As a matter of fact, Pat Abruzzi, who play with me
at the University of Rhode Island, went up to Canada, and he
did the same kind of thing. It was amazing. He won the same
award. They're the two guys I know that have won the MVP's
in Canadian football at the time that _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ in
Bridgeport. George Dickson broke some of Pat Abruzzi's
records. Those are the only two guys that were extraordinary
beyond. I'd loved to have played in pro football, but I was
too small. In those days you played both ways, and you just
played 60 minutes. Interesting.

R:

Did Factor ever play?

D:

Factor was a linebacker. A real good one.

R:

I know.

D:

But whenever ...