WHEELING – All hail Henry, Freddie, Mousey and Fish.
“I look at that doggone thing every day and I still laugh,” Ed Gorczyca said Friday morning. “After all these years.”
At 88, Gorczyca still isn’t the oldest member of the Polish American Patriot Club in Wheeling – amazingly – but he’s getting there.
“Four guys ahead of me,” he said.
The club for generations has been nestled like a pierogi at 4410 Jacobs St., on the southside of this working-class town that’s just a girder’s length from Pittsburgh.
Wheeling’s southside is where all the Polish immigrant families like his settled after finding work in the mills that gnawed and glowed 24 hours a day.
Said families, though, made sure their first-generation American progeny kept the ways of the Old Country alive, you’d better believe it.
Polish was still spoken around the dinner table.
Mass was a mix of Polish and Latin at St. Ladislaus Parish, before the ornate Catholic church was shuttered.
And at the Polish American Patriot Club, everyone was fluent in the language of football.
Especially the West Virginia University Mountaineers on Saturday.
If you didn’t go to the game, you went to the club, where, perched on your seat, you’d crane for Jack Fleming’s radio call from Old Mountaineer Field.
Then there was WVU-Pitt.
Four more, unto the breach
This one was war, religion, an epic poem and your favorite song on the jukebox, all rolled into one afternoon.
“Back then it was, ‘I don’t care how many we lose, just as long as we beat Pitt,’” Gorczyca said.
The two teams separated by 70 miles of Interstate 79, line up again today for another Backyard Brawl run in the rivalry that’s been around since 1895 – though Gorczyca grouses could hardly be a “rivalry” now in the traditional sense.
He’ll get back to that.
A pugilistic series, it was, though, when it was on the regular schedule.
You had your blowouts, your comebacks and your belly-up blunders – the likes of which could cause bleeding ulcers to take up residence in the innards of the flintiest of point-spread gamblers and the most faithful of the fans in either set of the bleachers.
You had Bobby Bowden and 17-14, which went his way.
And Rich Rodriguez and 13-9 … which did not.
Before that, there was the 1957 Brawl at the old Pitt Stadium in scruffy, funky Oakland.
Like two drunks throwing haymakers in the parking lot after last call, the Mountaineers outlasted the Panthers 7-6, and the WVU faithful – including the aforementioned Henry, Freddie, Mousey and Fish – stormed the field.
“Those boys are no longer with us,” Gorczyca said. “They never paid to get into a game. They always managed to sneak with the band. I don’t know how they pulled that off.”
He doesn’t know how they survived the hysterical scrum to snag a piece of those poor, wooden goalposts that never had a chance.
Like a prize trophy or a religious relic they delivered that gift from the gridiron gods straight to Jacobs Street and the Polish American Patriot Club.
Gorczyca wasn’t around then. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force right after high school, but he heard about it. And when he did, you could hear his laughter from one end of the barracks to the other.
“I enjoyed that one, for sure.”
Airplanes (and other collegiate gridiron facts of life)
He doesn’t enjoy college football like he used to. Conference realignment and Name, Image and Likeness, and all that.
“My God, if you gotta get on an airplane for an away game there’s something wrong,” he said.
“And you’ve all those players and all that money, and the school is still paying their tuition. I don’t know about that.”
He’s not that confident in WVU’s football prospects this season, even if Rich Rodriguez and his throwback pedigree to those games of yore is on the sidelines.
Still, when kickoff ensues at 3:30 p.m. at Milan Puskar Stadium, he’ll be perched at the Polish American Patriot Club in the front of the TV.
“Well, if we beat ‘em, that’ll make the season,” he said.
Meanwhile, the club is “his” place – it’s always been – just as it is for the now-departed goalpost quartet of Henry, Freddie, Mousey and Fish.
They applied a stylish, two-tone paint job to the Brawl booty and added their names, along with the date of the game and the score in full documentation of the moment.
You’ll see it pretty quick when you walk in. Right next to the bowling trophies and the framed portrait of John F. Kennedy, forever young.
In a world full of seismic cultural shifts – not even counting college football – Gorczyca likes that the Polish American Patriot Club is staying on at its little post on Jacob Street.
As said, he likes that he’s 88 – and still isn’t the old guy in the place.
“You can usually find me down here every day.”
