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  Watchung Hills Regional High School accepted students from three school districts in central New Jersey:  Watchung Borough, Warren Township and Passaic Township where students from Stirling, Millington, Gillette, and Meyersville all attended.  In grammar school in Watchung we had played against the other two townships and were vaguely familiar with their athletes.  They had several good athletes, especially in Passaic Township, where Frank Rossi and friends regularly beat us in baseball and basketball.  

Because we were a “regional” high school, the size of our class at least tripled as we freshman matriculated from smaller local schools to the uncharted waters of a new high school with over a thousand students. In was daunting and yet exciting to meet hundreds of young people from other schools.  

I tried out for the freshman football team.  I didn’t doubt that I would make it.  I wanted to be the quarterback.  I had competition from a Warren resident named Rob Lang.  He was an excellent student with a high IQ  I knew this because one day I stole a look at the freshman coach’s clipboard where each player’s IQ was listed and while I don’t recall the exact numbers, Rob had an IQ at least ten points higher than anyone else, including me.  IQ was a highly valued quantity in those days and it gave Rob an advantage with coaches over all comers, especially for the position of quarterback.  The problem was it was more a test of literacy and focus than athletic ability.  I believed I was a better athlete than Rob and would get the chance to prove it throughout our high school years, but his intelligence and good character gave him an advantage with the coaches.  He won the job and I had to settle for playing safety on defense, which didn’t suit me at all; I wanted to handle the ball on every play, not wait for someone to drop it or throw an errant pass.  You rarely touch the ball on defense.  I recall very little about that season playing freshman football.  I envied Rob, but it didn't turn me against him.  In fact, he and I became good friends.  

In our sophomore year, Rob was promoted to the varsity in the expectation he would replace a competent senior quarterback named Jim Goulding who would graduate at the end of the school year. I was given the job as the junior varsity quarterback.  I played passably well but don’t remember much about it other than I broke my nose in one game. I was starting to feel that the coaching staff including the head varsity coach Don Schneider didn’t know how to judge talent. Several other sophomores had been elevated to the varsity but not me.  I viewed my talent as latent and if given a chance would bloom, which it did later.  

I was pining to play for the varsity and thought I would get my turn the following year but was disappointed again. Inexplicably, Rob was given the job of quarterback and performed passably well without distinction.  The team had a winning record, but that was mostly due to the presence of Jace Ericson, one of the best running backs in the state of New Jersey.  He was 6’-1,’ weighed 195 lbs and could run the 100 yard dash in 10.8 seconds.  It generally took 3 tacklers to bring him down.  

Coach Schneider didn’t approve of me.  I had started drinking and partying on weekends with fellow athletes and a group of teenage sophisticates consisting of  aspiring bohemians and risk takers, some of whom were athletes and others who were natural comedians, artists or had other talents. I suspect Coach Schneider, who lacked a sense of humor, thought I was a bad influence on his more traditional athletes.  And I was a smoker, a habit I got from my parents.

Watchung Hills had not beaten North Plainfield in football in the seven years since our  high school had been built in 1957 and students from Watchung migrated from North Plainfield to the new high school.   In November of 1964 we played them at their field. As a junior, I was playing cornerback and was the place kicker on the team. I intercepted one pass that year and made my share of tackles. But my heart wasn’t in defense.  Jace Ericson revved up his motor for the game and almost single-handedly produced a victory for us.  He ran for over 100 yards and was so exhausted after the game from transporting tacklers on his back that he could barely walk.  (A few  beers and shots of vodka fixed that at the celebration later.)   I kicked an extra point and missed another that bounced off the post and yet we hung on to win a close game 13 to 10.  Our defense was nearly flawless.  Defeating North Plainfield was a major step forward for the WHRHS football program and our fans were jubilant.  

A week or two later I was thrown off the team.  The owner of the school bus concession who drove the bus that picked up students on our road, had seen me smoking a cigarette at the bus stop one morning and reported me to Coach Schneider, who informed me I was not going to be allowed to play our final game on Thanksgiving morning against Manville.  I was shocked, but not so shocked I couldn’t conceive a way to conceal my banishment from my parents, who would not have been pleased.  i told them I had injured my groin again (as I had just before the first game of the season) and would be unable to play.  I asked Coach Schneider to allow me to run the chains that measured first downs so that I could  be near the team.  He agreed.  My father never learned of my banishment.  I think I wanted to conceal it from him more because of embarrassment and shame than anything else.  After all, he smoked a pack of Camels a day. Regardless, I am still angry that I was betrayed by a prissy tattletale whose name was George Dealaman.  That was the year that the Surgeon General's report on smoking came out.  Professional athletes were still featured in advertisements in magazines, on radio and television endorsing their favorite brands of cigarettes. That was not banned until 1971.  There really was no good reason to throw me off the team.   

The following year, our senior year in the fall of 1965,I was again assigned as backup quarterback to Rob Lang.  The season did not go well.  We won our first game but began to lose to a series of undefeated teams or teams with only one loss.  We lost to South Plainfield and Governor Livingston (Berkeley Heights) who ended up undefeated.  We lost to Bound Brook, Somerville, and North Plainfield who all ended up losing only 1 or 2 games (out of nine).  The Governor Livingston team under Coach Jack Bicknell according to Wikipedia, “went undefeated, untied and nearly unscored on.”  Looking back there is some solace in knowing we scored on them in a 20-6 loss.  Jack Bicknell later went on to coach Boston College and Doug Flutie in his Heisman Trophy season.  
 

1965 was a sad football season at WHRHS.  Two of our easiest opponents, Ridge High School (Basking Ridge) and Bernardsville High School (where actress Meryl Streep attended and was a member of the cheerleading squad) had decided they didn’t want to play us any more.  Two very competitive teams replaced them: Southside Newark and South Plainfield.  

 Our school had built an addition with new locker room facilities for the football team but construction was behind schedule.  We had water for showers but it was cold.  We spent the entire season either taking a cold shower after practice or waiting until we got home to shower.  I contracted impetigo, apparently due to skipping cold showers.  In the game against Franklin Township, I was forced to dress at home and avoid contact with my fellow players.  Of course, as a defensive back and part-time wide receiver I couldn’t avoid contact with their players, so I don’t know how they justified it.  It’s a very infectious disease.  After treatment it disappeared the following week.                                                          
We beat Franklin Township and played a scoreless tie against South Side Newark, a team which consisted entirely of black players. Our team was entirely white.  They were visiting our field and  I remember them warming up on an adjacent practice field.  They were singing  ominously  something that resembled an African war chant.  As game-time approached it got increasingly loud, more freewheeling and spirited. They weren’t in a frenzy, but were ready for action.  To my surprise, we held them to a scoreless tie.  I was playing wide receiver in that game and took a sledge-hammer blow from a Southside defensive back to my rear end after a catch on what was then called a button-hook pattern.  Three days later my entire left buttock gluteus maximus  bloomed black and blue. Seven years later Southside High School was renamed Malcolm X Shabazz High School. Malcolm X was assassinated in February,1965, eight months before we played them.    

With the game against North Plainfield approaching and given that in five of our six games we had been shut out twice and held to one touchdown in three others, the coaches decided to make some changes.  I was moved to quarterback and Rob Lang was moved to defensive safety.  There were other changes.  That week I ran the offense against North Plainfield who had lost only one game.  We lost 21-0, suffering our third shut out in five games. North Plainfield would play undefeated South Plainfield on Thanksgiving that year in a battle that produced one of the most memorable games in Central New Jersey in the decade of the 1960s.  They lost a close game to a South Plainfield team quarterbacked by Wally Cirafesi, the second best quarterback in the state that year.  The best? Joe Theissman, a junior from South River.  That would be the Joe Theissman who later quarterbacked the Washington Redskins to a victory in the Super Bowl.  South Plainfield was down 20 to 6 at the end of the third quarter but rallied to defeat North Plainfield 26-20.  (I used to tell people I got beaten out for All-State quarterback honors by Joe Theissman, which was technically true.  He beat out me and hundreds of others for the honor.)  

North Plainfield had a fullback/linebacker named Pete Johnson. I had played against him in Small Fry League baseball when he was tall but skinny boy.  Six years later he was 3 inches taller and 30 lbs heavier than me.  The following year in 1966 he went on to play for Penn State under Joe Paterno in Paterno's first year as head coach.  In our loss to North Plainfield I was crunched several times by Pete Johnson and others on rollouts, drop backs, and quarterback options.  We couldn’t put the ball in the end zone.  He did, however, and scored two rushing touchdowns if I recall correctly.  

To be fair, our woe-begotten team ended up having played against three teams that were undefeated when we played them and three others, like North Plainfield that had lost only one game.  We had serious injuries to some key players including Dick Schneider, the coach’s son, who was the fastest running back in New Jersey before he broke his leg in our first game.  How do I know he was the fastest?  He won the state championship in the 100 yard dash that spring in 9.8 seconds. He would have made our team a lot better.  

Coach Schneider’s saving grace at that point was that he had approved the hiring of  an assistant coach named John David Yohn that year.  Yohn had played outside linebacker for the New York Jets in 1963.  In 1962 he had signed with and played briefly for the Baltimore Colts.  He quickly turned our defense into a menacing, stingy crew and had most of us convinced he should be the head coach. Unfortunately, they didn't get much help from the offense which was often guilt of three plays and a punt.  

The week following the North Plainfield loss we played better against once-defeated Bound Brook but still lost 7-0 in the mud and rain.  I remember running roll out after roll out and passing a wet ball to no avail. We gained a lot of yards in that game but couldn't score.  The end zone for us was a no-fly zone.  

We were a dismal  2-5-1 and scheduled to play our final game against rival Manville on Thanksgiving morning at their field.  In the same game the year before (the game I worked the chains because I had been removed from the team for smoking) we lost a close contest at home.  We were pining for revenge. Manville was undefeated with one tie. They had racked up 202 points while allowing only 36 in eight games played. 

Our coaches introduced more changes in our lineup. We were searching for solutions.  Because I had been running the ball somewhat successfully on roll outs and scrambles, it was decided to put me at running back and give the quarterback position to one of our talented running backs named Bill MacLeod who had been out for three weeks with broken ribs and was tentatively judged ready to play.  Before the game he was taped up with extra foam padding that made him look like a fat man.  Three weeks before on the evening he had returned home from the hospital with his broken ribs, I was one of three teammates who visited him. It was only a few hours after his injury. He soon begged us to leave early because in an attempt to cheer him up we couldn’t help but make him laugh, which shot spasms of level 9 pain through his rib cage. 

We practiced all week at our new positions.  We felt the changes might work.  If nothing else  it would confuse Manville’s defense. We worked in a couple of halfback option passes for me.  Bill was at best 80% and one hard hit might have disabled him, but he was intent on playing. (Bill's older brother Ernie had been a stalwart running back on the 1964 team.)  Coach Yohn worked up a defensive scheme that the defense could believe in.  It proved to be effective.  

The game was scheduled to start at 10:30 AM so as not to interfere with Thanksgiving dinner. The first play of the game we had a surprise for them.  I was to take the ball on a sweep and throw a halfback option pass to our tight end.  The play worked perfectly except that our tight end, who had gotten well beyond their defenders, began to slow down thinking he was out of my range. This caused me to overthrow him. I expressed my disappointment to him in colorful language. 
In the first half, neither team could score.  We kept running student-body-right (or left) sweeps and they kept stopping us. Our musical chairs-offense was still predictable. We were probably telegraphing our plays.  Our defense on the other hand was more than a match for their offense run by a capable quarterback named Bernie Schulz.       

In the second half we continued futilely running end sweeps and their defense kept meeting us out there where they knew the play was going.  Power plays off tackle didn’t work either.  Our passing game wasn’t fooling anyone; at game’s end we had one completion in six attempts for a measly 2 yards.)   Their linebackers and defensive backs spent most of the day rushing toward one sideline or the other or ganging up on our receivers.

Deep into the third quarter on my way out to sweep the left end for what was likely to be no gain, I saw daylight created by our pulling guard and their defensive tackle who had cut and run laterally to stop the end sweep.   I cut back inside, broke through up the middle and then veered right toward the opposite sideline. I juked out one defensive back and was on my way.  Fifty-one yards later I was in the end zone.  I missed the extra point kick but we were up 6-0.  

A few minutes later in the fourth quarter after another uneventful possession that ended up in their territory, we punted.  Their punt returner fumbled the ball and we recovered on their 7 yard line.  We ran up the middle on two plays.  On the second one, I ran through the gap between the guard and tackle and planted my face mask into the chest of an All-Area line backer named Ken Koharki.  It didn't move him very far but it straightened him up a little, which allowed our fullback Fred Ahlers to slip through for a score. I kicked the extra point and we were up 13-0.  

Late in the fourth quarter Manville scored on a 25 yard drive after we shanked a punt from deep in our territory.  But time was running out.  With two minutes left, they tried an onside kick which we recovered.  After three plays we had to punt again, but  this time we pinned them back on their own 15 yard line. Rob Lang ended their chances by intercepting a pass.  The game ended shortly thereafter with the score 13-7.  A embarrassing season of deep disappointment and frustration had ended with one glorious victory.  

Decades later people would come up to me and reminisce about that game which, because it was Thanksgiving, always had the largest crowds in attendance.  A lot of college students who were alumni of ours and our opponents would come home for vacation and watch it.  My recollection is that there were 7000 people in attendance that day.  Most of them were Manville fans hoping to see the team go undefeated.  

The Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend, I had to report immediately for varsity basketball practice which had been going on for several weeks. (I had been a starting guard on the team the year before.) That meant I didn’t get to view the film of the Manville game with my teammates that afternoon.  I later heard from one of them that in watching the replay of my 51 yd. run, everyone cheered and Coach Yohn said, “That’s just good runnin’.”  Because it was a compliment from a professional football player, it has stayed with me ever since.  

The Courier News of Plainfield was the paper of record in those days in central New Jersey.  They had detailed coverage with photos of all the important games played on Thanksgiving.  I happen to have a copy the article on our game because my father some forty years later sent me all my clippings he had collected in those years. The article, which covered nearly half a page with two photos, immediately prompted outrage among the Watchung Hills faithful.  The reporter, Dave Hardy, based the entire column on the emotional breakdown of one Mike Galida,a senior guard and defensive tackle for Manville:  

There sitting in the middle of the field at the Manville 37-yard line, tears  rolling down his mud-spattered face as he wept unashamed, was no. 78— Mike Galida.  

They weren’t tears caused much by the physical beating you took Mike, but rather the aftermath of utter frustration anyone might feel after having done his very best and more only to find it wasn’t enough. . . 

Like the rest of your teammates you came into this game proud of your 6-0-1 record and were entranced by the possibility of winning the first state championship title if you beat Watchung Hills.  

For sixty minutes without let up, number 78, you’re in there in your guard position. And for sixty minutes you played football with flawless execution, blocking and tackling with the tenacity of a tiger.  . . .

But it wasn’t enough.  No, it wasn’t enough to prevent Watchung Hills halfback Doug Eaton from taking a handoff and threading his ways through tacklers 50 yards for the first touchdown of the game.  

It wasn’t your fault that Eaton scored, you and the rest of those hard-nosed Manville linemen held your ground.  But somehow— through a quirk of fate or just plain luck— Eaton found daylight and was gone.  

And so on, ad nauseam.  "Luck" had nothing to do with it.  It was execution.   
 

The column sounded like Hardy was Galida’s father comforting him after their catastrophic loss.  Adding insult to injury, the two photos in the article were similarly indifferent to our efforts.  One was of our two mascots, two pretty girls dressed up like Indian princesses (we were the Warriors and our emblem was an Indian head not unlike the one on a Indian head nickel.).  The other photo was of  a Manville receiver catching a pass. 

Our fans were indignant.  Scores of letters were written to The Courier News complaining about the blatantly one-sided coverage that utterly ignored the magnitude of our accomplishment.  As I recall, it produced something resembling a letter of apology from the paper and the reporter himself.  The reporter was likely sitting in the stands on the Manville side of the field in anticipation of a convincing victory where he might recorded the ecstasy of the fans over their undefeated season.  Or maybe he was standing on Manville’s sideline.  It is clear that he was more affected by their momentous loss than our glorious victory.   
 
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I always wondered what happened to Coach John David Yohn.  He didn’t last long at Watchung Hills serving under Coach Schneider who was being blamed by many of our fans for our losing season.   Schneider stayed on for three more years because he had two sons, Dick and Don who became great running backs for WHRHS and helped him to winning seasons. I don’t have access to the team’s records, but i heard they did well.  After Dick ran the 100 yard dash in the spring of 1965 in 9.8 seconds, his brother Don ran it in 9.4 two years later, if I remember correctly.  Dick was our best running back and might have led us to a winning season that fall, but his broken leg in the first game ended his season and negatively impacted ours.  

As players, we loved Coach Yohn.  I re-visited  my high school yearbook to see what I could find about him.  He was pictured among photos of Physical Education instructors and coaches.  They were all dressed in the uniform of the time, which was side-striped grey slacks and a blue polo shirt with Watchung Hills Physical Education embroidered on it. The photo of Coach Yohn is of a 28 yr old  man in his prime, which is to be expected since he been playing linebacker for the New York Jets only two years before and largely retained his professional condition.  On the Jets roster, he was listed 6’-0” and 225 lbs and may have gained a couple of pounds, but he is so powerful looking in the photo it appears he is wearing shoulder pads under his shirt.  His neck is wider at its base than it is where it meets his jawline.  He is listed as the head track coach and assistant football coach.  As track coach he had several state champions that year in the spring of 1966:  Ray Siegrist in the 880, Lou Falzarano in the high and low hurdles and Ed Nicholas in the shotput. Tony Maglione medaled in the javelin.   Tony, Ed and Lou played on our football team. Ed won an athletic scholarship to North Carolina State.  Lou was our tight end. Tony was a tough linebacker and became a successful high school football coach at several schools in Central New Jersey.                                                                                                                               

                                             Coach John David Yohn

After a Grok search I found Coach Yohn’s obituary.  He died in 2002 of cancer after a very successful career as a coach:  

John D. "Coach" Yohn, 65, of 12 Riverview Drive, Middletown, died Monday in the Community General Osteopathic Hospital.
He retired as Principal of Dauphin County Vo-Tech.
He was a member of Evangelical United Methodist Church, Middletown; a graduate of Palmyra High School, where he excelled in football, track, and basketball. He received a full scholarship to Gettysburg College and graduated with a B.S. in Physical Education. He was a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he played two seasons of football and was selected as the "Most Valuable Player" as a center and linebacker. In 1962, he played as a linebacker for the Baltimore Colts and in 1963, started as a middle linebacker for the New York Jets. He was Assistant Football Coach at Boiling Springs; Assistant Football and Track Coach at Watchung Hills High School; Assistant Football Coach at Cumberland Valley High School. From 1968-1975, he was Head Football Coach at Middletown Area High School, with a career record of 71-13-2, three undefeated seasons, five CAC Championships, five time CAC "Coach of the Year", 37 games without a league loss and won three consecutive championships. He was Assistant Coach of the Big 33 in 1974 and Head Coach in 1976; and inducted into the PA Sports Hall of Fame in 1982.

No surprise there. He had all the tools to be a great and inspirational leader.  I searched YouTube for videos of him playing with the Colts and the Jets.  He is listed on the Colts roster as number 51, but as he played in only four games I could find no video of him.  He must have been thrilled, however briefly, to play with Johnny Unitas, Lenny Moore, Raymond Berry, Gino Marchetti, Big Daddy Lipscomb and others on the great Colt team of that era.  
 

But there are numerous videos of him playing for the Jets the following season in 1963 where he wore number 57 and started as an outside linebacker in 14 games.  My honest appraisal is that he was over-matched by the larger players he was competing against but he showed a lot of hustle and abandon in stopping runners and pass receivers.  When the play ended, he was usually in on the tackle or close by. That he played an entire season as an AFL linebacker on a team that would win the Super Bowl six years later is impressive.  Like John Tierney, he lived a life that mattered to a lot of people.  In 1965-66, he certainly mattered to Watchung Hills Regional High School.  

IPfF3

Varsity Basketball practice had been in progress for two weeks when I reported for duty after the Thanksgiving weekend.  I had some basketball-specific conditioning and catching up to do.  I was looking forward to claiming my position as a starting guard. On the 1964-65 team, Frank Rossi and I had been the starting guards.  We played a 2-3 offense that I liked.  I usually got the job of guarding the opposing team’s best outside shooter.  The defensive expertise that Coach O'Neill imparted to me had stayed with me.  

Frank was our leading scorer along with Ray (Giuls) Giuliano, a forward who in one game during that 64-65 season scored 36 points,  He was also named to the All (Plainfield) Area first team by the Courier-News along with Mike Grosso and Leon Mischenko.   They call them power forwards now and indeed, he was powerful.  He was 6’-2” and could outmuscle most anybody, except for  Grosso at Bridgewater-Raritan, who at 6’-8” was the best player in Central if not all of New Jersey that year.  Ray and I double-teamed him in our last game of the ’64-’65 season and he killed us.  That year his team won the Group IV state championship and he averaged an astronomical 30 points and 30 rebounds a game.. A few years later, Grosso was the starting center for the University of Louisville.  He is ranked among their top all-time scorers and built a successful career in advertising and broadcasting in Louisville after being drafted by the ABA and NBA.  He played for the Pittsburgh Condors and the Carolina Cougars in the ABA.  He was inducted in the University of Louisville Athletic Hall of Fame in 1994. 

One summer evening after the 64-65 season, Giuls and I were double-dating (our girlfriends were close friends) at a drive-in and ran into Grosso who was drunk but very friendly.  He did not apologize for destroying us on the court a few months earlier.  

Frank (Ros) Rossi was the best athlete in the class of 1966. He was 6’-1”, 185 lbs, with long muscular legs, broad shoulders and a striking red flat-top haircut.  He had a long Italian nose and his upper lip came to point and jutted out in the middle. In his first three years in high school  he had played only baseball and basketball, but in his senior year he tried out for the football team.  He had wanted to play tight end but at one point Coach Yohn put him at defensive tackle where he excelled. That must have irritated Ray Kovonuk, the varsity basketball coach.  Frank excelled on both offense and defense but at mid-season suffered an ankle injury which, given our failure to win many games, convinced him to quit and begin training for basketball while he recovered.  I suspect his father, Joe Rossi, who raised him to become a professional baseball player in the image of Joe DiMaggio, determined that football might derail his professional baseball career, which looked to be a certainty.  

Frank had an older brother named Fred who had been a star football, basketball and baseball player at WHRHS in the class of 1960.  He later excelled in baseball at Delta State College in Mississippi.  He could have been an identical twin of Frank except he had brown hair.  I played with them both in the summers of ’67 and ’68 In the Plainfield Twilight League when I was home from college.  We were on a semi-pro team sponsored by Dreier’s, a sporting goods store then located on Front Street in Plainfield.  Fred was the oldest of the Rossi’s six children.  Frank was the fourth born.  Fred held the record for the most points in a basketball game until it was broken by Larry Reid in the 62-’63 season with 31 points and then again by Ray Giuliano in ’64-’65 with 36 points.  

The Rossi family was a large and close-knit Italian family.  Their father, Joseph, was one of 12 children raised by Ferdinand and Catherine Rossi.  Which meant the children had many cousins, several of whom played or socialized with us in the Watchung Hills area.  Among them Dominick (Doc) Ferraro, Luis DeFillipis, Glenn and Charlie Rossi, and Larry and Kathy Esoldi.  The youngest of the 12 children, Vincent Rossi, nicknamed Chamber, had been signed by the Yankees in 1949 and played minor league baseball.  He frequently came and supported his nephews as they competed in sports for Watchung Hills.  His obituary says, “He was a father-like figure to his nieces and nephews and will be missed by all.”  I remember him fondly.  His job at the post office in Stirling gave him time to come out and support our teams.   

Dreier’s was the oldest continuously-run sporting goods store in New Jersey. I always shopped there for Hillerich and Bradsby Louisville Slugger bats,  Spot Bilt cleats, and Rawlings gloves.   Later it moved to the Blue Star Shopping Center in Watchung, where it closed in 1998 when the mall owner refused to renew or re-negotiate the lease.  Dreier's Sporting Goods had been in existence for 129 years.  The semi-pro team was coached by Don Kohler.  More on him and the  team later.  

In the 1960s, it was common for the best athletes to compete in more than one sport and often three during the school year.  This was before specialization and weight-lifting (because of professionalization, which includes college scholarships) came to dominate sports and sports training.  For growing athletes it was believed  advantageous to be in training throughout the year in a variety of sports.  Muscle mass was not viewed as necessarily helpful in developing an all-around athlete, although there were those, especially in football, who did lift weights and benefitted from it.  We were in it more for the fun.  The drudgery of weight-lifting and maniacal training came later.    

What playing three sports did for me was keep me (and others) in shape and off the streets after school.  It kept me growing throughout my high school years, while inducing in me a healthy appetite for food which further facilitated growth in size, strength and endurance.  Each sport causes you to exercise and shape different muscle groups, thus developing your whole body more equally.  I avoided weight training in my athletic life and I do not regret it.  Apart from the drudgery of it I felt I played positions that would not benefit from it and in fact it might diminish my flexibility and, for want of a better word, looseness.  Today it’s apparent that too much muscle mass causes more strains, pulls, cramps and tears than is necessary.  I am still of the school that says let each sport develop the muscles that it requires in a young athlete and no more.  The exception is aerobic and isometric training which i believe increases endurance and  strength without appreciably adding muscle mass. Full disclosure: I am not an expert.    

The basketball schedule at WHRHS for the 1965-66 season in my senior year  began two weeks after Thanksgiving.  The week before Christmas in our third game we played Governor Livingston High (Berkeley Heights) at home. The gymnasium was full because the alumni were again home from college and  Berkeley Heights was one of our rivals given its close proximity to WHRHS.  At Watchung Borough School we had played against some of their athletes in grade school.  The score was close all game with the lead going back and forth.  With 8 second left in the game we were ahead 48-46.  Berkeley Heights had a man at the foul line in a one-and-one situation.  He made the first shot.  Then disaster struck.  He purposely missed the second, which gave his teammate a chance to grab the rebound and score.  It gave them a 49-48 lead.  We called time out.  Coach Kovonuk designed a play where our center would set a pick for Frank who would receive the inbound pass from forward Russ Harden,  dribble up the court and take the final shot.  Five seconds would give us just enough time to execute the play.  

Berkeley Heights was having none of that and double-teamed Frank, who had scored 19 points in the game. We were running out of time to inbound the pass, so I ran toward Russ and he passed it to me, I turned and dribbled up the right sideline.   A few feet past mid-court with only a second or two left, I launched a 35-foot running set shot and swished it at the buzzer.  We won by a point. A loud roar went up and I was mobbed by the students who were sitting at courtside.  

Because of that last-second shot and my touchdown on Thanksgiving I had a month during that holiday season when I was the wonder boy of Watchung Hills. I enjoyed it while it lasted, which wasn’t long.    

Even small town fame is fleeting.  It’s a good thing too, because you will soon be humbled one way or another in sports (and life).  In such a situation, an athlete  needs to concentrate on what he can do in the next game and forget past exploits.  I learned later in playing sports in college that you play to win within the confines of a team. You play for recognition but mostly from your teammates in the locker room.  That’s where the gratification is most sincere, understood and appreciated. 

Vince Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,”— hyperbole to be sure, but winning is certainly more pleasurable than losing. The only way to win is through precision teamwork and grinding practice wherein talent is honed.  Lombardi was the master of the grinding practice.  Packer offensive guard Jerry Kramer In his book Instant Replay describes Lombardi’s strategy to declare the start of a “big push” in pre-season training and then, after two weeks of demanding and exhausting workouts, he would announce  the beginning of second “big push,” which turned out to be more punishing than the first.  To win you have to endure strenuous workouts that make the actual games seem easy.    

Mike Battle, who played for the New York Jets in the Joe Namath era, once said, “They pay me to practice.  On Sundays I play for free.”  As a lifelong amateur, I never got paid to practice or play.  Rather, it was the opposite: In playing for free, I had to pay the price of grinding practices and several injuries to play the games for free.  It was worth it. It was always rewarding.        

i went into my senior basketball season of 1965-66 feeling entitled as I was a returning letterman and  starting guard in the previous season.   In one game against Bound Brook the year before  with the score tied in overtime, I stole a pass from their guards who were freezing the ball because they wanted the last shot.  After intercepting the  pass I drove down the court and laid it in for the win.  On defense that year I held some of the best players in central Jersey to well below their scoring average in several games.  My role was that of a playmaking defensive guard.  On occasion i scored more than ten points and even managed 17 in one game, but that was not my job.  It was the job of Frank Rossi and Ray Giuliano and to a lesser degree the others including Lou Falzarano, Norm Hewitt, Bob Skladany, Irv Zander and Joey Ezro.    

I had high expectations as a senior.  But a new player named Bob Schmidt, a slender but strong sapling, had transferred in from another school. Irv Zander who had come up with me from freshman to JV to Varsity and had substituted for me on occasion in the previous year was also in the mix.    I had competition and I didn’t handle it well.  In practice games I began to resent when Coach would substitute players in for me.  Didn’t he understand that I needed the repetitions and conditioning?   

I had played with Irv and another tall guard/forward named Joey Ezro on the freshman team and the junior varsity team in the 62-63 and 63-64 seasons.  In our freshman year we were 13-6 and in our sophomore year we were 14-4.  (Frank Rossi was always a level ahead of us.  He had played junior varsity in our freshman year and was on the varsity in our sophomore year.)

Joey Ezro and I became close friends in those years.  In our winning sophomore season, we had a new junior varsity coach named Bob O’Neill who, although he coached only one season at WHRHS was unquestionably was the best coach I ever had.  He taught us his system of suffocating defense.  We learned that scoring was the point of basketball of course, but if you can prevent your opponents from scoring you demoralize them thus making it easier for you to score.  O’Neill was from Massachusetts, had graduated from Springfield College and was earned a master’s degree at Saint Bonaventure in New York state.  He was an enthusiastic fan of the Boston Celtics and their system which allowed them the win the NBA championship every year from 1959 through 1966.  

     1964: Bob O’Neil standing on the left, me in the center and Joey Ezro on the right   

In 1963-64 Coach O'Neill was 35 years old, apparently divorced, often disheveled and always smelled of cigarette smoke.Keeping up appearances was not a priority for him.  Like John Tierney, he was a Korean War veteran. Smoking seemed part of the job description for men who  served in the military during the war years.  While I was growing up I can’t recall any veterans of World War II or the Korean War who were not smokers, my father included.  Of course, several of us on the team were smokers also.  Joey Ezro smoked Lucky Strikes and I smoked Marlboros.  One of the games we played with school authorities was to see if you could smoke in the lavatories without getting caught.  

O’Neill’s coaching clothes which he changed into after his social studies classes and before practice were rarely laundered.  For most of the season there was an unpleasant smell about him, a combination of tobacco smoke and body odor.  He had a sweatshirt cut off at the elbows with underarms that were stained with perspiration and grime.  

          Later photo of O’Neill at Longwood H. S. in the same grimy sweatshirt.

 

He didn’t shave on a daily basis.  He may have been having marital problems and was perhaps drinking too much,  Eventually I found pictures of him after he left WHRHS and he looked much healthier and happier.  He married (or remarried) two decades after coaching us while he was coaching high school basketball at Longwood High School on Long Island.  

He was masterful coach, both strategically and psychologically.  He was consumed by basketball, had obviously played a lot of it at Springfield College and was probably on the winning side more often than not.  As a student of the game he had studied an influential book called Cincinnati Power Basketball  by University of Cincinnati coach Ed Jucker who won two national championships and nearly a third from 1961 to 1963.  Coach O’Neill borrowed from Jucker’s defensive philosophy and made it his own.  

O’Neill grated on a few people at WHRHS and one of them was varsity Coach Ray Kovonuk.  O’Neill thought himself a better coach than Kovonuk and not so subtly made that clear to him.  At one point Kovonuk had suggested to him that a scrimmage between the varsity and the junior varsity would be beneficial to both teams.  Coach O’Neill welcomed the chance and immediately started preparing us for it.   A few days later we played them and outscored them before Coach Kovonuk put a stop to it after 15 minutes.  O’Neill didn’t show it, but we knew he was very pleased.  He didn’t hide his dislike for Kovonuk.  He occasionally made sarcastic remarks about the head coach during our practices.

                            Coach O'Neil looking good at WHRHS, 1964

 

As in the cases of Coach Tierney and Coach Yohn, I lost track of Robert O’Neill since 1964.  He disappeared the following year and no one seemed to know what became of him.  In the fall of 2025, I looked him up online. I found a man named Robert O’Neil’s obituary but I wasn’t sure it was him. There were no photos.  This Robert O’Neill had died in 2005 of cancer.   He had been the head coach at Longwood High in Middle Island, Long Island for 30 years starting in 1965, so the timing was right for this person to be the Coach O’Neill I knew at WHRHS.  Here is his obituary:  

Robert O'Neill Obituary
O'NEILL-Robert of Mastic Beach, born on November 14, 1928 passed away on December 3, 2005 after a spirited battle with esophageal cancer. Already a ten plus year survivor of colon cancer, this Navy veteran from the Korean War made his mark on the world as both a teacher and basketball coach at Longwood High School in Middle Island for over thirty years. Known by many as Bob-o or Coach, Robert personified the role of varsity athletic coach and mentor to young men. Whether he was barking at the referees or executing his "mongrel" defense on the opponent, Bob's passion for the sport of basketball echoed throughout the locker rooms of high school gymnasiums. During his coaching career at Longwood, Bob-o amassed more than 300 lifetime wins and won a league championship in the 1986-87 season. In the classroom, as social studies and psychology teacher, Mr. O'Neill made sure none of his students left Longwood without understanding the principle of being a "have" versus a "have-not." His sharp wit, lively class discussions, and ability to take any side to an issue always made his class popular amongst the student body before he retired in 1995. Married for over twenty years, Robert is survived by his wife, sister, stepson, daughter, beloved animals, and all those whose lives he touched. He was an avid golfer throughout most of his life, and a pretty good poker player from what he told us although he could have been bluffing.

And yet I wasn’t sure it was him.  There are many Robert O’Neills in this world, the most famous one being  the man who killed Osama bin Laden.  But hours later I found a photo on Facebook that confirmed it was him.  He was attending a summer basketball camp in 1967 in New Hampshire with several NBA pros and coaches.  When I zoomed in on the face, it was clearly him.  He was standing next to NBA player and Coach Lenny Wilkins.  Other NBA personalities in the photo were Jerry Lucas, Cliff Hagen, and Larry Costello. With Coach O’Neill and the four NBA stars were seven current Longwood players from the team that would begin their season in a few months. Six of the seven were young black men.  It was no surprise to me that Coach O’Neill had somehow gotten his players to a basketball camp in the middle of summer with four NBA luminaries to instruct them and that he was there with them.  All four of the instructors at that camp are in the NBA Hall of Fame.  Lenny Wilkens is currently ranked third among NBA coaches with the most wins.   It made me wonder who paid for it all.  

                             Coach O'Neill and Lenny Wilkens, 1967

The tributes to Coach O’Neill on the pages below his obituary were similar to those that honored Coach Tierney and Coach Yohn.  He had made a difference in many lives.  Here are some of them:  

Scott Walker
July 8, 2018
Great Coach, Teacher and Motivator. He gave me the confidence to not only excel on the basketball court but in everything I wanted to do in life. My condolences to his family on his loss. Thanks for sharing such a superb man with all of us!

Class 83'

Janet LaFlair Flanders,  Class of 66
January 2, 2006
I'll try not to be sappy about this because I know Bob didn't do sappy. What he did do was save my life more then once. He was and will always be a unique human being with the capacity to care more deeply then most. He would pop in and out of my life but always when I needed him. There is nothing I could give back to compensate him but he never wanted compensation. He was just one of those rare individuals whose unselfish caring provided him with pleasure. He will be missed and always loved. No doubt he is very involved in a poker game with God now but I know he will still find the time to watch over us and keep us on the straight and narrow.

Thanks Bob...for all of it.

Jennifer Plate
December 29, 2005
I am so saddened to hear of this great loss of Longwood history. If you read this, LJ and Steve-o, you both were source of joy and happiness to Bob-o. His daily tales of your lives together were a testiment [sic] to this. I only hope you both knew it. I am sorry for your loss. You are an angel now Mr. O'Neill. Your teachings will stay with me forever. Class of 92.

Joan Henault  [Bob O’Neill’s sister was fourteen years younger than he.]
December 13, 2005
The Bob-O was my brother, he was the best. Thru thick and thin he was always there when i needed him. He kept me on my toes, he loved to get me going, but always with a smile. I loved to listen to his stories, he had so many.I learned a lot from him, he had such a memory. I met so many of his students and players and was so awed by the legacy that he left behind. It is so nice to know that he touched so many people and made such a difference. Thank you all for your thoughts ,stories and comments. It helps him to live on for all of us.

Karen Humphrey-Johnson
December 12, 2005
Bob-O was my beloved uncle and he will be missed dearly. I have many fond memories of him and enjoyed sharing our love for the Boston Red Sox and hearing his countless stories about our family. I could go on for days but will jsut say that I think of him often and know he is with us in spirit.

Allen Ransom
December 9, 2005
My heart goes out to the family. Coach O'Neill made a big impact on my life. I remember playing football for the ninth grade team at Longwood and we were playing against the middle school and I put a hit on a player and Coach O'Neill came up to me after the game and "said son do you play basketball"? I responded back with no. The next thing I know I am trying to play basketball on the ninth grade team, I was terrible. I was a project of Coach Reany and Coach O'Neill. I was terrible but they worked with me. . . .   I would fake an injury to avoid handling the ball and Coach would light into me about having some heart. One day I decided to talk back to Coach O'Neill and he put me in check real fast. 

I never got to play on the Varisty [sic] because of the no sports in 79. But I went on to join the Air Force and played base team ball and turned out to be a good player because of Coach O'Neill. Coach is in Heaven now and telling God on how to run the 1-4 set.

Kerriann Whelan Spirides
December 8, 2005
My condolences to Mr. O'Neill's family. He was a wonderful teacher and is remembered dearly by all who had his classes. He was funny and kind and always gave great advise. My favorite "Don't trust men baby". May my favorite teacher rest in peace. Class of '85.

Student 1994
December 6, 2005
Bob-O, 

To say that you touched many lives is an understatement. Everyone should be as lucky to know someone like you, and the ones who didn't really missed out on something special. Thank you for being the best teacher, inspiration, and friend to so many. You will be missed, but you will always be in our hearts. Till we meet again, enjoy the other side. You've earned it.

I learned more from Bob O’Neill than any other coach. He taught me to exercise my mind and not just my body in playing sports. To be aware of the totality of what was going on around me; to put a game in high-resolution focus. (Basketball can be a blur sometimes.)  All my other coaches through the years gave me much, but O’Neill instilled in me competitive intelligence.  In sport there is the physical game of talent, technique and strategy and then the mental game.  You need to train your mind and emotions to obey.  If you can’t outplay an opponent, you can sometimes outsmart him.  O’Neill knew how to break the game down into parts and teach young athletes how to think (always ahead) during competition. He anticipated how an opposing team would react to our offense or defense  and had a ready answer.  His influence on me for the four short months I was under his tutelage gave me tools to use for the rest of my life.  

                                                  ******* 


Coach Kovonuk was more polished and debonaire than O’Neill.    In addition to coaching basketball, he taught mechanical drawing and industrial arts.  Until later in my senior season I always felt close to him, that he was grooming me for an important role. At the end of our freshman season he elevated Joey Ezro and me to sit on the varsity bench during the Somerset County tournament. I was thrilled.  We were given Varsity uniforms and warm-up suits.  The uniforms were gleaming white with gold and black trim. The numbers were deep gold lined in black.  The warm-up suits were a brilliant gold color.  Given his sense of style, I’m sure Coach K designed them that way.

The start of the 65-66 basketball season was the moment when it finally became clear that Joey Ezro was done with interscholastic sports. In our junior year, he had not showed up for varsity baseball the previous spring where he would have definitely been a starting pitcher. I thought he might come out for basketball as a senior, but that was not to be.  

After our victory over Berkeley Heights and as my senior season progressed, my playing time was gradually reduced. I was playing point guard and basically feeding the ball to the four other players.  I didn’t get to rebound much, which bothered me because I had a talent for it. Although I was only 6 feet tall I had 30 inch vertical leap.  Bob Schmidt was a given a wing position on offense which was the position I coveted.  Frank Rossi, our best player, was on the other wing from where he could rebound, drive and shoot  from the corner.  My shooting from the point position in the 1-3-1, an offense that was different from the 2-3 we had run in the 64-65 season, was erratic.  Kovonuk started substituting Irv Zander  for me at that position.  By the end of the season I became increasingly detached as my minutes were reduced. I wasn’t miffed enough to quit, but it did affect me and my play.  My enthusiasm waned.  
 

We ended up having winning season at 11-9, but we lost a few games to teams that were not our equal. It was not an improvement on the previous season.  We were eliminated in the first round of the state tournament. Our record was disappointing given the talent on the team.  The only teams that were better than we were were South Plainfield with Wally Cirafesi and Bridgewater with the remnants of the team that Mike Grosso had led.  One of the two games we lost against South Plainfield went into overtime.  We split our pair of games with too many teams that I felt were not our equal, including Berkeley Heights, Bound Brook and North Plainfield.  

Whose fault was our disappointing season?  Obviously it was Coach Kovonuk’s, but I have to take some of the blame.  My attitude was not as good as it should have been although outwardly most people probably didn’t notice it.  I was doing my job, but not with enthusiasm.  I was still the starter, but my minutes were being reduced. I didn’t up my game to meet the challenge. 

And yet,  I may be overly critical of myself.  In writing this, a memory flashed into view.  I had severely sprained my right ankle right in the middle of the season.  Ankle sprains were the bane of my athletic life.  I probably suffered four severe sprains and several other that were minor.  This particular one was severe and probably kept me out of the lineup for two weeks in which other players like Irv Zander and Bill MaCleod filled my spot.  Irve was a great point guard.  

When forty years later my father sent me all the clippings from my days playing interscholastic and intercollegiate sports there were a couple from our 1965-66 basketball season and from the Courier News. One describes the victory over Berkeley Heights with this headline: “Eaton Scores On Long Shot” and captures the drama of that game.   The other describes a victory over Metuchen High and is headlined, “Watchung Cage Squad Scores Win.”  Here is the text of the column edited for brevity:  

Metuchen— Doug Eaton and Frank Rossi sparked a rally in the last four minutes yesterday to carry Watchung Hills to a 69-58 victory over Metuchen.  Watchung held a slim 54-53 lead with four minutes left when Eaton drove in for a layup.  Rossi hit on a jump shot and . . .
The Warriors clinched the victory in the final minute when Eaton swished a pair of fouls and Rossi put in a pair of field goals. . . 

My initial thought on reading this was, “Maybe I wasn’t so bad after all.” But the truth is I probably was at best mediocre, albeit with periodic bursts of effectiveness. The only reason my father kept those particular clippings was because I had been recognized for playing well. In my defense, I think Coach K did prefer to have me in there if the game was close in the fourth quarter. I had proven myself to be a clutch player.  Another truth is that Metuchen was one of the weaker teams we played.  They had won only one game when we played them that time.  Later in the year they came to our place and beat us by one point 71-70. I struggled in that game to contain their best scorer.

I researched Coach Kovonuk online and was pleased to learn that he later become a very successful, respected long-tenured coach in Central New Jersey.  If you win 200 games you are a good coach. He achieved that.  He was one of the early practitioners of the four-corner freeze, a tactic in which a team would not try and score and would simply pass the ball around outside the shooting perimeter to draw the defense out. As an eight grader, I first saw Coach K use it when WHRHS played a strong, heavily favored  Somerville team. It was executed brilliantly and WHRHS ended up winning a very low scoring game against a team with a superior record.  The editors of the 1962 yearbook were so thrilled by the win they included a copy of the Courier News coverage and the box score of the game in that yearbook.    

 Coach Kovonuk had a distinguished career coaching at WHRHS.  They won the Somerset County championship the following year. Unfortunately that was followed by two terrible losing seasons, which caused him to switch to coaching a small private school in Plainfield know as Wardlaw-Hartridge.  This was  the same school my father went to except when he attended it was not co-ed nor was  Hartridge, the private girls school in Plainfield.  At one point the two schools were joined together.  Coach K did well at Wardlaw-Hartridge and won two state championships in the private school division.  

Coach Kovonuk ended up with 200 career wins and Coach O’Neill had 300.  O’Neill probably never was aware of that, but it would have pleased him to know it.    
In all sports and with all teams you can’t expect to have a stellar record in every season.  I happened to be on one of Ray Kovonuk’s teams at WHRHS that did not live up to expectations, although we had a winning season.  Football and basketball were both disappointments to me in that school year, my senior year.  The 1965 football team was even less successful than the basketball team.  But the 1966 baseball team made up for all that disappointment. 
                                                

                                                    *******

Joey Ezro was also having difficulties in his life, which intersected with mine on a near daily basis until he failed to come out for baseball in our junior year, 1965. I was  anticipating being awarded the starting shortstop position on the baseball team. I thought Joey was looking forward to pitching and perhaps playing fist base as a left-hander.  We had just finished basketball.  We had two good starting pitchers in Pete Scott and Norm Hewitt, but Joey would have seen action and possibly dominated as a pitcher and first baseman.

Joey and I had been on the basketball and baseball teams in our freshman and sophomore years.  We played freshman basketball and then junior varsity baseball as freshman, and junior varsity in both sports when we were sophomores. He was as natural an athlete as you could find.  In basketball he had a smooth, soft flat jump shot that always seemed to go in.  He was quick but never looked like he was in a hurry. His body was always under control. In baseball he was a side-arm pitcher with a sweeping curveball and a sneaky-fast, tailing fastball.  He grew to 6’-2” and may have been taller in the end, which for him was only a few years away.

He came from a large family like many of us in the immediate post-war period. But his family was more working class than most in the Watchung Hills area.  Many students came from families whose parents were professionals. The Ezros had five children and Joey was their second born.  He was widely viewed as one of the most intelligent and talented people in our class.  But he didn’t like school and was one of the earliest to enlist in the nascent youth rebellion at the time. in his yearbook photo, which was compiled as our senior year began, they describe him as a “non-conformist,” a oft-used cliche in 1966 but accurate in his case.  While most of us still had crew cuts or haircuts of traditional length, he had a Beatle haircut with bangs down to his eyebrows  

To illustrate how good a basketball player Joey was I recall this:  On February 15th, 1964, the varsity and Junior varsity coached by O’Neill traveled to Somerville to play their two squads.  The varsity squandered a lead and was outscored by Somerville by 11 points in the fourth quarter in losing 55-46.  Kovonuk’s freeze backfired on him and the team.  By contrast, we on the junior varsity beat their junior varsity by 18 points with Joey scoring 25 points, which might have been a record for a junior varsity player.  I remember being in awe of his performance that day.  I said to him during the game, "You can't miss!"  And he said, "Yup."  After the game I told him, "You took over that game."  He said, "Yup."  
 

The 1966 WHRHS yearbook had senior photos and profiles that were gathered early in school year before Joey had decided to quit high school and sports altogether.  Joey's photo and profile were therefore included even though he did not graduate, His profile states that he played “Basketball 1, 2, 3, 4; Baseball 1,2,4” wherein the numbers represent each of the four years of high school. It was accurate in the sense that he had missed baseball in his junior year, but inaccurate in predicting he would play basketball and baseball in his senior year.  It tells me that as school started he had planned to attend school and play basketball and baseball in this senior year, but he never came out for either, which saddened and perplexed me given his great talent and my friendship with him.  He had played basketball as a junior and I have a memory of us trying to guard Leon Mintschenko, a 5’-10” guard from Somerville who destroyed us one game by hitting 12 of 14 shots and ended up scoring 32.  When I couldn’t stop him, Coach Kovonuk put Joey in to guard him, since he was taller than me.  We both had the maddening experience of getting a hand on a ball he shot and then having it go in anyway. That was by far the most points I ever allowed an  opponent.

 
I suspect now that Joey came to conclude before I did that Coach Kovonuk was not nearly the coach Bob O’Neill had been.  He played only occasionally in his junior year while I was playing regularly.  He did not expect Kovonuk would use his talents the way O’Neill did.  Maybe that caused him to leave school and sports shortly after we started the school year.  It occurs to me now that i might have beat him out for the position he coveted.   

A copy of the 1963 yearbook shows Joey in the Varsity baseball team picture as a freshman.  It also shows freshmen Frank Rossi, Irv Zander and I in the team photo of the junior varsity.  And yet, I don’t think that is how the season played out.  I think Joey pitched exclusively for the junior varsity as a freshman. I remember him pitching regularly for us. If he had pitched for the varsity I would have recalled it because he would have been the only freshman to do that during our time there. He might have thrown a few innings for the senior squad but I doubt it and found no evidence of it in box scores in the Courier News. It's likely that the photos were taken before the season started and that the rosters were not fully set.   Regardless, the fact that he is in the team photo of the varsity as a freshman shows how high a regard baseball coach Frank Matullo had for his abilities.  Joey would have loved playing for Matullo, and yet of his own choosing he never did  

Why did Joey quit interscholastic sports? I always suspect he hated the regimentation of school and rebelled. He felt much of the school work required was of no use to him.  We were all drinking a lot on weekends, but I’m sure he was also drinking week days since he didn’t have to go to school or get up early.  He couldn’t play basketball or baseball if he was no longer a student. It's debatable whether he He would have made a noticeable difference on the record of our basketball team, but I know for certain he would have had a dramatic impact on our 1966 baseball team. He was that good. If he had played I believe we would have won the state championship.  We  almost did win it without him.

  
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Joey and I came from two utterly different milieux.  Or perhaps I was aware of it but didn’t fully understand how great the difference was. The great advantage of a public high school is that it reduces the importance of social standing.  But the differences in privilege and upbringing still exist.  It’s easier for people of moderate or advanced means to raise children than people who struggle with lower incomes.  I visited Joey’s house one time and met his mother.  They were a low income family and she was different than the mothers of my other friends who were decidedly more stylish and attractive. She may have been poorly educated. It was a small house on a back street in Stirling and decidedly more crowded than our ten-bedroom house because the family had seven members.  Joey had three brothers— one older, two younger— who were  less gifted than he was. And he had a younger sister.

 
I come from limited privilege, but it was privilege nonetheless.  My family was large and although my father never made much money, we had grandparents who helped us.  My paternal grandparents virtually gave us the house we lived in.  My mother’s father, Dr. Charles Potter of Washington, N. J. at times provided the lion’s share of income for our family.  He owned a modern, glass-fronted lake house in northwestern  N. J, where we vacationed for two months every summer.  Joey spent most of his summers in Stirling, a town with a large population of Italian immigrants or their descendants who had moved there from New York City, Newark and other cities in the New York Metropolitan area. I suppose he visited the Jersey shore on occasion like we all did, but I doubt he ever had a real vacation. I don’t believe he ever had the money to buy a car in his short life.

I did get to play baseball with Joey one last time in the summer of 1965 before our senior year began.  It was in the Elks Junior Baseball League in Plainfield.  More on that later. 

                                                    *******

IPfF4

W

IPfF      Chapter 4   

 

WHRHS spring training for baseball started in early March when New Jersey weather is often damp and cold.  On days of inclement weather we would practice in the gym.  Coach Frank Matullo (we called him Mattie) would have us in the gym working our throwing arms and running sprints.  That was pretty much all you could do in a gym with windows. We may have played some pepper, but on a hardwood floor, that felt unnatural. When the weather was clear, we would go outside and practice.  One day in early March when the weather was clear but cold, Mattie posted a sign on the bulletin board outside the gym: “Put your Woolie Bullies on!  We are going outside!”  Woolie Bully by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs was one of the hit songs of 1965.  Mattie was hip to it.  

Taking batting practice in the cold was not a pleasurable experience like it was in warm weather.  Cold bats have bees in them.  If you don't hit the ball squarely, you get stung.

Coach Matullo was a laid back, soft-spoken man who loved baseball and was grateful he had a paying job in it. His demeanor was unlike Bob O’Neill's: rarely to anger, dispassionate, and fun-loving.  O'Neill spoke constantly when he coached, but Mattie was more laconic.  He'd give you hints and let you figure it.  But the ability to focus on what was needed was the same.  Rumor was he had been a young minor league center fielder in the New York Giants farm system.  When the time came they needed a center fielder, they didn’t call him up, they called up Willie Mays instead, which turned out to be the right choice.  The story is probably apocryphal, since I can find no records that Frank Matullo played minor league ball at all on comprehensive lists of minor league players on the internet.  I was able to find records for others like Joe Randazzo, a friend of Matty's who occasionally came and helped him coach us. I found records on Don Kohler who coached the Dreier's team in Plainfield on the internet. Also Chambers Rossi, Frank's uncle, but none for Mattie.  You could, however, see Mattie's baseball experience when he threw and swung the fungo bat during warm-ups. People who have played baseball for a long time develop a fluid, easy style.  He was a natural athlete. At Panzer College he had played four years each of baseball, basketball and soccer.  In his senior year he had been captain of the soccer team. 

It didn't seem like Mattie was coaching you at all.  He'd offer tips and instruction, but it was always gently recommended.  He never got angry or frustrated.  If guys were goofing around, unless the situation was extremely tight and demanded intense focus, he'd encourage it.  Having fun was part of the game.  It made practices enjoyable.  We were loose.  Any pressure was usually self-generated and your problem.   

                                            Frank Matullo

Mattie’s laid-back attitude was shared by his JV coach Bill Griswold, a big unit of a  man with an acne-scarred complexion and a passing resemblance to a friendly werewolf. He was roughly 6’-6” and must have weighed 250 lbs. He had a toothy broad smile and a deep belly laugh. He called everyone “Ace,” probably because he couldn’t remember their name.  He had been the varsity football coach before Don Schneider was hired in 1963.  He coached the nascent teams in the early days when WHRHS was building athletic programs from the ground up. Starting in 1957 they often played short schedules because most of the other teams had previous commitments and as a new team you had to build a schedule.  The football program was in its infancy. Coach Griswold brought it up to mediocrity and then signed it over to Don Schneider in 1963. In hindsight, I think that was a mistake. 

Bill Griswold died just before his 95th birthday in August of 2025, four  months before I am describing him here..  His obituary read: 

 William Henry Griswold, III, "Bill," beloved husband, father, grandfather, and great grandfather, passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family on August 30, 2025, at the age of 94. Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, on November 9, 1930, he was the son of the late Ruth (Chapman) and William Henry Griswold, Jr. A proud graduate of Cradock High School, Class of 1948, Bill went on to earn his Bachelor of Science in Education from the University of Virginia. He continued his academic journey with a Master of Arts from New Jersey Teachers College in 1958 and later received his Master of Education from Rutgers University in 1964. Bill served his country honorably during the Korean Conflict as a member of the United States Army's 716th Military Police Platoon. For his service, he was awarded the National Defense Service Medal and the Good Conduct Medal. Following his military service, Bill dedicated his life to education. Throughout his distinguished career, he served as a public school teacher and coach, Supervisor of Physical Education for Wilmington Public Schools, Supervisor in the New Castle County School System, and ultimately retired as the Athletic Director at Concord High School. He touched countless lives through his commitment to education and athletics. An avid sports fan and athlete, The Griz played Division I football at UVA and was even drafted by the Baltimore Colts. However, his passion for education and devotion to his family led him to pursue a different path-one that enriched the lives of so many. He was a skilled bowler, an enthusiastic woodworker, and a devoted coach of youth football and baseball in his community. He loved connecting with people and could spark a conversation with anyone about anything. In addition to his parents, Bill was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Elizabeth Brooks Griswold.

Coach Griswold played on the 1951 University of Virginia team that was ranked the best Southern independent college team out of 19 teams.  They won 8 games and lost one.  Given that Coach Griswold was drafted by the Baltimore Colts after that season, we can assume he played an important role on that winning team.  Of interest to me was that the one loss the Cavaliers suffered was to Washington and Lee University.  When I played for Centre College in the late 1960s, we beat Washington and Lee in football three times in four tries.  
 

Playing for Coach Griswold on the JV baseball team for two years was a pleasure.  The first year, he nurtured his four freshman: Frank Rossi, Joey Ezro, Irv Zander and me.  A few of the upper classmen on the team were not as accepting of us as they could have been. In those days freshman were subjected to orientation throughout the year, also known as “hazing” which, ironically, could be  disorienting.  Coach Griswold made sure we freshman were treated fairly.  I remember I was mocked by teammates repeatedly for having made All-County Chorus in my freshman year.  The Griz, as he was known, thought it was great that I was a singer.                                                                                                    

 

         Bill Griswold               

                                          
Coaches Kovonuk, Matullo and Griswold were all hired when WHRHS opened in 1957 although Kovonuk was initially part-time at WHRHS and another school in Bound Brook.  By 1965 they had weathered all the formative years in athletic competition and had built a solid foundation in the three major sports: football, basketball and baseball.  It was not unlike coaching an expansion team in professional sports. You build from the ground up. Except for my senior year in football (when Don Schneider was the coach), I played on a winning team in football, basketball and baseball in all four years due to their efforts to build successful programs. Eleven out of twelve seasons.  Going through the early WHRHS yearbooks, 1958-60, you can see the three helped each other by working as assistant coaches.  Matullo helped in football and basketball, Griswold helped in baseball and wrestling and Kovonuk helped in football and baseball.  The team pictures in yearbooks from those years tell the story.  One story they told was that there was not even a baseball team pictured in the 1958 yearbook.  A team photograph didn't show up until the 1959 yearbook.  In it, Coach Matullo had a lot more hair and three future WHRHS Hall of Famers, Fred Rossi, Pete Falzarano and Jerry Mobus, appear.     
                                                                                                                        It was a pleasure playing for Frank Matullo, who not only taught and coached at the regional high school but was the Director of Recreation and ran the summer recreation program for children in the Borough of Watchung where he moved in 1958,  He lived off Hillcrest Road less than half a mile from my house.  I worked as an assistant in the rec program for him in the summers after my junior and senior years in 1965 and '66.  I was  paid $30  a week.  

Because I had attended the summer recreation program throughout grade school, Matullo knew me well.  Even in those years I suspect he was grooming me for high school baseball. He made sure we played a lot of baseball in the summer sun while he was in the gym at Watchung Borough School supervising the smaller children.  We played a version of "one old cat" when we didn't have enough players for a full game.  We pronounced it "one-a-cat."  It's a game as few as three children can play.                                                                                   

 When I did arrive in high school, Mattie placed me not on the freshman baseball team, but on the junior varsity team with Frank Rossi, Joey Ezro and Irv Zander. I was lucky enough as a boy and then a teenager to have coaches (including my father) who would put players with potential in a situation that would accelerate their development  If you were playing with older players you learned to play at their level.   

After my freshman year Mattie had me play JV again as a sophomore. He had a competent shortstop in senior David Baker and a deft second baseman in Doc Ferraro on the varsity. They were co-captains of the 1964 team and played a major role in the team winning the Somerset County championship.  In his senior year, Doc (one of Fred and  Frank Rossi's cousins) was recognized and lauded by Matullo at the annual spring sports dinner for handling 70 chances at second base that season without an error.  

In the meantime I had started playing a lot of tennis during summer vacation after my freshman year.  I grew to love it. At one point before the baseball season of my sophomore year, I went to Mattie and told him I was thinking of trying out for the tennis team, which would mean I wouldn’t be playing baseball.  He said firmly, “No, you don’t want to do that.  This year you will be the JV shortstop again, and next year you will be the varsity shortstop.  In your senior year, you will be the varsity shortstop, the captain of the team and will make All-County at your position.”  And that was that.  
 

                                                    *****

 My first year in varsity baseball at WHRHS began when I was a junior in the spring of 1965.  Several senior starters  including Ronnie Peterson, Jimmy Higgins, Jim Goulding, Doc Ferraro, Dale Throneberry, Ken Spisso and David Baker had graduated. In fact, the entire infield had to be replaced. We needed a catcher and a centerfielder. The two starters who were returning were, however, as good as it gets: Norm Hewitt, a pitcher/outfielder, and Frank Rossi, my classmate, who had played right field on the 1964 championship team as a sophomore.  The good news was that Norm was the best hitter on that '64 team and Frank was arguably the second best along with Jimmy Higgins, who ended up playing football at Rutgers in the fall of 1964. First baseman Dale Throneberry also made a strong offensive contribution.  The team won the Somerset County title with a 10-2 record in 1964, two games ahead of Bridgewater-Raritan.  Their overall record was 13-4.                                                                                                          
Norm Hewitt was so good in 1964 as a junior he was the subject of a full column by Courier News sports columnist Hugh Delano.  The headline of the column was “Stormin’ Norman On A Rampage.”  It was midway through the season and Hewitt was batting .500 with 14 hits in 28 at bats. He also had a 4-0 pitching record.  He was a power pitcher with an excellent breaking ball.                                         

 The 1965 Watchung Hills Warriors had a completely revamped line-up.  The only full-time starter returning to his original position was Hewitt.  Frank Rossi had played right field in '64, but was now to be our regular catcher. Junior Billy Beyer was our second baseman, senior John Dilzell our third baseman, senior Jim Dolan our first baseman and I would play shortstop.  Juniors Fred Ahlers, Glenn Rossi, Irv Zander and seniors Alan Welch, Tony Romeo, and Hewitt when he was not pitching would man the outfield.  Juniors Jeff Mogey and Rob Lang were backup utility men. Pete Scott and Tony Szalacha filled out the pitching staff. 

  

 

The 1965 season began well.  We won our first four games against Bridgewater-Raritan, Franklin Township, Metuchen and North Plainfield. Against Bridgewater, Norm struck out 14 and hit a two-run homer to seal a 2-0 victory.  He threw a two-hitter against Franklin and hit a two-run double as we won 6-2.  Against North Plainfield he threw a four-hitter in an 8-1 victory.  

But then we ran  into Somerset County powerhouses Somerville and Bound Brook.  We lost 1-0 and 7-4 respectively. Somerville would beat us twice that year by the score of 1-0.                                                                                                                                            

Mattie had me batting eighth in the lineup for the first two games.  In the third game against Metuchen he moved me up to fifth behind Frank.  In the 10th game of the season he moved me up to second in the order and put Fred Ahlers, our fleet center fielder, in the lead-off position replacing Billy Beyer who was dropped down to 8th.  Mattie was gaining confidence in me. I was hitting in front of Hewitt and Rossi, which meant I would see better pitches.                                                                                                                          

The team did not hit well during the 1965 season.  There were a lot of formidable pitchers in the Plainfield area in 1965, Norm being just one of them.  I remember I was struck out by Tommy Utzinger of North Plainfield three times in the final game of the season. We normally handled North Plainfield easily, but with Utzinger on the mound, they were nearly invincible and beat us 3-1.  Norm was the only one who could hit him, gathering two of our four hits.  I think Frank struck out three times also, if I recall correctly. I remember us commiserating together after the game.  Utzinger struck out a whopping 16 of us in seven innings that day, which means only five of his outs were not strike outs.                                                                                                                                                             In the 1965 season, I only got 8 hits in 47 at bats and Frank didn't do much better with 10 in 47.  Norm led the team with 14 hits in 53 at bats.  Of course, Frank and Norm probably had a much higher OPS (on base percentage plus slugging) than I did.  Both were formidable power hitters who drove in and scored a lot of runs.  Norm did amazing things during the season.  He struck out 14 hitters three times in 7 inning games against Bridgewater, Metuchen and Manville.  Against Ridge High School, he picked off three runners in one game.  In that game, Frank drove in both our runs in a 2-0 victory.    

                                                  

 

1965:  The shortstop swinging away with Hewitt and catcher Rossi on deck. The man standing behind Frank was Mr. Pizzini, whose daughter Michelle was in our class.  His house was a short walk through the woods to our home field.  He would bring us chewing gum before every game and became  known as  "Gum Chum." He liked the name and would show up and yell "Gum Chum here!"  

  

Norm's cockiness manifested itself before our second game of two with the powerhouse team Bound Brook in 1965. They were the best team in Somerset County that year.  From the Courier News of May 28th:

"Norm Hewitt, a hard-throwing left-hander, is the best pitcher on the Watchung Hills baseball team. He also may be Watchung's answer to Cassius Clay.                                                                                                                              He pitched the Warriors past Bound Brook,2-1, in a rain-abbreviated game at Warren Township, and had made good his boast to halt Bound Brook's winning streak at 13.       'They won't make it 14,' predicted Norm Tuesday night after Bound Brook's 13th straight victory.  'I'm going to beat them Thursday'" 

        

Norm nailed his prediction-- with a little help from his teammates. We were facing John Budnick, the biggest and probably the hardest throwing pitcher in the County.  On this day he struck out eight of the first ten batters he faced. (Norm struck out nine in the game.)  Bound Brook took a 1-0 lead in the first inning. In the bottom of the fourth as threatening skies rolled in, I got a fat fastball from Budnik and drove it through the gap in left center for a double. Norm then grounded out, but Frank hit a deep drive through the same gap for a triple to send me home and tie the game. After the second out Alan Welch singled Frank in with what proved to be the winning run.  

Norm held Bound Brook scoreless in the top of the fifth and then the rains came in sheets suspending the game.  According to the rules, it was a legal victory.  Bound Brook's players were incensed that they were deprived of their at-bats in the last two innings.  The reporter was correct.  Norm proved to be our "answer to Cassius Clay", although Clay had changed his name to Muhammad Ali a year before. 

 

 

Norm had an impressive year.  He was named to the Newark Star Ledger All-Area team along with Frank.  The Courier News, which covered a five-county area, also named them both to their All-Area Team.  Here are their photos from the Courier News article that honored them:

 Here is the record of the 1965 WHRHS Warriors baseball team:   

 

There is one error in the scores listed above:  Piscataway actually beat us 5 to 4.  We did not beat them 11 to 5.  We were 10 and 7-- an above average team that lost a couple more than we should have.  

 

In doing this research, I was surprised to learn that both Frank and Norm were moonlighting during the 1965 season at WHRHS.  They played at least five games together for Dreier's Sporting Goods in the Plainfield Twilight League.  Nearly all the players for Dreier's were  playing college baseball or post-college players.  Norm and Frank were exceptions.   

Norm Hewitt went from Watchung Hills to Salem College, West Virginia.  He could have signed a professional contract but his parents insisted he get an education first. I remember fondly his father, Norm Senior, who came regularly to our high school games, even after Norm Jr. had graduated.  Norm Sr. was an  outdoorsman.   We called him "the Lobster" because his face was always red from exposure while hunting and fishing outdoors.  In his prime he had played minor league baseball and been a great player in the semi-professional leagues in New Jersey. 

After college, Norm Hewitt was spectacularly successful Jr. as a high school and college baseball coach, first at Hillsborough High in 1969 where he was hired as an industrial arts teacher and, like his mentor Frank Matullo, assigned the task of building the baseball program for the new high school that was opening there.  He coached at Hillsborough until he was hired by Drew University in 1981.  He gave the university its first winning season that year and then went on to become the pitching coach at Rutgers University from 1982-84.  From there it was back to coaching high school baseball at Bridgewater-Raritan West from 1987-99 when he returned to Hillsborough High School to coach there again.  In 2014 after retiring from teaching, Norm was rehired by Drew University to be an assistant baseball coach.  The following is from Drew University's description of Norm after they re-hired him:     

Hewitt is a member of the NJBCA Hall of Fame and the WHRHS Hall of Fame. He has been named Coach of the Year nine times, including New Jersey Coach of the Year in 1989 and again in 2005. In 1989 he coached the New Jersey All Stars at Yankee Stadium. Hewitt was also recognized by the NJSIAA as the state's representative for National Coach of the Year in 2005, and has served on the NJSIAA rules committee.   Norm has accumulated 631 career wins and has proudly advanced over 200 of his high school players to the collegiate level, among them, 21 All-Americans. Three of his pitchers have been drafted from his high school programs, and nine have gone on to professional baseball.

                                                                                     

Norm's winning percentage as a high school coach was among the best ever.  He won 631 games and lost 349 for a winning percentage of .644.  To put that in perspective, the best winning percentage among all MLB managers in history was achieved by John McCarthy at .615.  Norm even exceeded Frank Matullo's winning percentage at WHRHS, which was .609.  But Mattie only won 149 games to Norm's 631.  Norm coached quite a bit longer than Mattie and his teams played many  more games per season during his long career.  

 It was a pleasure to play the 1965 season with Norm, I got to relive the pleasure  when I played with him on the  Dreiers team in the Plainfield Twilight League in the summers of 1967 and '68.  He was the best left-handed hitter I ever played with --or against.   

                                                         *******

The summer after the 1965 baseball season at WHRHS, I was player/coach on a team in the Plainfield Elks Junior League.  The League was managed and directed  by Vic Liske, who coached the Plainfield High School swim team from 1934 to 1966 and was a highly respected citizen of the City of Plainfield. He never had a losing season as a swim coach and is viewed as one of the most successful swimming coaches in New Jersey history.  He had  coached Olympic athlete Milt Campbell in swimming. Campbell would later win a gold medal in the decathlon at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, the first black man to do so. 

 Vic Liske had among other distinctions being father to Pete Liske who quarterbacked for Penn State where he was the MVP at the Hula Bowl in 1963.  Pete was drafted into the NFL and had a 12-year professional career in which he played for the New York Jets, Buffalo Bills, Denver Broncos and the Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian Football League. He also played first base on the Penn State baseball team that appeared in the College World Series of 1963.  I was well aware of Pete’s career while playing in Vic Liske’s Junior Elks League in the summers of ’64 and ’65. The fact that he was drafted as a pro quarterback made Pete famous in the Plainfield area. 

Vic Liske was an elderly gentlemen who devoted his life to serving young people.  When I knew him he was approaching retirement age and walked with a pronounced limp. I don’t know what caused it but it made the long walks he had to make from his office to the field difficult.  He was fair and diplomatic when it came to mediating disputes among the Elks League’s  teams.  He umpired many  of the games, which could become contentious, but he always handled disagreements masterfully. 

The teams in the Plainfield Junior Elks League came from all over the Central Jersey area including Bound Brook, South Plainfield, Dunellen, Scotch Plains, Metuchen  and Westfield.  They usually consisted of high school baseball players.  You had to be 18 or younger to qualify to play but if you had not turned 19 when the season started, you were allowed to play even if you would turn 19 during the season. I coached our team in 1964 and 1965 with Mike Lombardo, a teammate from my freshman and sophomore year on the WHRHS junior varsity baseball team. Mike was two grades ahead of me but was still eligible because he had not turned 19 before the season started in 1965. 

I thought up  the name Hillsmen for the team, which was appropriate, since we were from the hills above Plainfield, a wealthy city with a population of 45,000 that in the late 19th and early 20th century had become a vacation destination for families from New York City which was 32 miles east of Plainfield.  Our players were all students of WHRHS and came from Millington, Stirling, Gillette, Meyersville, Watchung and Warren Township.  

I don’t recall how we got an invitation to join the League.  It could have been through my brother Chip who would have known Vic Liske because Chip was a champion swimmer for the Plainfield YMCA.   We were invited to join the league in 1964 after a team named the Queensmen couldn’t field nine men. (Plainfield was always known as the Queen City.) We inherited their record of 0-2 and assumed their place in the schedule.   I know the details about the summer seasons of 1964 and ’65 because because Pete Liske had accounts of all the games and box scores published in the Plainfield Courier News, whose archives I have researched online. I had forgotten almost everything about it. The more I learned, the better the story became. 

Those old columns in the Courier News tell the story of how we were a mediocre but winning team in the summer of 1964 but improved enough to get into a best-of-three game championship series in the summer of 1965.  In the latter year,  Joey Ezro, although he had missed playing on the varsity that spring,  played a prominent role in many of our regular season games.  The Tigers of South Plainfield were 10-2 during the regular season and we ended up tied for second with the Giants at 8-4. We defeated the Giants in a one-game playoff, 6-1.  Russ Harden got the win and Glenn Rossi, another cousin of Frank Rossi, hit a two run homer in the fifth to break a tie that gained us a spot in the three-game championship playoff with the Tigers of South Plainfield.     

Because Joey did not play varsity baseball with us at WHRHS during our junior season in 1965, I doubted he would want to play in the Elks League in our second season. When he didn't show for varsity baseball we knew something was not right with him. It was a mystery to all of us on that team.  He was so good!  Pitching was so easy for him!  Why wouldn’t he play? 

But he surprised me by agreeing to play in the Elks League. Joey played in 9 of our 16 games that summer.  He pitched only one game and played first base in the others.  We had four regular pitchers on that team: Ronnie Peterson, Pete Scott, Russell Harden and, to my amazement, me.  I had no recollection of pitching ever for the Hillsmen. The three others had been regular starting pitchers at WHRHS and I had not.  I was astonished to find in the archives I had pitched in at least five games during our 1965 season and had a won-lost record of 2-1 which tied me for fifth place with Pete Scott in the pitching statistics for the entire league.  Russell Harden, a sophomore on the WHRHS varsity that year, had placed second in the Elks League in pitching with a 3-0 record.  
 

Joey played first base in the nine games he played for us.  He hit the ball hard and often.  In 29 at bats he had 10 hits for an average of ,345.  And yet he was not listed in the final statistics Vic Liske compiled, which required that you have at least 28 at bats. I finally solved the mystery. When I totaled up his statistics, I included his at bats and hits from our playoff games.  These were not included in the regular season statistics Vic Liske had compiled.  

  
Joey loved to play baseball.  It was school that he hated. I suppose that's why he ended up playing for us.  He wouldn't have to go to school and he was good friends with all of us so he agreed to play. He may have told Mike and me he didn’t want to pitch, that he only wanted to play first base.  I deduce this because if I had anything to do with it I would have had him pitch every other game.   As it was, he only pitched in one game-- the deciding game in the 3-game championship series against the Tigers.  Those games were to be played on three successive days at the end of the regular season. 

The first game of the that series was rained out, which meant we had to play a double-header the next day.  Here is the description of the double-header from the The Courier News of August 21, 1965.   

In the first contest, the Hillsmen picked up a 4-2 decision behind the four-hit hurling of Doug Eaton and the hitting of Joe Ezro who drove in three runs with a first inning double and singled twice.   

Butch Stiglemeyer evened the series with a four-hitter in the nightcap as the Tigers gained a 6-1 victory.  

That was a complete surprise to me.  I have no recollection at all of pitching that game or any game for the Hillsmen. In fact I had even forgotten it was a three game series.  I only had a vague recollection of the final game.   

Russ Harden suffered the loss in the second game.  The final was scheduled for the following day.  The question was, who would pitch for us? Pete Scott must have been out of town.  Ronnie Peterson was in the line-up and was the top pitcher in Somerset County at WHRHs in 1963 and 1964 but was suffering from a sore arm. Harden and I were  pitched out and only available in relief.  In the end it was Joey Ezro, who had gone 4 for 7 in the split double-header the day before, who either volunteered for the job or agreed to do it when asked.  

That Joey consented to pitch couldn't have been more fortuitous. We wanted to keep Ronnie at 2nd base, me at shortstop and the fleet Fred Ahlers in center to keep our defense strong up the middle.  Glenn Rossi, a solid catcher like his cousin Frank, was behind the plate. No one had seen Joey pitch in over a year, but we knew he was in fairly good shape because he had been playing frequently for us. But was he in condition to pitch 7 innings against the team with the best record in the league? 

Ronnie Peterson was our best all-around player.  He was one of of the best athletes in the WHRHS class of ’64 if not the best. He was second in hitting in the Elk’s League at the end of the 1965 regular season with a .438 batting average.  Although he only pitched occasionally in the two years we played together on the Hillsmen, he had a blistering fastball and a sharp-breaking curve ball  as a pitcher. He could play solid defense at any infield position.  

 Ronnie was one of those older guys I worshipped as we grew up.  His mother and my father had worked for the same newspaper at one point, so I had met him even before they moved to Watchung.  She had divorced his father and married Merrill Morris who became a boating columnist for the Courier News.  In researching our games I would occasionally come across a column of his.  His mother's name was Norma, and we called her Norm.  

In researching this subject I was saddened to learn that Ronnie died in 2017.  He was still living in Watchung after all these years.  Here is his obituary:  

Ronald B. Peterson Watchung father and grandfather, standout in basketball and baseball in his youth, 'a passion for life'

 

Ronald Peterson, 70, passed away Feb. 10, 2017, at Overlook Medical Center in Summit, N.J. Ron grew up in Watchung, N.J., and lived there at the time of his passing. Prior to his retirement in 2006, Ron was a field manager with Exxon in Linden, N.J. Ron excelled in organized sports. He was best known for his agility and skill on the basketball court in school and municipal leagues, where he had many seasons as high scorer on champion-ship teams. He attended Watchung Hills Regional High School and graduated, with honors, from Valley Forge Military Academy, having received a basketball scholarship. He attended the University of Texas, El Paso. Baseball was also a passion. As a starting pitcher, also in school and municipal leagues, Ron earned several MVP awards and trophies for the most strike-outs. He was drafted into the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Yankees, where a serious arm injury prevented a career. A true Yankees fan, he was a regular at Yankee Stadium over the years, and more recently, never missed a game on television. He enjoyed coin collecting for many years and was a skilled and successful stock market analyst.   

That doesn’t tell the whole story of Ronnie’s accomplishments.  He was an All- Somerset County pitcher in 1963 and again in 1964 as a senior.  In 1963 his record was 8-2. in 1964, he was 9-2. In one 7-inning game he struck out 12 and walked none.  In 1963 he was listed at 5’-8” and weighed 145 lbs.  I believe he was at least an inch taller than that in later years and probably weighed 10 lbs more, but was still diminutive for a pitcher.  He was one of those who “could throw pills at you,” to quote the lingo of the time.  And he was an excellent basketball player, one of the top scorers in his two varsity seasons at WHRHS.  At Valley Forge, where he spent a fifth year of high school,  in one game he scored 48 points.  

For the Hillsmen, he played 2nd base except for when I pitched. Then he would play shortstop. On occasion he would pitch for us.  He was two grades  ahead of me in school (although only 16 months older).  It was a pleasure to play with him.  

We Hillsmen were a ragtag bunch.  We frequently had trouble getting enough players to field a team.  We had a solid starting nine when they all showed up, but there were at least nineteen players whose names appear in the box scores from that season.  We would meet “down at Watchung Center”, a row of stores  that lined the newly constructed traffic circle.  It had a confectionary store, two gas stations, a delicatessen, a liquor store, the police station, the Fire Department, town offices, a library and a furniture store run by Harlan Pratt.  The Center was at the confluence of two streams, Blue Brook and Green Brook (which turned into Stony Brook at the Center), and five roads:  Somerset Street, Valley Road, Hillcrest Road, Stirling Road and Mountain Boulevard.  At the east  and west end of the circle were two lakes, Best Lake and Watchung Lake. 

The Hillsmen would gather at Watchung Center hours before the game to make sure we had enough players. Several of the players had been sitting on the bridge there for years in their leisure time, which was abundant. Mike Lombardo was their de facto leader. Hanging out was a pastime for them when they were not playing the national pastime or misbehaving in some way. I had been known to mingle with them.  Now many of us were on a team competing in the big city of Plainfield. We wanted to show the flatlanders who was boss.  The Bridge Sitters as they were called were a fun bunch.  

Gathering a full lineup of nine players was difficult on occasion. Players would go out of town or forget there was a game scheduled. And yet, I think we only forfeited for lack of players once each in 1964 and 1965.  Some of the people who were drafted at the last minute to fill in had not played since Little League if at all.  Others had only played in grade school or quit after their freshman year in high school.  We didn’t have uniforms and on occasion we had to put someone in the lineup under an assumed name wearing street clothes and Bass Weejuns-- someone who thought he had come to the game as a spectator.  And yet we had a good core team that was mostly dependable.  That is why we won twice as many games as we lost.  

If we didn’t have enough players we would get on the payphone at Watchung Center and start calling various prospects, even if they were not on the roster. Our uniforms consisted mostly of sweat pants or jeans and white t-shirts since we never figured out a way to get a sponsor to pay for t-shirts, much less uniforms.  We probably could have gone to Bernie Dreier of Dreier's Sporting Goods for help, but never got around to it.

In 1965 the Hillsmen  made it to the Elks League finals and on August 20th, we won the title.  Joey pitched the final game of the series and we won 8 to 3 in seven innings.  The column in the Courier News claims Joey needed “. . . relief help from Doug Eaton in the sixth inning.”   I have no memory of that but according to the box score I pitched in relief, went 1 for 3 and scored three of our eight runs.  Fred Ahlers, our centerfielder both at Watchung Hills and with the Hillsmen, drove in five runs and iced the game with a three run homer in the top of the 7th. 

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For sixty years I have frequently thought of Joey with a combination of affection and sadness.   After graduation in 1966, which he could not attend because he stopped going to school, I remember seeing him only once in the summer of 1967 after my freshman year in college. My girlfriend from college, Betty Fowlkes had traveled from Nashville up to N. J. She was from an old Texas ranching family that had moved to Franklin, Tennessee. I was having a party at our  house to introduce her to my Jersey friends.  I remember Joey charmed Betty and that he was drinking a potent mixture of  Southern Comfort with beer chasers.  He loved her southern accent and teased her about it.  I suspect she was the first southern belle he had ever met. He made a little joke about her being my Southern Comfort.   

In doing this research, I learned that Joey had several run-ins with the law in the years I knew him.  All of us got into a little trouble with the cops on occasion, but Joey was the high scorer in that game also.  

From various local newspapers, I learned he had a record: on October 1, 1965 he was fined $20 in municipal court for throwing beer cans out of a car and $15 dollars for "following too close;" on December 30th, 1965 he was fined $30 for careless driving; on June 1st, 1967, he was fined $55 for "malicious injury to property" and given a 30-day suspended sentence; on May 24th, 1968 when he was still 20 years old and underage, he and two others were arrested for possession of alcohol.  

On December 30th, 1968, eighteen months after I last saw him in the summer of '67, Joey died in a high speed car crash.  One of his friends was driving drunk and hit a telephone pole.  The car was a convertible. The front end of the car was crushed up against the passenger seat where Joey was sitting.  The driver and another passenger survived.  I learned from a mutual friend later that a portion of Joey's  skull and brain were shorn off by the convertible top hardware attached to the top of the windshield. He was buried ten days  later after I had returned to college.  I grieved at his loss.  I grieve him still because I'm sure he would matured into a fine person.  He had a good heart and an abundance of charisma.   

I had a lot of friends at WHRHS including several in the class ahead of us, but Joey and Frank Rossi were my closest friends from the class of ’66 and probably the best athletes in the class, although there were others in sports like Track and Field who did very well in the County and State championships of 1966 including  Ray Siegrist in the 880, Ed Nicholas in the shotput and discus and Lou Falzarano in the high and low hurdles, Tony Maglione in the javelin and Paul Ernst in the high jump.  Frank and I remained devoted to our sports (as did Irv Zander and Fred Ahlers) while Joey slowly withdrew from school and sports.  I often wonder if he had played baseball in our senior year that it might have saved him. We had a state championship-caliber team.  We didn’t win it, but I’m convinced we would have if Joey had pitched for us. We had two great underclassmen as pitchers that year in Bob Stapperfenne and Paul Parker, but Joey was bigger, stronger, better and more experienced  than they were. We were high achievers, but i can't help but think on what could have been.