It was a unique assignment Friday night to photograph Revere’s season-opener football game along with the celebration of their football predecessors of 60 years ago.
Take away the action on the football field, and through my camera lens I saw guys in their mid-to-late seventies happy to still have their health and greet each other, enjoying a few laughs and memories about their youth and their football glory days.
But through the lens of time, I saw heroes.
I was nine years old in the autumn of 1964 when the Revere High Patriots were rolling along at 7-0-1, poised to confront the Winthrop Vikings in a Thanksgiving Day duel that would decide the Massachusetts Class B football championship.
I was unfamiliar with the term “ineligible” when I heard that the Massachusetts Secondary Schools Principals Association decided that a Revere player was “ineligible.” I learned the meaning of the word “forfeit” when the mysterious “Headmasters” had the audacity to deprive my gridiron warriors of their rightful chance at triumph, just days before the Big Game. I cussed and cursed those contemptible functionaries who made my team 0-8 instead of 7-0-1. In whatever terms a nine-year old could have expressed it, I thought: “those miserable bastards.”
The decision sent shock waves through our fair city, among young and old alike.
Understand, in 1964, high school football was paramount, the epicenter of fan-based passion. There wasn’t a whole lot else. The Boston Patriots were still a new phenomenon, gaining only a modicum of attention despite their moderate success during the first four seasons of the fledgling American Football League.
Television had just three stations and telecast one college game on a Saturday—usually featuring Notre Dame—and a professional game on Sunday—usually featuring the New York Giants. Revere was largely populated by first-generation Americans, very much a working-class city, and most residents had no connection to or concern about the myriad programs of New England college football.
So, in 1964, everyone went to the high school football game. Revere High football meant traffic jams along Broadway on a Saturday afternoon as throngs of fans hustled to Paul Revere Stadium. Many of them carried blue felt pennants emblazoned with white letters R-E-V-E-R-E, and youngsters blew into long plastic horns that made a distinctive two-note honk that modulated low-to-high or reverse. Moms and Dads and brothers and sisters and grandparents and cousins and friends and neighbors and people learning to like sports crammed into the rickety wooden bleachers for the 1 p.m. kickoffs and cheered or groaned with every play.
As the afternoon sun slid west toward sunset, the roaring crowd and the music of the marching bands echoed from Park Avenue into the dense neighborhoods of the city’s core, the soundtrack of an autumn Saturday in simpler times.
Those were the days I learned to love football, and to admire the guys who played it. I remember their names and their numbers as if they cannot be erased by time: Jim DelGaizo, 17 and his brother John, 44. Vic Mancini, 40. Big Steve Bloom, 70. Phil Alexander, 84. Alan Drover, 80. Bill Cintolo, 22. Bill Piscione, 60. Paul Nuell, 31. Need I go on? These were the guys who sacrificed their skin and blood to mix with the grass and the mud of the football field. They were larger than life to me and my friends.
I always wanted to be like them—tough, committed, and determined. I wanted to learn the lessons that high school football—and sports in general—could imbue to a young soul.
In 1964, the RHS football team, their devoted fans, and this nine-year old boy got whacked upside the head with a lesson that resonates today: sometimes, life is unfair. Despite your hard work and your good intentions, sometimes things go awry.
When the team came out and beat Winthrop 8-0 in the final game, overcoming the demoralizing news that arrived only a few days earlier, it was a lesson that you carry on and do your best, no matter what.
The players of that era gathered Friday night and helped Mayor Patrick Keefe unfurl a banner that documents the final scores of the 1964 season. It will hang in the RHS fieldhouse, testament to the teams accomplishments on the field those many years ago.
In November, they will be celebrated again when Revere High grad, teacher, and assistant football coach Brandon Brito releases a documentary film about the wild football season that gripped Revere in 1964.
Friday night, the memories of that wild season flooded those of us who were there, then and now. And while my camera lens focused on contemporary images, through the lens of time I saw only heroes.
