SCHENECTADY — Red state, blue state, let ’em hear your partisan hate!
“Stomp the Swamp!”
“Kill the Hill!”
… Relax. It’s just a football game.
Well, not just a football game.
For more than five decades, Election Day in Schenectady meant more than simply heading to your local polling place to cast your vote.
There was the bonfire the night before. Stuffed dummies hung in effigy. A parade of decorated cars rolling up and down State Street. Girls in “huge white chrysanthemum corsages,” 1958 Mont Pleasant High School graduate Lois Dello Gullott recalled in a 2011 tribute video.
And two high school football teams, one in red, the other in blue, who merely wanted to tear each other’s heads off, while thousands watched, even if it meant skipping class to sneak in, cutting out of work at the General Electric plant early, or climbing a baseball backstop to get a better view.
It’s been 40 years since the Red Raiders of Mont Pleasant and the Blue Devils of Nott Terrace, then Linton, played the annual Tuesday afternoon Election Day football game.
But the mythology behind the game is still very much alive and well.
Daily Gazette reader Charlie French of Niskayuna recently stumbled upon a program from the Nov. 5, 1968 Mont Pleasant-Linton game at an estate sale, recognized a name on the Linton roster, Nick Falvo, who owns Schenectady Auto, and contacted us wondering about the history of this ferocious rivalry, which began in 1932 and ended in 1985.
“I like old stuff, and I like to learn new things about the old stuff,” he said. “And I like the spirit of the thing. I like that it was printed by the print shop at the school, because my mother-in-law worked at the print shop. Those were the days when you did that.
“It reminded me of school in the old days, when you had something and sold it for ten cents.
“Who knows how many thousands they printed?”
For the record, avid football fan Richard Nixon was elected President that day, and Mont Pleasant won the game 14-13 in front of a crowd of 6,500, an echo to a legendary 14-13 Red Raiders win in 1962 that still gnaws at Pat Riley, the NBA legend who played quarterback for Linton that year.
Riley was covering Joe Massaroni when Walter Pidgeon threw the game-winning touchdown pass to Massaroni with 27 seconds left.
Mike Meola, Riley’s teammate, recalled that “the bookies that put out the point spreads had Linton as a three-touchdown favorite. Throw out the records. This game will make or break your season.”
“Here’s a lasting memory: Our line stood up,” 1964 Mont Pleasant grad Paul Della Villa said. “You wouldn’t have expected it, but our linemen came into that game with determination.
“I was a junior, and they had a kind of pride. The seniors made all the important plays, Massaroni, Pidgeon and Joey DiBartolomeo blocking the extra point. They just didn’t want to lose that game, and they stood up. They did it.”
“To me, it was a very bitter pill to swallow,” Meola said. “I get the feeling from Pat that that particular loss and Kentucky’s loss to Texas Western [for the 1966 men’s basketball NCAA championship] were his two biggest agonies of defeat in his entire athletic career.”
That speaks to how important the Election Day game was to not only the players and coaches, but residents throughout the city.
Also for the record, Mont Pleasant finished the series with 33 victories to 18 for Nott Terrace/Linton, with two ties, 0-0 at Union College’s Alexander Field in 1943 and 6-6 at Mont Pleasant in 1966.
Bob Pezzano played his first-ever varsity basketball game for Linton that year, and recounted how fans, still miffed at the outcome of the football game, chanted “Break that tie! Break that tie!” at the basketball game.
“We [Nott Terrace] really wanted to lay it on [in 1953] because Mont Pleasant had been so good for so many years,” 90-year-old Bob Czub said. “There was a lot of animosity between the teams and the players. If you could get a shot at one of them guys, you did it.
“I missed a trap block, everybody was on the ground, and they grabbed the running back by the shoulder pads. It would’ve been six, easy. And, boy, did I get ripped.”
Czub was an All-American lineman on the Nott Terrace team that outscored its opponents 277-6 and beat Mont Pleasant 19-0 in 1953 in front of 10,000 people at McNerney Stadium.
One of the most renowned games in the series is the game that was never even played.
Anticipation was through the roof in 1954 for the matchup between two undefeated teams, but days before Election Day, Mont Pleasant’s co-captain Dan Monaco was diagnosed with polio.
Nott Terrace’s Oliver DeVito also contracted the disease after the game had already been canceled, leaving everyone involved wondering what might have been.
“Everyone aspired to play in that [rivalry] game,” Meola said. “That’s how big it was. We have two high schools in Schenectady and the competitiveness between the two — ‘Kill the Hill, ‘Stomp the Swamp’ — it wasn’t necessarily just about the football players and coaches on the field.
“It was the cheerleaders, the student body, the fans. It was a camaraderie among everyone in the city of Schenectady.”
In 2011, the Schenectady High School Athletic Hall of Fame paid tribute to the football series at its annual dinner and produced a video that included footage from some of the games and interviews with those involved.
“When we walked out of the locker room, people were lined up 10-deep on either side, I get goosebumps just thinking about it now. Unbelievable feeling,” Rit DiCaprio (Mont Pleasant, 1971) said in the video.
“Throughout college [at Maryland], we played the Penn States, Alabama, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Florida … never had a feeling. Never. Never had a feeling like that Mont Pleasant-Linton game.”
“They [Mont Pleasant fans] would always yell ‘Stomp the Swamp!,’ and we’d have people yelling back, ‘Kill the Hill!’ And you could feel the tensions actually rising at that point,” Cheryl Butler Feldman (Linton, 1982) said in the video.
“The anxiety, the pressure, the lead-up to the game, like the night before with the bonfire,” Meola said in a phone interview on Friday. “You’re only taking a bus trip down McClellan Street, and when you’re a young kid, you think it’s from here to eternity.
“It [1962 loss] was a sobering kind of thing. No one on the bus spoke much. Nobody cared to party. There’s always a dance at the high school that night. Difficult to get yourself up for that.
“Basketball in Schenectady is so big that football is somewhat of a distant second, but, still, that one game rises above everything.”
Memories may last forever, but the Election Day game didn’t.
By the late 1980s, Mont Pleasant and Linton were in the early stages of consolidating into one high school, with Linton officially becoming Schenectady High School out of a merger in 1992.
The football series that began in 1932 ended in 1985 with a 33-0 victory for Linton, which was Class A for sports. Mont Pleasant was a Class B school based on enrollment.
Nott Terrace/Linton had never won by such a lop-sided margin.
Jim Poirier, Jr., the quarterback for Linton in 1985, was in the unusual position of having heard stories all his life of the football exploits of his father, Jim, Sr., who starred … at Mont Pleasant.
“I don’t think I understood until I had my son what it means to root for your son, but I was always a little suspicious of which sideline he was sitting on,” Jim, Jr., said with a grin in the 2011 tribute video, with his dad sitting next to him. “I don’t think I ate what he cooked me that morning for breakfast before the game. Just in case.”
“And that’s how strong of a rivalry it was,” Jim, Sr., said with a chuckle.
Jim, Sr., who threw two touchdown passes in Mont Pleasant’s 21-0 victory in 1955, died on Sept. 6.
“The football meant so much in Schenectady that at Dad’s wake — he’s 87 years old — he still had three former teammates show up,” Jim, Jr., said on Friday. “People still hold on to those teams and those rivalries.”
“For some reason, it never seems to get old,” Meola said.
“Today I have two very close friends that were Mont Pleasant guys,” Czub said. “But it’s still there, I’ll tell ya.
“And every once in a while it comes out.”
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