Pottsville Maroons Are Champs

By: K.C. Dicomitis

    The people of Pottsville and surrounding areas of northeast Pa.
are a hardy lot.  I am a Pottsvillian, you know, when we "coal
crackers" like you, you have a friend for life.  If we dislike you,
brother, you've had the course.
     But, for 37 years, not only Pottsvilians, but others interested in
justice, have been fighting for a right that has been wronged.  In
1925, and continuing through 1928, the Maroons were members
of a 20-team league.  Of course, franchisedthrough the National
Football League, presided over by the late John F. Carr.
     In those days, you played rough-and-tumble football.  You saw
the likes of Tony Latone, Jim Thorpe, Gus Sonnenberg, Curley
Oden, Charlie Berry and countless members of the exclusive "Pier
6" club.
     Well, in 1925, the Maroons won 10 games, while losing two,
thus wrapping up the championship by defeating the Chicago
Cardinals, 21-7.
     A week later, Norte Dame's Four Horsemen with front line, was
reassembled to play an exhibition game in Philadelphia.  Matter of
fact, the game was played in Shibe parkm now known as Connie
Mack Stadium; home of the Philadelphia Phillies.  The ball club,
not the cigar!!!
     As Red Smith so eloquently puts it in his colums:  "21 of Rockne's
top 22 players had finished college in the spring of 1925 after whipping
Stanford in the Rose Bowl."  Red forgot to put in the score: Notre
Dame 10, Stanford 7.
     Well, friends, the Maroons met the new unit and won, 9-7, on a
30-yard field goal by ex-American League Umpire, Charlie Berry.
     The following is what's burning many of us.  That includes: Red
Smith, the Sports Columnist; Walter S. Farquhar, columnist of the
Pottsville Republican newspaper; Joe Zacko, the sporting goods
dealer who outfitted the Maroons, and acted as father, mother,
doctor, finance head, friend, grocery clerk- you name it- and me, the
youngest member of the vigilante committee.
     There is in Canton, Ohio, a professional football Hall of Fame.  In
it are treasures of yesterday and today.  But it doesn't have Charlie
Berry's shoe.  The same shoe that kicked the field goal to beat the
Irish of and set-up what I and others believe to be "the first all-star
game."  The same that is witnessed every year in Chicago.  The
very same game that pits the top collegiate football stars agsinst the
previous year's National Football League winner.
     Ladies and gentlemen, the shoe in question is now encased in
bronze and in the possession of Joe Zacko!  If I know Joseph C.
Zacko, ringmaster for all, it's in a safe, dropped into water outside
of New York harbor, and guarded night and day by an army of
dancing skin-divers.
     Unless the current commissioner of the NFL, Pete Rozelle, takes
care of this "wrong," nobody, and I mean nobody, will ever get
that shoe.

East Providence Post, R.I.- January 24, 1963