2— Steelton
Harry DeFrank is not a complicated man.
It’s just not necessary to expend a lot of time, energy or resources trying to figure out exactly who he is and how he came to be that way. All that’s required is to take a ride with him through his hometown of Steelton, Pennsylvania. Because the town of Steelton defines Harry DeFrank, and Harry DeFrank personifies the town of Steelton. Harry DeFrank is a Steeltonian through and through…Steelton born, Steelton raised, Steelton proud. That says all that needs to be said on the subject.
Steelton, Pennsylvania is a town as tough and sturdy as the industry which fostered its incorporation in 1865. It became home to hundreds of immigrant families who settled there in search of job opportunities. Steelton was conceived when the Pennsylvania Steel Company concluded in the mid-1860’s that it would be cheaper to manufacture the steel required for railroad tracks domestically rather than import it from England. The plant the company began to build in May of 1866 would become the first mill constructed in the United States for the express purpose of manufacturing steel. The tract of land the company executives selected, a few miles south of the Pennsylvania state capital of Harrisburg, was chosen primarily for its proximity to rail and canal transportation. Steelton it would be called. Steelton it would be forever.
Harry DeFrank was born January 27, 1926…the fourth son of Tony and Emma (Prayer) DeFrank. His father was of Italian ancestry; his mother, Pennsylvania Dutch. His memories of his mother are regrettably very short. She passed away at age 32 after giving birth to her eighth child. She was not the only victim of this delivery. The baby, named Francis, died at birth. Harry was 6 at the time.
“The docs said it was pneumonia,” he recalls quietly. “It could have been cancer, who knows. The three boys (brothers Ernie, Richard and Harry) were called into her room to see her one last time the day she died.”
Eldest sister Clara withdrew from school in the 8th grade to serve as a surrogate mother. But it was father Tony who ran the household. He was the breadwinner--he started working in the steelworks at age 13 and was a crane operator there for 60 years--but he also was the disciplinarian, the molder of his children. “He was tough, very strict,” Harry remembers. “Guess he had to be tough with all those kids to raise. I know I took a lot of whippin’ from him when I misbehaved.” He didn’t say how often that was. And he wasn’t asked.
“Tough”…if there’s a word that captures the character of Steelton and Steeltonians, “tough” would be that word. In many respects, the town aesthetically remains very much like it was 60-to-70 years earlier when Harry was a young boy growing up. The massive, though now largely idled steel plant across Main Street along the Susquehanna River, still dominates the town’s landscape. Its narrow streets remain lined with tight frame houses. But what really distinguished and defined Steelton in its earliest days were its churches…the churches of Steelton.
The history of Steelton was captured very precisely in a book, “Steelton, Pennsylvania—Stop, Look, Listen”, published in 1979 by author John B. Yetter in collaboration with Harold L. Kerns. When a visitor reads through that proud history, what immediately stands out are the churches. They paint the picture of the town as well as any other historical reference could: First Presbyterian Church (organized in 1882); Main Street Church of God (1883); First Baptist Church (Black, 1884); St. James Roman Catholic Mission (established in 1887 when three nuns took up residence in an old farm house); Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church (German, 1888); Grace United Evangelical Church (1888); Trinity Episcopal Church (1908); St. Nicholas Serbian Orthodox; and four more Roman Catholic churches—St. Mary’s (Croation); St. John’s (German and Hungarian); St. Ann’s (Italian); and St. Peter’s (Slovenian). An 1898 survey recorded no fewer than 33 different nationalities as living in Steelton. By 1936, its ethnicity dropped to 19. No matter. 33 or 19…the town was, in its time, a veritable melting pot.
Life in Harry DeFrank’s childhood and teenaged years was not that much more complex than it was in Steelton’s earliest days. Gone, to be sure, were the lamplighters, the hitching posts and the horses’ troughs. In their place came the small businesses that ultimately would give the community its long-term identity…the gas station run by an owner who was called (affectionately, it was stipulated), “Tony no-brakes”…the corner barbershop of Harry’s uncle, Pete Ivkovic (the husband of his Mother’s sister)…Bill Bryant’s Confectionery where you could buy ice cream for a nickel a dip…and Smokey’s, a pool hall close to the high school. (“I used to be a decent pool shooter,” Harry admits. “I liked to shoot pool and the breeze. I don’t want to tell you I snuck out of school to shoot pool. But I did shoot a lot of pool at night.” Today, Smokey’s is home to a chain drug store).
There also were the boys…always the boys and the nicknames that became their monikers: “Raz” and “Ramo;” “Geep” and “Tupe;” “Jab,” “Wotza,” “Gerg,” and “Kuss;” “Mi-sho,” “Midnight,” and “Mizzy;” “Sharp,” “Feesko,” “Toolbox” and “Teetsa,” not to mention “Alfalfa,” “Pickles,” and Harry’s brothers, “Rex” and “Bussy.” When you made a friend in Steelton, he was more likely than not, a friend for life. Zarko Markona, Harry’s classmate, was a manager for the Steelton football and basketball teams during their high school years. John Grgic was an outstanding Steel High football player of the same era. Almost 70 years later, the three still would lunch together once a month. In the spring of 2006, in fact, Markona and DeFrank traveled together for an outing and a little gambling in Atlantic City, New Jersey. As often as not, the bonds between Steeltonian peers were tight, deep and lasting.
Material wealth was not a commodity found in great abundance in Steelton. From its earliest days a century and a half ago, the town was a working, blue-collar town inhabited by working, blue collar people. It remains pretty much that way today. “Money was tight for most of us,” Harry remembers. “We went on a lot of walks, played a lot of ball, shot a lot of pool. Every once in a while, we’d spring for ice cream at Bill’s Confectionery.”
Steeltonians were a special lot in many ways for their spirit, their determination, their perseverance in the face of adversity. They were of sturdy stock; they were close to each other; and above all, they were resilient…proud throwbacks to the tireless work ethic of their forefathers. No less than 17 floods ravaged the community between 1865 and 1924 alone. The crests of the mighty Susquehanna during these disasters ranged between 17 feet and 27.1 feet. The first flood, in 1889, still is remembered for the logs that littered Main Street after flowing down the river from a sawmill in Williamsport more than 60 miles to the north. But Steelton, undaunted throughout, bounced back as determined as ever.
Still, the worst was yet to come. A 1936 flood, the year of the better known “Great Johnstown Flood,” hit Steelton from a once again raging Susquehanna, cresting at 30.3 feet, 13 feet above flood stage. Even that decimation was topped 36 years later by the ravages and wrath of Hurricane Agnes in 1972. The Susquehanna crested at 32.7 feet and wiped out most of Steelton’s East end. “We used to have about 13,000 people,” Harry recalls. “The ’72 flood took half the town down and now we’re down to about 6,000.”
Steelton also endured two devastating train wrecks on the railroad tracks that ran through the community between the steel mill and the river. In 1905, a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train hit a freight train carrying carloads of dynamite. 22 people were killed. Window shutters served as stretchers for the injured. Streetcars and horse drawn wagons transported 130 injured to the closest hospital. Fifty-seven years later, another Pennsylvania Railroad train, this one called a “Baseball Special” en route to a Saturday night game in Philadelphia, derailed at Steelton, just miles from its departure point in Harrisburg. Three passenger cars tumbled into the Susquehanna. 24 people were killed, 120 more were injured. Once again, the spirit of the Steelton community was tested. Once again the town and its people responded with a resiliency befitting their proud history.
There is something else defining about Steelton and Steeltonians. That’s their affinity for sport.
If you were a boy in Steelton, “sports” was just something you did, Harry DeFrank says in that matter-of-fact way of his. “Every other house had a basket up in the alley for us to play with.” And play they did. The honor roll of outstanding Steelton athletes is quite long and here, at the risk of an omission or two, are some of them:
--The Reich brothers, Gil, an All-State basketball player in 1948 who went on to quarterback the West Point Cadets, and Dick an All-State fullback in 1950 who followed his brother to the Military Academy, but later transferred to Kansas…
--Charlotte “Rusty” Grubic, a local United Steelworkers Union secretary who beat 64 other women in winning the 2nd Annual Women’s World Invitational Bowling championship in 1959 in Chicago…
--Marty Benkovic, who coached the Steel High boys basketball team to a 300-107 mark between 1963 and 1978, including three eastern state championships in 1964-65; 68-69 and 76-77.
--Duke Maronic, who played for the Philadelphia Eagles in the formative years of the National Football League and later became one of Central Pennsylvania’s most renowned high school football and basketball officials.
--Tony Rados, a Steeltonian who played his high school football at Harrisburg Catholic High School and went on to quarterback the Penn State Nittany Lions football team in the early to mid-1950’s…
--Boxers Marlin “Indian” Eshelman, Pete Husic, Johnny Gill and Demo Atanasoff…
--Warren “Cal” Heller, a 1929 Steel High graduate who earned All-American honors four years later on the 1933 University of Pittsburgh Rose Bowl football team…
--And lest we forget, the Steelton athlete who started this honor roll, Miles Fox, quarterback of the 12-0 1926 Steelton state championship football team and member of the 1926-27 Steel High team that won a state basketball championship by defeating Sharon, 34-26. Fox went on to the U.S. Naval Academy where he died an untimely death in his sophomore year.
With this kind of history to its lore, it was predictable…probably expected, that Harry DeFrank would become a Steelton athlete…7th and 8th grade football; junior high football and a varsity halfback and fullback his junior and senior years. He also played three years as a small guard on the Steel High varsity basketball team. In his senior year, DeFrank set a Central Penn League scoring record with 32 points against Lancaster High School, a record that stood until Dick Reich broke it in 1950 with a 38-point outing.
After a two-year military tour (1944-46), in the U.S. Navy with a B-24 bombing squadron in North Africa and England, DeFrank returned to Steelton and, naturally, took up sports again. He played minor professional basketball with the Harrisburg Senators and the Hagerstown Cavaliers in the Eastern Basketball League before retiring at age 30 and confining his competitive juices to the local YMCA Industrial League.
It was in that role that, as we shall learn, more by accident than design, he started coaching Catholic Youth Organization basketball. It started him down a path that he traveled for a half a century. “I just like it,” he told the Harrisburg Patriot News in 1996 on the occasion of his 300th Trinity coaching victory. “It gets in your blood. It keeps you active. It makes you sharp, although I don’t know how sharp I am. But that’s the reason I do it.” A decade after that interview, Harry DeFrank was still at it.
Copyright (c) 2008 VPC, L.L.C.