Dan Rooney Read Online Free Page B

language. Though our family never spoke what is called “Pittsburghese,” there is a unique dialect that I and everyone else on the North Side understood. People would say yunz instead of y’all . In this dialect Pixburgh was dahntahn . Neighborhood parks were the most bee-you’-tee-full . When hungry, people asked for some snik-snaks . They drank pop, ate jumbo (baloney) sammiches , and in the summer they cooled down with flavored shaved ice from Gus the icy-ball man. We bundled things with gumbans (rubber bands). And when people stuck their noses in our business, we called them nebby .
    I can pick out a Pittsburgh or North Side accent anywhere I travel. In Florence, Italy, at a dinner one time, a young woman started talking and my ears pricked up immediately. She talked just like me! I knew right away she was from the North Side. Our peculiar dialect has good points and bad. On one hand it defines us and gives us a
sense of belonging and community, but I’ll be the first to admit our way of talking can sound coarse and a little strange to a refined ear. Sometimes people jump to the conclusion that we’re uneducated, but nuh-uhh, we’re a lot smarter than people think.
    My father and his seven brothers and two sisters lived in an apartment above grandfather’s “Dan Rooney’s Café and Saloon.” My grandfather owned the entire building, located just a block from Exposition Park, a field for football, baseball, and any other game or match you can imagine. My father grew up strong and tough and streetwise. A natural athlete, he loved to compete. Baseball, football, boxing, you name it, he played it. And he played to win.
    By the time he was eighteen he was out of the house and on his own. His intelligence and winning smile caught the attention of local politicians, like state senator James J. Coyne. Before he was twenty-one, Dad became chairman of the old Ward (actually Pittsburgh’s 22nd Ward, but all the old timers insisted on calling it the 1st Ward, its Allegheny City designation). Dad had the Irish gift of gab, but he wasn’t just a smooth talker—he genuinely loved people and they loved him. He liked nothing better than helping others and he learned to work the system to get the most for his friends and constituents. At the same time, he was a young man and actively participated in sports of all kinds, but in these early years boxing was his passion.
    Carnivals came to town twice a year with professional boxers, pugs who would challenge the local talent. A tough mill worker could make $3 for every round he could go with the pros. The carney boxers usually made short work of the yokels—except when they got to our neighborhood and took on the Rooney brothers. My father and his brothers beat the carneys so many times and made off with so much money, the promoters banned them from the boxing tent. In fact, Dad was such a skilled boxer that he attracted the attention of the U.S. Olympic Committee, which in 1920 invited him to represent the United States at the Antwerp Games. My grandmother, however,
was against the whole idea. Dad would have liked to go, but he was so busy with ward politics and other enterprises he declined the honor. The Olympic Committee then tapped Sammy Mosberg, a good New York fighter who Dad had just beaten in a big tournament a few weeks earlier. To everyone’s surprise, Mosberg came home with the gold medal. Just to show the home crowd who was best, Dad challenged Sammy to a rematch—and whipped him again. That was Dad. I still have the silver trophy he won for beating Mosberg at the 1920 Pittsburgh Athletic Association tournament, which he prized above all others. It’s not a very flashy trophy, but to him it kind of represented Olympic gold.
    Boxing, football, baseball—he loved them all. But he was more than an athlete. He was a skilled organizer and a great promoter. While still a teenager he started the Hope-Harveys, a