Jan 8, 2005 By Glenn Tunney For The 7 min read

Gus Cardarelli heard those words in the summer of 1945. After his stellar playing career as a defensive lineman at Kansas State, Gus had been teaching and coaching football at Redstone Township High School for seven years when the Steelers’ offer came from out of the blue. “They wanted me to play defense,” the 92-year-old Republic resident told me recently, “so I went in to talk to their front office people. Art Rooney said to me, ‘I’m offering you a contract for $175 for every game we play.'”

Gus opened a folder, pulled out his 1945 Steelers contract and handed it to me. I studied the signatures at the bottom of the single-page document. It was signed by Augustus Cardarelli and Arthur J. Rooney on August 21, 1945.

“I see you signed the contract,” I said to Gus, “but as it turned out, you never played for the Steelers. Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t,” he replied. “I realized after I signed that there would be problems getting back and forth to Hershey (the location of the Steelers’ training camp) and I knew I had a steady job at Redstone Township High School. So I decided not to play for the Steelers.”

Pointing to his own signature on the contract, Gus chuckled, “I started to sign it in the wrong place, so Mr. Rooney had to sign a bit higher than he should have.”

The agreement, printed on a single sheet of yellow paper, is entitled “Uniform Player’s Contract.” The name of the team and the name of the player are typed in the blanks provided. Typed in the blank for salary is “$175.00” for each regularly scheduled league game played. I scanned the uncomplicated terms of the contract. Its language made it clear that in those days, NFL team owners could do just about anything they wanted with their players.

Times have certainly changed in the world of professional football since Gus Cardarelli flirted with joining the Steelers 60 years ago. I wonder if an agent for a modern NFL player would agree to contract language that reads, “The player accepts as part of this contract such reasonable regulations as the Club may announce from time to time,” or “the Club may renew this contract for the [following] year, except that the salary rate shall be such as the parties may then agree upon, or in default of agreement, such as the Club may fix.”

The relative assurance of a job at Redstone Township High School versus the tenuous promise of a position on the Pittsburgh Steelers convinced Gus that in the best interests of his family, his future lay not at Forbes Field but much closer to home. Gus continued teaching science (for his first six years) and health at Redstone Township High School and Brownsville Area High School for a total of 36 years until he retired in 1975. During those years, Gus’ unique classroom style left an impression on thousands of students.

In 1967, the school districts of Redstone Township and Brownsville, longtime rivals on the athletic field, merged into a single school district. Gus found himself teaching health in the newly-constructed Brownsville Area High School near Hiller. A rivalry still simmered among students from the two former high schools, even though they were now members of a single student body. Gus recalls the day a female student in one of his classes remarked that Redstone teachers were not as tough as Brownsville teachers.

That was the wrong comment made to the wrong man.

“I’ll show you how tough I am,” Gus declared to the young lady, who was sitting at a front desk. Reaching to pick up a baseball bat that was in the room, Gus flexed his left bicep and broke the bat over his arm.

“Oh, my God!” the astonished student shrieked.

“You broke a baseball bat over your own arm?” I said incredulously to Gus, interrupting his story.

“Yes,” he replied matter-of-factly.

“I have done that a few times. It started when I was in sixth grade. They paddled my sister and I got mad. They used slats as paddles in those days, so I went ‘bing’ on my bicep and broke those slats so they couldn’t paddle my sister any more.

Gus continued, “As time passed, I started breaking broom handles over my bicep, hundreds of them over my lifetime. Then in the early 1950s, we had some sort of celebration in the gym at Redstone, and a kid brought a baseball bat. I broke it over my bicep in front of 300 fans.”

“Which part of the bat would break?” I asked him.

“The handle,” he said. To clarify, Gus stood up from the couch where we were talking, picked up a nearby cane, and in slow motion, obligingly demonstrated his handle-breaking technique for me.

I shook my head in amazement.

Gus was a tough guy in his heyday, and he worked hard to maintain that reputation among his students. There were years at Brownsville Area High School when he had 70 students in a classroom.

“I could handle that many,” he assured me. But Gus was not above using a little razzle-dazzle to keep his students guessing about what he would say or do next.

“When I was teaching health at Brownsville Area High School,” Gus said, “the principal was Alex Barantovich, an old friend of mine. One day, I told the class that I was so tough, I could command the classroom door to open. I knew that Barantovich and another fellow named John Marcolini were standing in the hall outside my classroom.

“What the class didn’t know was that I had tied a string to the door, and I had instructed Marcolini, ‘When I say ‘Open, door’ a third time, you pull that string.'”

Gus declared to the class “I’m so tough,” then turned toward the door and intoned, “Open, door.”

Nothing happened.

“Open, door!”

Another pause. Still nothing.

“OPEN, DOOR!!”

The classroom door swung open obediently. There was no one there.

Pandemonium erupted in the classroom as Gus grinned broadly. And of course, from the front row came the predictable “Oh, my God!”

When Gus wasn’t bedazzling his students or educating them about social diseases and the hazards of a careless lifestyle, he was running Gus’s Sporting Goods, a family business that he started in Republic in 1948.

“I was a top dealer for Nike,” boasted Gus, “before Nike was as successful as it is now.” One newspaper reported that “in 1981, the tiny store sold over 16,000 pairs of Nike athletic shoes, more than any single establishment in the U.S.”

As Gus and I were wrapping up our conversation and I was gathering my notepad and tape recorder, I asked him when he finally gave up the sporting goods business.

“I still dabble in it a bit,” he laughed as we stood up from his couch.

Then his face took on a more serious expression.

He looked down at my feet and studied my shoes with a professional eye.

“I have a nice Converse,” he said to me, as he has probably said to thousands of people over the past half century. “I don’t know if it would fit you or not. What size are you?”

That’s Gus Cardarelli – at 92, still the sporting goods entrepreneur.

This former dynamo of a football player, near-Steeler and educator of thousands of local boys and girls is still a friend to many folks whom he has charmed over the years with hundreds of tales and his great sense of humor.

Gus and his late wife, Jean O’Brien Cardarelli, who passed away in 1978, raised two sons and three daughters in the Redstone Street house where Gus still lives today. He spends time most days at the senior citizens center in Republic, and when he is at home, his loyal dog, Shawnee, is always at his side.

At the drop of a hat Gus will tell a story, often sprinkled with Italian phrases that remind his listener of this first-generation American’s colorful background.

Thanks, Augustus Caesar Cardarelli, for allowing me to share some of those stories. Ciao!

      

Glenn Tunney may be contacted at 724-785-3201 or 6068 National Pike East, Grindstone, PA 15442. Comments about these weekly articles may be sent to editor Mark O’Keefe, 8-18 E. Church St., Uniontown, PA or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com . All past articles are on the Web at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~glenntunneycolumn/