The man they called ‘Spider’
I can remember one sound that seemed to permeate all others when I was a child growing up in Uniontown. It could be heard across the entire East End, and it came from the man they called, “Spider.” “Take him, Take him, Take him,” he extolled the young basketball players up there on East End Playground. It was Wilfred “Spider” Minor’s urgent plea to dozens of offensive-minded athletes to stop any assaults on their own basket. He was their mentor and coach. Their guru!
Every summer, there he’d be – teaching and encouraging those spirited young gladiators to reach higher than they ever thought they could. And many of them did reach higher. You know the story. All-Americans and All-Staters dotted the entire East End of town, and just about all of them had been under the enthusiastic wing of one Spider Minor.
By then, Spider Minor was already approaching middle age. He walked slow, and I always wondered what he really knew about defense. I knew his namesake, the young Wilfred “Hawk” Minor (his nephew) possessed enormous offensive and defensive talent while leading my Uniontown Red Raiders to WPIAL Championships in both basketball and football in our senior year. But I had no idea that he was merely following in the footsteps of his boisterous uncle.
It took me years to figure out just how dominant Spider Minor had been when he suited up for both basketball and football in the late 1940s. I came face-to-face with his exploits while researching old newspaper articles at the Uniontown Public Library. They wrote poetry about him! Not in books, but in game accounts in the Morning Herald.
Then, too, I would later listen to those guys whom I thought were the greatest athletes to ever come out of Western Pennsylvania, and they would tell me it was really Spider Minor who could never been overlooked in that regard.
My, how I must have missed something special having not been born yet.
I do know that I’d really faced the wrath of Spider Minor, while he’d been on the door at the Vets up on Main Street. I was 20. I wasn’t old enough to get into the Vets. Spider Minor knew that, and blocked my entrance. I ended up wasting a shower and a half bottle of cologne thanks to him. It took me the rest of the year to get over that night.
But as soon as I turned 21, he flung open the gate and graciously afforded my entrance. He spoke to me as an adult ever since.
I felt mighty honored the day, a few years ago, when he walked through my back yard, and stopped for nearly an hour to reminisce about his early exploits right there near my house. He seemed so happy pointing at the houses that were there, and how he’d visit the little stores and do what little kids did in those days when they really didn’t have much to do.
“We’d wait until they’d bake a fresh batch of bread. They’d put it outside to cook, and that was our cue,” he confessed to me. He was half proud, but mostly nostalgic, about those days. And I was too. Even though that bakery had been long gone for years, I could see so clearly right through his heart.
Then there was an unbelievable day, when I was out in front of my house, and I spotted an old, old newspaper that must have been there for years. I still don’t know how it got there, or why. I opened it to the sports page, and found one of those “poetic” accounts of a long Spider Minor run to the end zone. I was so happy to have found it, I walked to a neighbor’s house to show them what I’d found. But what occurred after that was even more amazing.
As I approached my neighbor’s front yard, there sat the man of whom they wrote that thrilling account – Spider Minor. I couldn’t wait to hand him that newspaper! I had found some way of saying, “Thank you!” A thank you for what he meant to all of us who cheered our champions, and for the champions themselves.
Spider Minor died on Thursday after a long illness. He joins a growing list of East End legends who’ve recently died (his nephew Ozzie Minor, Nancy Jenkins and George Petro among them). But because of him, the East End is still alive – if only for his voice that still echoes in our memory … “Take him, take him, take him”!
Edward A. Owens of Uniontown is Webmaster of “Red Raider Nation: Where Champions Live.” E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net