Move to Uniontown was huge for Terry Brady
After his freshman season at Frazier High School, Terry Brady and his family made what turned out to be one of the best decisions for Brady’s football career. “I transferred into Uniontown from Frazier after my freshman year,” Brady stated. “At Frazier we scrimmaged half lines because we didn’t have enough players to scrimmage a whole line. When I came to Uniontown, I walked on the field the first day of practice and in the stadium there must have been 200 kids out for football. It was truly a shock.”
The decision to transfer to Uniontown was a calculated move on the part of the Brady family.
“My Father, Richard, played football for Bill Power,” Brady offered. “He thought the world of Coach Power. I had played for Frazier in seventh, eighth and ninth grades and Coach Power had seen me at Frazier. He told my Dad that he thought if I got to Uniontown in a bigger school I would have a better chance of getting a scholarship, so we moved from Perry Township to Franklin Township.”
At Uniontown he joined a program that had gone undefeated and captured a WPIAL title in 1962 and was primed for a big season in 1963.
“I hit it off right away,” Brady reported. “I had no problems transferring in. I had a great relationship with guys on the 1964 team – guys like Carl “Putsy” Carbonara and Gary Brain.”
He played mostly on the jayvee squad in 1963 with talented players like Ray Parson, Wilfred Minor, Ray Gillian and Phil Vassar. The little Raiders posted an 8-1 record in jayvee play. The lone blemish was a 20-19 loss to Canon-McMillan.
The Uniontown Red Raiders’ run to the WPIAL football title in 1965 was fueled by the disappointment of the 1964 season.
The Raiders were 8-0-1 in 1964. The lone blemish was a 6-6 tie with Johnstown.
“I started that game and it was a super mud bath,” Brady recalled. “The mud was deep and the tie killed us, but it cemented us together as a team and as brothers. It made the team. We knew after that tie that we couldn’t win anything, but we were all determined that they were going to know that we were there.”
Brady started at defensive tackle for the 1964 squad and then played offensive and defensive tackle for the Red Raiders in 1965.
“Line coach Joe Yourchik had the most influence of all the coaches on my career,” Brady stated. “He was a gentleman and he was a hard coach, but I would have walked into Hades and grabbed the devil for him. There is no man that I respected more than Joe Yourchik. He was an excellent line coach.”
Brady was a stalwart on the Red Raiders’ offensive and defensive lines in 1965.
“It really didn’t matter which side of the ball I was on,” Brady explained. “I just liked to play the game. I guess everybody likes to play defense and tackle the quarterback, but I really enjoyed the game.
“I didn’t think a thing about going both ways. I knew I was in excellent shape. I came from a farm, and we got up at six o’clock in the morning and did our farm work, and then at 12 o’clock we would go swimming. We would swim until six o’clock at night and then come home, eat dinner and go to bed. I was in pretty good shape. I had no problems.”
Brady played at 5-foot-10 and 195 pounds. The rest of the line wasn’t that big by today’s standards.
“No, we weren’t really big, but if you look at that team and see the film, you will see that it was a team that was extremely quick. As a tackle I was a pulling tackle. We were all quick on our feet, and we were all agile,” Brady said.
Uniontown’s mighty 1965 WPIAL AA champions earned the highest numerical index ever in Dr. Roger B. Saylor’s Pennsylvania scholastic football ratings. Some of Uniontown’s numbers from the 1965 season are phenomenal.
The Red Raider defense had four shutouts and gave up seven points only once (13) to Redstone. Uniontown’s offense rolled up 252 total points in 10 games, and the defense surrendered 47 points.
“A couple of the games I asked coach Yourchik if I could stay in and play with my brother, Allan, who was running with the second team,” Brady stated. “You don’t get to play with your brother on a team like that too much. That was special, but we took everybody out against Redstone, so that is why the 13 points against Redstone. We pretty much gave them the points.”
During the 1965 regular season, Uniontown trailed a tough Washington team 7-0 at the half, but came back to prevail over the Little Prexies, 13-7.
At Mt. Lebanon, the Blue Devils drove to the Red Raider five to open the game. The home team lost the ball, and the rest of the game it was all Uniontown, as the Red Raiders won, 20-0.
Penultimate opponent Brownsville had eliminated Clairton from the AA race the previous week, but Phil Vassar scored three times as the Red Raiders rolled, 29-0.
In the season finale, Uniontown faced unbeaten Trinity before a standing-room-only crowd at W&J’s College Field in Washington. The Raiders were not to be denied as Wilfred Minor threw for 103 yards and intercepted a Hiller pass, as Uniontown won the showdown, 32-6.
“The Washington game was the toughest game during the regular season,” Brady said. “They were really good. They had a back named Ted Vactor that was tremendous.
“Anytime that we beat Mt. Lebanon was sweet as candy. I carry a scar on the bridge of my nose from a Mt. Lebanon game my junior year. Beating Mt. Lebanon was great, and the Trinity game was great. Some people at the time said Trinity was going to beat us, but it didn’t happen that way.”
Brady has fond memories of his teammates.
“No one had two ends like Ray Parson and John Hull,” Brady marveled. “It was amazing how that team got together. That is a once-in-a-century team. Everybody just clicked and came together. The worst thing you could do was let your teammate down.”
Brady also has a great deal of respect for former coach Leon Kaltenbach.
“Coach Kaltenbach was a very good coach,” Brady said. “He was a great organizer. He spent time with every group — the linebackers, the backs, every group. What impressed me was his organization, and he had a tremendous staff.”
In the 1965 Class AA Championship game at Pitt Stadium, the Red Raiders fell behind Butler and its Saul brothers, Rich and Ron, 7-0 in the first half. With the game tied at 7-7, Uniontown got the ball back on a punt at its own 13-yard line and started a decisive drive that covered 87 yards in just nine plays.
Halfback Ray Gillian scored the winning touchdown on a sweep to the right behind the blocking of fullback Phil Vassar and halfback Trip Radcliffe, cut back, and, with Vassar and Radcliffe taking down more would-be Butler tacklers, raced in for the winning touchdown.
“The halftime locker room, as I remember it, there was not a lot of screaming at us to do this or do that,” Brady recalled. “It was, you know, you have a job to do and there is only a few points difference and this is the time to do it. That’s what I got out of that halftime.”
Brady garnered First-Team All-Western Conference honors as a senior and sifted through some college offers when he graduated in 1965.
“I had several offers,” Brady remembered. “One was Nebraska. I knew my limitations and didn’t have the size to play at Nebraska. I always thought it would be better to be a big frog in a little pond than a little frog in a big pond.”
Brady chose Youngstown State.
“College ball was different and was more business,” Brady said. “I made the traveling squad and made varsity as a freshman, and then I got hurt. I suffered a broken neck, I tried to come back as a sophomore, but it gave out again. Coach Dwight “Dike” Beede called me in and said from this point on you stay off the football field and go to school.”
Brady, now 62 years old, graduated from Youngstown State in 1970 and returned to Fayette County. He worked for Sears Roebuck for 15 years. He bought Yum Yum doughnuts in Connellsville and ran that from 1984 until 1999. After that he settled down and got into politics and became the elected constable and Democratic committeeman. He owns 45 acres in Franklin Township.
He and his wife Frances have been married since 1972 and have no children.
“There is no better place to live than Fayette County,” Brady stated. “With all of our problems, I still feel Fayette County is the best place to live. We have some of the greatest people; I honestly have had a great life.”
George Von Benko’s “Memory Lane” columns appear in the Sunday editions of the Herald-Standard. He also hosts a sports talk show on WMBS-AM radio from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.