Memory Lane
Kaltenbach had some great Uniontown football teams The “Golden Age” of Uniontown High School football lasted from 1948 until 1969. During that period two coaches were at the helm of the Red Raiders – Bill Power and Leon Kaltenbach.
Bill Power was the architect of the Uniontown powerhouse. He became head coach at Uniontown in 1948 after a successful coaching stint at Point Marion.
Power developed the Red Raiders into a football power. During his 15 seasons as head coach at Uniontown he posted a record of 107-35-2. His teams captured the Fayette County Championship in 1949 and the WPIAL title in 1962, plus his teams also won the powerful Western Conference title in 1957, 1958 and 1962.
Kaltenbach was a 1953 graduate of Clairton High School, where he played football and baseball for the Bears.
“I played on some competitive teams at Clairton,” Kaltenbach recalled. “My senior year we were 8-2. I played fullback for Coach Neal Brown.”
When Kaltenbach graduated he decided to attend college at Clemson.
“I played on some pretty good teams at Clemson,” Kaltenbach said. “We had quite a pipeline from western Pennsylvania at that time; in fact, Bill Thomas from Perryopolis was my roommate at Clemson. I was captain of the team that lost to Colorado in the Orange Bowl, 26-21.
Kaltenbach was a three-year letter winner at Clemson. In 1955, the team was 7-3 and finished 3rd in the ACC, and in 1956 the Tigers (7-2-2, 4-0-1) won the conference title and were ranked 19th in the final Associated Press poll. Clemson lost to Colorado in the Orange Bowl in 1957. The Tigers were 7-3 and tied for 3rd in the ACC. They were ranked 18th by United Press International (UPI).
Clemson coach Frank Howard earned Kaltenbach’s respect.
“He was tough as nails,” Kaltenbach said. “He was a very, very tough coach. I think the coaching tips that I picked up were accumulated from high school to college, and I knew how to win.
Kaltenbach felt that Clemson was a great experience.
“It was an excellent experience. It took me five years to graduate, but it was great. It was a military school for a couple of years when I first went there, and then it became a regular coed school. But I enjoyed the college experience very much,” he said.
Coaching was the next step for Kaltenbach.
“I loved football,” Kaltenbach said. “I wanted to coach. I was preparing myself to coach and teach, and that’s what I did.”
After graduating from Clemson, Kaltenbach returned to western Pennsylvania and got into teaching and coaching football.
“I coached at a little Class A school around Bridgeville -South Fayette,” Kaltenbach said. “I was the line coach. We had a pretty good team. I left there and went to Uniontown.”
Kaltenbach became an assistant for Bill Power in 1959.
“There was no connection with Coach Power,” Kaltenbach said. “The job came open, I applied and he hired me.”
He served as line coach for the Red Raiders.
“Coach Power was a great coach,” Kaltenbach said. “I enjoyed those coaching years with him. He was a great coach. He was always well prepared, very thorough and no nonsense. He knew what he was doing, even though he never played football. He was a great student of the game – a phenomenal student, and he was always totally focused. He made great use of film. We spent a lot of hours watching film. He retired after winning the 1962 WPIAL title.”
Reflecting on the Uniontown success story, Kaltenbach marveled at some of the athletes that came out of that small town.
“It was a great mixture of athletes,” he said. “You had the country kids, the city kids and the African American kids. It was just a great mixture of talent that we were able to put together and motivate.”
Kaltenbach remembers the march to the 1962 title when he was an assistant.
“The win over Mt. Lebanon was big that year,” he said. “That was a great rivalry – a tremendous rivalry – and a lot of times they made it difficult for us to realize our dreams.”
When Power stepped down after the 1962 campaign, Kaltenbach was named head coach, and in his first three-years at the helm, he fashioned an unbelievable record.
His Red Raider record after three seasons was 25-1-2. The 1963 team lost only to undefeated Washington, 20-19, while the 1964 Raiders were unbeaten with only a 6-6 tie with Johnstown marring the season. Then the Raiders had one of the great teams in their history – the unbeaten 1965 squad.
“That’s a great start to a coaching career,” he said. “I think we were one of the first schools to really have a weightlifting program to build strength. We had a very good staff with Joe Yourchik and Tony Nunes. He was a good coach. We were building toward another championship.
“The tie with Johnstown in 1964 was tough. The conditions were horrendous. It was disappointing to travel all that way to play that kind of a game. It was very disappointing, but the kids came back and then we had a great season.”
Uniontown’s mighty 1965 WPIAL AA champions earned the highest numerical index ever in Dr. Roger B. Saylor’s Pennsylvania scholastic football ratings. The Red Raiders played and defeated many of the WPIAL’s strongest teams in the regular season, and then came from behind to conquer what may have been Butler’s best ever team by 14-7 in a great Class AA title game at Pitt Stadium.
“The 1965 championship game was a great game,” Kaltenbach said. “It was amazing … the talent that on the field for both teams. Our conditioning really paid off late in the game. I also think that we weren’t going to be denied that victory. I just knew that it was a matter of time. We wore them down, and with about two minutes left, we run that sweep with Ray Gillian and won the game. It was a phenomenal game; it was as good as any college game that you would want to see.”
Kaltenbach resigned as head coach at Uniontown after the 1969 season. His record in seven seasons with Red Raiders was 52-12-2 with one WPIAL Championship.
“It was tough for me to leave, very tough,” Kaltenbach lamented. “I don’t know. You just get to a point where you had that run like you had, and people expect you to win all the time. They kept looking for another championship. It gets to you after a while. You keep pushing and pushing.”
Kaltenbach coached high school football in Georgia and then coached college ball at Liberty University in Virginia.
In three high school seasons in Georgia he compiled a record of 10-19-1. He was offensive coordinator at Liberty, and in his last season there they posted an 8-2 record.
He entered private business for over 20 years. One of his ventures was the North Georgia Candle Company that had 15 stores throughout the southeast.
Kaltenbach, 72, is retired and living in Gainesville, Ga. He is divorced. He had six children by his previous marriages. Two of his children died young because of diabetes.
He has traveled the world and is involved in missionary work and working with young people in places like China, India and Russia.
He was saddened to hear that football has fallen on hard times in Fayette County and reflected on what made Uniontown football a powerhouse when he prowled the sidelines.
“When I coached at Uniontown – financially – it was a very poor area,” Kaltenbach said. “The coal mining industry was on the way out, and people were desperate. The kids saw athletics as a way to get out of that cycle, and we used that dream to get them to really be involved and to put everything into it to get out. That’s why there are so many kids that went on to college. If we had 15 seniors, 13 of them went to college. Pride had a lot to due with the success we had there – a lot of pride. There was great pride in being a Red Raider.”
Kaltenbach still has a soft spot for Uniontown.
“Oh, man the fondest memories that I have are from Uniontown, he stated. “So many times I’ve wanted to step in my car and drive up there and see what Uniontown is like and what’s happened to it.”
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.