The following column recounts some rich football history — as well as dreams for the future — at the old Roosevelt Field on Brighton Avenue, once the capital of high school football in Central New York. Columnist Sean Kirst is interested in your memories: If you recall the days when Roosevelt reigned as the region’s premier high school field, email Kirst at skirst@centralcurrent.org, and he’ll collect those thoughts in a followup piece.
Sixty-two years after making the best split-second football decision of his life, Tony Dottolo looked out last Thursday from inside his idling SUV as a fierce snow squall swallowed up the field where it happened — though the storm hardly diminished his memory of an intense high school huddle and a pivotal call Dottolo made for his teammates on third down.
At 79, those memories were sparked by his return after many years to Brighton Avenue’s Roosevelt Field, next to what’s now Brighton Middle School Academy — a structure built a century ago as the old Theodore Roosevelt Junior High. In 1963, Dottolo was a senior quarterback on a once-beaten Eastwood High team that went up against powerful Christian Brothers Academy, which was atop the old City League and rolling with a 12-game winning streak.
The game, incredibly tense, was scoreless with barely two minutes remaining. Dottolo had a chance to do what he had watched his football hero, quarterback Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts, do against the New York Giants for the National Football League championship in 1958: Dottolo was in charge of a desperate last-ditch drive, with a chance to upend a superb opponent.
“The place was packed,” said retired Syracuse Fire Department Lt. Tom Humberstone, a running back – and a craftsman well-known in the Finger Lakes for his handmade duck decoys – who had a critical catch and run that helped get the ball to the CBA 25. Old clippings put the crowd at beyond 3,000 on that November Friday, thousands assembled for an electric night of high school football only a few weeks before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the whole world seemed to change.
This weekend, teams from throughout New York played for state championships at the JMA Wireless Dome — including a CBA squad, now on a 41-game winning streak, that won its fourth state crown in five years by sweeping past Saratoga Springs, 41-12.
Yet until the mid-1960s, Roosevelt Field on the city’s South Side was the longtime pinnacle of high school football in Syracuse, decades before the advent of today’s high-profile state playoffs that for a few teams build into dream trips to the dome.
“This was it,” said Dottolo, holding a high school scrapbook his mother made for him and looking out Thursday as gusts of snow swept across the field. He said that except for occasional stops at Griffin Field in Liverpool or the old MacArthur Stadium, all high school football games in Syracuse during his era were played at Roosevelt — which meant his Eastwood Bears would travel across the city by bus to face such foes as Central Tech, Vocational, Nottingham, Valley, the old North High and CBA.
While the field remains, the bleachers – once filled for those weekend games – are long gone. A tattered scoreboard still stands beyond the western end zone, though Syracuse City School District facilities director Tom Ferrara said that scoreboard isn’t the original, but instead went up somewhere around 30 years ago.
One landmark does endure from the field’s citywide heyday, based on clippings at the Onondaga Historical Association: In 1956, amid civic debate about deteriorating conditions at Roosevelt, the school district ordered some prominent improvements. The bleachers were moved closer to the field to solve the longstanding problem of spectators crowding in and standing all too close to the teams.
The biggest addition was a heated press box with interior wooden paneling. That structure still stands. As part of that 1956 initiative, the district also announced it would sell $3 books of tickets for six games — a bargain over the price of 75 cents at the gate — and that it would patch the many holes in the fence put there by generations of students, sneaking in.
Good luck with that.
David Tuxill, now 83 and retired as a Syracuse teacher, grew up near Roosevelt, on Midland Avenue. Sharon Thibault Kawa, 77, a resident of Strathmore for 47 years, spent her childhood on West Pleasant Avenue, also on the South Side.
They both remember, vividly, when it seemed like every kid in the area zeroed in each week on making clandestine entry to games at Roosevelt — and they remember exactly how they would sneak in, even after the district tried sealing off those holes. Kawa distinctly recalls going through the fence along Lafayette Avenue, while her older brothers deftly climbed that chain link barrier, and dropped over.
“Believe me,” said Kawa, a retired educator: Her mother never knew.
Tuxill has another memory that stays with him, after 70 years: How the voice of Roosevelt Field public address announcer Sam Ciciarelli would echo through the South Side and carry on to Elmwood – including the nights when Sam’s voice conveyed particular excitement because his son, the late Paul Ciciarelli, was a football standout for CBA who later coached the team.
No historical marker exists to inform students or visitors of the staggering legacy of that field, or how it was the centerpiece of Central New York high school football for much of the 20th century. The CBA quarterback in that 1963 game, for instance, was Marty Domres, who died at 78 in October. He was eulogized nationally, both for a terrific career at Columbia and for eventually replacing the legendary Unitas — Dottolo’s hero — as quarterback for the Baltimore Colts.
Buddy Wleklinski, athletic director at CBA, said Roosevelt used to be the longtime football home of the Brothers, going back to when their campus was downtown and they played in the City League. Wleklinski has several photos that capture the energy of that era — including an image of a packed house for a city-county playoff game between CBA and Solvay — that even now cause him to pause whenever he happens to drive past that old field.
“I just try to envision it,” Wleklinski said of Roosevelt as the region’s showcase field.
Still, there’s a plan that would help the field regain that status as a focal point of its South Side neighborhood. Ferrara said the school district’s immediate stadium priority is to get a new one built downtown, just behind the Institute of Technology at Syracuse Central — a project that will hopefully happen next year.
There won’t be room at that site, however, for a new track. The district already has a schematic for another project, at some point down the road: Construction of a $14 million stadium at Roosevelt, alongside Brighton Academy, that would include a 6-lane track, bleachers that could seat 1,500, restoration of a stone depression-era building once used for restrooms and the addition of an all-weather field to provide a home for middle school football, lacrosse and soccer — as well as for community athletic groups, needing space.
The idea, Ferrara said, is using that stadium to help restore exactly what the old Roosevelt football field once embodied:
Community.
As for Dottolo, now living in Clay and retired after a long career at Bristol Myers Squibb, he felt a jolt of emotion at the instant last week when he again saw the old field. In high school, he was a 5-foot-7, 135-pound quarterback who also played shortstop in baseball and point guard in basketball. That 1963 season was the final football campaign for Eastwood, whose students would soon become part of the new Henninger High School.
Dottolo and Humberstone — “a tough kid with the heart of a lion,” as Dottolo described him — both became emotional in talking about that Eastwood team, particularly its resiliency and grit. They almost hesitated to name names, wishing they could mention every player on the roster, though they both spoke of the same teammate, with reverence:
David Dumas, a defensive lineman who — according to old clippings — teamed up with Vince Corbacio to make a giant, touchdown-saving tackle near the goal line in that 1963 showdown against CBA.
Not quite five years later, Dumas died in combat as a Marine, in Vietnam.
Their teammates, they said, also included Jerry Santini, who died last April — a tremendous player who went on to a record-breaking career as a running back at Penn. And Sam Gentile, one of several co-captains, including Dottolo. And Lou Sacco, another tough-as-leather running back.
They kept going – naming off teammate after teammate they recall, with deep appreciation – until it simply becomes impossible to name all of them here.
Those Bears were all part of a squad that ripped off four straight wins in 1963, after an opening day loss to Cortland. Still, against CBA? Few observers gave them much of a chance. That Brothers team was so talented, The Post-Standard reported, that an Eastwood victory would “go further than being called an upset.”
Eastwood coach Bill Jerry had incorporated elements of the Cleveland Browns game plan into the team playbook, Dottolo recalls. The Bears were also inspired by their former coach, Pat Testa, a mentor they loved so much that to them he had “a halo over his head,” Dottolo said — and they knew he was watching from the packed stands at Roosevelt as Eastwood began its last, make-it-or-break-it drive.
The score was 0-0 with 2:25 remaining, with the Bears facing third down at the CBA 25, when Dottolo — whose calm under pressure later contributed to a career in professional pocket billiards — called a play that he and Humberstone can both still describe, in detail.
“We saved it,” Dottolo said, “because it always worked.”
Dottolo went back to pass, then rolled right. Humberstone, a decoy, captured CBA’s attention. Wideout Ron Devoe “slipped out into the flat,” Dottolo said, and his quarterback saw him there, wide open. Devoe caught the ball, shook off one would-be tackler and ran into the end zone while Eastwood fans went absolutely berserk.
The drama wasn’t over. Domres, a great quarterback, still had two minutes and the ball. He swiftly completed a 46-yard pass that looked like a potential touchdown — until Eastwood defensive back Ed Jarmac managed to catch up with the sprinting wideout, for the tackle.
Final score: Eastwood 6, CBA 0. Dave Hardwich — now a retired criminal investigator in Virginia — was an Eastwood graduate who attended the game. He said the entire neighborhood erupted afterwards in a celebration he’ll never forget, with cars driving up and down James Street, blaring their horns.
“It was like they’d just won the World Series,” Hardwich said.
A week later, Eastwood ended its regular season with a 40-0 victory at Roosevelt over Vocational — Jarmac scored touchdowns on a kickoff return and a fumble recovery — giving the Bears a memorable 6-1 City League record in their final season of high school football. No one quite realized what a pivot it would also be for Roosevelt Field, whose central place in Syracuse high school lore was abruptly nearing its end.
Within a few years, Henninger and Corcoran — two new city high schools — would have their own fields. Central Tech continued to use Roosevelt into the 1970s, when the school closed its doors and Fowler, with its own field, opened on South Geddes Street.
In the 1990s, the old Kirk Park Colts Pop Warner program was reborn and played at first at Roosevelt. Mark Hall, a founder of these new Colts, never forgot how he’d go there as a child to watch his brothers, Rod and Larry, play for Central — along with such childhood heroes as Bryan Preaster and Ken Kinsey, whose Roosevelt memories include breaking his leg while carrying the ball, then recovering so thoroughly that he went on to play running back for Syracuse University.
Rod Hall eventually moved west, where he works for the University of Washington. Central was winless in his final season, he said by phone, though he remembers he had a couple of interceptions as a defensive back — and that his coach gave him a chance in the offensive backfield for his final game.
For a teenager, those were vivid and lasting memories. All these years later, it’s not so often that Rod returns to Syracuse. But on his last visit home, he made a point of driving to that now-lonesome spot along Brighton Avenue where he played some high school football. As he parked by that old press box and scoreboard, he felt the same pull that also swept over Tony Dottolo:
One more time, amid the ghosts, Rod walked the length of Roosevelt Field.
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