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Of Jazz and Football: the Fame of Austin High

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Austin High Fight Song

(tune: On Wisconsin)

Go you Austin. Go you Austin.

Best school in the land.

We’re behind you, cheering for you.

Don’t you hear that band? Rah! Rah! Rah!

Go you Austin, go you Austin,

Fight on for her fame.

Fight fellows, fight, fight, fight,

We'll win this game.

Chant: Hit 'em high, hit 'em low,

Go you Austin, Go!

The transition from grade school to high school was exciting and terrifying. On the eve of my first day, I lay awake for hours filled with a mixed feeling of dread and anticipation. Soon I would leave behind tiny George W. Tilton Elementary School with its hordes of unruly K to 8 pre-teenagers. I would be passing from childhood to maturity—or something halfway on the way.

Austin High—I could hardly believe it. Legendary Austin High. Only two miles from Tilton and yet in another space-time continuum. With over four thousand students in 1952, Austin High School claimed for itself the title of the largest coeducational high school in the United States. During the Great Depression and World War II, enrollment had reached seven thousand.

My aunts and uncles, who ranged in age from ten years to forty years my senior, spoke of my impending Austin experience with enthusiasm as though I had simultaneously won a scholarship to Harvard and signed a contract to star in a Hollywood movie. None of them had attended Austin. My mother’s siblings were all products of Proviso High School in Maywood; my dad and his brother and sister had gone to Roosevelt on Chicago’s north side. Austin impressed them for two reasons: the so called Austin High Gang and the Tigers, Austin’s outstanding football team.

The Austin High School Gang

Music had been Austin’s strong suit for years. In 1928, march master John Philip Sousa, then 74 years old, had visited the campus and conducted both the co-ed and the girls’ orchestra. To this day, Austin High is known to every serious student of American jazz. In the 1920s, the “Austin High School Gang,” a group of white teenage boys from the west side rose to prominence among jazz musicians. In 1927 under the name "McKenzie and Condon's Chicagoans" the group recorded for Okeh Records. According to the website “Rare Vinyl Network”: “Chicago was to take the music of New Orleans and make it hot, turning up the temperature not only with Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven bands, but with others as well, including such artists as Eddie Condon and Jimmy McPartland, whose Austin High gang helped usher in a revival of the New Orleans school.” Jazz chronicler Agha Yasir adds: “Following the lead of legends such as Bix Beiderbecke, King Oliver, Earl Hines, and Jimmy Noone, Chicago's Austin High Gang . . . of young white players made jazz in the spirit of their idols. Members of the high school clan included drummers Gene Krupa …and a young clarinetist named Benny Goodman whose fame would surpass them all.” Although Goodman was never a regular member of the band, he did play with them occasionally during their amateur days. Krupa, who was not an Austin High alumnus, was the group’s drummer during their Okeh recording sessions. One historian of jazz details the original membership of the band as follows: “Among the first were a handful of high school students who got together in the autumn of 1922 in a manicured West Side neighborhood called Austin and therefore became known to jazz history as the Austin High Gang--though none of them was actually ever graduated from that school. They included 15 year-old Jimmy McPartland, already a veteran street fighter from the roughest part of the Near West Side, who thought he might like to play cornet; his guitarist brother, Richard; a shy, bespectacled violin student named Frank Teschemacher, who would soon shift his allegiance to jazz clarinet; and Bud Freeman, another product of a tough part of town and already interested in the saxophone. They would soon be joined by Dave Tough, a reticent bookish would-be drummer from the prosperous suburb of Oak Park.”

 “Go, You Tigers!”

Jazz aside, Austin was best known nationally for its football teams, coached from 1936 to 1965 by Bill Heiland, whose record was an amazing 195 wins, 57 losses, and 19 ties. During Coach Heiland’s tenure, the Tigers won 22 sectional titles, 9 public league championships, and 3 Prep Bowls (in which the public champions faced the best team of the Catholic league). In 1936, 37, 38, and 39, the Tigers played for the national high school football championship, winning the title outright in 1937 at Jackson, Tennessee. They tied in 1936 in Columbus, Mississippi and again in 1939 in Jackson. In 1937 its all-time star player, Bill DeCorrevant, amassed 209 points in a nine-game season! In a single game against McKinley High, he scored nine touchdowns and three points after. That same year, DeCorrevant led the Austin Tigers to a 26-0 victory over Catholic League powerhouse Leo in “the most celebrated high school football game in history… played before a record crowd estimated from 115,000 to 125,000 at Soldier Field. No other game--high school, college or professional--ever drew more.” In that celebrated game, DeCorrevont scored three touchdowns and passed for another. DeCorrevant was one of countless Austin players who went on to college fame and professional football careers.

A year before I entered Austin, the student body rioted when the Tigers were shut out of post-season competition by a coin toss. As a result of the commotion, the rules were changed. If two schools had an identical win/loss record, total points scored by and against each team were used to break ties.

What DeCorrevant was to my parents’ young adulthood, Abraham B. Woodson was to mine. During my freshman year 1952-53, Abe Woodson’s incredible broken field running brought home the Public League championship trophy. Against archrival Lane Tech, he ran for 135 of his team’s total 199 yards! Woodson would go on to become an All American at the University of Illinois and to play nine years with NFL teams. Mike Panitch, who quarterbacked the Tigers in the 1952 and 1953 Prep Bowls before going on to play at Michigan State, recalls that 11 Austin graduates once played in the NFL at one time. During my high school years, Austin alum Pete Pihos led the NFL in receiving from 1953 through 1955. Pihos earned first-team All-Pro or All-League honors six times and was named to six Pro Bowls and in 1987 to the NFL Hall of Fame.

Here is an excerpt from an interview of Woodson by Joe Goddard, which appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, October 24, 2004:

•  GROWING UP: I was going to run away at age 12 when my parents got divorced, but I made friends at Touhy Park, where we pitched pennies and shot dice to stay out of trouble. Miss Tannen, my grammar-school teacher, was a strict disciplinarian, which I needed.
• CHANGING SCHOOLS: I went to Crane for a year, but . . . I transferred to Austin because my brother [Hugh] had gone there. We were the only blacks among 4,000 students, along with Pudge Simmons. I had to have legal residence in the school district, so I stayed with the Simmonses and worked as a busboy at the Duet Restaurant at Lake and Central to be able to pay $60 rent.

THE TEAMS: Austin's great coach, Bill Heiland, taught me everything about football. We played in the Prep Bowl my senior year and lost 27- 14 to coach Terry Brennan and Mount Carmel. There weren't big crowds then, but we got to play in Soldier Field. I still have two tickets. My most memorable game was 7-0 over Lane Tech in rain, cold and strong wind. I scored the only touchdown.

Abe and his brother Hugh lived with the Simmons family at 414 N. Lockwood Avenue, which was in the Austin district, about 6 blocks from the campus. Podge Simmons was the first African American to attend Austin. Podge played for Coach Heiland on the 1937 championship team. Players from other high school teams used to follow the boys home to make sure that they actually lived in the district.

Podge recruited his housemate Hugh, and later Hugh’s brother Abe, after Abe’s short stay at Crane Tech.  During my freshman year, Abe was the only African American in the student body. He graduated before the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public schools. Woodson remembers his Austin years as free of racial tension. However, the University of Illinois, far to the south of Chicago geographically, socially, and politically, was another matter. In the Goddard interview, Abe states: “There were no racial situations at Austin, but Illinois was a different environment. Blacks had to go into town to get haircuts. An assistant coach told the black players, “In order for you boys to play first string, ‘You're going to have to be twice as good as the white boys.'” We got past all that, and the school gave me a great education.''

Many Austin students lived outside the school district and were allowed to transfer from their home districts via “permits.” About half the friends I made over my years at Austin held such “visas.” I lived outside the district—scant yards east of the dividing line between Marshall High (famous for its basketball teams) and Austin. My mother, not wanting me to attend the integrated Marshall, wrote an appeal to the powers that be, claiming the legal fiction that I would be living with her cousin in the Austin district.

During my freshman year, we lived at 4533 West Monroe Street in the second floor apartment of a two-flat owned by an elderly Italian couple, who occupied the first floor. Ours was a one-bath, two bedroom apartment with an enclosed porch, which became my sister’s bedroom. My brother and I shared a room, which was separated from my parents’ by the bathroom. I remember the apartment as comfortable and, after our many years in a cramped one bedroom apartment at 635 North Springfield, palatial! Austin was about a mile away. I would take the Madison Street “Green Hornet” streetcar west to Lotus Avenue, and then walk two blocks north to the school.

Austin was housed in two huge structures—the “old building,” three stories of dingy red brick, the top floor sagging under its own weight and age, and “the new building,” soot-coated yellow brick, four stories tall, and then about thirty years old. The two buildings were separated by a grassy campus less than a hundred yards wide, shaded by mature trees, with park benches in front of the West Building. The campus was crisscrossed by a web of sidewalks, one of which amazed me by remaining snow and ice free during the worst winter weather. Wandering about on my own, I discovered a tunnel connecting the musty, decrepit theater in the basement of the old building with the boiler room in the middle of the new building’s basement. Although my home room and most of my classes were in the old building during my freshman year, choir and various activities required that I cross from building to building, which I did whenever the weather was inclement via my secret passageway, the boiler room engineers paying no attention to me.

After my freshman year, I was transferred to a “division” or home room in the new building where all but one of my classes were held. It was a rite of passage. From my point of view, the new building had one serious flaw—the Rockwood Auditorium where all school assemblies and graduations were held. It was an attractive facility with expensive lighting, comfortable seating, a magnificent organ, an orchestra pit, a well trained stage crew nattily attired in their maroon crew jackets with their respective job titles embroidered in white letters (e.g. “stage manager,” “carpenter,” etc.), and velvet curtains to rival the best Chicago movie palaces. Unfortunately, despite a powerful public address system, the acoustics were terrible. It was a struggle to understand anything that was said from the podium microphone on the stage. On the other hand, the musty theater in the old building had excellent acoustics. Masque and Gavel, Austin’s drama club, in which I was active, regularly performed plays there.

On the pix page is an aerial photo of Austin High School viewed from the west. The front of the building and the main entrance (just right of the squat auditorium) are on Pine Street. Architecturally, the opposite end of the building (not seen in this photo) is more inviting with its small grass campus and outdoor brick staircases leading to two entrances. The auditorium sits at the corner of Pine and Fulton streets. At the entrance just to the right of the auditorium, the Austin seal, upon which students were forbidden by tradition to tread, is embedded in the floor. The administrative offices are in the middle of this wing.

In the pictures, we view the old building in all of its gothic, unsymmetrical ugliness. Or, should I say, in its fortresslike grandeur? Then we see the new building, the auditorium to the left, the R.O.T.C. classrooms and underground rifle range to the right. The open area in the center was originally an R.O.T.C. drill ground but its use was abandoned because the echoing sounds of marching feet and shouted commands disturbed teachers and students in the classrooms. According to my freshman math teacher, Catherine Doheny (pronounced “DOE-knee”), the R.O.T.C. Company originally had horses for the cadet officers to ride in parades, which would explain why they were still equipped with cavalry sabers during the 1950s. As I recall, a one-story high, long narrow lunchroom fills much of the space of the former drill ground.

The gymnasium, swimming pool, and locker rooms of the new building were on the first floor on the right side of the building, along West End Avenue. Out of view to the right of the old building was a faculty parking lot where outdoor pep rallies were held each fall during homecoming week.

Just after my graduation in 1956, a quarter of a million dollars was invested in improvements to the dilapidated old building. As whites fled the city and African Americans moved further and further into the Westside, the boundaries of the Austin district were constantly redrawn in an attempt to preserve a white enclave. Then a scant year after the old building was refurbished, it was demolished and a satellite campus was created two miles north in a more securely Caucasian neighborhood.  However, this maneuver won the segregationists only a short reprise. The neighborhood surrounding the school went black, then fell victim to neglect, atrophy, and decay. When I last visited in 1981, some of the surrounding blocks resembled 1945 Berlin. In many cases, only shells of homes and apartment buildings remained. Numerous structures had been left to disintegrate or had been destroyed by fire. The remaining Austin school building looked as disheveled and neglected as well—covered with grime, its first floor windows encased in graffiti decorated plywood sheathing.

I was unable to attend my fiftieth class reunion in 2006 but it is reported to me by some who did that the neighborhood and the new building are in better shape today although some of the apartment buildings are still abandoned and boarded up. In the words of one alumna, “The neighborhood looks almost exactly today as it did when I lived there—working class and fairly well maintained. Of course, the children playing on the street were white in our day. Today they are black.”

As I write, Austin is about to graduate its last class, a handful of students who attend classes on the building’s fourth floor. Already Austin Business and Entrepreneurship High School with about two hundred students has opened at the facility. Reporter Michelle S. Keller states: “Only seniors saunter through its near-empty halls now, a small class of 214 students. The final chapter is dominated by senior activities: spirit week, class pictures, a luncheon and Friday's prom -- Austin High School's last dance.”

The new program is part of “Renaissance 2010,” an aggressive plan to close failing schools and replace them with a mix of smaller schools. Eventually, two other new, but smaller high schools will share space in the yellow-brick building and, after a three-year phase out that ends next month with the last class of graduating seniors, the old Austin High School will cease to exist.

This is a sample from my new book, How I Found God and Love at Austin High, 1952 to 1956. The retail price is $20.00. For a postpaid, autographed, and inscribed copy send your check for $20.00 to