Win streak breathes life into dying Pennsylvania town

There was a time not so long ago when Andy Nixon's working-class hometown was a significant notch in the Rust Belt.

Smokestacks belched thick clouds of soot into the air, but this was a good thing. It meant there was plenty of work, a full loaf of bread on the table.

Nixon, who was the football academic adviser at UNLV when Harvey Hyde was coach - talk about your blue-collar jobs - hails from Clairton, Pa., 12 miles south of Pittsburgh in the Monongahela River Valley. The valley is lush and picturesque; when Big Steel was rolling, it was mostly grimy. Clairton was one of the grimy spots along the river.

When Andy Nixon graduated from Clairton High School in 1960, roughly 28,000 hard-working people - Italians and Germans and Irish and Slovaks and African-Americans, who came north for the jobs - called Clairton home.

Then the bottom dropped out of Big Steel.

Now only 6,796 hard-working people call Clairton home.

Now guys like Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen write songs about the lousy economies in places such as Clairton - places where they've taken all the coal from the ground; where the union people have all left town; where the windows on Main Street are whitewashed, the stores vacant.

When writer-director Michael Cimino was looking for a gritty, grimy place to serve as backdrop for "The Deer Hunter," he chose Clairton, Pa. It seemed perfect to him (and to the movie's star, Robert De Niro, who helped Cimino scout for locations). In the opening scene, a sign says "Welcome to Clairton, City of Prayer."

Only it was shot in Mingo Junction, Ohio.

By 1978, Clairton wasn't a bustling mill town anymore, the way it was in 1967 when the young men who lived there would set aside their lunch pails and their hunting rifles after they were through playing football to fight the Vietnam War.

Big Steel wasn't rolling anymore. If Clairton is the City of Prayer, most have gone unanswered.

"There's not a lot there," Andy Nixon says of Clairton today. "Downtown is still sort of there, but the buildings are all boarded up."

The coke works still is open, limping along, which means there still are jobs for the hard-working people of Clairton - which means the sons of the hard-working people of Clairton continue to play high school football on Friday night.

On Friday past, Clairton whipped Serra Catholic of McKeesport, Pa., 41-0. It was 41-0 in the second quarter before Clairton started taking knees and mercy rules were invoked, such as shortening the quarters to eight minutes in the second half.

This was Clairton's 55th consecutive victory.

The Bears of Clairton, Pa., have put together the nation's longest winning streak in high school football, and who says Clairton doesn't have a prayer?

They have given Bishop Gorman something to strive for.

They have made 69-year-old Andy Nixon proud.

Look at the picture. This is a man who studied psychology at Brigham Young and worked at UNLV for 10 years and retired from the Clark County School District after 15 years and now works nights and weekends at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, where they have symphonies and offer other culture.

Look at the picture again. The man is wearing a bear hat.

During the 1950s, Nixon says Clairton was the area's only high school that had a swimming pool. There were four movie theaters, a dozen or so new car dealerships. There was always a cloud of soot in the sky in those days. Big Steel was rolling. Guys had to work overtime to keep up with the demand.

Nixon's father drove a heavy truck for the street department. Sometimes during the winter he would work 72-hour shifts, loading steel slag onto his truck. The slag would be used to sand the snowy streets so the shift workers at the mills and the coke works could get to their jobs on time.

"The town operated like a well-oiled clock," Nixon said.

Then the bottom dropped out of Big Steel. And now the rusty springs from that well-oiled clock and 6,796 hard-working people are about all that's left in Clairton.

Until Friday night during football season.

Then there is running back Tyler Boyd and the Clairton High School Bears, winners of 55 straight and three consecutive Pennsylvania Class A state titles, who haven't lost a home game since 2005, who beat opponents so thoroughly that quarters have to be shortened from 12 minutes to eight.

Put that in your smokestack, Mingo Junction.

The Bears have united what remains of Clairton, put a little starch in those blue collars. The high school football team has given those who have moved away, such as Andy Nixon, a reason to suit up in orange and black on Friday nights when they huddle around their computers and wait for the latest scores from the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League.

Sometimes they even wear Bear hats when they wait for the scores.

People who have moved away from Mingo Junction, Ohio, don't wear mascot hats and huddle around computers waiting for high school football scores anymore.

Mingo Senior High School no longer exists. It closed in 1993 when the mill there starting laying guys off. The steelworks finally ceased operations in 2009 and recently was sold at auction to a company known for reducing old mills to rubble and scrap metal.

The smokestacks still reach into the sky in Mingo Junction. But the air no longer is filled with beautiful soot and clay.

The blast furnaces have gone silent.

There are no winning streaks to be forged.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.