Before Joe Paterno and such players as Jack Ham and John Cappelletti became synonymous with Penn State football, there was coach Bob Higgins and such players as Red Moore and Steve Suhey.
Moore and Suhey were part of a glorious era of Penn State football in the decade before Paterno’s arrival in 1950. What they accomplished in the 1940s may be more meaningful and momentous to the university than the two national championships and 409 victories that made Paterno the winningest coach in major college football.
This was all brought back into focus in the last few days when we learned of the passing of Moore, one of the most significant, yet virtually unknown, players in Penn State history. Formally, he was William R. Moore Jr. — but everyone called him Red, and he was a co-captain of the 1946 team.
That was the team that voted unanimously not to play a game at the University of Miami (Fla.) because segregated Miami would not allow Penn State’s two African-American players — wingback Wally Triplett and end Denny Hoggard — to participate. The next season Moore was playing in the NFL, but with Suhey and nearly all the other players back from the 1946 team, Penn State broke the color-line at the 1948 Cotton Bowl game on New Year’s Day when Triplett and Hoggard helped Nittany Lions play to a 13-13 tie with SMU.
In recent years, more and more Penn Staters have become aware of what those 1946 and 1947 teams did to advance the civil rights of African Americans in sports.
Triplett, Penn State’s first black varsity player in 1945, has made it virtually a one-man crusade to let the world know all about it. Still, what those teams accomplished cannot be repeated too often, especially during this sullen period of moral crisis when the Penn State name is being smeared and unfairly tarnished by the alleged despicable acts of one man and the possible action or inaction by a few more.
Moore died on Dec. 14, 2011 — his 89th birthday — and one has to appreciate all the irony of the circumstances. He had been living the last seven years in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., just a few miles from the University of Miami campus. His death came at a time when his successors on the 2011 Penn State football team were preparing for another visit to Dallas and the Cotton Bowl Stadium. Then there’s the fact that Suhey, who was Moore’s best friend, also died on his birthday, Jan. 14, 1977. It’s also ironic that about three weeks before Moore’s death, Suhey’s widow, Ginger, passed away at her home in State College.
Of course, it’s fairly well known among Penn State football aficionados that Ginger was the oldest daughter of Higgins and the mother of three sons and two grandsons who played for Paterno — including Joey, a fullback on the team that will play against Houston in Cotton Bowl Stadium on Jan. 2. It’s also common knowledge that Paterno once lived for a time with the Suheys in their small State College apartment when he moved to Penn State. With just a handful of players or widows of players from those 1946 and 1947 teams still alive, the last direct ties to one of the university’s proudest achievements is slowly fading away.
Like Triplett, some of the players on those teams were just a year or two out of high school. But most of them were older, more mature veterans of World War II. Both Moore and Suhey saw combat in the Pacific, Moore in the Navy on a destroyer and Suhey as a gunner in the Army Air Corps. John Potsklan, co-captain of the 1947 team, survived heavy fighting in Europe and a German prisoner of war camp.
Integrating the Cotton Bowl with one of Penn State’s greatest undefeated teams in 1947 may have had more national significance, but what the 1946 team did by refusing to play Miami at the tail end of the 1946 season was more momentous in the history of the university. College and professional football were virtually a “lilly-white” game back then. Very few teams had black players and there were times during the 1930s and 1940s when integrated college teams primarily in the North and Midwest did play against segregated teams without their black teammates.
The Miami game had been added to Penn State’s 1946 schedule over the summer, but the fact that Miami was segregated did not attract any attention until the Daily Collegian broke the story in mid-season. Higgins and the players called a team meeting to discuss the issue. A small group of players wanted to play the game without Triplett and Hoggard. But they were relatively silent when Moore, Suhey, Potsklan and a half-dozen others quickly took over the meeting and called for a unanimous vote.
“The guys spoke up and you could have knocked me over when they said what they did,” Triplett remembered year later.
When I interviewed Moore in Florida five years ago, he told me, “there was just no question” about playing without Triplett and Hoggard. “They were part of the team. There was no way the team or the school was going to OK anything where the [black players] wouldn’t be involved.”
Moore admitted there were some racists on the team, but that was not unusual given that racism had been part of the nation’s culture for more than 100 years. Like a lot of players, Moore had played with and against African-Americans in high school, so having black teammates came natural to them in college.
And it was in high school in the late 1930s in the western Pennsylvania towns of Rochester and Midland that Moore initially became a historic Penn State civil rights figure — even though he didn’t know it at the time.
Moore was a lineman for Rochester and one of its main opponents was Midland, which featured an African-American triple-threat tailback named Dave Alston. Since football began at Penn State in 1887 there had never been a black player on the team. In 1941, Alston and his older brother Harry were specifically recruited by Higgins to be Penn State’s first black players. Freshmen were ineligible then, and the Alston brothers wound up on the freshman team with Moore, Suhey, of Cazenovia, N.Y., and Potsklan, of Brownsville, Pa.
With Alston as the star back, brother Harry and Potsklan at ends, and Moore and Suhey at guards, the freshman team went undefeated for the first time in 25 years with a 5-0 record. The frosh outscored their opponents 133-26, with Dave Alston running for eight touchdowns and passing for four, while also drop-kicking six extra points.
“If there was any racism on the team, I didn’t notice it,” Moore said. “I got to know Dave while I was in high school. I played football and baseball against him. Dave and his brother were accepted [on campus] just like anybody else, and Dave was always friendly. I didn’t hear any undertow about their color or anything thing like that.”
Dave Alston’s freshman performance attracted national attention and at least two major magazines predicted great things for him on the Penn State varsity. Unfortunately, Dave died unexpectedly in early August of 1942 from complications following a routine tonsillectomy operation. Brother Harry never returned to school. As might be expected, World War II threw college football into a turmoil, and it wasn’t until the war was nearly over that Triplett became the school’s first African-American on the varsity when freshmen were eligible in 1945.
Moore did play on the 1942 and 1943 teams while training on campus for active naval duty. But he missed the next two seasons before returning to school for the 1946 season. He was selected as an All-East tackle and then was drafted in the 12th round by the Pittsburgh Steelers, the 118th player out of 300 taken that year. Before joining the Steelers he played in the prestigious, but now-defunct, College All-Star Game in Chicago that matched a team of college all-stars against the previous year’s NFL champions. Moore’s all-stars, coached by Notre Dame’s legendary Frank Leahy, beat the Bears, 16-0, before 105,840 — which until 1994 was the largest crowd ever to see an NFL game. In his first year with the Steelers, Moore made All-Pro and was the team captain in 1949, when he played guard alongside Suhey.
However, pro football wasn’t as lucrative as it is today and Moore and Suhey left it in 1950 to work full time. Moore had a couple of different jobs, including one with Suhey as a salesman for Balfours, before becoming the head football coach and director of physical education at Allegheny College in Meadville in 1954. He joined Cornell as an assistant coach four years later but returned to Meadville in 1964 and spent the rest of his working days in athletic merchandise sales.
You won’t find Red Moore’s picture anywhere in Penn State’s Lasch football building, the All-Sports Museum or the annual media guide. His name is lost in the long list of all-time lettermen on a Lasch wall and at the back of Penn State’s media guide. That’s too bad. He was one of Penn State’s finest — the acknowledged leader of a team that once made a bold statement for civil rights.
