Chapter One
Newcomerstown
Woody Hayes was entirely a small-town man. None of the national championships, the bowl games,
fame, glory, and power that came from lording over college football would ever shake Hayes’s firm
believe that all that was right in the world came from rural America, where love of country, hard
work, and loyalty made America great.
It was this philosophy that would send Hayes to speak at nearly every Elks club, Masonic lodge, and
Moose hall that asked, giving him the chance to lecture his audience on the virtues of small-town
life. In return Hayes would be honored with a key to the city, a chicken dinner, and a modest
speaking fee. The fee invariably would never see the inside of his pocket. Instead, he often would
donate the money back to the club, or sign the check over to the local high school football team
that was invariably in need of new equipment. Even when the speaking fees increased well into five
figures, he would quietly sign the money over to a hospital or a charity. Sometimes he simply
tucked the check into his jacket, where it would be forgotten until the garment was sent to the dry
cleaners.
“I speak at a lot of banquets in small towns, because small towns have so many great people,”
Hayes said during those boilerplate speeches. “All the presidents came from small towns. The
largest town that a president came from was in that state up north,” he said, referring to former
president Gerald Ford, who hailed from Grand Rapids, Michigan. The standing joke would always
bring a chuckle. So deep was his disdain for rival Michigan, that even during these friendly talks
Hayes, who counted Ford as a friend, would refuse to mention the state of Michigan by name.
Hayes’s own tenets were forged in rural Ohio, first in Clifton, a tiny mill town along the banks of the
Miami River some seventy-five miles southwest of Columbus. It was there that he was born on
Valentine’s Day in 1913, the third and youngest child of Wayne Benton and Effie Jane Hupp Hayes.
Woody was eight years younger than his sister Mary and two years younger than his brother Ike.
Unlike his more independent older brother, young Woody was doted upon by both his sister and
mother and stayed close to the women in the house.
“As the youngest, I don’t think there was any doubt I was spoiled,” Hayes said.
In 1915 Wayne Hayes moved his family to nearby Selma, where he took a job as school
superintendent, another step in his career as an educator.
Wayne was the visionary of the family, an intense man who, with his eleven brothers and sisters,
was expected to work the family homestead in Noble County, Ohio. The family had deep Ohio roots.
Woody’s great grandfather David Hayes was a blacksmith and joined the Union army during the
Civil War. He was killed during the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, leaving Wayne’s father
Isaac an orphan at eight years old.
Wayne was bright, ambitious, and resourceful, and the family farm wasn’t enough to hold him. Most
nights after chores and dinner, Wayne’s mother would sit him down and school her son in reading
and arithmetic, building the foundation for his future for a life off the farm.
Wayne saw teaching as a way to better himself. During the early 1900s Ohio was still primarily a
rural state, with small, unincorporated towns and hamlets dotting the countryside. High schools in
these areas were either distant or absent altogether, so kids who completed the eighth grade could
take the Boxwell Examination, that, if successfully completed, could serve as a substitute to a high
school diploma. Wayne passed the test, posting a score high enough to qualify him to teach the
eighth grade-beginning his long, slow march toward becoming a college graduate and a school
superintendent. The Hayes family was serious about education.
Achieving high school equivalency by passing the Boxwell Examination was one thing, but attending
college was for the wealthy and privileged, not for farm families from Noble County, Ohio. Though
married and the father of three young children, Wayne was undeterred by family and financial
hurdles that lay before his educational goals. He attended six different colleges at night and during
the summers, before eventually earning a degree from Wittenberg College in 1920. Woody was
seven years old when he saw his father graduate from college. Wayne Hayes was thirty-eight. The
memory would stay with Woody forever; his father’s perseverance serving to motivate and inspire
when things turned dark, as they often did, given Woody’s high-octane, combustible personality.
The degree brought new opportunities and prosperity to the Hayes household, and in 1920 the
family moved northeast to Newcomerstown, Ohio, population 4,500, where Wayne accepted a job
as superintendent of schools. It was a sizable step up, compared to the tiny towns like Clifton and
Selma where the family previously lived. Wayne earned twenty-eight dollars a month when he first
began teaching in the early 1900s. By 1920 he had saved enough money to buy a modest white
frame house at 488 East Canal Street, just east of downtown and near a stretch of water that used
to be part of the historic Ohio Canal. After spending years working his way across Ohio, Hayes
would never move his family again.
Woody was seven years old when his father settled his family in this quintessential 1920s small
town, nestled in a valley along the Tuscarawas River. Hardworking folks lived in the village bisected
by the Ohio Canal; outside the town limits farmland checkered the hilly countryside.
It was in essence a company town, with the Clows Pipe Works and the Heller Tool Company serving
as the two main employers. The heavy industry, combined with the county’s rural population,
provided enough economic stimulus to make the town a bustling place. The country’s interstate
system was still a long way off from crossing through Ohio. Instead, highway 29 funneled traffic
through the heart of the downtown, helping pump commerce into the heart of Main Street. But
travel was still difficult, and people who lived in Newcomerstown stayed put. There was a feed
store, grocery, clothing store, hardware store, tannery, and even a cigar factory-all located within
a few blocks of each other-where the locals spent their money, creating a self-sufficient place
where one could buy whatever was needed.
Farmers would come into town on Saturday mornings to shop, eat, and perhaps, on summer
afternoons, to linger to listen to a local band play uptown on Main Street. The locals would also hold
town picnics at Mulvane Park. A summer social highlight was the tricounty fair held in the centrally
located town, bringing together residents of Tuscarawas, Coshocton, and Old Washington counties,
hoping to have that year’s blue-ribbon-winning crops and cattle.
The local schoolchildren would swim in the river during the summer and ice skate on it during the
winter, and if they collected enough bread wrappers from the local bakery, they could go to the
movie house for free. Farmers and other rural folk would gather at the Grange Hall for meetings and
dinners. Sunday mornings were for church, and afterwards families either went to a church dinner
or to a neighbor’s house for meals, dressed in their Sunday best. These get-togethers were formal
affairs and provided a way of socializing after a long week of work, but they also helped establish a
social pecking order within the town, a town so small that everyone helped each other, but also
knew everyone else’s business. Whenever a child contracted scarlet fever, the doctor would
quarantine the family by placing a large red sign outside the house to serve as a loud warning of the
then deadly disease, but also to signal to neighbors to leave food on the front porch of the
unfortunate family.
There were dozens of towns in the Ohio Valley like Newcomerstown during the early 1900s, but the
small village on the river had already made a name for itself, thanks to the baseball heroics of
Denton “Cy” Young. Young grew up on a farm outside of town and moved back to his boyhood
home after his Hall of Fame baseball career ended in 1911. He managed the local semipro team,
sponsored by the Clows Pipp Works, in his retirement, and sometimes he would wear his old
Cleveland Indians uniform to remind himself and the locals of his days of fame. The old lefthander
would even break out his old Boston uniform on special occasions, like July 4th or Labor Day.
Young took a liking to Woody and hired the earnest youngster to do small jobs around the farm,
paying him a nickel to groom the local baseball diamond. Cy’s fame was not lost on the
impressionable Woody. Young would regale him and other locals in farmyard smokehouses with
stories of past stardom, of pitching duels against Walter Johnson, and of other glories that come
from winning 511 big league games.
“That man could make me feel grown up when he said `Woodrow,’ and that’s what he always called
me,” Hayes said. “Here’s a man who would sit in front of Denver Reed’s smokehouse and talk about
pitching, and he pitched for twenty-two years. But he was a humble man. He never made himself
look good. Never.”
It was a time when sports began to enter the collective consciousness of America, with stars like
Young, Johnson, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig elevated to hero status. Listening firsthand to Young
tell his stories instilled in Hayes an idealistic and virtuous notion of sports, one that would strongly
influence the impressionable young man.
But it wasn’t all ice-cream socials and Main Street bands. Newcomerstown could be a rough-and-tumble
place, especially compared to the more prosperous neighboring town of New Philadelphia,
the county seat located fifteen miles to the north. Life could get difficult in the seemingly idyllic
village. Hard work didn’t always pay off and faith wasn’t always rewarded, especially when children
got sick, or when jobs or farms were lost.
And while there may have been a vibrant Main Street, not everyone was welcome. There was a
contingent of black residents brought to town to help build the company-owned houses and to work
in the foundry that produced cast-iron sewer pipes that were used throughout most of Ohio. The
blacks lived on the south end of town, segregated from the whites. Come Saturday night the police
invariably would be called to the community house in “Clowstown” to break up knife fights and
other violence that sometimes erupted after a backbreaking week of work in the plant.
When Wayne Hayes arrived in the summer of 1920, he was greeted with a combination of
skepticism and hope that he could breathe new life into the town’s school system.
From the clapboard house on East Canal Street, a half mile from the main square, the Hayes family
settled into their new home-where it didn’t take long for the new superintendent to establish
himself as a man to be taken seriously.
He ran the school district with an iron fist, demanding that his teachers memorize textbooks while
doing the same himself. He was a shrewd administrator, hiring promising young teachers just out of
college, while weeding out those that weren’t adapting to the evolving educational system that was
moving the schools to a more modern curriculum. It wasn’t long into Wayne’s tenure that the
teachers began calling their boss “Pappy,” or “Pops,” as a nod to his dominating management style.
“When Pappy hired me, I was still a senior at Ohio University, but he needed me to replace another
teacher that was run out of town,” said Robert “Gene” Riffle, who Wayne had hired to teach
industrial arts. “I took the job, but I had to spend all summer building new desks for the students as
part of my duties. So, not only did Wayne get a new teacher but he got new desks as well.” Rules
were to be strictly followed to maintain order and fairness. Right was right and fair was fair, with
few exceptions allowed.
When neighbor Barbara Scott was to enter the first grade, her mother showed up on the Hayes’s
front porch with an appeal to allow her daughter to start school with her friends, even though her
birthday fell just days past the December cutoff.
“My mother took me with her to his house to talk to him personally, and he firmly said no,” Barbara
Scott said. “He said that was the rule, and that was it. He was a very strict and very formal man.”
Wayne was as strict and demanding at home as he was in the classroom. Self-educated and self-reliant,
he expected as much from his children as he did from himself, and he took a formal
approach toward his family, signing letters sent to his daughter Mary, away at school, “your father
W. B. Hayes.” He insisted that his children be a cut above the rest in their class, and he pushed
them to achieve so much so that Woody once said, “I believe there is nothing tougher than being
the school’s superintendent’s son.”
But the demands were countered with a strong sense of fairness and respect. Truant officers would
be dissuaded to visit the home of a family whose son or daughter was out of school. Wayne would
pay the visit instead, sparing the family the embarrassment and shame from nosy neighbors.
There wasn’t a lot of frivolity and waste in the Hayes household. Work and sacrifice were expected
to extend Wayne’s small-town-school salary. The family paid cash for most everything. If there was
an account balance at one of the local stores it was to be paid off promptly, with no debts to mark a
man of standing in the community.
Education was honored as much as hard work, and religious teaching and much of the learning took
place inside the house on Canal Street. Books filled shelves all over the house, and Wayne would
often read aloud to his family, reciting poetry and Latin, trying to instil in his children the
importance of academics and culture.
Wayne was reaching the pinnacle of his career and commanding a nearly reverent status. Running
the school system was considered a professorial life in rural Ohio, and he fit the part. He was a
popular speaker throughout the county, espousing his views with a flair for the language, yet
maintaining the respect of the community.
Wayne brought home the money, but it was his wife who expertly managed it. Effie was from a
large rural Ohio farm family, and with nine brothers and sisters she learned at an early age the
importance of marshaling a family’s resources to make ends meet.
When her husband announced to the family that he would not attend his college graduation because
of the ten-dollar cap-and-gown fee, Effie dipped into a secret stash she kept in a pitcher on the
kitchen sideboard and insisted that the whole family attend.
She was a proud, practical, and hardworking woman, but she also provided a sense of balance in
the household, a sorely needed quality, given the high level of intensity swirling about her husband.
While Wayne Hayes was well built and a good athlete, with fine features and a tough, no-nonsense
approach, Effie was a large woman who was a steadying influence on her children. She would insist
that her family spend Sunday afternoons at the dinner table that was set with linen, and that the
kids be dressed in their Sunday best. Around the table, the family talked about sports, world affairs,
and philosophies. They gossiped about the goings-on in town, and they talked politics, instilling in
Woody his rock-steady Republican beliefs.
It didn’t take long for the Hayes family to rise to the top of the local social circles, given Wayne’s
commitment to education, Effie’s involvement in various social activities, and their children’s
burgeoning academic and athletic abilities.
Talent ran in the family. Mary was a singer who left Ohio after high school to pursue a singing
career at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music and Dramatic Art. Sending her off to such a specialized
school was no small feat. Wayne would spend summers teaching at Bliss College in Columbus, and
would bring each of his children down to Columbus for a week to expose them to the city life, while
earning extra money to help send those same children to college. It was a major achievement and a
significant personal sacrifice to send Mary to music school, but the foundation was laid long ago; all
of the Hayes children would go to college.
The investment paid off. Mary went on to star on Broadway during the late 1920s, playing the
leading lady in The War Song. During the Depression she became the first female radio announcer
in New York City and went on to write a series of radio programs. Despite the eight years difference
in age, Woody was close to his sister and often went to her for advice, even later in his life, when
his coaching career was already well established.
Before self-publishing a coaching manual, Woody shipped a copy to his singer sister in New York
City, seeking her approval for what was nothing more than a bound set of offensive plays.
(Continues…)
St. Martin’s Press
Copyright © 2005
John Lombardo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-312-32518-5
Excerpted from A Fire to Win
by John Lombardo
Copyright © 2005 by John Lombardo.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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