Rudy Andabaker: Part of Donora's legacy
Rudy Andabaker had a long, illustrious football career.
He starred for Donora High during some of their greatest seasons, made a name for himself on the Pitt football field, played guard two seasons for the Pittsburgh Steelers at 5-11, 196 pounds, then went back to the high school ranks as a head coach for Donora, where he engineered a great era for the school, and for Bethel Park.
Andabaker, nicknamed the “Silver Fox,” was Donora's football coach in the school's final years of existence before the merger with Monongahela to form the Ringgold School District, which began in the fall of 1970.
Andabaker related how he first came to work for the Donora School District.
“Coach [Jimmy] Russell and I were supposed to coach Belle Vernon,” he said, “but Donora said their [coaching] job was open, and they made me supervisor of physical education. It was a big raise; I couldn't turn it down because we had a family of four.”
The Donora football program was a picture of stability. From 1915 through its final football game, Donora High had just three head coaches (and from 1931-1969 they had only nine different men serve as coaches). The first head coach was John Anderson (1915-1935). Next came Jimmy Russell, a fixture through 1965 who moved on to Belle Vernon before retiring with a WPIAL record for coaching football for 38 consecutive seasons. Then came Andabaker.
One of his assistant coaches, Richard Mongelluzzo praised Andabaker, saying, “Rudy never cut a kid. As many years as he coached football, he never cut a kid off the team, never. A kid came out for football, he was part of the team — the only way he left the team was if he got hurt or he quit.”
Over a splendid two-year period Andabaker's Dragon squad featured standouts such as Bernie Galiffa, Ron Campbell, Larry Nelson, Malcom Lomax and Kenny Griffey.
With such talent it was a pleasure for him, and a delight for Dragon fans, to see the team roll like a juggernaut. The Dragons went 17 straight games from 1967-1968 without suffering a loss, winning 16 with one tie tossed in. That tie occurred in 1967 when Donora, in just their second contest under their new status as a Class A team, could muster only 13 points against a tough Beth Center team. From there the Dragons won 15 in a row.
During a 2006 interview Andabaker said Griffey, a 1968 team co-captain along with fullback Lomax, was “a great part of it [the team's success].” That was an understatement. As a junior Griffey scored 13 touchdowns and tossed in 12 more, including three on runs, as a senior.
Lomax led the team in scoring as a junior with 124 points, then rambled for 1,162 yards while tacking on 138 more points in his senior season.
“To give you some idea about (Griffey) being an outstanding athlete and a great son to his mother — his attitude was out of this world,” Andabaker said. “He had a wonderful mother. I went over one night when he had a pulled thigh muscle. I got some pills from our local doctor and I said, ‘Mrs. Griffey, we don't want to jeopardize Kenny's career, but this would help him a little bit with his pain. He can decide if he wants to play or not.'
“She looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Mr. Andabaker, I think Kenny will be all right.' And she said to Kenny, ‘The team needs you and Mr. Andabaker needs you.' That's the kind of mother he had, and I'm sure he repaid her.”
Turning to Lomax, Andabaker called him a youngster “that could've played with anybody, and when I say that, I know what I'm talking about — I played as a sophomore with Dan Towler on the 1945 Donora team that was picked as one of the best teams in 60 years in the WPIAL.”
While the men who threw, carried and caught the football got the most recognition, it was players like Andabaker who did the grunt work.
Years later, when the Ringgold school board didn't hire Andabaker as its first football coach, he landed on his feet at Bethel Park.
“We didn't do bad, but we never beat Mt. Lebanon,” he said. “When Art Walker was [coaching] there hardly anybody beat him. We were 6-3 a few times, but then 6-3 didn't get you anything; you had to go by the Gardner system. Now if you're 6-3, you make the playoffs.”
Andabaker, who is proud of his days at Pitt, related a Jimmy Russell story. Russell was a big Notre Dame supporter, said Andabaker.
“He was always Notre Dame this and Notre Dame that. I said, ‘You don't realize it, but when you look at the books, you had eight [kids who played for you at Donora] who were captains at Pitt — I was a captain at Pitt. That's a big honor to have eight ballplayers at one school to become captain.”
Andabaker, a 1997 inductee in the Mid-Mon Valley All Sports Hall of Fame, stated that when he was at Pitt “we played a major league schedule — opened up with Northwestern or Duke. Our [only] weak teams were Penn State and West Virginia.”
It was a great era for Pitt, just as Andabaker's last two seasons at Donora High will always be remembered as a golden age of that school.
Wayne Stewart is a freelance writer.
