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Vietnam, 25 Years Later: How Vietnam got to McKeesport
Sunday, April 23, 2000 By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In the old steel town, memories of the 23 who died are still alive
America will look back on the Vietnam War all this week, and surely no town will have deeper memories than McKeesport.
The nation's first Vietnam memorial wall sprang up in 1966 after five former members of the McKeesport Boys' Club were killed during a nine-month stretch of the war.
Boots Johnson, a skinny, gentle spirit who was known to everyone in town as manager of the McKeesport Area High School football team, was the first of them to die. Johnson told the football players goodbye in October 1965 and began his tour as a medic Nov. 4. He was shot dead in battle 31 days later.
McKeesport's casualties escalated quickly. By October 1966, four young men who had played ball with Johnson at the Boys' Club had been killed.
Overall, the town would lose 23 men before the war ended in 1975. Eleven of them had grown up together at the Boys' Club.
Johnson, never a fighter, went to Vietnam with the idea of healing the injured. When he didn't make it back to McKeesport, the town grieved.
"It hit us hard," said Dick Bowen, a longtime high school football coach. "Boots was small, jovial, always pumped up and real popular with the players and coaches.
"He told us how excited he was to be going in as a medic. He was dead almost before we accepted the fact that he had left us."
In that era of protests and animosity toward the military, McKeesport hailed its soldiers as hometown heroes.
Sam R. La Rosa, director of the Boys' Club, was the reason. He became the most aggressive man in town when it came to sticking up for men who went to Vietnam.
His memorial wall, built outside the Boys' Club, was dedicated on Veterans Day 1966. It contained the names of the five former members who died in 1965 and 1966.
As the April 30 anniversary of the fall of Saigon nears, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will offer a series of special reports this week on the Vietnam experience and its impact on the people of our region.
At 23, Boots Johnson was the oldest. The others were between 18 and 20.
La Rosa would add six more names to the wall before the war was over.
"Thank God there were no more than that. And thank God we didn't wait for years and years to honor our boys, the way they did with that big memorial wall in Washington," said La Rosa, still feisty at 87.
Today, McKeesport's Boys' and Girls' Club is named in honor of La Rosa, who started the local organization in 1945. He still visits the club regularly, and maintains five thick scrapbooks on its fallen Vietnam servicemen.
To La Rosa, the war hurts like an old wound. Boys he'd known from age 8 were suddenly showing up at the club in crisp uniforms to say "so long." Too often, those were the last two words he would hear from them.
Tom Sweeney was one of La Rosa's favorites. Sweeney seemed mature far beyond his teen-age years, quietly volunteering for jobs that most kids didn't bother to worry about.
Soon after La Rosa started honoring those who had died in Vietnam, Sweeney helped with one of the memorial services. He even laid the wreath at the base of the wall.
On the way home that day, Sweeney told his mother he thought La Rosa was the most considerate man in town. "It's nice that Sammy does these things so people will remember our guys," Sweeney said.
He joined the Marines that year and was shipped to Vietnam.
"Not long after that," La Rosa said, "his dad was adding Tom's name to the memorial."
Sweeney was killed by rifle fire Feb. 26, 1968. He was 18, so young that he never saw much except McKeesport's smokestacks and the combat zone of Quang Tri, South Vietnam.
The war's death toll was felt steadily in McKeesport. At least one member of each graduating classes from 1964 to 1969 was killed in Vietnam.
McKeesport had about 40,000 people during the war's peak years, but it was still small enough for every kid to be known by almost every adult.
The high school, teeming with 3,000 students in those days when U.S. Steel was king, was a melting pot. The college-prep crowd that desperately wanted to avoid Vietnam mixed easily with the vocational students, who knew combat was probably in their future.
John G. Bertoty graduated from McKeesport Area High School in 1963, just before the war turned white hot and every young man began to worry about becoming a raw recruit.
"Nobody wanted to go to Vietnam," said Bertoty, now academic principal of the high school. "You can bet I didn't."
He and millions of others headed for college, which suddenly had two purposes -- it was a path to something better than a life of labor and an escape hatch from Vietnam.
The fight against communism was a rich man's cause on the policy level, but a poor man's war in the jungles. The 23 McKeesport men who died in Vietnam were career soldiers and blue-collar kids without much interest in college.
Greg Popowitz, who went to Vietnam in August 1967, was killed by a land mine Jan. 24, 1968. He was 18.
"I remember that his grandparents ran a beer garden, and that Greg was a good boy," La Rosa said. "He never had a chance beyond that."
Boots Johnson's name still brings flashes of recognition all around McKeesport. Today, the mills are shuttered and the town has lost a third of its population, but many of the 25,000 residents can still picture Boots exhorting the football team.
That he died 34 years ago does not seem possible to Bertoty, who was two years behind him in high school.
Johnson graduated in 1961, but was so devoted to the football team that he stayed on as unofficial manager until he went to Vietnam.
"He was an extremely gentle fellow," Bertoty said. "People liked him instantly."
Johnson's real name was Norman Wallace Johnson. He's listed that way on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, which contains the names of all 58,202 U.S. servicemen who died in the war. The wall in McKeesport also uses his given name.
"Nobody ever called him Norman. To tell you the truth, I don't know why we called him Boots," La Rosa said. "I just know that he was the first one we lost, and that we lost too many."
Tomorrow: America's returning soldiers were followed by refugees from South Vietnam, many of whom settled in Western Pennsylvania.
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