THE FIGHTING FINNS - Leo Hill

New Ipswich Historical Society

FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region

Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.

Leo Hill

My mother died when I was 16. The old man was hard to get along with. He would always be sitting and reading the Raivaaja, the Finnish paper from Fitchburg. When you’re a young kid, you don’t want to stay around the house. So I went up to my sister’s—Jennie Parhiala’s—and the old man came after me. Boy, he was peed off; he was shaking his fist at my chin when I got into his truck. And Jennie happened to see it. She came out to the truck and got a hold of me and said, “Come on, you’d better live with me.” Hjalmar Maki, a teacher at Appleton and co-manager of the basketball team, and Bill Provenzani, the new basketball coach, came up to see my sister Jennie and her husband, Alfred Parhiala. I had stayed out of grammar school for two years by that time. I had originally left school to go work with my father. Provenzani asked Alfred if I could come back to school. He had been a Manual Training teacher at the BF Brown School in Fitchburg. I think he might have seen Vernor Korpi and some of the other Finns from New Ipswich play at a game up there. In those days, there was Kurth and Teddy Kesti and Chuck Kangas and Toivo Rosander and Ray Lahti: all Finns. They were good, but they didn’t win championships. They didn’t have the coach. Hjalmar Maki said, “Look, if Hill comes back to school, he can come live with me.” So I lived with him and his wife Josephine for a year. She was a helluva good cook. She used to make us steak dinners the days before the games. Hjalmar used to rush home after the games were over and call the plays and the results into the newspapers: that’s why we got so many clippings. The Manchester Union was always calling him, “Please send them in because we want to report them. All the scores. Everything.” Provenzani was the best coach I have ever seen. The guys on our team weren’t that big. We were just little squirts. The A class included Keene and Manchester Central High School and Nashua. In the Monadnock League, the B class included Peterborough and Wilton and Milford and Marlborough and New Ipswich. About six towns in all. We didn’t have but 15 guys. We had a terrific team, but it wasn’t because we were that good. It was that coach. Because of him, we played a lot of A teams. Provenzani didn’t get much money for coaching at Appleton. I think they paid him $500. We practiced in the Town Hall every day after school. There’s a pipe that goes all the way around the inside of Town Hall. That was the only heat in the building during the practices. We had long johns on and then on top of those, we’d put our basketball pants. Provenzani would say, “Hey, you. Come here.” I don’t know remember if he called us ‘Stupid’ or ‘Farmer’ or something else. He’d say, “Bend over.” Then he’d give you a boot! You can’t do that today, I don’t think. He said we had to make four fouls out of five, then we could go and dress up. If you didn’t make four, you’d keep on shooting. I was there quite a while sometimes. Then one day a guy from the neighborhood named Smitty comes by with a nice pail of cold water for the team. And of course they had no water up at the Town Hall. Smitty got to the door. Provenzani got a hold of the water pail. He threw it out! And your throat is so dry, you can’t breathe or swallow. Provenzani says, “These guys drink water after they practice.” We used to have to skip rope after school when we got home. I used to go behind the house on the sly so nobody would see me. And in practice, there was no two-hand throwing over your head or anything like that. There had to be the chest passes and you didn’t run around like a darn fool like they do today, up and down the court. You had to have two hands on the ball, too. You didn’t throw no one-hand passes. If you did, you’d come on the bench and you’d really get bawled out. There were no liquids to drink on Friday if the game was on Saturday. Then when you got to half-time during a game, you’d go in the dressing room. You didn’t get oranges. You got grapefruit. Sour—ugh! You’d get a big pill—some kind of a pep pill. And a little shot of grape juice. In a little paper cup. It was to boost your energy. Like drinking tea. For keeping up your speed. They were almost all Finns on the team. All the younger Kangas brothers—Toivo and Ralph and Leonard and Harvey. Then there’s me as a Finn and Bruno Maki as a Finn and Walter Somero as a Finn and John Aho as a Finn. The other ones, Mac McCuddy, Gus Lambert, Marcel Beausoleil, Lee Page, and David Quinn, were almost half Finn, anyway, because they knew what we meant; we told them. We used to talk Finn in the games. All of a sudden, we’re going to run a play or something and the center jumps and you holler, “Takasin!” That means ‘Get back!’ Then it’s another play and one of the guys yells, “Hyvä alas!” That means ‘Good; throw it all the way down to the basket.’ You’re going to run like the devil and catch the ball and put it in the basket. The other team doesn’t know what the heck you’re saying. We’d pack the hall for games. We used to get Otto Weisman (he was Finn even though his name wasn’t) and my brother-in-law Alfred Parhiala and the other Finns watching. Otto used to sit beside the court and I would shoot from the side. He’d say to me, “Pistä pusiin [Put it in the bag].” And Provenzani hollered at us so darn much, he’d have to go downtown to Toko’s store and buy himself a box of aspirins. Coach used to pick me up at home on the way to the games. He would really blast me off, all the way over and all the way back. Coming and going. But I enjoyed it. We all still liked him. We were winning. We were beating good, big teams like Manchester Central. We beat Manchester 18 to seven. That was the largest high school enrollment-wise in the State of New Hampshire. We had less than 100 kids enrolled at Appleton. Manchester only got one basket during the whole game—a foul shot. Then we lost to Keene High School by two points. And we didn’t have a six-footer among us. I was 5’10” or something. McCuddy was the tallest and he jumped center on the tap. We only had to have one tap to start the game or the second half. Then I’d switch over with McCuddy. Leonard Kangas: he was a good ballplayer and a nice guy. He was taller than I was. He was the best player out of the whole bunch. Leonard was terrific; he was picked on the All Stars and everything at the tournament at the University of New Hampshire. And his brother Harvey was a smart little ball player. He’d poke the ball in the face of the guy on the other team, just to scare him. Wouldn’t hit him or nothing. We played in the Town Hall at first, then we got the new gym at Appleton Academy. Hjalmar Maki and I worked nights there to build the bleachers. We put up the baskets. I don’t remember when that fire at Appleton happened, but everything went. We lost all our trophies. I don’t know if they got them replaced or not, but I doubt it. I had 15 gold basketballs at one time. Now they give you trophiesfor anything. Before, you had to earn them. I think the best game was when we played Peterborough: now that was a grudge match. There was bitter rivalry in the Monadnock League. We had a helluva job to beat Peterborough. I played against Harold Clukay: what a jumbo he was! I’m a little nut and I’ve gotta play center against him. Appleton’s uniforms were red and white. Red was for visiting and white was for home games. If we played with our white uniforms at home, Peterborough had to come down in green. When our team went to the University of New Hampshire, we lost to Groveton, two points. The ball went way up high, and then it comes, zippo, right through the net and we lost. And Peterborough stunk when they went into the tournament at the University. Appleton beat them at almost every game and won the state championship from them. Once Provenzani asked me, “What the hang are you doing?” I had a rib injury and it used to pain me especially bad when I was reaching for a high pass or something. He would call me on the side and say, “If you don’t catch the next ball, you go down and dress up. Go home.” So I guess I caught the ball. Then we went to see Amiott, the coach at Fitchburg High. And I brought Lee Page with me because he had no muscles in his ankles. You had to tape him up. And that was a rough job because he had athlete’s feet and there was a little odor. And Amiott said to me, “You’ve got a split rib.” So he taped me up. And then he showed me how to put a basket weave on Lee Page’s ankles. I had to do it before every game. You put a couple strips on from under the arch and then you go around but you don’t cut the blood off from flowing on top of the foot. You leave it open all the way down. Today you see them going around and around and around with the tape. Some years later, Vernor Korpi and I went down to see Provenzani in the hospital. He was dying. And you could see right off that he didn’t even care to talk to us too much. He was in bad, bad shape. We told him, “We’re going to go home.” And I guess he was kind of glad to hear that. He died the next day. He must have been up around 65 or 70 years old. Nowadays they don’t play like Provenzani. One guy dribbles down the floor. Then they lose the ball. Then some guy dribbles it back. And one day I told Vernor Korpi, “When do you see a center take a ball out? The center’s supposed to be the tallest guy on the team. He’s got to get back down under his basket so he can make a basket. ”Even when I was in the VA hospital down to Manchester last year, a guy from Milford come in there. He had known the Appleton team and knew some of the players. I don’t know what his name was, but he used to go to all the basketball games. And we used to beat Milford. He came over to my bedside and said, “Boy, you guys had one heck of a ball team.”

The End

Thank you Patricia Kangas Ktistes for allowing the New Ipswich Historical Society to reprint these interviews.