There already was going to be much written about Franco Harris, the legendary Pittsburgh Steeler who 50 years ago caught a deflected pass off his teammate at the last minute of a game against the Oakland Raiders in a play that would be known forever as the “ Immaculate Reception.” Now, as Franco passed in his sleep, just two days before the NFL and his adopted hometown of Pittsburgh was poised to celebrate what has been anointed in poll after poll as football’s “greatest play ever,” the term has even more divine resonance. But what is so remarkable for those who actually got to meet the man was that unlike so many others we call “heroes,” Franco was one of the few who seemed to live up to the term.
It may seem strange for those who are just passing through the Pittsburgh airport to see a statue of Franco Harris next to one of a young George Washington, who at 22, shot a French diplomat in Pittsburgh, setting off the French and Indian War. The Heinz History Center had for years on the side of its building a photo of the two with the caption “Two of Western Pennsylvania’s great battles.”
Those who have seen the special “Night of the Living Steelers” understand more what a turning point Franco’s catch was. At the time in 1972, Pittsburgh was still the “Steel Capital of the World,” when there was only the faintest murmur that the town which produced more steel in World War II than Japan or Germany, which seemed so unstoppable, would be humbled by losing its biggest industry. For the Pittsburgh Steelers, the opposite was true.
As their own Art Rooney, who had won the franchise in a poker game, would admit, the Steelers were a team were on the NFL’s longest losing streak. Rooney missed seeing the famous play as he was going down in an elevator to console his team for yet another loss. He would be later often quoted as saying “Before Franco got here, we only knew how to lose. Afterwards, we only knew how to win.”
But because of who he was as a person, Franco’s legacy will be far more than that of what he did on the field. And that is saying a lot for someone who led the Pittsburgh Steelers to four Superbowl championships and broke all sorts of franchise rushing records. Franco’s star on the field and his Franco’s Italian Army rose at just the time Pittsburghers so needed something to root for and believe in.
While I grew up in Pittsburgh during this time, I got to know Franco in a different phase of his life while making a documentary called “My Tale of Two Cities,” about the city which “built America with its steel, conquered polio and invented everything from aluminum to the Big Mac.” I had recently moved back to the place where I grew up, having spent two decades in Hollywood as a screenwriter (“St. Elmo’s Fire”) and TV writer/producer (“Saved by the Bell”) and was back home for what I thought would be a one-year Hollywood sabbatical to teach at the University of Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh was in such bad shape that I ended up on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in a program about people who had changed their lives, where even Oprah said to her audience in disbelief: “You moved to Pittsburgh?” The town itself was now on a losing streak, having been the first major metropolitan city in the new millennium to declare itself “financially distressed” (i.e., bankrupt) and having lost half its population since the decline of the steel industry.
Those yellow Terrible Towels you see waving at every game in cities across America — those are being waved by the Pittsburgh diaspora who were forced to leave the Steel City as jobs in the mills, which once paid 80% more than the average American worker, were gone. And all those factories that Fred Rogers would visit here on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” showing us how things were made, had also disappeared from this region. To add insult to injury, shortly after I appeared on “Oprah,” Pittsburgh lost its favorite neighbor, Fred Rogers. And to punctuate where the city was, even its beloved Steelers were losing
For the documentary, we had gone to icons from Pittsburgh who had represented its greatness and asked them if and how the city could make a comeback. Could the city that had once been the Silicon Valley of the industrial revolution — with Andrew Carnegie becoming America’s first billionaire selling Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan, George Westinghouse lighting up America with his long-distance lines and H.J. Heinz putting ketchup on every table around the world — find its way again?
To get that answer, we went cheese shopping with Teresa Heinz Kerry in Pittsburgh’s Strip District; had breakfast at a local diner, Ritters, with former Treasury Secretary Paul O’ Neill, who had turned Alcoa around when so many other corporations had left; and walked dogs with transplant pioneer Dr. Thomas Starzl, who turned Pittsburgh into the “Transplant Capital of the World” in the 1980s. We listened to Fred Rogers’ widow Joanne Rogers play the piano in her husband’s old studio, asking her and Mr. McFeely: What could Pittsburgh make now, and was there hope for the city’s future?
I had recently met Franco Harris at the premiere of George Romero’s “Land of the Dead,” a movie that had been forced to shoot in Canada because at the time Pennsylvania had no film tax credits. George was back for a fundraiser we were having for the Steeltown Entertainment Project, a nonprofit I had cofounded with a former Wall Street attorney Ellen Weiss Kander, who had also come home, trying to see if we could help Pittsburgh become a player in the entertainment industry. In what we used to call a “cute meet” in my screenwriting days, Franco tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I could introduce his son Dok to Quentin Tarantino, who had flown in for the occasion. I made the introduction, and Quentin seemed as excited to meet Franco as he was to have visited Monroeville Mall, where Romero had shot “Dawn of The Dead”— which is to say, he was, like millions of others, a huge fan.
Franco offered to be in our movie, and I had visions of us tossing a ball around Heinz Field. Instead, Franco insisted we film on Pittsburgh’s North Side, in the Mexican War Streets where he had the same house he had bought as a Steeler and from which he and Art Rooney would walk to the games together on game days.
In the film, you can see Franco, Dok and I tossing a ball around in the streets. (We are interrupted by a vehicle driving through, and Franco called “car,” which was beyond exciting for anyone who has played street football.) I ended up challenging Franco, asking him if what Pittsburgh needed was someone “catching a pass” or more young people like his son Dok who had come back to Pittsburgh after going to D.C. to attend business school and law school. Franco, never ruffled, articulately and gently put me in my place, asking why it had to be one thing or the other. Didn’t a great city need to have it all — sports, the arts, business — all working together like a team?
But what was most memorable was a scene that didn’t make it into the movie, that happened while we were setting up to film. Two young kids from the neighborhood, which was like too many Pittsburgh neighborhoods, struggling, called out “Franco!” “Franco!” They looked like they were barely teenagers, and I wondered how they even knew who Franco was.
“Is that your car?” one of them asked, pointing to a shiny new BMW on the street. Franco shook his head and pointed to an old Jeep Cherokee.
“Are you still rich?” the other one asked.
“What’s rich?” Franco asked, sounding a bit like a rabbi. “The important thing is to be happy with what you make.”
He then asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“Basketball player. Football player,” they quickly shouted in unison.
Franco shook his head.
“Come on, now. What do you really want to be?”
After a moment, one confessed he would like to be a fireman. The other said “lawyer.”
He then shook their hands and said how he looked forward to meeting them again someday when they were a fireman and a lawyer.
That was who Franco was on and off camera. Officially, he was on the board of the Heinz Endowments and chair of the Pittsburgh Promise. But the internet and local news programs are now filled with countless stories of what Franco was like as a person — kind, gentle, generous, but a man who stood for something, and treated every person decently.
“My Tale of Two Cities” ended up playing in theaters across the country, and Franco graciously agreed to be part of a panel in Washington, D.C., as we were the first movie ever to play the Capitol Movie Theater. It was unsurprising that we filled the 500 seats almost immediately with Franco as part of the panel, moderated by Howard Fineman, about how other cities could reinvent themselves as Pittsburgh was now doing.
At this point, Pittsburgh’s new economy was getting some attention as a company called Google opened its Pittsburgh headquarters, movies and TV shows were shooting there because of our new film tax credits, and even the Steelers had managed to defy all the naysayers and win another Super Bowl. We went to sing Pittsburgh’s unofficial theme song, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” with Mr. McFeely as we had done in Times Square, Beverly Hills and Pittsburgh’s own Point State Park in the movie, but the D.C. cops shut us down as apparently there was an ordinance about “no singing in the Capitol.”
On the way back from the trip, Franco insisted on driving me home from the airport. I asked him if he wanted any help with building a website, as so many people seemed to approach him wherever he went. He smiled shyly and asked, “Do you really think I need to be more visible?” I had come to know Franco and his son Dok and his wife Dana, and could see how he relished every moment with them. But like Pittsburgh’s Fred Rogers and Mr. McFeely, Franco knew the fame he had gotten for a moment that would become known as the “ Immaculate Reception” was not what mattered. (He had no memory of even catching the ball, he would tell people — he had no time to think.) It was what he did with that moment that was so remarkable: his decision not to sell out, but to use it for good.
I started telling Franco which off ramp to take to get to my house near the University of Pittsburgh, and he smiled and said, “Are you trying to tell me how to get to Oakland?”
Franco had enjoyed teasing me since the moment I confessed to him that I was not even a Steelers fan growing up in Pittsburgh — I liked the Minnesota Vikings because their quarterback, Scrambling Fran Tarkington, could run away from the big guys — as I had to as a scrawny kid growing up in a Steel City. Franco told me he understood that. It was a stupid decision, especially since the Vikings would lose again and again to Pittsburgh during the ’70s. I ran into Franco, Dok and Dana just a couple of weeks ago on Walnut Street near where I had grown up and played football. I was with my brother, who was the good athlete in the family, and Franco seemed to delight in teasing me about how I still couldn’t throw a football.
I told Franco how I was making a new movie about August Wilson’s Hill District and wanted to interview him for his work trying to restore the famous Crawford Grill in The Hill where August and everyone else had heard jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and Lena Horne. Franco told me of course he would be happy to. The truth was I had asked to make a documentary about him, especially after seeing an old film George Romero had made of Franco from the 1970s. Dana, who Franco always deferred to, assured me that was not going to happen.
Franco never sought the limelight, but he was most unusual in how he dealt with it once it found him. I am still teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, and this past semester had two football players in my film class. Because of a new law, football players in college now can make money off their images, and one of them already had an agent. They missed a couple of classes, and for extra credit, I made them watch “Hoop Dreams,” the award-winning documentary about aspiring basketball players who attend a predominantly white private school on scholarships with the expectation that they will make it to the NBA like Isaiah Thomas, who went there. But what I wanted to show them was who Franco Harris was: A guy who was as good a ball player as anyone who ever played the game, but who was an even greater champion off the field.
It is important for us to know we still have heroes — that not everyone disappoints us. And that in the real-life “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” the statues of Fred Rogers and Franco Harris stand for doing things not for one’s own glory, but for the greater good.
When asked after his passing about Franco, a close friend of his recounted how Franco would always ask whoever he met, “What do you need?” Whenever possible, he would deliver.
After our street football game on Pittsburgh’s North Side, Franco signed a football for me and wrote “Believe in Pittsburgh.” Thanks to Franco, it is still possible for people here and around the world to believe.
Carl Kurlander (carlkurlander.com) is a film director and producer and teaching professor at the University of Pittsburgh.