One of Brian Kiehl’s last phone conversations with Franco Harris was about Saturday’s WVU-Penn State football game in Morgantown.
Kiehl, for the record, ended up laughing in the ear of his football idol.
Couldn’t help it.
Harris, the former Nittany Lion star who went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Pittsburgh Steelers, bowled over many a defensive back on his way to the end zone at old Mountaineer Field in the late 1960s.
Bobby Bowden was turning the team from Morgantown around by then, but Joe Paterno was still Paterno.
And Penn State?
Let’s just say the Mountaineers got an annual mauling by the Nittany Lions during Harris’ tenure as a football-toter on those long-ago Saturday afternoons in autumn.
Harris died suddenly at his home in suburban Pittsburgh two years ago. He was 72.
His passing was made more poignant by its closeness to a milestone moment in his playing career, but that’s getting ahead of the narrative, a bit.
Of draw plays and donuts
“Franco was really looking forward to this game,” Kiehl said of the nationally televised contest, with its noon kickoff.
However, he was worried about tickets, a subject he gently broached with his friend.
After all, who knew better the drawing power of WVU vs. Penn State on the football field in Morgantown?
The star wasn’t on a pedestal when he delivered his overture, Kiehl remembered. He was pragmatic. He retired from the NFL in 1984. He graduated Penn State in 1971.
By his definition, he was no longer a big deal, in terms of sports-celebrity.
“So, Franco said, ‘Uh, Brian. If I can’t find tickets, do you think you get me into the game?'”
Keihl gave out that aforementioned cackle — a small one — but one that would have made Myron Cope proud, regardless.
“I said, ‘You’re gonna get tickets, trust me. You’re Franco Harris. All you have to do is pick up the phone.’”
The phone was how Kiehl and Harris became professional acquaintances and friends.
Kiehl is the director of child nutrition services for Monongalia County Schools and Harris ended up going into the child nutrition business himself.
Harris founded his Super Bakery operation in Pittsburgh with Lydell Mitchell, his old teammate from the Nittany Lions.
No sports bar here: Harris, whose degree from Penn State was in hospitality management, was long-thinking of coming up with a nutritional offering that children would actually enjoy.
It came in the form of the nutrient-packed donuts that are a signature item of his bakery, which counts convenience stores, hospitals and school districts, including Mon County’s, among its clients.
The donuts are a popular staple on the Mon lunch menu.
‘That’s Franco, back there’
Right before the start of the 2022-23 school year, Harris, at Kiehl’s request, came down to Morgantown to meet with cooks in the school district.
The intensity of the performance required for their job description, he said, is the equivalent of a two-minute drill on the football field.
“Hey, that’s hard work,” he said that morning in the auditorium at South Middle School.
“I know what you guys do, day-in and day-out, and I can’t thank you enough.”
Harris worked harder than football in those early days of Super Bakery, he remembered.
He loaded the truck and drove the truck.
Then, he unloaded the truck, and placed the product himself, which gave pause to many a bleary-eyed commuter dropping into the convenience store for his morning coffee.
Seems that burly guy with the goatee who just smiled and nodded hello looked familiar, which carried a shock of recognition — in pure Pittsburghese.
“Yinz ain’t gonna believe it. That’s Franco, back there.”
“Naw, that ain’t Franco. He ain’t gonna be stahkkin’ no shelves, an’ at.”
“Go look.”
Harris always had a cackle of his own at such reactions.
“After I left the game, I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna have to get off the couch and go to work,’” he told The Dominion Post.
“That was just understood. Players didn’t make the money then that they do now.”
Immaculate, out of nowhere
Harris, though, made his football legend in Pittsburgh.
And, in doing so, he also became synonymous with a legendary Morgantown radio guy: Jack Fleming.
Fleming was the smooth, lyrical announcer who called the games for the Mountaineers on WAJR on Saturday and for the Steelers the next day, on WTAE.
Meanwhile, on Dec. 23, 1972, Harris was working hard in a game against the Oakland Raiders — except this wasn’t just any game.
This was a playoff game.
After 40 years of wandering the NFL desert, the Steelers were back in the postseason.
Twenty-two seconds left on the clock, Oakland with a 7-6 lead.
Terry Bradshaw, the brash, blonde quarterback for the Steelers, throws a pass in desperation that bounces off the original target after a collision.
Game over.
Yinz guys: Hold up.
A once-and-future donut entrepreneur scoops up the ball and runs it into the end zone.
In the WTAE booth, Fleming sounds a sonic celebration.
“The ball is pulled in by Franco Harris!” he yells in his call, later immortalized by NFL Films.
“Harris is going for a touchdown for Pittsburgh! Harris is going! Five seconds left on the clock! Franco Harris pulled in the football! I don’t even know where he came from! Where’d he come from?”
Nothing to it, Harris said.
“Everybody stopped. They all thought the play was over. I was the only one on the field still moving toward the ball.”
In the Catholic-heavy town, the play was immediately dubbed the “Immaculate Reception.”
Harris died Dec. 20, 2022 — just three days before he was to be honored for the 50th anniversary of the catch.
Photographs and memories
Kiehl grew up in Erie, Pa., where everyone in his house rooted for the Steelers, and — well — the Nittany Lions.
However, don’t hold the allegiance to the latter against him, he said, chuckling.
“I have season tickets for WVU,” he stressed. “And I still hate Pitt.”
Last season, he and his wife, Joy, went to a Penn State home game at Beaver Stadium.
There, they took in a visually compelling and touching tribute to Harris that they had known about — but hadn’t seen until then.
At the Penn State All-Sports Museum, which is housed in the stadium, Brian and Joy were able to regard the “Franco Harris Memorial Mosaic,” a life-sized action shot of Harris, running the ball for his alma mater, in his No. 34 uniform.
Look closer, and you’ll see that the texture of the composition, what actually makes up the big photograph, is a bunch of little photographs.
Some 2,000 selfies and other candid shots in all, of Harris interacting with fans and associates, in and out of football.
Visit https://digitalmosaic.net/francomosaic/ to regard it for yourself.
The couple from Morgantown will be easier to spot than you think. Just enter “Joy K” in the search field to see where and how they factor in.
While Mr. and Mrs. Kiehl were looking at the mosaic, the museum attendant was looking at them.
“That’s really something, huh?”
“Yes, sir, it is. We knew Franco. And we’re in there.”
“Well, that means you get the ‘secret’ tour of the stadium, if you’d like that.”
“Heck, yeah, we’d like that.”
Brian Kiehl wishes the football celebrity, who didn’t know he still was, could be with him Saturday at a certain stadium in Morgantown.
“I’m gonna be thinking about Franco every play.”
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