THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502260151
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY VICKI L. FRIEDMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 188 lines
Andrew Heidelberg's memories of integration take him back to a Norfolk school board office almost 40 years ago.
Andy sat quietly, watching the superintendent wave around a file containing his elementary school transcript and notes by his former teachers.
``It says here you like to be a leader,'' the superintendent said. ``Well, you know, you're going to Norview. You might not be able to lead there.''
Andy wondered if this is what they told all the black students about to integrate the Norfolk public schools.
``Even if you want to win, sometimes you've got to let them win to be accepted,'' the superintendent said.
Let the white people win? Is that what he should do? Andy asked his mother as they left the office and walked toward their Chesapeake Manor home.
``You let anybody beat you, I'll beat your behind,'' she told him. ``If you can win, you win.''
Andrew Heidelberg laughs, falling sideways into the plush pillow on the couch of his parents' Norfolk apartment.
``Those were awesome times,'' says Heidelberg, who looks younger than his 51 years in his blue-striped shirt and colorful tie. ``I mean awesome!''
Awesome - his favorite word. He uses it often to describe the turmoil, the torture, the memories he had as one of the 17 black teenagers to integrate the Norfolk public schools in 1959. He uses it to describe his senior year, when he became the first black athlete to compete on the varsity level for a previously all-white public school in Virginia.
``First from Delaware to Texas,'' he adds. ``That was the South, you know.''
Awesome is how he felt the first time he played in a football game at Norview. And it was awesome what he did that night - score two touchdowns.
And today when he sees blacks and whites interacting, when he thinks back to his two daughters, Angela and Kirsten, graduating from Norview, and when he remembers those words the superintendent of the Norfolk public schools said to him - that's all awesome, too.
``High school is supposed to be the best time of your life,'' says Heidelberg, still slender with a trim moustache.
It wasn't for this kid who just wanted to play football.
Andy took a couple extra swallows as he walked with his buddy Freddy toward the building that looked as big as a palace. They were approaching Norview High School from the back on a chilly morning in 1959.
It was February, but for Andy and Freddy, it was their first day at Norview. The Norfolk schools had been closed, but the State Supreme Court held that the lockout violated the state constitution, and the schools reopened peacefully.
``Scared?'' Freddy asked his buddy.
``Nah,'' Andy answered.
``Then why is sweat trickling down your nose?'' asked Freddy, shivering from the 30-degree temperatures.
They rounded a corner of the school and saw the crowds, the cameras, the police.
``Hey,'' yelled someone in the white mass. ``There's two more.''
Heidelberg gets worked up talking about the scariest day of his life.
``There was more white people there than I had ever seen in my life. In my life!'' he recalls. ``I didn't know if they were going to lynch us or what.''
Heidelberg and 150 other local black students, after being approached by the NAACP, took academic tests to qualify for public school. He was one of the 17 who were told they had passed, and suddenly, he was set to go to Norview.
``It seemed ridiculous at the time, ridiculous,'' he says. ``Go to school with white people? That was something you just didn't do.''
The affected schools fought back. Rather than submit to integration, they closed. White kids went to private schools, and the black kids met in the basement of Bute Street Baptist Church, where they had to steal books so they didn't fall too far behind. Finally, in February, the high schools opened their doors.
Every day the big white kid in the corner of the hall waited for Andy to pass. ``Hey, nigger,'' were the first words out of his mouth, day after day, week after week, as he and his buddies broke into fits of laughter.
Finally, Andy decided to speak first. ``What's up, nigger?'' he said one morning to the waiting white boy. This time the boy's buddies turned their snickers to their friend, not Andy.
``Nigger,'' Heidelberg says disgustedly. ``I'm being modest when I say this, but I must have heard that word 500 times a day for 3 1/2 years. I used to cry about it.''
Heidelberg's dad, a Baptist minister, instilled in his son the need to use humor. Just don't fight, he told him.
Heidelberg says he and the others were the NAACP's sacrificial lambs. Their behavior had to be model because any excuse would get them thrown out of school. Then the tormentors would have won - and Heidelberg and the 16 others and the NAACP and the civil rights movement would have lost.
``I didn't like the joke, but I was always the one being ridiculed,'' he said. ``To get through, I started trying to make light of some of it.''
I have to go to the bathroom soooooo bad,'' Pat said to Andy as they walked home from Norview.
``Pat, we just left school,'' Andy said. Can't she just wait till we get to Widgeon Road, he thought. He knew once they crossed Widgeon Road - the color line from white to black - they were home free. And there was a market there where she could . . .
``I have to go; I have to go; I have to go,'' she squealed.
``Pat, can't . . .'' said Andy, and suddenly he stopped. There was Pat, crouched in a field of grass, relieving herself right in front of him and everyone.
I didn't know until 20 years later,'' Heidelberg says, ``she was so scared, she wouldn't go to the bathroom the whole day in school. The whole day! Can you imagine that? I was a guy, so I didn't care. I'd go in and take the harassment.''
But the bathrooms were the worst, he explained: ``There was no one to protect you there.''
``I wanted to quit so bad,'' he said. ``But everybody knows you're there, and you've got people pulling for you. I just had to see this thing through.''
Sometimes Andy would walk in the Norview halls and look up at the football championship pictures. Oh, how he wanted to be there, too. He wanted to be part of a Norview program that won five district championships and two state championships since 1955. Part of a tradition that had 250 kids come out for football and fans, on the average of 10,000 per game, who were more like critics.
``Hey, nigger,'' a white boy sneered. ``Whatcha looking up there for? You'll never be up there.''
That's the guy I want to see,'' says Heidelberg with a good-natured cackle.
He had been a star in the Norfolk recreational league, but he didn't make the team at Norview his first two years.
``Too light?'' the 150-pound Heidelberg was asked the day he got cut.
``No, too dark,'' he responded.
But his senior year, 1961, he made the squad as a halfback. Pressure had eased, he explained, after sit-ins on college campuses and the progress of civil rights. And suddenly, Heidelberg went from the ghetto to wonderland. In his first game against Princess Anne at Chittum Field, he scored on a 54-yard pass play from Donald Strickland.
Suddenly the band was playing and the crowd of 11,000 was yelling: ``We want Andy!'' And Andy would deliver again. He ran the second-half kickoff back 81 yards to score again.
``That's when I realized I was OK with white people,'' he says good-naturedly, ``as long as I was doing something for them.''
Norview traveled to Lynchburg for a matchup against E.C. Glass. The National Guard would be at the game, but the team went to a local restaurant for the pregame meal. Andy was sitting with his best buddies, Calvin ``Zongo'' Zongolowicz and Ken Whitley, when assistant coach Buck Moody approached the boys' table.
``Andy,'' he said, ``you need to eat in the kitchen.''
Andy and his buddies, both white, laughed.
``Andy, I'm not kidding,'' Moody told him.
Embarrassed, Andy moved back to the kitchen where the management had prepared a table for him. As he lifted a fork, Zongo and Whitley joined him.
``If you're eating in the kitchen,'' Zongo said, ``so are we.''
Three decades later, Whitley recalls the meal with a chuckle.
``I should have eaten in the kitchen more often,'' said Whitley, now the wrestling coach and an assistant football coach at Lake Taylor High. ``The cooks were all black. We got the best meal.''
Whitley was one of two football captains who was asked by coach Charlie McClurg about having a black athlete on the team. Whitley knew it would be tough - schools such as Oscar Smith forfeited games rather than play Norview because of Heidelberg - but he said the team wanted to protect Andy.
``We rallied around him,'' Whitley says. ``Everybody was out to get us anyway because we were so good, and now we had the first black. But we didn't let that split us. We accepted him.''
``Once I made the football team, believe me, I wouldn't trade you that school for the world,'' Heidelberg said. ``I was in football heaven.''
Norview won the Eastern District in 1961, and Heidelberg went on to play at Norfolk State, where he was an All-CIAA running back and punt returner. He signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1967, but was cut in preseason. He played in the Atlantic Coast Football League for the Rhode Island Steelers and in the Canadian Football League.
Later, Heidelberg would go into banking, first as a teller and later as a loan officer. After nearly 30 years in Rhode Island, he returned to Norfolk seven months ago. He's looking for a bank job here.
He's also writing a book, tentatively titled ``17 Plus One'' for the 17 trail-blazing students - ``And the one,'' he says, ``is God.''
It's a story he tells with enthusiasm, one he says needs to be repeated and remembered. Heidelberg says he used to turn on the TV and wonder why they were always showing stuff on the Holocaust. Then he realized how far removed today's youth are from the history that changed the world.
Black students often ask him, ``That didn't really happen to you, did it?'' when they hear his stories.
``Only when I come back here now do I see the impact of what we did. I mean it was awesome,'' he says. ``Sure, I wanted to play football in the NFL. But after what I did, I'm satisfied.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Heidelberg with NFL great Jim Brown
Color photo
PAUL AIKEN/Staff
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