Blow-out game brings back fond Ram memories

Photo above:
Mike Trapani, left, and Al Pontiff are reunited with a Redemptorist High football helmet worn in the 1950s before Coach Joe Galliano took it to Archbishop Rummel when that school started its football program in 1964. The helmet was repainted in Rummel’s colors. Trapani was Redemptorist’s first All-Prep star in 1949, and Pontiff quarterbacked the Rams’ Catholic League title team in 1957.

Story and Photos by Ron Brocato | CLARION HERALD

My longtime friend Al Pontiff phoned last week with a request.

A former athlete at Redemptorist High, Pontiff told me of a game his alma mater’s baseball team played against Nicholls High in 1954 whose statistics sounded rather outrageous.

He gave me a few scant details – that the game took place early in the season and the (Redemptorist) Rams won in a rout. Thinking the details he had heard from a player on that team were rather braggadocious, Al asked me to verify the outcome.

Having access to microfilm from the Jefferson Parish Regional Library website, which anyone with a valid library card can get, I delved into the spring of 1954. I found what he was looking for; a two-paragraph story in The Times-Picayune, dated April 3 and under the headline, Rams Lambast Nicholls, 16-4. It read:

“(Coach) Babe Gendusa’s Redemptorist Rams pounded the ball to all corners of Perry Roehm Park Friday night in the prep league opener. They smacked out 16 base hits, 12 of them two-baggers and one a three-base hit to take a 16-4 decision over the Nicholls Rebels.

“Nicholls paraded five pitchers to the hill in an attempt to stop the Irish Channel lads. Pitcher Ed Jacquillard, besides pitching a four-hit game, collected three for four (hits as a batter).”

At that point of Redemptorist’s history as a member of the city’s Prep League, one year before the creation of the Catholic and Public leagues, the little school stood in a neighborhood shadowed by the St. Thomas Projects and two Catholic churches that stood face-to-face on St. Andrew Street (St. Mary’s Assumption and St. Alphonsus).

Redemptorist was unique among local Catholic high schools in that it was a coed school, run by the School Sisters of Notre Dame, while its peers – Jesuit, St. Aloysius, Holy Cross and De La Salle – had male-only enrollments.

The history of its athletic programs dates back to 1946, but its teams did not compete in the New Orleans Prep League until the 1949-50 school year under a coaching staff that was led by former Warren Easton quarterback Joe Galliano.

A proud tradition

The Rams’ heyday came and went in the mid-1950s, when the football team won consecutive Prep League titles in 1956 and 1957 after surviving a four-way tie by winning a playoff. Its baseball team won the league title in 1966, and its 1966-67 basketball team advanced to the Top 20 tournament’s semifinal round.

The Rams’ athletic teams exuded an extraordinary amount of pride, win or lose. But their brief notoriety yielded to other events in history.

The school had a proud and loyal alumni, championed by one who became its “patron saint,” who looked after the school through its existence.

Arthur Schmitt, a 1957 graduate, not only was his graduating class’ president, captained two of its sports teams and escorted (then married) its homecoming queen (Joan Cuccia). He also spent most of his adult life in service to his alma mater as a coach, principal, then as its president until the school was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Schmitt has salvaged some of the school’s historic artifacts and trophies and maintains records of past student bodies. Its oldest living, and perhaps greatest athlete, Mike Trapani, a 1949 graduate, has turned 92. He once played in the St. Louis Cardinals baseball organization and the Rams’ first football All-Prep star.

Left,  the Redeemer-Seton gymnasium door was a sign meant to welcome back students and teachers for the 2005-06 school year. Instead, the missing letter served as an ominous sign that the school was in its final chapter, erased by Hurricane Katrina’s winds and subsequent floodwaters.

A charter member of the Catholic League, Redemptorist earned its opponents’ respect through years of morphing into Redeemer in 1980, when it closed its original location, to Redeemer-Seton in 1994, when Seton Academy merged with Redeemer.

The school was relocated to the site of the former St. Joseph’s Academy on Crescent Street, a half block off Paris Avenue.

Today on that property sits Holy Cross’ baseball stadium and field.

Many of the former students who wore blue and gold meet monthly for a group lunch to replenish memories of their cherished years of walking the hallways of the little Irish Channel Catholic school, memories they will take with them when they depart.

For one, a 16-4 drubbing of Nicholls, some 69 baseball seasons ago, still reverberates.

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