In the back room at the Club 4100, at Edison and 4th streets in Brooklyn, movie director Barry Levinson moves among some old football fans, a bunch of dog-eared photographs and the lingering remnants of an era that’s starting to seem as distant as some starry galaxy, and asks a simple question: What is it about this town?
He’s asking the question for a documentary he’s shooting here for ESPN. Executives at the television sports network approached him several months back and said: Do something for us. Whatever you like.
Levinson lives in Connecticut now, but his frame of reference is still Baltimore, and a piece of his heart’s still with the old Colts. And he’s still thinking about that connection between the team and the town, a tie so strong that when the ballclub was taken hostage to Indianapolis in 1984, it was never perceived as the day the music died.
Because the Colts band kept playing and playing.
For 12 years between ballclubs, the band’s leader, John Ziemann, kept his gang together, kept it rallying for a new team, and kept taking invitations to play at halftime at other NFL teams’ games. It was the only football band in history without a team to call its own.
Levinson was out in California much of that time, directing odes to his old hometown such as “Diner,” “Tin Men” and “Avalon.” But, even from 3,000 miles away, he heard about the life-after-death Colts band.
To him, the band was the precise manifestation of the town’s die-hard spirit: It insisted that the NFL understand the passion that was still here, even after the ugliness of the forever-despised Robert Irsay.
He told ESPN he had his documentary subject: the old Colts band, and how it captured the spirit of a town hungry to get back in the game.
So here he was, Tuesday afternoon, at the Club 4100. The place is under new management now — Meena and Raj Harkie, delightful people, bought it about a year ago — and it’s still a kind of shrine to the old Colts, with memorabilia all over the place, and a new generation of Ravens fans who find the restaurant’s still a classic neighborhood joint and a slice of old Bawlamer.
And now, in the back room, Levinson and a film crew went about the business of resurrecting the past with half a dozen old Colts fans. But these aren’t just fans — they’re the generation that started the annual football frenzy, the forebears of today’s Ravens fanatics.
Some of us still remember such Colts fanatics as Loudy Loudenslager and Len “Big Wheel” Burrier, and Bill Gattus and Eugene “Reds” Hubbe, all of whom were street characters who led cheers on 33rd Street in the great long-ago, greeted the team when it arrived home on cold Sunday nights at the airport and made the team the central focus of their lives.
But the guy who preceded them all was William Andrews, best known as “Willie the Rooter.” He set the standard. He circled the ballpark and led cheers, carrying signs he’d made when he was supposed to be painting cars for a living. At a Christmas party the night before he died in 1957, when others started singing “The 12 Days of Christmas,” Willie led choruses of the Colts fight song.
When he died, Willie’s pallbearers included some of the Colts. The ballclub gave his family lifetime season tickets.
And now, half a century later, here was Willie’s widow, Kitty, and one of his sons, George, telling Levinson what it was like back then when football was new in Baltimore.
“I’m getting chills just talking about it now,” Kitty Andrews said. “And I didn’t even like football. But Willie would come back to our seats and say, ‘Honey, I just had 60,000 people cheering with me.’ His face was all lit up. How can you not love that?”
The love affair goes on. Levinson spent the week shooting at various places around town — the Club 4100, Sabatino’s Restaurant in Little Italy, the Sports Legends Museum — but there were echoes in other places.
On Tuesday night, old Hall of Famers Lenny Moore and Gino Marchetti entertained a big crowd at Mother’s in Federal Hill. The Baltimore sports monthly PressBox sponsored it. On a big screen against a wall, there was footage from the 1958 season and the great championship game.
And Lenny and Gino recounted memories that have become part of a community’s legacy.
That’s the legacy Levinson’s documenting now. It started in that ballpark on 33rd Street, but it continues in places all around the great metro area, where the memories linger. And, coming next spring on television, the whole country will hear some of the details.
