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1968 grads planning 60th birthday party
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TWO SCHOOLS: Four of the people organizing the Warren Western Reserve and Warren G. Harding class of 1968 60th Birthday Party on July 24 at Maffit Meadows on Bazetta Road in Bazetta Township are, from left, Rick Thompson of Reserve, Hank Angelo of Harding, Vicki (Vlad) Marino of Harding and Mark Clawges of Reserve. They posed in Clawges’ garage, where he keeps Harding and Reserve memorabilia.
A group from Reserve and Harding is organizing the event.
By Ed Runyan
WARREN — In the early 1970s, few rivalries contained quite the backyard drama of a game pitting the Warren Western Reserve Raiders and Warren G. Harding Panthers.
One of the dimensions that made the rivalry great was that the two schools were one until Reserve was built and opened in 1967 to accommodate the growing industrial city.
Mark Clawges, a Warren insurance salesman who graduated from Reserve in 1968, said the folks on the west side of the Mahoning River were proud to have a new school and their own football team, even though they knew it would take a little time to compete with Harding, a powerhouse that won the state championship in the big-school division in 1971.
Turns out it didn’t take long — just a couple of years — and Clawges thinks one reason may have been that the West Siders had a bit of a chip on their shoulder, helped along by the coach of the new Raiders football team, Dick Strom.
“He would say, ‘They’re saying it’ll be 10 years till [Reserve] can play with those kids [at Harding,]” Clawges remembers.
Frank Sericola, another 1968 Reserve graduate who played for Strom, said it was only natural that Strom used the East Side/West Side issue to motivate the Reserve players.
Clawges summed it up with a saying that was popular among West Siders at the time: “East Side money can’t buy West Side pride.”
Whatever the reason, Reserve became an equally intimidating presence, winning their own football championship in 1972. Harding won the state title again in 1974.
Warren’s industrial strength took a tumble in the latter part of the 1970s with the downturn in the steel industry, and Reserve High School only lasted until 1989 — 22 years — when Reserve became a middle school.
When Harding and Reserve became one high school again in 1990, Warren’s football prowess took center stage again — and the new Harding Raiders won the 1990 state football title.
It wasn’t long after the two schools came back together in 1990 that the class of 1968 started to think it was time for the two halves of the Warren school system to come back together for a reunion.
After all, the separate classes of 1968 at Harding and Reserve had only really been separate for one year: the 1967-68 school year.
During their sophomore year, the East Side and West Side kids were in the same building at the old Harding High School on Elm Road. During the 1967 school year, students had a choice whether to attend Harding or Reserve.
And because Turner Junior High on Mahoning Avenue housed kids from Northwest Warren and Northeast Warren during the mid-1960s, teens from that part of town became friends no matter where they lived.
Harding and Reserve continued to have separate reunions, however.
Ron Zelenak of Howland, a 1968 Harding graduate who grew up on West Avenue near W.D. Packard Music Hall, remembers that half his junior high friends were from the west side of the river and the other half from the east side.
Today, Zelenak is among a group of 1968 graduates from Reserve and Harding that feels it’s finally time that the two halves of Warren come back together.
But instead of having a joint Harding-Reserve class reunion, the organizers have decided to have a 60th birthday for the class of 1968 next year since nearly every member of the class will turn 60 sometime in 2010.
Zelenak, who recently retired from Delphi Packard and had two knee-replacement surgeries, said he thinks it’s time that East and West come together to renew the friendships that were formed more than 40 years ago.
Hank Angelo, former mayor of Warren, and a 1968 Harding graduate and member of the football team, says he doesn’t feel the “split” between Harding and Reserve prevented him from having a lot of good friends from Reserve.
“The media made a big deal about the East Side vs. West Side, but among the classmates, there was no animosity,” he said.
His Harding classmate, Vicki (Vlad) Marino of Warren, says she thinks the Harding-Reserve rivalry mostly affected the males.
Guys from Reserve told her they thought about asking her out for a date but thought better of it because an East Side girl would not date a West Sider, she said. She insists that she would not have cared about that.
In the end, Clawges says the Harding-Reserve rivalry starting in the late 1960s is something he will long cherish — one reason he has Reserve and Harding memorabilia filling a garage at his house.
“It was just crazy, crazy times. I’d never give ’em up.”
runyan@vindy.com