Richhill football players identified in team photo
Many years have passed since Peggy Wiley Morgan was in her freshman year at Richhill Township High School in Greene County in 1936, but some of the memories remain fresh.
“There wasn’t any level place or field in Wind Ridge to play football, so the team practiced and played its games down around Ryerson Station,” she said.
Mrs. Morgan has good reason to recall the team and its players in this week’s Mystery Photo; her brother John “Jack” Wiley was a player, and another brother, Asa “Ace” Wiley was the coach.
Jack Wiley would go on to play for Waynesburg College and then for the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1946 through 1950. He was head coach from 1951 through 1954 at Waynesburg College, where the football stadium at what is now Waynesburg University is named for him.
Ace Wiley taught and coached football and wrestling at Waynesburg High School and Waynesburg College, and later at Slippery Rock State College.
Katherine Parson had no trouble identifying her late husband, Charles Parson, the boy to the left of the one holding the football, and had a pretty good idea who most of the boys in the photo are.
“I don’t know if the team had any substitutes,” said Mrs. Parson, 93, who now lives in Waynesburg. “I don’t recall them using any. If you were playing, you had to stay in the game.”
The size of the school might have had something to do with that. Mrs. Parson attended Center High School in Rogersville, where she was one of 18 students in her graduating class. Center and Richhill high schools were absorbed in the merger that created West Greene School District.
A good friend and teammate of Charles Parson’s was Gerald Hughes, who died in 2008. Hughes was a lifelong resident of Graysville, a Boy Scout leader, farmer and insurance broker who operated the Bristoria Store with his wife, Carolyn. Sadly, on the day this photo was published, his younger brother, Byron, died. Byron was a vocational-agriculture teacher at Center Township High School and later in West Greene for 40 years.
Nancy Racunas of Washington emailed us with the information that her uncle, Dennis Fordyce, 94, is living in Canton, Ohio. “I spoke to my uncle just now, and he is delighted at this ‘mystery’ that was a part of his life!” she wrote.
Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.