Harbor graduate Brian Gaines established such a reputation as an athlete, Ashtabula Area City Schools implemented a rule keeping athletes from participating in two sports during the same season.
Gaines will be recognized in a slightly different way when he is inducted into the Ashtabula County Football Hall of Fame in December.
“I never thought I’d be halfway decent at football,” Gaines said. “I was small.
“I hear Hall of Fame and I associate with the big guys. I pitched a perfect game in 1960, but once it sank in, this takes the cake. This is really a big thing. Then I read who I will be inducted with and I thought, ‘Wow! That’s pretty good company.’ It’s really nice that people think that way of you.”
Beginnings
A competitor, even as a kid,
Gaines found the gridiron after he had begun playing baseball. There was no midget football in Ashtabula at the time, so he and his friends had but one option if they wanted to play in organized leagues.
“We played flag football in elementary school,” Gaines said. “I had started Little League and thought I should be doing something else, too. My dad was a big driving force. He played baseball and basketball. If your peers played, you wanted to play, too. Obviously, you wanted to be the best. Sometimes you were, sometimes you weren’t.”
Playing flag football in their early years, Gaines and his young teammates never experienced what it was like to block or tackle. They received quite a rude awakening upon joining the junior high team.
“The first time we played tackle was in seventh and eighth grade,” Gaines said. “It was a big deal going from seventh and eighth grade to being a freshman. Freshmen football was a lot better competition. That was the time kids either started to make it or fall back and just didn’t continue to improve.”
Gaines learned something in those first practices in pads.
“We finally got a chance to find out what it was like to get hit,” Gaines said. “That’s when I realized I didn’t want to get hit too hard. I learned to run away or put my head down and hit (the defender) before I got hit because I didn’t want to get hit. It was a big adjustment from flag football to junior high. In flag football, we weren’t allowed to block hard or tackle. It was a big adjustment.”
That lesson may well have shaped Gaines’ career as a running back. He developed an ability to not use his speed, but also to elude would-be tacklers. Then again, he may well have developed those skills ,anyway.
“(Not wanting to get hit) could’ve been (the reason I was so shifty as a running back),” Gaines said. “I just wanted to get the better of my competition. I wanted to get the better of the defensive person. It didn’t turn out that way all the time, but the majority of the time, I got the better of them.”
Gaines had a ready-made role model right in his family while he was learning the game. But there were others, too.
He even modeled himself a little after one of the boys he admired.
“I have a cousin (John Altonen) who played,” Gaines said. “He graduated in ’57. I looked up to him. He was the one I went to watch. I remember watching Brian Laffey play. He was big. I wondered if I’d get to play because I was so small. I was only 180 (pounds). That was one of the reasons I had to be quick and shifty. Bill Davidson was one I admired. He was a quarterback, I think. He could run the sweep to the left and throw with his left hand. I could be wrong about that, but I remember him going left and throwing with his left hand.
“One of the guys I looked up to was Doug Vacchelli. He was a scat back. He wasn’t big. I thought I might want to run like that guy if I got in and played. I did get that chance.”
Sailing along
It didn’t take Gaines long to get a chance to show his stuff at Harbor. As a sophomore, an injury to an older player opened the door.
Gaines slammed it shut once he was through.
“I was pretty lucky,” he said. “We had a real good senior player named Dave Flore who had a shoulder injury. Lucky for me, my baseball and track experience paid off. I was a pitcher and could throw the ball. I got to run a lot of options and throw passes. I got to do a lot of rollouts and what looked like sweeps but were halfback passes. I could run and I could throw. I was lucky because sophomores didn’t start.
“I was kind of young. I was 15 or 16 and I got to step right in to a starting role. It’s pretty awesome when that happens.”
Despite his youth, Gaines wanted to be the center of the Mariners offense. That wish came true in a big way.
“Back then, all I wanted to do was play,” Gaines said. “I don’t know that I was the only one who thought this way, but in any sport you played with a ball, I felt it was mine. That’s probably from my pitching experience. The coach handed you the ball and expected you to get the job done. That carried over to football and basketball.
“That’s the way I wanted it,”
Gaines said. “I wanted to be the go-to guy. I didn’t care how young I was, give me the ball. I wanted it.”
Gaines did get the ball. And he got it often.
“Mick Zigmund tells me he remembers a game where Harbor beat Jefferson on rainy night,” Gaines said. “He said he doesn’t think anybody carried the ball but me. His basketball coach (during the winter) said I was going to be able to do much because I was punch drunk from all the carries I had. They ran me quite a bit that year.
“We lost two other backs and a quarterback when I was a senior. The last 11 minutes (against Jefferson), I ran for more than 100 yards, a couple touchdowns and an extra point. Things were working, so coach ran me all the time.”
Of course, even Gaines understands he could never have toted the mail as much or as effectively without a certain unit helping him out.
“My blockers deserve a lot of credit,” Gaines said. “They all have to make adjustments before anything can happen (for a running back). Those linemen when I was a sophomore were pretty good sized guys. They’re probably the reason I scored quite a few touchdowns. I got some open holes. They gave me some big holes to get through. They should get credit, too.”
“Thad Hague was a real good lineman,” Gaines said. “I think he was a senior when I was a sophomore. Doug Benn, who also lettered as a sophomore was the center and he got to play a lot. Tom Towers, he was close to 300 pounds, he was a big bear of a guy. Dave Berkowitz played against us. He grabbed ahold of me on one play... Dave wouldn’t get ahold of you with big Tom Towers there. When those two would wrestle it was like watching two bears wrestle each other. Mike Cain, a lot of times, he would block for me then I would block for him. Back then, you didn’t have a lot of halfbacks who could do the end run and throw passes. Mike and I were right- and left-handed.”
When Gaines talks about his career, what comes to mind right away is Harbor’s rivalries with the other city schools.
“The biggest thing that sticks out is we always started with St. John,” Gaines said. “They had a good team. I would always tell my friends at St. John I was glad we started out with them because they always got better as the season went on. They really could have made it a close game (with us). We beat by 28 or 30 points. It wouldn’t have the same in if we played them in the end of the season. St. John didn’t beat us in anything until like, 1965. I always tease them they beat us the whole time I was in school. We were a good team.”
“Ashtabula was always a rivalry because everyone always said they were our big-brother school. They always harassed Harbor until we consolidated in 1963 and they redistricted the (two city) schools. I can remember as a sophomore playing against Wash Lyons and Willie Miller. They said Wash ran hard, and he did, but I never liked tackling Willie. He would hurt you, he was so big. With those two guys, Ashtabula was a powerhouse in 1961 and ’62, or right around there. They were a tough team. They had huge linemen and were quick.” There were others who helped him along the way, too.
“There were two men who were really a driving force for me,” Gaines said. “The first one is my dad, Harry Sr. The second is Ed Armstrong. The first time I played for Ed was in freshman football. I played all four high school sports (football, basketball, baseball and track) for him. He treated me so well, I had to respect the man. I said if I ever coached, I wanted to coach like him.”
By the time he was done playing, Gaines had become the role model he had once looked up to.
“I had heard comments in my adult life from people who had seen me play,” Gaines said. “One of the things I remember is James Henry, who graduated in ’69. When I used to be on Facebook, we’d make comments back and forth. One of the first times we commented on Facebook, he said myself and Dick Candela were his heroes. For somebody four or five years younger than you to admire the way you played is nice. It’s when somebody tells you you were their hero. That was 40-some years later.”
Flying high
Gaines pursued a contract in baseball, then college, after he graduated from Harbor.
“When we won the state American Legion championship in 1963, a scout from Baltimore came to look at us,” Gaines said. “I was waiting on a call and never got it. I remember a scout saying I might not want to go to college (because I could get signed to a pro contract out of high school).
“I finally went (to college) five years after I graduated. They started a baseball program at the Kent branch and I played there. Then I went in the military.”
After enlisting in the Air Force, Gaines was sent to Arizona, where he continued to play baseball.
“They sent me to Tucson,” Gaines said. “I forgot the Indians had spring training there. I asked what was out there. I was told there was the desert and that was it.”
Always a competitor, Gaines found baseball once again.
“They had some summer leagues and some guys on the base played in what they called a AAA non-professional league. I played with Ron Hassey and Jerry Kendall.”
Coming home
Gaines went on to play ball in a Mexican professional league while living in Arizona before returning to Ashtabula County.
“I came back to Ohio with plans of finishing college and getting into elementary education. I didn’t do it, though. I got a job at Kennametal in Orwell. They were in the carbide cutting-tool industry. I worked there for 30 years before I retired in 2008.”
Despite having a career, Gaines still found a way to stay around the sports he loved. He wound up coaching women’s basketball at Kent State-Trumbull.
“Our girls won a state championship,” he said. “We averaged more than 80 points per game and we beat KSU-Ashtabula by almost a hundred points. The girls were pretty good. It was always good to come home and show the girls off a little bit.”
Gaines raised a family in Rome Township. He has a wife, Cindy, three sons, Brian Chad, Chris and Brandon and three grandchildren, Kaitlin, Connor and Brady.
Despite being retired, Gaines has found a new way to get his competitive juices flowing.
“I’m still affiliated with sports,” he said. “I, more or less, manage Orwell Community Park for the Park Board. That’s where they play Little League. I have a crew that works for me. I like to maintain the fields. I keep them in good shape. I like the kids to have something nice to play on.”
When he’s not on the field, Gaines likes to compete.
“I’m still competitive when I play my wife in cornhole,” he said. “I still like to compete. I really get a lot of enjoyment out of see how nice I can maintain the fields. I wish I could still play (football, baseball and basketball).”
Ettinger is a freelance writer from Ashtabula.
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