In the year 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt was President to 138,397,345 Americans and the price of a first class stamp was three cents. Overseas, the Battle of the Bulge begins as Germans penetrate Allied fronts in Belgium and Congress passes the G.I. Bill of Rights to provide benefits for armed service veterans.

The St. Louis Cardinals beat the St. Louis Browns to win the World Series and a horse named Pensive won the Kentucky Derby. The Academy Award for Best Picture in the year 1944 was Casablanca. And in Port Richmond, a ragtag bunch of boys, sitting on a stoop, put their heads together and upstart the Putso Athletic Club.

You figure the Philadelphia Eagles are named for the bird that symbolizes American pride, justice and liberty, while the Baltimore Ravens are named for the famous bird in Edgar Allen Poe’s dark and sinister poem, “The Raven”-Poe wrote that masterpiece while living in Baltimore.

And the Putso A.C. got its name, well, from a vegetable huckster with a horse. This is how it started,. A group of teenage boys are sitting on a stoop in Port Richmond trying to form a football team for the Pop Warner League. Since they are from the Cohox area and a lot of them are Irish boys, they are settling on calling themselves the “Shamrocks”.

But lo and behold, “clop, clop, clop”. Traveling down the street comes Joe Putso and his horse and cart selling produce. At that moment, the Putso A.C. was born. They practiced at Cohox field and got a bunch of hand me down uniforms from some guys in South Philly after they went off to war. They played all over northeast Philadelphia, scrimmaging against the Richmond Redskins and the Venango Bears in friendly neighborhood rivalries. The first team of guys with names like KO McMonagle, Onionhead Murph, Squeaker Craven, Yosh Wojcik, Redsie Danner, Gallo J. Gallagher Larry “Hick” Sullivan, (who many said because of his legend like performance in basketball, baseball and football should be inducted into the Hall of Fame) as well as those without nicknames like Len Varacallo, Tom Walsh, Joe Darragh and Charley Foxx kicked off the pig skin at Cohox Field on Saturday, October 14, 1944.

An old black and white photo shows the guys on the field with tidy, well kept brick rowhouses as the background. Three years later, those “boys” became men and went off to fight WWII and a new crop of players took the field. Keeping their sense of humor, these boys called themselves Ostup A.C.-that’s Putso, spelled backwards.

64 Years Later
This past Sunday, at the Columbia Social Club on Almond Street, the boys got together again, like they do every year and reminisced about the days of playing ball for Putso A.C. On the wall, obits for greats like Herbie, “The Coach” Smith and Frank Costello are taped up and old black and white team photos are passed around. There’s also a photo of a legendary Putso Dollar Night Social with a bunch of guys and girls dancing and partying at one of the social halls of Port Richmond’s past. It seems just like yesterday they were playing at Cohox…