This is a photograph of a Coffey Club banquet at the Mayfair Hotel in 1938. The banquet was put together to honor Coffey Clubber Saul Adler, who was one of the greatest centers to ever play basketball in Western Pennsylvania.
Adler left the Coffey Club around 1927 and moved to Monroe, La., to run a minor league baseball team called the Monroe White Sox. But he returned to town on occasion to see his friends from the Coffey Club and to reminisce.
The Coffey Club was one of the greatest basketball teams to come out of Western Pennsylvania during the amateur era, roughly 1900-1930. It was associated with the Kingsley House, the Zionist Institute, and the Young Men's Hebrew Association before going independent in 1922. It was one of the few Jewish youth clubs in the city to own property: the Coffey Club, previously known as Montefiore Hall, at the western edge of Oakland. The Club won citywide championships, and its games were major events within the Jewish community, especially its ongoing rivalry with the Second Story Morries.
You can read the full story of the Coffey Club in Western Pennsylvania History magazine. But for our purposes, we're concerned with its afterlife.
[IMAGE: Black and white photograph of several dozen members of Coffey Club seated at a U-shaped table. All of them are wearing suits and ties. Dishes cover the tables. A professional wait staff can be seen in the background. A note at the bottom of the image reads: "Coffey Club Banquet for Saul Adler, Mayfair Hotel, April 2, 1938—Karl Meyers Papers, 2002.0103.]
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For a time in the early 1930s, the Coffey Club reunited each year for an "old-timers" game against the reigning Young Men's Hebrew Association team. The 30-something Coffey Club inevitably lost these matches to the YMHA kids.
By the mid-1930s, the remaining Coffey Club members were approaching their 40s. They stopped playing reunion matches. But their legend only grew.
[IMAGE: (Left) A box score from the March 27, 1931 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of a game between the YMHA and the Coffey Club. (Right) A notice from the March 24, 1932 Post-Gazette, announcing an upcoming old-timers game.]
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In fact, the Coffey Club was mentioned in local newspapers—both Jewish and general publications—at least once each year between 1908 and 1976.
The nature of that coverage changed over time, of course.
When the Jewish Criterion listed its all-time local Jewish basketball team in March 1935, three of the five players were former Coffey Club members.
Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, local sports reporters like Al Abrams, Bob Drum, Les Biederman, Paul Kurtz, and Andy Dugo regularly wrote about the Coffey Club—reliving classic match-ups, recalling legendary players, revealing behind-the-scenes moments that hadn't been reported at the time, and pondering the changes in the game as the professional era dawned over basketball. They covered the former Coffey Club members like major celebrities, reporting on marriages, on the births of children, even on health scares, like the time Ziggy Kahn and Buck Gefsky both needed eye surgery.
The surviving members of the team kept coming together once a decade or so for reunions, where they celebrated themselves as only they could. Some 450 people attended a banquet for Buck Gefsky at Webster Hall in 1956.
[IMAGE: (Left) A graphic from the March 22, 1935 Jewish Criterion, listing the "All-time Jewish Floor Team." (Right) An article from the May 4, 1956 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with the headline "Coffey-Clubbers Rehash Good Old Basketball Days." A photograph shows five former members of the team.]
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In time, though, Coffey Club obituaries became more common than news items about the team. Local newspapers printed at least half a dozen obituaries for former Coffey Club members in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
It is remarkable that membership in a local semi-professional basketball team, formed some 70 years earlier, was at one time considered so newsworthy.
[IMAGE: Obituaries from the May 20, 1975, Jan. 15, 1972 and Aug. 9, 1976 Post-Gazette, for Abe Golomb, Jack Frishman, and Isaac H. Bloom.]
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The Coffey Club briefly faded from local newspapers in the 1980s, only to be revived again with the creation of the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame of Western Pennsylvania. To date, at least eight former members of the Coffey Club have been inducted. That's pretty incredible, especially when you consider that the voters were probably too young to have seen the Coffey Club in its prime.
The last of those inductions appears to have been in 1996. A generation has now passed without the Coffey Club in the news. Today, the team lives on through the stories told to children and grandchildren of the members, and of course in the records that have been saved in the Archives over the years.
[IMAGE: (Left-Right) The covers from the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame programs from 1983, 1985, and 1993, each featuring Coffey Club members—Jewish Sports Hall of Fame of Western Pennsylvania Records, MSS 308.]
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In the next issue of the newsletter, we'll continue looking at the afterlife of Jewish youth clubs by considering the lasting friendships of the Aaronians.
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This year, the Rauh Jewish Archives is highlighting stories of Jewish club life in Western Pennsylvania. If you would like to donate records of a local Jewish club, or just chat about clubs, contact the archive or call 412-454-6406.
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A House for the Whole Community |
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Congregation Beth Shalom is often credited with building the first synagogue in Squirrel Hill. That claim is true, but it misses the essence of the Beacon Street building.
The Archive recently received a copy of the first Beth Shalom yearbook, published before the High Holidays in 1924. The congregation had been around for seven years and had dedicated the first section of its building a year prior, in September 1923...Beth Shalom explicitly did not call this building a “synagogue.”
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March 24: JGS Pittsburgh Presents: Crista Cowan |
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With more than 24 billion online records, Ancestry.com has a lot to offer Jewish family history researchers. Join Crista Cowan for a look at records in the United States, Canada, and England specific to Jewish immigrants, as well as tips for researching the millions of JewishGen records, Holocaust records, and other European records from the 18th and 19th century for those of Jewish descent. She’ll add a few tips for successful searching as well.
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Crista Cowan has been employed by Ancestry.com since 2004; her involvement in family history, however, reaches all the way back to childhood. From being parked under a microfilm reader at the Family History Library in her baby carrier to her current career as a professional genealogist, Crista has spent thousands of hours discovering, documenting, and telling family stories.
In her time at Ancestry, she has been a European Content Acquisition Manager, the Digital Preservation Indexing Manager, and the Community Alliance Manager for the Ancestry World Archives Project. For the past several years she has been the Corporate Genealogist, with responsibilities for speaking and teaching at genealogy conferences around the world and helping with family history research for public relations stories. Known online as The Barefoot Genealogist, she has a weekly internet show designed to help people discover their family history.
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Passover begins on Saturday evening, March 27, making this year a relatively rare instance when Erev Pesach (the night before Passover) occurs on the Sabbath. Each day has specific requirements, and discussions about how to accommodate both days date back thousands of years, to the Talmud.
One such year when the two days coincided was 1930, and Rabbi Sol B. Freidman of Poale Zedeck Congregation took the opportunity to provide guidance with this article in the Jewish Criterion, published on April 4.
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If you like this newsletter, why not forward it to a friend? We want to share the story of Western Pennsylvania Jewish history with as many people as possible.
If you've received this newsletter from a friend or neighbor, and you want to read more, just click on the link below to start receiving future editions.
[IMAGE: Marian Schreiber and employees at the Schreiber Trucking Company, c.1943—Schreiber Family Papers and Photographs, MSS 846.]
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The Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives was founded on November 1, 1988 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the documentary history of Jews and Jewish communities of Western Pennsylvania. You can help the RJHPA continue its work by making a donation that will directly support the work being done in Western Pa. |
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Plan a Visit
Senator John Heinz History Center
1212 Smallman Street
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15222
412-454-6000
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A proud affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the Senator John Heinz History Center is the largest history museum in Pennsylvania and presents American history with a Western Pennsylvania connection.
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