One went to Central. One went to Harding. Both played football. Both ran track. They grew up rivals. They became good friends. They are two of Bridgeport's finest. John Longo and Lou Saccone were two kids who grew up playing sports in the mid-1940s because there wasn't anything else to do. Longo lived on the East Side and went to the Orcutt Boys Club, playing sandlot baseball to try and forget about the war that raged in both Europe and the Pacific. Saccone lived in the North End and did the same at the Middle Street Boys Club. In high school, they were two of the most prolific athletes in the city's history. To this day, Saccone is still proclaimed as perhaps the best overall sports star Bridgeport has ever seen. He earned 14 letters at Central and is still the only five-sport letterman at the University of Bridgeport. Longo ran track for three seasons at Harding and played just two years of football, but put up eye-popping numbers. Even Saccone can't forget the past. "Babe ... he was a special player," he said.
In 1947, Harding played Central at Hedges Stadium in their annual Thanksgiving Day game. The Presidents were in line to capture the state title. They needed a victory over their cross-town rivals to clinch the crown. Longo won the game all by himself. He scored five touchdowns on runs of 15, 25, 50, 10 and 20 yards as Harding rolled to a 32-0 win. "I always tell Lou that he caught a cold from the breeze of me running past him all afternoon," Longo said with a laugh. "That day, I had the edge on him. That day." You see, Longo, who will turn 77 on Aug. 21, can't forget the past either. The year before, it was Saccone who scored two touchdowns in Central's 19-18 win. In the Aug. 9, 2002, feature "Where Are They Now" in the Connecticut Post, Saccone said he had to ask teammate Marty Martino who won that day because he had received a concussion in the game and didn't remember what had happened. "Those were some great, great games," Saccone said. "That last year (1947), I read where there were 18,000 people watching us play at Hedges. It was quite a treat to play against Harding and Babe. That was always our number one game." Football foes In his junior year, Longo, whose mother nicknamed him Babe when he was 5 or 6, tried out for and made the Harding team. Coach Steve Miska, however, had a senior-dominated club and Longo spent much of the year on the bench. When Babe was a senior, though, it didn't take long for Miska to see his talent. "The first thing I did in the very first game was intercept a pass and return it 90 yards for a touchdown against Commercial High (of New Haven)," Longo said. Other magic moments followed. With the score tied at 6-6 against Hillhouse in the final minute, Longo raced 46 yards for the game-winning touchdown. Against White Plains (N.Y.), a team boasting a 36-game regular-season winning streak, Babe went 70 yards in Harding's first possession for a score and the defense did the rest in posting a 7-6 win to remain undefeated. "Football was his best sport, no question. He was a heck of a runner," said Lou Bogash Jr., chairman of the Bridgeport Old Timers, which inducted Longo into its Hall of Fame in 2001. "He wasn't big, he was short in stature but a very powerful runner. He usually made them miss, but when he hit them, he hit them in the right spot to knock them backwards." On Thanksgiving Day against Central, Longo knocked everyone backwards, scoring five times, giving him 12 touchdowns for the season, as the Presidents completed an 11-0 campaign.
"That was quite a feat by John that day," Saccone said. It helped earn Longo All-State honors in 1947 at halfback. Saccone tried out for football on a dare. Already a pretty good basketball player as a freshman, several of the football players who also played basketball kept giving Saccone a ribbing about not being "tough enough" to play a man's sport like football. "So I went out for football the next year," he said. He played three seasons of football for Central, under coach Ed Reilly, earning three letters. He also played four years of basketball, four years of baseball and three years of track, a total of 14 varsity letters, the most by any athlete in school history. "Lou was a great baseball player, but I would say football was his best sport," Bogash said. (The Bridgeport Old Timers inducted Saccone into their Hall of Fame in 1990.) "He wasn't a giant, not on the heavy side, but he was fast and strong and tough." There were days when Saccone played baseball and ran track the same day. If the Presidents were batting and he wasn't due up, Reilly had him go to the track and race in the 100-yard or 220-yard dash or throw the shot put or the javelin — in his baseball uniform — before heading back to the diamond. And while he will always remember the Thanksgiving Day football games, Saccone said the post-game celebrations still stand out. "The whole town was into it," he said. "When the game was over, the people would do the snake dance right through Main Street. Or the kids from Central would go to Harding and do the snake dance in front of the school. Whoever won got to brag." Teammates at UB After graduating from Central, Saccone was looking forward to settling down and getting a job. "I wanted to work in the brass shop," he said. "I didn't want to go to college." But he did. Saccone said that a doctor (he doesn't remember his name) from upstate Connecticut paid his way, and he decided to go to Wisconsin in 1948 to play football because he had seen them beat Yale 9-0 the previous fall at the Yale Bowl. However, homesickness, the veterans returning from the war and the fact that the school's freshman teams never played a game ("all we did was scrimmage the varsity," Saccone said) got him on the next train back to Bridgeport. Back home, Saccone set out to find a job. But Miska, Harding's coach, got him entered into Boston College. The day before he was supposed to leave, however, Saccone met University of Bridgeport football coach Kay Kondratovich. "He asked me to come down and look at UB," Saccone said. "I think tuition was like $125. I didn't have any money, but he got me a job and I ended up playing football with Babe." Longo had gone right to UB from Harding, and in 1948, he was part of the first football team under head coach Chet Gladchuk. "We didn't do so bad. We won three and lost four," Longo said. "Lou and I played football for three seasons and we also ran track and played baseball for three years. That's how we became good friends." "I can't say enough about Babe," Saccone said. "He played hurt, he was a tough kid for his size. He would glide past people. I had a lot of fun playing with him. We both played to win." Saccone ended up playing football, basketball, baseball, golf and track for UB, the only five-sport letter winner in the school's history.
The April 22, 1950, edition of the Bridgeport Post echoed Saccone's great accomplishments. "Saccone has been considered the finest all-around athlete that Bridgeport has ever produced," the paper said, "as the 'iron horse' turned in an outstanding scholastic career at Central High School before doing the same at the University of Bridgeport." Separate ways After graduating from UB, Longo played a season of semi-pro football with the Stratford All-Stars. After that, he spent many summers playing fast-pitch softball around the region. He worked as a service supervisor for the Southern Connecticut Gas Co. and has been retired for 13 years. Saccone stayed involved in sports. He coached freshman football and basketball at UB in 1954-55. In 1955, he became the school's varsity baseball coach, leading the Purple Knights to their first winning season (16-10). He coached the freshman basketball team at Fairfield University under George Bisacca and from 1957-65, and he was the head football coach at Notre Dame High School of Bridgeport, amassing a 88-16-5 record in nine seasons, including winning the 1964 state title. "The things I learned in college helped me in my (coaching) career, teaching kids and directing them," Saccone said. "Kids like me that didn't have much, we always had sports." Saccone also taught kids right and wrong working as a high school official for many years as well as officiating in the Bridgeport Recreational League. He also was a math teacher at Notre Dame for 35 years.
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