He didn’t know it at the time, but the summer of 1959 changed Bill Priatko’s life. After playing for his hometown Steelers, Priatko signed with the Cleveland Browns. Shortly after reporting for training camp — and back then camps were longer than the tax code — he walked into his dorm room and was greeted by his roommate, a rookie cornerback from Ohio State.
Priatko and Dick LeBeau became fast friends amidst the cauldron of a Paul Brown training camp, forming a lifelong bond. LeBeau was not the only player in Browns camp that year who would later become a towering figure in Steelers history.
Chuck Noll was in his seventh and would what prove to be final season in Cleveland. Brawny and brainy, he played guard and linebacker and was an extension of Brown, his coach, on the field. He and Priatko connected though not just through the shared misery of a training camp that lasted more than two months.
“After our two-a-day workouts, at supper Chuck and I would sit and talk,” Priatko recalled. “That’s when I really first got to know the kind of man Chuck Noll was. We never talked about football. He had so much knowledge about different subjects, whether it was supply and demand, the economy, this and that. He always seemed to indicate that his goal in life was to maybe be a university professor or to go into law. He never mentioned coaching.”
That is the career Noll pursued, and it eventually led him to Pittsburgh. He won his first game as an NFL head coach, but the Steelers did not win again in 1969, finishing 1-13. Early in 1970, Priatko applied for the athletic director job at Norwin High School, which is a couple of miles from his North Huntingdon home in suburban Pittsburgh.
“One day I was in the superintendent’s office talking and he said, ‘Do you know who called here to recommend you?’ I said, ‘No, sir.” He said Chuck Noll. I didn’t know but that’s the way Chuck was,” said Priatko, who celebrated his 92nd birthday last Monday. “I bumped into him two weeks later at a Steelers alumni get-together at the Roosevelt Hotel and I said, ‘Chuck, I want to thank you for something I didn’t know. You made a phone call to Norwin High School to recommend me, and I really appreciate that.’ He said, ‘Did you get the job?’ I said, ‘No, they decided to go a different direction with co-athletic directors so it didn’t work out.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Well, who would want a recommendation from a 1-13 coach.” I’ll never forget looking at him and saying, “Chuck, before you’re done in this town, your recommendation will mean more than anybody’s.'”
More than a decade later — after Noll had won four Super Bowls — another man who has a place in the NFL pantheon of coaches picked up the phone for Priatko. And Paul Brown’s recommendation after Priatko applied for a job in the Robert Morris University athletics department could not have come at a better time.
“I was teaching high school, and I had lost my job because of a school merger. I was out of a job and I’m 51 years old with my wife and four kids,” Priatko said. “I received a call one day from Robert Morris University and I didn’t think anything would come out of it. They called me back for a second interview and I got hired. I was just floored and so grateful.
“My first day I was sitting in the faculty room talking to the president of the school. He said, ‘Do you know who called here to recommend you? Paul Brown. I’m a Paul Brown fan and was in my office one day and my secretary said there was a Paul Brown on the phone.’ He never thought it was Paul Brown the coach. He said, ‘I started talking and I realized it was him and he was calling to recommend you. I hung up and said to the secretary to call human resources and see if they interviewed a Bill Priatko.’ He hired me because Paul Brown recommended me.”
Priatko served as Robert Morris University’s director of academic services and compliance coordinator from 1982-93, working closely with student-athletes. He left such a mark at the school that he was inducted into the RMU Athletic Hall of Fame in 2015.
And he still wonders what might have been had Brown not recommended him for the job.
“When I got back to my office that day,” Priatko said in reference to his talk with the university president, “I called [Brown] and said, ‘On behalf of my family and I, I don’t know how to thank you.’ All he said was, ‘You were always loyal to me.’ I said, Coach, your call did it and I’ll be eternally grateful.’”
