From Roosevelt’s playground to the Superdome: Panfile’s lessons opened doors to success in life

By: Tony Pawlik, MHS Class of 1971
They dedicated the Manville high school football field to one of my teachers, last week. He was my sixth-grade teacher way back in 1964, I remember it like it was yesterday … walking to Roosevelt School on that first day of school, you didn’t know who you would get for a teacher, it was either Mr. Brunn or Mr. Panfile. I had a knot in my stomach on the way to school … I got Mr. Panfile.
I was a kid who loved sports and he coached the football team at Manville High School; can’t get better than that, can it? Funny thing is, he never really talked much football in class, believe it or not, he talked about a lot of other "stuff" but not that much about football.
So now, it’s the first day, and after the Pledge of Allegiance, you had to turn in your health forms to your teacher, the ones your parents had to fill out and sign. He’d call us all up to his desk to go over the health forms and as you walked up there, he would just eye you up one side and down the other side, did it for the girls as well as the boys, I think that was the first test, how you walked up there … there would be a lot more tests like that all throughout the year, you just didn’t know when he was keeping score.
Now you would think that being a varsity football coach at Manville High School would be a big advantage on the Roosevelt School playground for playing football during recess or lunch break, right? Wrong. Mr. Panfile was a line coach, couldn’t throw the ball more than 5 or 10 yards, no surprise that you really got disappointed when you got picked on Mr. Panfile’s team.
Me, I didn’t care, it was two-hand touch on the playground! I figured it out early: his favorite throw was a safety valve, a 5-yard pass in the flat. Where do you think I ran most of my patterns, led the league in most yards after catches? Now, the other sixth-grade teacher at Roosevelt, Mr. Brunn, had a "gun" for an arm. When you were on his team, he was the "Mad Bomber" and he could throw a "skinny" post on a line at 30 yards; so, let’s just say that he had a different offensive philosophy when he was the QB, throwing it downfield. I kind of liked being on Mr. Brunn’s team more than Mr. Panfile’s, but we had a lot of fun on that playground playing two-hand touch. Mr. Panfile got to scout a lot of kids on the playground; never figured he was watching that close and taking notes.
I remember he was always pretty competitive as a teacher. We had these tests they did every year on the sixth-grade level in town and we competed against Weston, Camplain and Main Street schools, the other elementary schools in town. There was an addition test, a subtraction test, a multiplication test and a division test, about 100 quick little number facts and you had about three minutes to complete them all. Mr. Panfile wanted everyone to get 100 percent correct and we drilled every day to make it happen.
Did I say he wanted everyone to get them all correct? Now, come on, we had some kids who just weren’t going to get them all correct but he knew who he could count on to get 100s and he wasn’t just counting on us to get them all correct – he demanded we got them all correct!
So, we do pretty well on the addition test as a sixth-grade class but … we didn’t do that well on the subtraction test and boy, did he let us have it. The rest of Roosevelt School heard it!
Boys and girls together – 24 kids just getting totally chewed out (I would know that feeling a few years later). I think we practiced multiplication tests 10 times a day until we took the next real (multiplication) test that counted from Miss Kinney, who administered the tests. Funny how I thought Mr. Panfile was pretty tough but I always thought that Miss Kinney was tougher than he).
I think we did better on the multiplication and division tests – thank goodness, we lived for another day.
There were 24 kids in our class and we had two girls who would now be considered, students with disabilities in that sixth-grade class in 1964. These were the days before teachers had professional development days and I seriously doubt that Mr. P had any sensitivity training at Scranton, where he received his teacher training. But I want to tell you Mr. Panfile had more patience with those two than anyone I’d ever seen; he treated them fairly and at times, he’d even put his foot down with them but it was a "gentle" foot. And yet, at times, they tested him but in a very different way, a sensitive way, certainly in a way that I’m sure that that he had never been tested before!
He showed us a different side, that kinder, gentler side that the superintendent talked about at the dedication. Now, you have got to remember that Nadine was probably not even born then but I want you to know, those two girls actually made The Man back-peddle and that is something that I had never seen in all my days in the sixth-grade.
Imagine – Mr. P backing up a bit, never saw that before with The Man, he protected those girls, and he made us protect them on the playground, too!
So, it’s a nice spring day and Mr. P decides we need some sunshine instead of some math instruction (now that’s my kind of teacher). He takes us out on the playground to play softball, just our class and he’s pitching to both teams, someone hits a pop fly and I’m settling under it, I got this one in my back pocket. Suddenly, someone just runs right into me and just crushes me – remember, I’m maybe 5-feet tall and weigh 80 pounds soaking wet in the sixth-grade. I never saw it coming, I mean I just got annihilated, absolutely blindsided.
Now, I’m on the ground and Mr. P comes over to see if I’m OK and I’m sure he thought that looked pretty comical from the pitcher’s mound. Now he wants to laugh and I’m ready to cry but no one was going to give in. He asked me if I was OK, and I said I was (all the while holding back some tears). He helped me up and let me keep what little pride I had left on that day. I slowly trudged back to my position and we played some more softball. Didn’t realize what he’d done until I had kids of my own.
When I was in high school, I got to play on our freshman team. I still wasn’t that big, maybe 5 feet 6 inches, and I had played quarterback on the Pop Warner level for a while. We had this freshman football coach who didn’t think I should be the QB, so after a while I’m not playing QB that much on the freshman team.
Towards the end of the season, Mr. Panfile starts coming down to more and more of our freshman practices and one day I see him talking to Mr. Mahon, our head coach, and the next thing you know, I’m back playing QB. That was cool – I was psyched!
The next day, Mr. Mahon calls me over and tells me, "you’ll never play QB at Manville." I was kind of taken back by that comment but as it was explained to me later in life, "some days you bite the bear and some days the bear takes a bite out of you."
That was a big bite and it hurt but I will never forget that Mr. Panfile believed in me back then and he would always be in my court!
There was a coach in the NFL in the early ’60s who had some pretty good football teams at Green Bay. Vince Lombardi was probably the most successful NFL coach – they even named the Super Bowl Trophy after him, and he had this saying that always was misinterpreted, misquoted and taken out of context about winning. The misinterpretation was, "Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing." According to Mr. Lombardi, this quote was absolutely taken out of context. What he said in his entire statement was something like, "winning is not a sometimes thing, it’s an all-the-time thing and the process of winning is what makes us champions!"
That’s my recollection after reading some Lombardi books years later, however, Mr. P, in his infinite football wisdom, latched on to the misinterpretation with "winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing" and that became his mantra for as long as I can remember. You step on the practice field and that’s all we heard, but, shoot, I learned that way back in the sixth-grade from all those arithmetic tests Miss Kinney made us take, among other selective Panfile gems.
The 1968 MHS football team had to be one of the best at MHS over the years. I know they won 28 straight back in the mid-60s, but that ’68 team could hold its own with anyone. I was a sophomore then, didn’t play much varsity, mostly JV, but I will tell you that those seniors – Pody, Louie, Phil, Jackie, Geno, Rock, Froggy, Lebedz, Cebula – they taught me something about winning and what it took to win!
Wonder where they learned that from?
I remember being outweighed by 40 pounds and trying to tackle Jackie and him carrying me 5 yards into the end zone during some scrimmages. Or running into Louie’s stiff arm, and having to rearrange my face mask afterward. Wow, so that’s how you do it.
Anyway, those guys were good, it was really tough after Jackie died but those seniors didn’t let adversity get in the way and somehow we went undefeated and after the Middlesex game, it was an amazing feeling, everything clicked. The Man somehow willed that team to perfection!
My junior year, I found out something about losing, we went 5-4 but when you lost, Monday’s were tough. Those film sessions with Mr. P could get pretty bad; practice on Tuesdays was also bad; so were Wednesdays and Thursdays. What’s the opposite of kinder and gentler? That was what Monday to Thursday felt like after a loss. We never saw that kinder, gentler side of Mr. Panfile at all, he was all about business back then.
Oh, yeah, we learned about work ethic and discipline and team work and gineger (yes, that was one of Mr. Panfile’s made up football words – I asked Gene Kruczek what it meant when I was a sophomore. He told me that it means to buckle up your chin strap and get moving plus there were a couple more words around it that I can’t print).
What we learned as juniors is that you didn’t want to lose around Mr. Panfile, he wasn’t about losing and everything he did was to get us to play better and put us in position to win.
But you know something, if you played for Mr. P, he would be as loyal to you as anyone. There were kids on our team who may have had it rough at home, he knew it, and maybe they needed some extra money at home. Well, Mr. Panfile made sure they’d get a job or whatever to get them through, he did that but he didn’t have to do that.
My senior year we had some injuries. I was still at QB but my buddy Bill Bolash, our running back, got hurt. I never saw anyone get more out of his body than Billy, so when that happened, Mr. P let me throw the ball, something that was totally out of character for him. I mean all of the teams in the past that had success at MHS ran the ball. Bobby Weber’s teams ran the ball during the winning streak of the mid-60s and it was the same with the ’68 team.
We had an up and down year, ended up at 5-4 again. We could have done better but playing football for MHS and Mr. P was all I’d ever wanted since playing two-hand touch on the Roosevelt School playground during recess in the sixth-grade.
I remember a couple of times when we were doing some classwork and one of his players would come to our classroom asking Mr. P for a recommendation for college after football season was over. When they came in with their leather blue and gold MHS varsity jackets on, my mouth dropped and I stopped doing whatever classwork we were doing. I would just stare at them as they were talking to Mr. Panfile.
I told myself, man, one of these days I want to wear one of those jackets. Anyway, we did throw the ball more my senior year, because Mr. P probably thought we had the best chance to win, that was what he was all about, winning. I do remember we had something like 28 pass completions on Thanksgiving Day at Middlesex. But we lost to a pretty good Middlesex team that day and that loss stayed with me a little longer than most as that would be my last game for the blue and gold and playing for The Man.
I was fortunate enough to continue playing football at Rutgers and eventually played in the very first game in the Louisiana Superdome for the New Orleans Saints in 1975. I later coached at Rutgers for a couple of years on a Rutgers undefeated team in 1976, but I will tell you this: all the lessons learned in Manville from The Man .. . way back when .. . whether in that sixth-grade classroom or on the football field .. . they mean much, much more as you get older, especially when you have kids of your own.
My daughter just got married last month, I have two boys in college and all the lessons that were learned, well, they’ve been handed down from one generation to another, from our parents and relatives, from our teachers and coaches. My kids have been taught the difference between right and wrong, and that hard work will always make a difference, character and integrity matter, teamwork is important – in the family and at work, there’s a whole lot more but you know what I mean.
I was very proud to walk out on the football field to escort Mr. Panfile out for the dedication of the stadium in his honor. No one is more deserving of that honor with the history and tradition of football at Manville High School and what he has done for and meant to the town of Manville.
He has continued to work and serve the community in a very unselfish way; teacher, administrator, coach, community leader and volunteer and Manville resident for over 51 years. No one has done it better!
Nothing summed up the day and the man more than his final remarks as the dedication ceremony was taking longer than expected and in his very unselfish way, he just said "it’s time to start the game."
You know, I was lucky enough to grow up in Manville in the ’60s and I played against a lot of guys in town that made me a better athlete. I was fortunate enough to play football at MHS, Rutgers and New Orleans and those guys pushed me to be a better football player.
More importantly, I was a student of and played for Ned Panfile and I will tell you this – he made me a better man.
Thanks, Coach.