They say every person has a story to tell. Well, that’s certainly true of Mountaineer football’s newest nonagenarian, Louis Birurakis, who will be at West Virginia’s season-opening game against Missouri on Saturday, September 3.

 

Louis has been asked to be an honorary captain for the game and will be on the field with his family for the ceremonial coin toss. The lifelong Morgantown resident is among WVU’s oldest living football alums, his Mountaineer career wrapped around two years of military service in 1945-46.

 

In 1944, the University High graduate tried out and made West Virginia’s wartime football team coached by Ira Errett Rodgers, a fill-in for regular Mountaineer grid coach Bill Kern. Then, after two years of military service, Louis resumed his football career for coach Dudley DeGroot in 1948-49, and he also played one season for coach Art “Pappy” Lewis in 1950.

 

Interestingly enough, with the exception of some sandlot games while growing up in the Liberty section of Scotts Run, Birurakis had never played organized football before being talked into trying out for the Mountaineers during a time when college football teams across the country were dealing with depleted rosters because of World War II.

 

“University High School didn’t get a football team until the year after I graduated in the summer of 1944,” Birurakis recalled. “I had never played a game before going to West Virginia.”

 

Undeterred, Birurakis learned the sport from scratch, playing guard on a team that won five, lost three and tied one, including a big late October victory at Penn State to hand the Lions their first home defeat in six years.

 

It was considered one of the great triumphs of that period for Mountaineer football.

 

“(Halfback) Jimmy Walthall played a great game and we beat them 28-27,” Birurakis said. “They missed an extra point.”

 

Also that season, West Virginia beat a pretty good Temple team that was loaded with ROTC members and service personnel, 6-0, as well as tying Maryland, 6-6, in College Park.

 

Then, shortly after the season ended, Uncle Sam came calling for Louis.

 

He was first assigned to the U.S. Cavalry before being transferred to the Signal Corps and then to the Counterintelligence Corps where he specialized in foreign languages, mainly his native Greek and Russian.

 

But just days after completing his CIC training in Baltimore, the Germans surrendered and the Japanese waved their white flags shortly after that.

 

“They heard I was coming,” Birurakis joked.

 

When the war ended, servicemen from around the world began flooding U.S. colleges in record numbers on the G.I. Bill, and that is how Birurakis was able to earn a highly-valued college degree from West Virginia University.

 

His father came to the United States from Greece in 1920, and he first settled in Wheeling, West Virginia, working in the coal mines there until a labor dispute forced him to move to Scotts Run to find work.

 

Scotts Run, just a couple miles west of Morgantown, once sat on top of one of the most bountiful coal seams in the world. At its peak in 1923, Scotts Run had 37 different coal mines in operation with most of the work taking place in the area right underneath where the University Town Centre sits today.

 

By the time the Morgantown and Wheeling Railroad was completed in 1916, there were 13 thriving communities in Scotts Run comprised of many different ethnic groups. And despite frequent labor strife and the emergence of mechanization in the late 1920s, Scotts Run flourished until the early 1930s when the crippling effects of the Great Depression really took hold.

 

The area gained national notoriety when an Atlantic Monthly writer declared Scotts Run “the damndest cesspool of human misery I have ever seen in America.” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt also brought attention to Scotts Run following a well-publicized visit she once made there, and from that visit came her later involvement in the Arthurdale resettlement project in nearby Preston County.

 

Sadly, Scotts Run was never the same following the Great Depression and it experienced more tragedy in the early 1940s when a series of accidents claimed the lives of nearly 100 miners.

 

This is the Scotts Run that Louis Birurakis mostly remembers as a child, spending his lazy afternoons skipping rocks along the slag ponds, climbing the slate piles and playing football games with a taped-up Carnation milk can because the ground was too hard for the footballs to last more than a game or two.

 

“You couldn’t kick it, but you could lateral it, throw a pass and run with it,” he remembered.

 

Throughout his childhood, Louis remembers his father constantly telling him to tend to his studies and get good grades in school. There was a better life out there for him to seize.

 

“All of the time he worked in the mines he kept telling us how bad it was, how hard it was working in the mines, and he kept telling all five of us, ‘Go and get an education!’” Birurakis said.

 

So Louis did.

 

First he intended to teach in the local school system but that never materialized because he suspects his Greek heritage may have been a factor in him not being able to land a job.

 

Then, through the help of former Mountaineer football player Oley Hedrick, at the time the president of the local union, Birurakis was able to get a good job as an ironworker which enabled him to work on some of the area’s most iconic structures, specifically the WVU Coliseum, Mountaineer Field, the first Star City Bridge and the Interstate 79 bridge that spans the Monongahela River just south of town.

 

Louis retired shortly after the completion of Mountaineer Field in 1980, came out of retirement to work briefly at the power plant that was constructed along Beechurst Avenue in the mid-1980s, and retired once more a few years later.

 

But Louis just couldn’t remain idle.

 

In 2008, at age 82, Birurakis applied for a job working West Virginia University football and basketball games for Contemporary Services Corporation, a company contracted by WVU to provide crowd management services for Mountaineer athletic events.

 

This job gave Louis an opportunity to fulfill his two great, lifelong passions - working for his alma mater and establishing a permanent sign to commemorate the extensive history of his beloved Scotts Run.

 

Every single penny he made from his seven years working those athletic events went to the cost of constructing the Scotts Run sign Morgantown residents see each day when they drive across the Star City Bridge.

 

Underneath “Welcome to Historic Scott’s Run” are listed the 13 communities - Tropf Hill, Bertha Hill, Miller Hill, Osage, Chaplin, Pursglove, Liberty, Davis, Jere, Shriver, Bunker, Cassville and New Hill.

 

“All of the communities in Scotts Run are on there,” he said proudly. “On the back of the sign there is a reference to the coal mine situation when the miners were evicted from their homes in the 1920s, and also of the mining tragedies that occurred in the early 1940s. In order to get that sign we had to raise over $5,000, so I went to work for CSC and everything I made went to that sign.”

 

It was Louis’ small way of honoring his father - and all of the fathers from Scotts Run who risked their lives each day to go in the mines to make a living.

 

“There’s a lot of history in that area,” Birurakis said.

 

Indeed, there is, and Louis Birurakis will proudly share it with anyone who is willing listen.