Life, without a helmet: Former MHS teacher Tony Zack, whose combat experience inspired a Hollywood movie, starred in real life after the war

Dec. 31—Tony Zack never lost his head on the battlefield that day, even as an enemy bullet pierced his helmet — only to ricochet around, in a relatively harmless way.

It was in France, at the height of the fighting in World War II.

Zack was dazed, but not dead.

He didn't have a hole in his skull to match the one in his helmet.

The skin wasn't even broken.

His unit, which had been entrenched in the countryside, was overrun, and Zack was one of the few survivors of the skirmish.

A little boy named Jean-Paul helped lead the once-and-future Morgantown High School teacher and coach to safety.

The act of bravery by a child of war ensured that Zack would live to tell about it.

Not that he did tell very many people about the miracle-alchemy of battlefield physics in a big war — coupled with the even bigger empathy of a little kid — that melded to save his life.

Don't think he wasn't grateful.

There just wasn't time for such reflection in the tumult of the struggle against Hitler's Third Reich.

Still, the story became legion.

Especially in a unit that did a lot of heavy lifting in heavy combat.

Zack took it all very personally, to begin with.

He was born and raised in Uniontown, Pa, a son of Italian immigrants who sailed across the Atlantic in the pursuit of their American dream on these shores.

His mother died young, and the dutiful son dropped out of school for a time, to help care for his younger siblings.

Then, he dropped back in — after the grieving eased and after the household had become more financially stable, with the help of the extra paychecks.

By then, Zack was across the state line in West Virginia.

He was studying industrial arts and playing football at New River State College (now WVU Tech) in Montgomery when he got he got his draft notice.

Matchbook movie deal Zack mustered into the "Big Red One, " the famed 1st Infantry Army division that fought across Europe and slogged headlong onto Omaha Beach, smack in the middle of the ocean chop and bullets of D-Day.

One of his platoon mates was Sam Fuller, who was just as coiled as Zack was mellow—and who would eventually become a Hollywood screenwriter and filmmaker.

Fuller had already been at work in the movie town, in fact, as a rewrite man on B-movie scripts when the news crackled across his car radio of the attack at Pearl Harbor.

He quickly enlisted.

According to lore, Fuller was in either in the field or in a foxhole with Zack — he never could quite remember if was France or Germany or Africa or Sicily, or if it was in 1943 or 1944, even — when he made a pitch for a movie.

With Zack's celluloid blessing, he wanted to give a big-screen treatment of that helmet and that bullet and that little boy.

"If we make it out of this thing, Sarge, " Fuller said.

Fuller, amazingly, even got it in writing.

Zack scrawled his intellectual consent, in pencil, on the back of a matchbook cover.

Then, just like that, it was 1951.

Casting call Zack by then was teaching mechanical drawing and coaching football at Morgantown High when a communication from a buddy, on Twentieth Century Fox letterhead and dated May 16 of that year, landed in his mailbox.

Its author was Fuller.

"Dear 'Sgt.' Zack, " it began.

The movie director had tracked him down and was telling him about that movie and its title, "The Steel Helmet, " that was shooting in Los Angeles.

"Anyway, am happy you're alive, " Fuller wrote. "When are you coming out to Hollywood ?"

Soon, as it turned out.

Same account, different war He and Martha Jane Rowe had just married, and Fuller paid for their honeymoon trip to sunny California.

It was a trip to the soundstage, where that movie they kibbitzed on, was in production, with the then-ongoing Korean War as the backdrop.

Said film told the story of a protagonist simply named, "Sgt. Zack, " who survived being shot close quarters — with a bullet that bounced around his helmet, and back out again.

A soldier, befriended by a little boy on the battlefield.

"Jenny did some amazing sleuthing, " Zack's daughter, E.J. Mahoney, said last week from her home in St. Petersburg, Fla.

She was referring to Jenny Secreto, who presently teaches English at the school on Wilson Avenue and knows a compelling narrative when one comes her way.

A detective story, too ...

Zack, who left the area in 1964 for a teaching job in Ohio, and died in 1999, was before everyone's time at MHS, Secreto said.

"I never knew he existed, " she said.

"Then, when I found out, well, you know me — I had to learn everything I could about him. I was obsessed."

Secreto went on the Google and ancestry.com trail. She found an online obituary that may have been him (it was).

Then, she found another item that may have referred to his daughter (it did).

"That got me to Florida, " the Morgantown High teacher said. "So I wrote a letter to E.J."

And Mahoney, who had also had a career in education like her dad — she became a school principal at the age of 29 on her way to earning a doctorate — wrote back.

"I was so impressed by Jenny's effort, " Zack's daughter said.

"And so touched that she would want to recognize my dad in Morgantown."

Thank the Morgantown High School Foundation, Secreto said.

An outside company that publishes promotional materials for the foundation was compiling blurbs from past graduates on their favorite memories and favorite teachers of MHS.

One came from an alum living in Texas after a career in the military.

He wrote about "Coach Zack, " and how people didn't know about what he did in the war until the movie came out — which the teacher and coach likely wouldn't have mentioned either, had it not been for an account carried in an earlier incarnation of this newspaper.

It got out the way these things always get out.

Someone, probably in the family who knew about the trip and its reason, called the newsroom after Tony and Martha got back.

A short article in the paper talked about the movie and featured a photograph of the newlyweds posing with Fuller and Gene Evans, a then-unknown character actor who was starring as "Sgt. Zack, " in the film.

Reel life — real life Evans was a big guy, with a height and build like an NFL linebacker.

He was also a World War II veteran, who came home with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

Fuller was drawn by Evans' Everyman vibe.

The actor was legitimately authentic, the director and screenwriter said — which is why Fuller wouldn't buckle, even as the studio was pushing for John Wayne in the lead role.

Like all of Fuller's other war films to follow, "The Steel Helmet, " with a pardon to reviewer-speak, was gritty and unflinching.

It touched upon the basic training-infused, conditioned hatred of the person in the other uniform.

And, the prevailing race relations in America at the time in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when it was still a "Whites Only /Coloreds Only " world at home.

There was also the tested telling of young people shipping out to war: to fight, bleed and die for causes they may not fully understand.

The movie is still available for the viewing on YouTube.

Mahoney has seen it more than once — but she can't always watch it, she said.

That's because her father, who spoke sparingly about the war, still said the battlefield tension the movie depicts was pretty much accurate.

"The Sgt. Zack on the screen was different than the Sgt. Zack in my house, " she said.

"Dad wasn't coarse or prejudiced at all, like Gene Evans played him. But Sam Fuller gave a real sense of what he still went through."

Reporting for (domestic) duty She appreciates that it was a former student who put Secreto onto her dad's life and times.

Mahoney was 12 when the family moved from Morgantown to Ohio, in the Parma area of Cleveland, where Zack continued on professionally, as an industrial arts educator who also coached the varsity on the side.

She loved her time Morgantown, she said. She remembers living in a big house in the South Park area, above MHS.

She remembers riding on the float with cheerleaders during Homecoming parades and accompanying her dad to school, watching him in his classroom, with his students.

He was everyone's favorite teacher and coach in Parma, too, his daughter said.

"When your kids come up to you, after they've been out of school, and they're actually glad to see you, well, that's your legacy as a teacher, " she said.

"That happened all the time with Dad."

Her favorite moments with her dad, however, came when her daughter, Meghan, now an educator herself, was a little girl.

That's when a certain doting grandfather would happily enlist for babysitting duty.

Zack, who was relaxed, friendly and approachable, still carried himself with a quiet kind of dignity — which is why some of the things Mahoney witnessed were priceless, she said.

She'd come home from work, and there the teacher, coach and combat veteran would be.

Reading the sports section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer with curlers in his hair, as it turned out, because little Meghan decided she wanted to play makeup artist that day.

"That's how he was, " a daughter said.

"He was just ... my dad."