Remembering when the Giants held training camp at C.W. Post for the summers of 1970-71

Fred Dryer wasn’t a TV actor yet. He was barely even a professional football player, having been drafted a year earlier by the Giants. But the moment he rolled onto campus 56 years ago this month, it was clear he soon would become a star in both pursuits.

Big Bob Lurtsema, the veteran defensive tackle, was tougher to get a read on. No one could tell if he was a weakling or a wise guy in the weight room. Tucker Frederickson already may have been something of a disappointment as the NFL’s first overall draft pick a few years earlier, but none of the coeds who chased after him seemed to mind. And Alex Webster, the two-time Pro Bowl fullback who was entering his first full season as head coach of the Giants, really appreciated a home-cooked meal.

These are just some of the precious memories those who were part of the only two summers in which the Giants held their training camp on Long Island — 1970 and 1971 — recall every year around this time.

And with this season’s team starting its latest edition of training camp at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia this week, it’s especially poignant for them to remember that brief and unique sliver of the century-plus history of the franchise when the New York Giants were anchored on Long Island.

The Giants had held previous camps everywhere from Bear Mountain to Wisconsin to Oregon before they landed in tony Brookville at what then was called C.W. Post College and now goes by LIU Post. They have gone to Connecticut, several sites in New Jersey, Albany and now West Virginia since. But for those two years when they summered on the Gold Coast like a team of Gatsby partygoers, just a few short miles up Glen Cove Road from the hated Jets at Hofstra, they were Long Islanders.

“It was an incredible time,” Frank Venturino of Glen Cove, then a teenager who worked in the locker room, told Newsday of the experience. “My brother Tommy took care of the offensive locker room, I took care of the defensive locker room. So I got to hang out with Spider Lockhart, Willie Williams, Bob Lurtsema, and he got to hang out with Fran Tarkenton. That was pretty cool.”

How’d they get to Post?

Exactly why and how the Giants wound up at Post seems to be lost to history.

They’d held their previous two camps at Fairfield University in Connecticut. John Mara, the Giants’ current president and CEO, whose family has run the team since its inception in 1925 but who was a high school student who wasn’t involved in day-to-day organizational decisions in 1970, told Newsday he could not recall how the team made the decision to train at Post (although he had other memories of the experience we will get to shortly).

Perhaps there was a connection with Joe Scannella, who had been Post’s head coach for four seasons before leaving to become a scout for the Giants in 1968. Perhaps it was because Scannella was head coach of the Montreal Alouettes by 1970, the same team with which Webster got his start as a player and retained close ties. Or maybe it was Ziggy Nedwick, the Post receivers coach at the time, who brought the two entities together. Nedwick was well-regarded in NFL circles as the designer of equipment that was used for drills at the pro level.

The likeliest reasons, though, probably were similar to the ones that led John Harbaugh to bring this year’s team to West Virginia: The search for isolation, tranquility, open space and an opportunity to build camaraderie.

“This is an opportunity for a young team with a new staff to spend 10, 12 days together in West Virginia in the hills, you know, and just be about football,” Harbaugh said. “Eat dinner together and have an off day together, all the things that you kind of do to just bond and get to know each other. If it can help our team become closer, I think that’s a good thing.”

Post was just like West Virginia . . . but much closer.

However the match between team and school happened, it felt like a perfect fit. Practices would not be very crowded. Most workouts had 500 to 1,000 fans in the bleachers and along the fences asking for autographs.

‘Off the beaten path’

“It’s a great little facility,” said Rick Barile, a captain on the 1970 Post team from Baldwin who also worked as a locker room attendant that summer. “Post is kind of in an innocuous location. It’s not like Hofstra, which is very accessible. It’s kind of off the beaten path. And aesthetically it’s a beautiful location.”

The locker room at the time was certainly not pro-caliber, Barile said. “But the outdoor facilities were phenomenal,” he added. “There were three football practice fields, not to mention the stadium field.”

A glimpse at the Stadium

Barile, who now lives in Massapequa, said he got a thrill out of being with the pro players. He briefly became one himself after leaving Post, signing as an undrafted rookie fullback with the Cowboys, but he suffered a knee injury during a conditioning drill and was cut before he was able to participate in an actual practice.

“We would stargaze at these guys,” Barile said. “It was where we practiced, and to see those guys there was really cool.”

Glimpse of the Stadium

He also remembered being asked to help haul the Giants’ equipment back to the Bronx after they wrapped up their stay at Post. That endeavor came with a self-guided tour.

“Here we were at Yankee Stadium standing at home plate, looking at the monuments, saying ‘This is where Babe Ruth played,’ ” he said. “That was very very cool. To actually stand there in the outfield like my idol Mickey Mantle, that was quite an experience.”

The rationales for camp may have been similar to today’s, but the times and tones were decidedly different.

In an article early in the 1970 camp, Newsday casually reported about the cases of beer being hauled into Brookville Hall, the three-story dormitory building where the team was housed, for delivery to the makeshift coaches’ offices.

John Mara told Newsday that the first night he spent on campus in his room in Brookville Hall, he saw something fall past his window. Then something fell by again. He quickly realized it was the players climbing out their own windows above him to break curfew.

They wouldn’t have to go far to vent some training camp steam. Post, like many colleges at the time, had a fully operational bar right on campus called The Rathskeller. And Frederickson, in a phone call with Newsday, recalled other nearby establishments such as The Mug and College Hall in Glen Head where he and players would sneak off to for beers on their time off . . . or otherwise.

Frederickson said he doesn’t remember much about the football during those summers at Post, but he did recall the carousing and the fact that he was stung under the eye by a bee early in the 1970 camp. The insect had flown in through his face mask during one of the early practices.

“I had to miss almost three weeks of workouts,” he said, far from unhappy about sitting out the strenuous and repetitive process. “That was my favorite part of it.”

Perhaps now it’s easier to understand why the Giants didn’t win more games in those miserable 1970s.

Dinner table to weight room

Others obviously have different recall of those days.

Venturino didn’t just get to watch the Giants practice, he got to watch them eat. His father, Al, was the equipment manager at Post; Venturino and his brother would follow in the family business, with Frank serving in a similar capacity at Post while Tommy did the same at Penn State. He said his dad would have Webster and the rest of the coaching staff over to the house in Glen Cove for big Italian-food dinners several times each of those years.

“The Giants experience was something we’ll never forget,” he said.

Gary Santangelo, who was from New Jersey and was a Post starting offensive lineman at the time, said he remembers being in the weight room with Lurtsema.

“I don’t know if he was fooling around to make us feel strong, but we were working out, a couple of the Post players, and they were working out, and he was doing bench presses and struggling with a very small amount of weight,” Santangelo told Newsday. “I don’t know if he was doing that to bust our chops or whatever, but here we thought we were big shots. ‘Holy cow, I’m doing this easy and Lurtsema is struggling?’ ”

Santangelo may have felt stronger than an NFL player, but he still wasn’t going to push his luck. He and teammate Paul Eliopolis, who was from Massachusetts and who died last year, worked cleaning up the dorm rooms while the players were at practice.

“Eliopolis, he always wanted to poke around and go through their stuff,” Santangelo said. “I said ‘Paul, are you out of your friggin’ head? Are you crazy? One of these guys walks in here and they’ll kill both of us. I’m not doing anything and I’ll get killed too!’ ”

California callin’

Everyone remembered the impression Dryer made.

“He was from California,” Santangelo said. “I can still see Freddy Dryer driving up with his Volkswagen bus, two surfboards on the top, long blond hair. That certainly stuck in my memory.”

And of course there was the legend of Gary Wichard, the Post quarterback who would go on to become an NFL agent before he died in 2011. The story goes that Wichard was fielding long field-goal kicks from Pete Gogolak and throwing the footballs all the way back nearly the entire length of the field. Y.A. Tittle, then one of the Giants’ coaches, saw the display.

“He may have the best arm I’ve ever seen,” Tittle told The New York Times.

“It was a very cool and unique experience, and we loved it,” Barile said. “As they say, it was a good gig.”

In 1972 the Giants were back to having their camp at Fairfield in Connecticut. Their regular-season home also began to move around at that point. After being essentially evicted from Yankee Stadium, they played part of the 1973 season and all of 1974 at the Yale Bowl, spent 1975 at Shea Stadium in Queens, then moved to the Meadowlands in New Jersey, which has been their base of operations since 1976.

But in all those years, they never came back to Long Island. Nor have there been any recent talks to do so in the future.

“It’s too bad,” Venturino said with some palpable resentment. “We gave them everything.”

For a few weeks over two summers more than 50 years ago, though, in an era that seems closer to leather helmets than this age of AI analytics and GPS-tracked training, at a school whose name has changed and whose denizens of the time are getting fewer and fewer, one of the NFL’s marquee organizations wasn’t known as the New York Football Giants.

Nor were they the Connecticut, New Jersey, Oregon, Wisconsin or West Virginia Giants.

They were the Long Island Giants. The C.W. Post Giants.

In some minds, they always will be.