The Steagles Had Two Home Cities. Their Workweek Was the Harder Divide.

Jack Hinkle’s football day did not begin at a football field. During the 1943 season, he worked at Bendix Aviation in North Philadelphia, where several of his teammates also held jobs. Practice came after work. In a recollection preserved by the Professional Football Researchers Association, Hinkle described the fatigue of putting in a day at the plant and then trying to play football at night. (profootballresearchers.com)

That was an unusual foundation for an NFL team, even in a league accustomed to players holding other jobs. Hinkle belonged to the Phil-Pitt Combine, the one-year partnership between the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers that newspapers and fans called the Steagles. The club had two home cities, two head coaches and a roster assembled because war had left both franchises short of players. Yet the hardest division to manage may have been the one between the hours available for football and the hours already claimed by war-related work.

Original charcoal editorial illustration of a wartime football player carrying his helmet before an industrial skyline; interpretive scene, not a documented Steagles moment.

The Steagles finished 5–4–1, giving the Eagles franchise its first winning season. That result makes the experiment sound tidier than it was. The team did not discover a permanent new way to run a football club; it lasted one season. Its achievement was narrower and more revealing: amid factory schedules, incomplete practices and trips between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, it managed to become good enough to win more games than it lost. (static.www.nfl.com)

By 1943, World War II had changed what an NFL roster could be. Players had entered military service, and those still available did not all fit one simple description. The National WWII Museum’s account of the team notes the varied circumstances of men who remained in the league: quarterback Allie Sherman had perforated eardrums, Hinkle had suffered from ulcers, end Tony Bova had poor eyesight, and Roy Zimmerman’s farming work contributed to his exemption. Their circumstances differed, but together they show why it would be misleading to reduce the Steagles to a team of men who had merely been passed over for service. (nationalww2museum.org)

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh faced the same problem: neither had enough available players to proceed as it normally would. Pooling their resources kept both franchises on the field. The arrangement’s formal name, Phil-Pitt Combine, described its mechanics without much charm. “Steagles” did the opposite. The Pro Football Hall of Fame credits the nickname to local newspapers, including Pittsburgh Press writer Chet Smith. It sounded like the name of a team. Behind it was an agreement between two clubs with separate histories, cities and loyalties. (profootballhof.com)

Those cities remained visible on the schedule. Four home games were played at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park and two at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. A supporter could see the Steagles at either end of Pennsylvania. The players, meanwhile, needed more than a shared uniform to make the arrangement work. They needed time together, and time was precisely what their other obligations limited. (static.www.nfl.com)

Ray Didinger’s Eagles histories describe a team whose players were required to hold full-time jobs in defense plants or other war-related businesses. Practices were held at night, with work schedules making full attendance difficult. The broader setting helps explain why those jobs mattered. Wartime production filled the Philadelphia region’s shipyards and factories; Pittsburgh’s steel industry was part of the country’s defense buildup. That industrial setting did not put every Steagle at the same plant or on the same shift. It did mean that football was being fitted around work central to the war effort, not the other way around. (philadelphiaeagles.com)

Hinkle’s job at Bendix gives that general condition a human scale. He had been discharged from the Army Air Forces and was working in North Philadelphia. He could report for football, but reporting was not the same as arriving rested. His account of working by day and practicing by night suggests a problem no diagram on a coach’s board could solve: instruction requires attention, repetition requires time, and teammates need to be present together to learn how to play together. (profootballresearchers.com)

The coaching arrangement added another layer. Philadelphia’s Greasy Neale and Pittsburgh’s Walt Kiesling served as co-coaches, each bringing his own connection to one half of the partnership. Former players Bucko Kilroy and Vic Sears later recalled friction between them in interviews recounted by Didinger. Those memories give the shared leadership a rough edge, though they are not a reason to make the season into a tale of two men’s personal feud. Even perfectly harmonious coaches would have faced the same limited practice hours and patchwork roster. (philadelphiaeagles.com)

Some of the players themselves embodied the make-do nature of the season. Bill Hewitt, a star who had retired in 1939, returned to play. His presence gave the Steagles a Hall of Fame talent, but it also showed how far the league had to reach to fill its teams. Men at different stages of their football lives were being brought together under circumstances neither franchise had planned. (profootballhof.com)

Once games began, the improvised club gave little immediate sign that it would struggle to stay above .500. It opened with a 17–0 win over Brooklyn, holding Brooklyn to negative rushing yardage, and then beat the New York Giants. Those victories were real evidence that the Steagles could compete. They were not evidence that the work of becoming a team was finished. (static.www.nfl.com)

Heavy losses to Chicago and the Giants followed. The contrast matters more than the neatness of a fast-start, hard-fall storyline. The Steagles were capable of shutting down one opponent and being badly beaten by another. Their season moved through that unevenness rather than overcoming it all at once. Each week brought another game to prepare for, with practices still subject to the demands of players’ jobs. (static.www.nfl.com)

The word “combine” can make the team sound as though it was assembled once and then simply sent out to play. In practice, combining is a continuing task. Coaches have to decide what can be taught in the time available. Players have to learn one another’s habits, then carry that knowledge into a game. A club that splits its home dates between two cities must also keep its football operation moving. The Steagles’ record cannot measure all of that work, but it is hard to understand the record without it.

Late in the season, the wins that secured a winning record came at the two ends of the team’s geography. At Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, the Steagles beat Detroit 35–34. One point separated them from a different result. They followed with a 27–14 road victory over Washington, reaching 5–3–1 before their finale. After the reversals earlier in the schedule, those games gave the season its firmest answer to the question of whether this arrangement could produce a competitive football team. (static.www.nfl.com)

The answer was yes, within limits. They had not yet secured a championship, and their final game did not supply a triumphant closing scene. Green Bay beat them 38–28 at Shibe Park. A contemporary Stars and Stripes report described a competitive game before 34,294 spectators, then the largest crowd for a professional football game at that ballpark. Don Hutson scored 20 points for the Packers. The home crowd saw a loss, but it also saw a team that had made its peculiar arrangement last through the season and finished on the winning side of the standings. (philadelphiaeagles.com)

That distinction is worth preserving. It would be easy to turn the Steagles into a wartime fable in which every obstacle is answered by a victory. Their season does not require one. They lost four games and tied another. Their coaches shared authority uneasily, according to players who remembered them. Their practices had to compete with full-time work. A one-point win helped put them above .500, and a ten-point loss ended their year.

After 1943, the partnership ended and the Eagles and Steelers returned to separate organizations. The nickname endured because it captures the oddity at a glance: two familiar teams spliced into one. But the oddity alone is not the reason the Steagles matter. Their season shows what wartime disruption looked like after the decision to keep playing had been made—when a player still had to finish his shift, a coach still had to find a way to practice, and a team still had to meet on Sunday ready to face an opponent. (profootballhof.com)

The Steagles’ first winning season in Eagles franchise history was built under those conditions. Its lasting image is not simply a merged name on a schedule, or even a crowd at Shibe Park watching the last game. It is Hinkle coming from Bendix to football, joining teammates whose days had been claimed elsewhere, and helping make one team out of the hours they had left.