SCHENECTADY – Schenectady High School football coach Carmen DePoalo often uses quotes he borrowed from longtime friend and area youth football legend George Rose to motivate his varsity team.
“Do good things, and good things will happen,” DePoalo said earlier this week. “At practice I tell my guys that all the time. That’s something I learned from him.”
Rose did a lot of good things, too many to count, actually, in his over 50 years as a volunteer with the Schenectady-Belmont Pop Warner football program. He was so influential that in 2009 the Schenectady City Council paid tribute to the league’s longtime president by adopting a resolution praising his accomplishments.
Rose, who stepped away from league activities in 2016, died Sunday at St. Peter’s Hospital at the age of 88.
“He had a passion for those kids. For Belmont,” said DePoalo, who volunteered alongside Rose for years with the football program in Schenectady. “Without George, a lot of kids would have been nowhere. It’s a big loss in the community. He was a legend, and he will be sorely missed.”
But, never forgotten by so many he touched.
“Mr. Rose was Pop Warner, and Pop Warner was Mr. Rose,” said Derek Adams, an assistant on DePoalo’s high school football team and a former coach with Schenectady-Belmont. “He lived on Victory Avenue.”
“He made that football league his family,” said Gwendolyn Lawson, one of Rose’s four children and one of three who survive him. “He went all out for those children. He would help them pay for registration. He would give them rides to practice and games. He would make sure they got home safe.”
DePoalo said the former General Electric welder went the extra yard so he could help out others in the youth football community while tending to his own family. The St. Luke’s Catholic Church congregant and usher never asked for anything in return.
“Work, work, work. That’s the type of man he was,” DePoalo said of Rose, who was born and raised in South Carolina. “He worked [the] second shift [at GE], and when he was done, he’d sleep for a couple hours and then work a second and sometimes a third job.
“A lot of kids we coached had no dads,” DePoalo added. “I can’t tell you how many kids he took care of at Christmastime.”
“We used to call him ‘The Mayor,’” Adams said of Rose, who battled back from a stroke before finishing out his long and successful run with Schenectady-Belmont. “As we grew up, we started to realize just how much he did and what he meant.”
As Schenectady-Belmont Pop Warner president, Rose never refused a youngster who wanted to get involved in the football league.
“He just wanted to make sure kids had a chance to play football,” said Adams. “He’d go through fire for kids. For kids who had nothing.”
“He believed that there was no bad kid, and that every kid deserved a shot,” DePoalo said.
On the field it was Xs and Os, but moreso, a time for Rose to extend life lessons for the youngsters to digest.
“He taught them the right way,” Lawson said. “He was big on sportsmanship. Working as a team.”
And accountability.
“If a kid did something wrong, he’d call them out. The next thing you know, he’s got an arm around him,” DePoalo said. “That’s the kind of guy he was. We won a lot of championships there, but above all that stuff, he was a real gentleman.”
Rose was polite yet relentless as a fundraiser for Schenectady-Belmont Pop Warner. He would often solicit donations from area businesses, and when turned away, he would always return and ask again.
“Once given a task, he didn’t give up,” Lawson said of her dad.
Rose was quite thorough, too.
“When we had our kids going out for donations, he made sure every kid had a dime taped to the bottom of their bucket,” DePoalo recalled. “Just in case they needed to make a phone call. He was always looking out for them.”
Adams was one of those kids, acting as a team mascot and later competing as a Schenectady-Belmont player. Like many of them, Adams returned to the league to serve as a coach.
“What stands out with me and him [Rose] was the first Super Bowl I won [in 1998] with the Junior Midgets, and the look on his face,” Adams said. “He had this huge smile. It was like having a father being proud of you.”
DePoalo chuckled when recalling the time Rose became the league’s president in the early 1970s. DePoalo’s dad, Sal, was president at that time and knew Rose through construction projects they worked on.
“It was election time and my father said to George, ‘If I’m going to run for president, you’re going to be my vice president,’” DePoalo recounted. “Right after we had the election and they both got voted in, my father quit, and that made George president. George was good with it, and we all had a good laugh.”
Rose first became active with Belmont Pop Warner when his son, George Jr. — a former Los Angeles Police Department officer who died in 2001 — joined the league. Rose helped set up playing fields and was a member of the chain gang before his role with the organization — and popularity — expanded over time.
“He couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone,” Lawson said. “Those kids are grown up now, but they remember him.”
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Rip Mr Rose, a true gentleman and and a wonderful human being. He was to youth football in Schenectady what Mike Maietta was to youth baseball.