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From Super Bowls to Super Donuts, 'You have to keep moving,' Franco Harris says

Aug. 20—Franco Harris got an immaculate reception, of sorts, Friday morning at South Middle School.

The 100 or so people in the auditorium laughed warmly at the one-liners launched out with ease by the NFL Hall of Fame running back.

Sometimes, they would gently interrupt the player who starred with the Steelers during the team's memorable dynasty of the 1970s — to agree, out loud, with what he just said, or to offer an aside of their own.

And they applauded the Super Donut just as much as the applauded the Super Bowl.

The former was why Harris, 72, who fashioned himself into a food service entrepreneur three decades ago after retiring from the game, was in the University City on this morning.

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That's the name of the signature donut offering of Super Bakery, the Pittsburgh enterprise he founded in 1990 with Lydell Mitchell, his fellow running back on the Penn State Nittany Lions team during his college football days.

Harris graduated in 1971 with a degree in hospitality management.

He was drafted by the Pittsburgh football franchise a year later.

The aforementioned doughnuts, meanwhile, are made with whole grains and enriched with a trademarked blend of minerals, vitamins and protein — or MVP, as the bakery likes to slyly tout on the nutrition label.

Super Bakery markets them to convenience stores, hospitals and schools across the continental U.S., including Monongalia County's school district, which is a longtime client.

Harris was in Morgantown at the invitation of Brian Kiehl, who directs child nutrition services for local district.

Classes begin here Tuesday and Kiehl traditionally assembles cooks the week before the first day for a rundown on federal nutritional guidelines, recipe tips and an old-fashioned pep talk on the game-day situations, as it were, they'll face in the cafeteria.

Harris delivered the latter on this morning.

"I know what you guys do, day in and day out, and I can't thank you enough, " he said.

"You can see the impact proper nutrition has on kids, " he continued. "It's food for the body and the brain."

Harris came up with the idea to pack all that nutrition into a product kids might actually enjoy.

"Everybody loves doughnuts, " he said, as he readied to take the auditorium stage.

"Kids love doughnuts, grown-ups love doughnuts. It was a chance for us to do something different."

As it turns out, Harris carried that doughnut concept just as efficiently as his did the football in the Pittsburgh backfield.

"Donut Wednesday, " which is built around the Super Donut, is a popular feature on cafeteria calendars across Mon's schools.

"Our kids really love 'em, " Nichole Kennedy, who works in the cafeteria at Suncrest Middle with her daughter, Katrina LeMasters, said. "Everybody does."

"And we love that Franco came down to talk to us, " her daughter seconded. "We appreciate that he knows what we do every day. Sometimes, you just want to hear that."

From bowl games to baked goods Harris got into the food game after unlacing his cleats for good in 1984.

A distribution business he fronted morphed into Super Bakery six years later.

Harris off-loaded trucks with a pallet jack and just him — "Which made me just as sore as any football game, " he said, ruefully.

He was also his own delivery driver. On more than one morning, a bleary eyed Pittsburgher ducking into a convenience store for his morning coffee would stop, then double back around.

That familiar-looking guy stocking shelves warranted a second look. Recognition was inevitable.

"Transitions can be hard, " Harris said, with a smile and a shrug. "But you have to keep moving."

Not that he had a choice: Players then didn't draw the salaries they do today, he said.

'They thought the play was over'

There was no doubt he was going to put in time on a job somewhere, no matter how many yards and touchdown points he put up on the scoreboard at Three Rivers Stadium.

Meanwhile, on Dec. 23, 1972, Harris kept moving in a game against the Oakland Raiders — and made himself famous in the process.

This wasn't just any game. This was a playoff game. After 40 years of wandering the NFL desert, the Steelers were back in contention for a title.

Twenty-two seconds left on the clock, Oakland with a 7-6 lead.

Terry Bradshaw, the brash, blonde quarterback for the Steelers, throws a pass in desperation that bounces off the original target after a collision.

Game over.

Or not.

A one-day doughnut entrepreneur scoops up the ball, and runs it in to the end zone.

Jack Fleming, the WVU Mountaineers' play-by-play announcer who did the same for the Steelers on Sundays, made the call — the audio of which is also immortalized on the clip from NFL Films.

Sport media members decreed that act — dubbed in Catholic-heavy Pittsburgh as the "Immaculate Reception " — as the No. 1 play in the history of the league.

Was it luck that Harris was there ?

He doesn't think so, he said Friday. Because he went for the ball.

"If you go for the football, you're going to make something happen, " he said. "That's where the action is."

"You only had one player moving on that field after Terry threw that pass, and that was me, " he said.

"The Oakland players all stopped. They thought the play was over."

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