No! No! No! Who the Hell Boos Santa Claus?!

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Well, because it's fun to do and we know we love it and we hope you do too. Philadelphia has a reputation across professional sports for having the toughest and roughest fans. Nobody knows that better than Frank Olivo. He was on this day in 1968 when the 19-year-old Olivo was dressed as Santa Claus at an Eagles football game and was booed and pelted with snowballs by the Philadelphia fans. It's such a famous moment that ESPN even made a spoof 30 for 30 about it. Here to tell the story is Frank's first cousin and best friend, Richard Monastra.

Here's Rich starting with a little background on both him and Snowball Santa Frank Olivo. We were born in the post-war era. Two of us are baby boomers. I was born in 46. Frank was born in 1948 in South Philadelphia, born to typical Italian immigrant families.

Our parents hailed from Naples, Italy, for the most part. We were born and raised in South Philadelphia, went to Catholic elementary schools, Catholic high school. I graduated in 1964. Frank graduated in 1966 from the same high school, Bishop Newman.

I went on to college. Frank decided that he wanted to be a barber, so he went to barbering school. His father was a veteran of World War II.

He had landed at Omaha Beach in the D-Day. He was wounded and wound up with a plate in his head. His mother, Rose, worked her whole life in the tailor shops, which was pretty typical for South Philadelphia women. Frank went to barber school in Center City, Philadelphia, in the area now they call Chinatown. Got his barber's license.

Frank really, really liked that. He liked being a barber. He was very social. By the time he was a kid, he was very, very social.

He got along with everybody. He had a talent early on. We started to see it in him of being a bit of a showman, too. He would do impersonations of actors, movie stars, whatever.

Family really loved it. Kids in the neighborhood really loved it when he would imitate our teachers, especially when we were in high school. He sort of liked all that attention. He was sort of deprived of that attention as a kid. His own personal family, his mother and father, I guess you might call them today what we might say is a dysfunctional family.

Rose and Bruno were always working. Frankie was on the street a lot of the time. Fortunately, he would come over to our house. My mother kind of took him in. He was like our brother. That part of South Philadelphia sometimes has a bad rep. A little bit of the so-called mob guys hung out there.

There's a place called Poochie's and Nick's Roast Beef Shop. I think both of those places were kind of fronts for the organized mob guys. Somehow, Frank got friendly with those people as well. Every once in a while, they would ask us to carry these little brown bags to go from point A to point B.

Little did we know we were carrying number plays or horse bets. Frank spoke up about it one time. He said, what's in these bags you're asking us to carry?

One of the guys at this place called Poochie showed them. Frankie started to laugh. The quasi-mob guy started to laugh, too. He said, I like you kids. You guys are really cool.

You've got a real chutzpah here, so to speak. He gave us a free roast beef sandwich and half a buck apiece. Time went on.

I went on to college. We were always fans of the Philadelphia sports scene. We used to go up the old Scheib Park to watch the Phillies play. The cops there who guarded the stadium were very friendly. They let you hang outside the stadium, and once the first inning was over, they opened up the gates and we all got in for free.

The kids hanging outside the stadium got in for free. We sat up in the bleachers and watched the ball game. Once we were a bit older in our teens, our uncles had eight season tickets, four in one row and four seats right behind the first four. As we grew up, they would take us to the Eagles games as a rite of passage.

That ultimately led up to the infamous snowball event in December of 1968. The Eagles were scheduled to play the Minnesota Vikings, which were a fairly new team at that time. I think they had come into the league about 1961 or 1962. They weren't very good, but the Eagles were worse. The Eagles were having a very, very bad year. They were something like 2-10 or 2-11. Their schedule was much shorter.

I think the NFL played a 12 or 14 game schedule then. Anyway, this game, all the sports writers had picked up on it. They were calling it the O.J. Bowl in reference to O.J. Simpson. If the Eagles lost this game, they would get the number one draft choice in the NFL draft. Of course, everybody was touting O.J. Simpson. At that moment, he was probably the best player in the country playing for the University of Southern California. The Eagles weren't really a down period. Their coach, Joe Keharik, former coach at Notre Dame, had signed a 15-year contract. Can you imagine back in those days? I think Joe Keharik was a great example of the Peter Principle.

You rise one level above your competence. He was great as a college coach, but he was lousy as a pro coach. People would boo him routinely every game, win or lose. On this day, there was an airplane circling over Franklin Field, trailing a banner saying, Joe must go, and every time the plane went over, fans would cheer. The fans were in a sour mood that day, trust me.

It snowed the day before Saturday, nothing much. The game started late because they had to clear the field. The game starts, the game goes on, and the Eagles are winning, and the fans are booing.

You can imagine, because everybody wanted them to lose so that they could draft Simpson. Historically, the Eagles, at the last home game, used to have Santa Claus come out on a sleigh. He would throw these miniature footballs into the stands, one of which was a gold-colored one. If you caught the gold one, you got a season ticket for the next year's games. Well, that year, December of 1968, for whatever reason, they decided not to throw out the footballs.

People were booing that. Somewhere in the second quarter, this man from the Eagles is looking throughout the stands, and he spots Frankie with a Santa Claus suit. Now, the obvious question is, why is Frankie wearing a Santa Claus suit to the Eagles game? Well, our grandmother, each Christmas, would host a Christmas party for all the grandchildren, and she would give them our gifts there. She was getting up in years, and rather than going to visit each one of our households, even though we were fairly close, it was a bit of a chore for her, so it was a big party. All the relatives, all the cousins, aunts, uncles, there had to be 60, 70 people in the house. Well, one of my uncles usually played Santa Claus.

Charlie Simkus had been doing it, but Charlie had lost a lot of weight. He wouldn't fill out the suit, so he drafted Frankie Olivo to do the Santa. So he gave him the Santa suit, and Frankie decided on a whim to wear the Santa suit to the Eagles game, because we were going to go right from the Eagles game back to my grandmother's house for the Christmas party.

And you're listening to Richmond Astra, and he's the first cousin of Frank Olivo. And Frank, well, you're going to hear more about this remarkable episode in Philadelphia sports history, and American sports history for that matter, when we come back, more of the story of the Snowball Santa, which occurred on this day in 1969, here on our special Christmas edition of Our American Stories. Okay, so you never became a professional soccer star. But you could still show out during the FIFA World Cup 2022 with cool soccer swag from your friends at Frito-Lay. Frito-Lay, the official USA snack of the FIFA World Cup 2022, is giving you the chance to win custom swag and amazing prizes by joining their pass the ball challenge.

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Say what to watch into your Xfinity voice remote. And we continue here with our special Christmas edition of Our American Stories. You've been listening to Richard Manestra tell the story of his first cousin and best friend, Frank Olivo, the Snowball Santa. This infamous event took place on this day in 1968. At an Eagles football game in Philadelphia.

Let's continue with the story. So we're in the stands. Frank has got the Santa suit on. The place is in a sour mood. The Eagles are winning. Planes are flying over saying Joe must go.

I mean it was really nasty. Anyway, this guy from the Eagles staff spots Frankie, goes up in the stands and asks him if he'd be interested in subbing for the man they had hired to play Santa Claus. Apparently the guy they had hired, the Eagles had hired, was stranded up in North Jersey somewhere and couldn't get down there to Philadelphia because of the snow.

Okay. PR guy for the Eagles told them what to do, where to be and so forth. And they took him into one of the bowels of the stadium there. Half time came. The PA announcer gets on the PA and says Santa Claus is coming to town.

Would everybody welcome Santa Claus? What a big Philadelphia welcome. Well, that's when the fun began.

Frankie enters the field. He's walking around carrying a big Santa bag and he's got some of the Eagles cheerleaders are dressed up as elves. And they're walking around the base of the stadium and all the booing started. People started booing Santa Claus. And then the snowballs came. People are picking up and they're making snowballs and throwing them at Santa Claus and the elves. Well, a couple of the elves ran for cover.

And here's Frankie became the target of all this. Not only did they start throwing snowballs, but they would start throwing anything they can get their hands on. People are throwing beer cans, beer bottles, sandwiches, anything they get their hands on. They're heaving at Santa Claus. They're taking out their vengeance about the Eagles poor season and winning this game, thereby losing the O.J.

Bowl. They were taking their frustrations out on poor Santa Claus. So Frankie and what was left of the elves crew made a circle around the field and then they went back in.

Frankie worked his way back to the to our seats. Of course, when we all got back to the Christmas party, we all were telling, you know, the others who were at the party what had happened. You know, Frank had gotten hit with snowballs and beer cans and stale sandwiches and hoagies and God knows what all. And people were half laughing and, you know, half shocked by it all.

It wasn't until that night somebody had the television on in one of the other rooms in my grandmother's house. And they noticed that Frankie's on TV. So we all ran over to the TV set, you know, and you see him coming out of the tunnel of the stadium.

They're playing some music on the P.A. system and people started throwing snowballs and you hear the booing and all that. Of course, Philadelphia fans have had this reputation for eons about being rowdy fans, you know, all that stuff. We're the only city that had a judge on site and a sort of a jail in the bowels of the stadium for people who got too rowdy.

So, I mean, it was really crazy. Philadelphia is a great sports town, don't get me wrong, but people can get really crazy sometimes. So this story made national news and at least one aspect of international news.

The London Times picked up on it. He told us he did not expect, you know, that booing. He said booing bothered him more than anything.

He said, you know, he couldn't understand people throwing snow and all that. But he said the booing, he said, who the hell booed Santa Claus? And, of course, that's the line that got tagged to Philadelphia from that point on. This is the city that, you know, booed Santa Claus.

And every once in a blue moon, you hear some sportscaster on some station, local or national, throw that line out there. You know, when something happens negatively in the city of Philadelphia, they'll say, well, you got to remember this is the city that booed Santa Claus. Of course, when he went back to work at the barbershop, he was working in a barbershop in the suburban station, which is the main train station in the center city of Philadelphia. And people would come in there, they would spot him there. Of course, his picture was cut out of the newspapers.

There were people hanging up in their windows of the barbershop. He got a lot of customers from local celebrities, business people, television stars. One of his customers was the Archbishop of Philadelphia at the time. He was a man by the name of John Kroll.

He's now deceased. But he was asking Frankie for his autograph. Imagine this, the cardinal of Philadelphia asking Frankie for his autograph. So he had all the local politicians would stop in there. Mayor Tate, James Tate was the mayor of Philadelphia, had his picture taken down in Frank's barbershop. So he became a local celebrity.

Frank never got any pay from the Eagles. They gave him a pair of cufflinks, if you can believe that. Frank was not much of a cuff-shirt kind of guy, you know.

In fact, one of my uncles, Tony, he was a bit of a loudmouth, to say the least. He wrote to the Eagles and he called them a bunch of cheap SOBs. Anyway, Frank got his own shop. Didn't fare well.

It was a bad time. By this time, it's the early 80s, had to close the shop down. He went to work at one of the casinos that had just opened up in Atlantic City. As a dealer, he got his license as a dealer. And he ultimately worked his way up to become a pit boss. He got to rub elbows with some of the acts that were appearing there. One of his favorite buddies was Don Rickles. Frankie was on a first-name basis with Don Rickles.

They exchanged cards at Christmas time. I think when Frankie's daughter got married, or maybe it was his son, I forget which, Don Rickles sent him a gift. Throughout his life, however, Frank was plagued by heart issues. Even as a kid, sometimes he'd have to stop playing ball for a bit, or whatever we were doing became too much of an exertion for him. Frank died on the 30th of April, 2015.

Let's see, he was about 65 or 66 at the time. I did the formal eulogy at Frank's funeral. And while I was preparing to do that, I was getting phone calls. When I tell you literally from all over the country, the story didn't die. It just wouldn't leave him.

Even to this day, the fact that you contacted me, evidence is the fact that people are still talking about it. The day of his funeral, the priest asked me what music they should have for Frankie. And half-jokingly, I said, play Here Comes Santa Claus. The priest looked at me rather puzzled. I said, I'm just kidding, Padre.

But I thought that would have been appropriate, because I think he would have loved that. So the legend lives on. He's the gift that keeps on giving. And you've been listening to Frankie Olivo's first cousin, Rich Monastra, tell the story of the snowball Santa and the psychological profile of a Philadelphia Eagle fan, at least a whole bunch. And I was a New York Giants fan growing up in northern New Jersey, and I will never forget my first away game at Philadelphia, and I had the temerity to wear a New York Giants hat. That lasted about a second.

The story of Frank Olivo, the story of Snowball Santa, which occurred on this day in 1968, here on Our American Stories. Imagine air travel that's simple, hassle-free, and fast. That's Surf Air. Save hours on every trip. Avoid busy, crowded terminals and fly from airports closer to your home.

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There's a better way to fly private. So you never became a soccer star, but you could still show out during the FIFA World Cup 2022 with cool soccer swag from Frito-Lay, the official USA snack of the FIFA World Cup 2022. Add your picture to the Golden World Soccer Ball, then pass the ball to fellow fans for a chance to score custom swag. Scan the QR code on specially marked bags of Leis, Cheetos, or Doritos, or visit Fritolayscore.com to join the Pass the Ball Challenge. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residence at 50 USDC.

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