Noti III remembered as one of Dieruff ’s first great athletes
In its 64-year history, Dieruff High School has produced its share of outstanding athletes: Ross Moore, Robin and Jeff Bleamer, Vivian Riddick, Rick Hollister, Skip Kintz, Bob Riedy, Jan Kapcala, George Atiyeh, Anthony Ross, John Smurda and Andre Reed to mention a few.
But one of the first great ones to wear blue and grey after Dieruff opened its doors in 1959 was Charlies Noti III, one of the school’s first Kiska Award winners.
The 1962 Dieruff graduate was a star in football and basketball for the Huskies. He was a Big 33 selection in football and after a stint at Fork Union Military Academy where he played football and basketball, he earned a scholarship to play at the University of Arizona.
After one year of football with the Wildcats, he transferred to the University of Miami and played three years of Division I basketball for the Hurricanes.
Noti died Sept. 2 in Cape Coral, Florida. He was 79.
“Charlie and I used to hang around a lot together growing up on the East Side,” said Joe D’Annibale, the longtime president of East Side Youth Center. “Charlie was a great athlete, but more importantly, a great guy. He’d do anything for you. He was all over the place and if you needed something, he’d get it for you. When we were kids, we didn’t have a lot of money. If we needed a ride or anything, Charlie was always there”
Noti played for Francis O’Keefe and Ernie Wescoe in football at Dieruff and legendary basketball coach Dick Schmidt.
The Noti family became synonymous with the East Side and Huskies athletics.
His father, Charles “Chubby” Noti Jr., was once called “The Mayor of East Allentown,” by a former Allentown mayor, the late Joseph Daddona. Chubby Noti was involved in the building of the East Side Youth Center and said when he was inducted into Dieruff ’s Hall of Fame in 1988: “All of my kids were involved in sports and the East Side Youth Center was a place for them to play. The East Side had nothing like it; a big indoor gym, a wide-open field big enough for a football and baseball field, an outdoor basketball court. It was a place for the kids to go and get involved with sports.”
One of those kids was his son Charles III.
He was a captain of the Dieruff basketball team and a teammate of Riedy, who went on to play at Duke. In football, he was a running back for the East team in the Big 33 Classic.
Despite all of his accomplishments,
Noti was quite humble.
“Charlie was one of the best athletes to come out of the East Side, and with him everything was the East Side, the same as his dad,” D’Annibale said. “The thing about him was that he didn’t want the spotlight. He didn’t like a lot of attention. People would want to give him awards and stuff and he kept declining them. A couple of organizations wanted to award him this or award him that; he kept saying no.”
Noti’s son, Charles IV, also known as Chopper and another former Dieruff athlete, backed up D’Annibale’s comments.
“My dad didn’t talk about his accomplishments at all, ever; in fact, we didn’t even talk a lot about sports,” he said. “It wasn’t a big thing for him. But he did love the University of Miami and followed their teams and he would go to their reunions. I think there was not a day in his adult life when he didn’t wear a Miami shirt.”
One of the stories from Noti’s Miami days reveals the kind of athlete he was.
“The one story I did hear from my mom was that in the summer when he was entering his senior year of basketball he was run over by a backhoe. The back tire of the backhoe ran over the top of him,” Chopper Noti said. “My mom said the only reason he was alive was because he was so strong. The backhoe shattered his pelvis, but didn’t hit any organs and he was still able to play his senior year of basketball at Miami.”
His story was told in an orthopedic magazine.
The family will be scheduling a memorial service in the Lehigh Valley later this week.