Chapter 12
The Real Family
ASIDE FROM HAVING TO CHANGE POSITIONS a time or two, prove to a couple of managers that he could hit left-handed pitching, battle a nagging weight problem and put up with perhaps more than his share of injuries, Willie Stargell sailed through his major-league career relatively unscathed on the baseball diamond.
His adult life off the diamond, though, had more than a few challenges. Two of his three marriages ended in divorce. Two of his five children were born to women to whom Stargell was not married. He was the subject of a controversial book, in which his off-field exploits were chronicled by a writer and photographer who were given surprisingly open access during the 1973 season. He was accused by two teammates of providing amphetamines, an accusation that later was found to have no substance by baseball’s commissioner. He watched helplessly as his second wife, Dolores, battled for her life after suffering a near-fatal brain aneurysm, then had to endure the media reports of the couple’s separation and ultimate divorce just a few years later. Yet after his divorce from Dolores he remained on relatively good terms with her. The same could be said of his post-marital relationship with his first wife, Lois. And all five of his children remained a major part of his life until the very end. Family—just as it was important to the 1979 Pirates—was one of the pillars upon which Stargell built his life.
One of the family members closest to Stargell was his sister, Sandrus Collier. Although technically Stargell’s half-sister—they shared the same mother, Gladys, but had different fathers—Stargell never thought of Sandrus as anything but his sister. Ten years younger than her famous brother, Collier had an up-close-and-personal view of the Hall of Famer during his teenage years, and much of his adult life as well. She remembers Willie the ballplayer had a persona that was different from Willie the brother or Willie the family man. “With his family, he was more down to earth. And in baseball, he was more focused. I mean, you never messed with him during baseball season. Don’t ask him to go anywhere, don’t ask him to do too much of anything because he had to focus on baseball. And if they were in the playoffs or anything, forget it. It’s strange—you look at the person as a family member, not as a baseball player. You want him to be interested in what’s happening in your life—‘There are things going on in my life, too,’ I’d say. But he’d say, ‘Oh, I wish I could, but I can’t.’ I didn’t understand it when I was younger. Once I got older, then I could understand where he was coming from.”1
Collier’s earliest memories of her brother were from his days at Encinal High School, back in Alameda, California. As an older brother, Willie treated her well—at least until his friends came over. “Then I was the pain-in-the-butt little sister,” she said. She can remember Stargell getting set to head off to his first spring training with the Pirates early in 1959. She and her parents took him to the airport, and her mother, Gladys, was nervous because her son was about to get on an old propeller-style airplane; this was in the days before jet engines were the rule. Collier said a local clergy member—a Reverend Bailey, who had large church in Oakland—was boarding the plane as well and because Gladys knew the reverend, she felt better about seeing her son off. Collier had no idea at that time exactly what her brother was up to. “I just thought he was going somewhere,” she said. “I think it didn’t hit me that he was playing baseball until his name started showing up in books or sports magazines or sports papers.”
By the time Collier turned 12 or so, her brother had reached the big leagues and it was then that it really hit home—her brother was a baseball player. When the Pirates made their West Coast road trips, Collier and her parents would go watch them play at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. And often times Stargell would bring teammates over to the family home in East Oakland after the games. “I remember when he first made it to the major leagues,” Collier said. “I think every relative we had showed up.” Baseball was a familiar pastime for Percy and Gladys, as one of Percy’s cousins played in the old Negro Leagues. Gladys began following the Pirates when Stargell made the club, but mostly she was focused on one player. “All she really cared about was Willie Stargell,” Collier said. “She wanted the Pirates to do well, but as far as she was concerned, there was only one player on that team.” Collier said her mother’s favorite announcer in the major leagues was the Dodgers’ Vin Scully because Scully referred to Stargell by his given name—Wilver—rather than Willie.
Collier, who became an elementary school teacher, understood baseball and enjoyed the game, and she would take her students on field trips to Candlestick Park because some of them never had the experience of seeing a game in person. “And I loved going to the games.” She spent parts of her summers traveling with her brother when he would make his West Coast road trips, going to Los Angeles and San Diego. He was protective of his younger sister even when she was plenty old enough to make her own decisions. “I wasn’t allowed to date baseball players,” she said. “Willie was very firm with them—he’d say, ‘You cannot date my sister. Don’t even look at her twice.’ I tried, but they would go, ‘Oh no, you are Stargell’s sister—you are hands-off.’ And I used to ask him why and he said, ‘I know what ballplayers are like and you’re not going to be involved in that.’ I hated it. When he finally said I could, I wound up being older than all of them. And he said, ‘Good—that’s just how I planned it.’”
As she grew older, Collier spent plenty of time with her brother back east during the season. She enjoyed visiting with Willie’s wife, Dolores, and when Dolores suffered her brain aneurysm in 1976, Collier spent more than a month with the family while Dolores was undergoing rehabilitation therapy in Harmarville, a suburb of Pittsburgh. “It was very hard for Willie to concentrate on baseball that year, what with the kids and him having to go out to Harmarville,” Collier said. A year or so later, Stargell asked his sister if she would give up her teaching job and consider relocating to Pittsburgh permanently to help him with his sickle cell foundation. “I looked at him like he was crazy. I said, ‘You’re sick aren’t you?’ It took me a year to think about it and I said, ‘I’ll give it a try.’ I gave myself five years.” Ultimately, Collier would get married and she would end up living the next 10 years in Pittsburgh, helping to run the Willie Stargell Foundation before financial issues forced its closure in 1984. “It was the right time to be there,” Collier said of her time in Pittsburgh, which included the 1979 “We Are Family” championship and all the good times that came with it. “It seemed like once I got there, things just fell into place for him,” she said. She ran interference for her brother, helping whenever he needed it. She never regretted moving to Pittsburgh because it benefited both her and her brother. “I think it really helped, especially during all that World Series madness,” she said. “You can always move somewhere and it doesn’t work out, but for me, something just clicked. I would not give up that time for anything. I really enjoyed the experience.” The Pirates—and Stargell’s—triumph in the 1979 World Series paid huge dividends for Stargell’s sickle cell foundation and his endorsement opportunities. “We were inundated with phone calls—people came out of the woodwork,” Collier said. “We had some things lined up before the World Series, but once people realized who they had, they capitalized on that.”
Relocating from California to Pittsburgh wasn’t easy at the outset for Collier. She experienced what she called “culture shock” at first. For one thing, she had never been to Pittsburgh in the winter before. So she didn’t know how to drive in the snow and ice. In fact, she didn’t know how to walk in the snow and ice, either. “My husband said, ‘You better stand in the window and watch how people are walking’ and that’s basically what I did,” she said. “You take short steps—you do not take long steps or think you can go running in the snow. And driving? That really took me a while. But after that first year, I could handle anything.”
Collier said she helped Willie with a number of charitable endeavors, including delivering food baskets to those in
need. She used to think she had grown up in poverty, but one year on Christmas morning, she experienced something that put her childhood in the proper perspective. “This one family had plastic on their windows, some of the windows were cracked and there were eight or nine people living in this room,” she said. “And I remember coming out of that house and sitting in my car crying. My husband looked at me and said, ‘You thought you were poor? That was poor.’ Growing up in Oakland, I wasn’t privileged. But both my parents worked and provided for us, although we didn’t always get what we wanted. But to see what I saw that day, it really changed how I thought about things from that point on. I think I did a little growing up when I moved to Pittsburgh.”
Collier said when she was younger, Stargell was more like a father figure to her than a brother. She had a serious asthma problem and was sick much of the time, and can remember her brother taking care of her or making sure she was okay. “I think he used to hate it, too, sometimes,” she said. “He was the big brother but he was also a secure person that I could feel safe with.” Collier said Stargell was there to help her with her adjustment to Pittsburgh, too. She came to him once early in the process and he provided some needed advice. “I told him, ‘Okay, Willie, I can’t handle this.’ He said, ‘I experienced this, too, when I first left home. It’s going to hit you in about six months and then you’re going to be okay.’ So that father figure always remained with me.”
The tables were turned some 20 years later when Stargell’s health began to fail. “Then I became the mother figure,” she said. Stargell would call Sandrus, or ask his third wife, Margaret Weller Stargell, to call Sandrus and ask for her to come.” It was difficult in the beginning because I was going through a divorce and had to find someone to watch my son and call in my teaching job,” she said. “Lots of times I’d get calls on Saturday and I’d need to be there that night. I couldn’t drive that far in the middle of the night, so I’d have to fly. But I’d go. And lots of times I’d stay in the hospital. I noticed the reversal of roles. And I remember my mother always saying, ‘Make sure you take care of your brother.’”
Collier said her brother’s involvement in the sickle cell foundation reflected what he saw his role and purpose to be. “He just wanted to help people,” she said, “and to be there for the community. The community loved him—the whole town loved him because of what he would do, whether it was helping out in baseball clinics or making sure kids were off the street.”
Willie taking it easy during a cold winter day in Pittsburgh (courtesy of Sandrus Collier).
Collier said her brother didn’t express many regrets, even though he played in an era when salaries paled in comparison to those just years later. Stargell’s annual salary information is available for several years; court records filed in conjunction with his divorce from Dolores indicated that he earned $289,233.52 for his Most Valuable Player season in 1979 and then $416,908, $269,778 and $336,218 for his final three big-league seasons. Earlier salary figures were not available, but in Out of Left Field, Stargell’s attorney, Litman, referred to an offer of $165,000 that GM Joe Brown made for the 1974 season. Still, those figures pale in comparison to what players earn today and even what players took home shortly after Stargell left the game. “We talked about the fact that he was on the cusp of the big salaries and he said it would have been nice,” Collier said. “I think he had the opportunity to get more, but he chose to take benefits vs. the big-buck salary because he didn’t feel like bucking the system. There were people who told him he could have gotten more after the Comeback Player of the Year [in 1978] and the MVP season in 1979, and he could have. But he chose not to. I think he was comfortable. I don’t think he had any regrets.”
Collier said that while Stargell was always there for his family and was plenty active in the community, he was also his own man in the true sense of the word. “Willie was one of those who would do what he wanted to,” she said. “It wasn’t anything wrong or dangerous. But if he felt like going to Aruba today, he would pack up and go. And he’d say, ‘I’ll see you when I get back.’ Those kinds of things. He was very comfortable with just being Willie the person. I don’t want to say he had a premonition of his death, but I think he lived his life to the fullest, the way he wanted to. Not that he beat his own drum. He’d do things in the norm, but I think he just enjoyed life. It was the simple things in life he enjoyed, too, not something that was very extravagant.”
Although Stargell liked the freedom to come and go, Collier remembered her brother embracing the role of fatherhood. “He loved the kids and he loved taking them places. When they were small and he was home in the winter, wherever he would go, he would feel his kids should go, or he would do things that included the kids. They just had a good time—you could see it in their smiles.”
Collier said Stargell never talked to her about issues related to racism when he was in the minor leagues; after all, when he was 19 she was only 9. But she believes the experiences he had in Alameda and the Bay Area helped him negotiate those stormy seas. “He knew growing up in California that there were good people in the world. He was in a different place and he knew if he was going to be playing baseball, he was going to have to experience this. I think what Jackie Robinson went through played a big part in helping him manage to survive all that. That’s when Willie started reading a lot and that helped him get over those types of things.”
Years later, when Stargell left Pittsburgh and headed for Atlanta, Collier said she believed he never wanted to go. “He really felt he was going to get something with the Pirates,” she said. “Then when Chuck Tanner left, he went because Chuck asked him to go. That helped a lot. He liked it in Atlanta—he could have stayed there. But he also missed Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has something about it; you stay there for a while and it takes a piece of you.” Returning to Pittsburgh prior to the 1997 season was like “coming home” for Stargell, his sister said. “He was no longer a player, but he was still loved and respected. He still had things to offer to the younger guys, and he really loved coaching the younger ones and scouting for them. I’ve heard guys in passing say how much they learned from him. They respected him. And he was fair and respectful to them. I think that made a difference to a lot of players.”
Collier said she became aware of her brother’s medical problems right after he married Margaret, in January 1993. Collier was aware of Stargell’s high blood pressure; he had been treated for that issue since late in his playing days. In those days, team personnel would provide Stargell with the proper medication, Collier said, but after he retired—and especially after he left Pittsburgh—he wouldn’t always take that medication. “I wasn’t around anymore so I wasn’t there, Johnny on the spot,” she said. “He had to do it himself. I think he just forgot that he needed to do this until one day he had to take a physical and all these things came out. One thing led to another after he got married.” Collier said she believes Stargell’s travel schedule as a minor-league instructor might have played a role in his deteriorating health because it was not easy getting direct flights into and out of Wilmington. “You could be stuck in Charlotte for three to five hours at a time,” she said. Then there was Stargell’s appetite, which—like many other aspects of his life, was in a Hall of Fame category. “His weight issue was a family tradition,” Collier said. “He liked good food—gourmet food—and wine. There were certain things he wasn’t supposed to eat, but he would say, ‘I’m going to die with something—I might as well enjoy my ride.’ And we’d all say, ‘Don’t say that.’ His illness was very hard for all of us because he would always bounce back. But the last time he didn’t bounce back. The last time I saw him, which was a week before he passed, I just knew it. It wasn’t the same anymore. He had actually stopped talking. He couldn’t talk.”
Collier said her brother’s decision to marry for the third time caught her—and other family members—off-guard. “I think he was at a point in his life where he was tired of coming home from road trips and being by h
imself,” she said. “It was kind of a surprise for us, but it was a nice, pleasant surprise.”
Before there was Margaret Weller, there was Dolores Parker. And before Dolores Parker there was Lois Beard. Her family lived just a few blocks from the Stargell family in East Oakland, and she and Stargell began dating at Encinal High School in the late 1950s and remained together through Stargell’s early years in the Pirates’ organization. The two eventually were married on May 14, 1962, but the wedding did not occur without some drama involved. At the same time Lois was pregnant with the couple’s first daughter, Wendy, Stargell also had fathered another daughter, Precious, with a woman named Brenda Joyce Hyde. Lois, who later remarried after her divorce from Stargell and is known as Lois Booker, believed Stargell’s growing celebrity status—after all, he was an up-and-coming, handsome professional ballplayer—made people want to get close to him. Not that she was terribly understanding about it. “I told him, ‘You got yourself in this dilemma, what are you going to do?’”2 Stargell wasn’t sure Hyde’s baby was his—a California court ruled in 1964 that Precious Wilbern Vernel Stargell was indeed Stargell’s daughter—and because he had a longstanding relationship with Lois, the two were married. Stargell also provided monthly support for Precious—who was born less than a month after Wendy, in 1962—and in fact Precious spent plenty of time with Wendy, Lois and Willie. “I still tease her when I call,” Lois said of Precious. “I always say, ‘This is your other mother calling.’” What could have been a heated or at least terribly awkward situation remained more than civil in part due to the approach that Willie and Lois took. “We always tried to keep things light and Wilver had a great sense of humor—that’s something we all have,” she said. “Rather than get upset, we tried to keep things together and remember our purpose.” In fact, Lois said, all of Stargell’s children—he had another daughter, Dawn, with a third woman and two more children with his second wife, Dolores—were one big happy family for the most part. Even the various mothers of Stargell’s children corresponded regularly with one another and got along well throughout Stargell’s life. Lois said it was not at all unusual for Precious and Wendy to spend time together. “Precious would take Wendy to the movies or take her to lunch or dinner when she’d come out for the summer to be with her mother and my mother,” she said. “I’m big on family and I thought everyone in the family should know each other and know their history.”
Willie Stargell Page 31