Stargell and Lois parted ways following the 1964 season, although the divorce did not become final until early in 1966. Lois said that even after Stargell remarried in November of 1966, it was not uncommon for Wendy to spend part of the summers at the Stargell home in Pittsburgh. And Lois said Wendy also would visit Dawn and her mother in Atlanta from time to time. “We have what you would call a really extended family,” Lois said. “It all worked out well between Wilver and me because we concentrated on taking care of Wendy, keeping in touch and staying positive.” Lois recalled an incident in a Los Angeles court house where she and Stargell were involved in a hearing pertaining to Wendy’s child support. “We were going back and forth in the courtroom with the lawyers but when we went outside in the hallway, we were talking about where we were going to meet later,” Lois said. “My attorney said to me, ‘I don’t understand—you’re in there battling about Wendy’s benefits and then you come out here and it’s, “How’s your mother?” “How’s your mother?” But that’s the way we were raised. You still have a mission as far as taking care of your child. You still have family. Sometimes people get a divorce and they want to divorce everything. But I think you should stay positive. You can’t have too much love.”
Lois said Stargell’s death at the age of 61 hit her extremely hard, despite the fact that they had been divorced for more than three decades. “It was a life shut out too quickly,” she said. “I think he just pushed himself too much and it seemed like he just wore out. Even when he was playing he was always having surgery—one year he had surgery on both knees. He would just not stop and try to rehabilitate them. Sixty-one is so young. I knew he was sick, but sometimes he’d get sick and then he’d get well. But this time ... I was really surprised.” Lois recalled a trip she made back to Oakland from her southern California home in 2009 and it all flashed back to her—school dances, baseball practice, young love in bloom. “All of a sudden you think to yourself, ‘He’s not dead.’ But he is dead. You can’t believe it. Someone you’ve known since you were 14 and now you’re 66. That’s a long time. Not only were we friends, we were boyfriend and girlfriend and husband and wife.”
Stargell’s outgoing, positive personality and his love of music—and particularly dancing—is largely what attracted Lois back at Encinal High School. So it only made sense that dancing played a role in the first meeting between Dolores Parker and Stargell back in 1962. Not even 18 yet, Parker was attending a fashion show put on by Ebony magazine at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Pittsburgh when she first saw Stargell. Having just returned from his winter league stint in the Dominican Republic, Stargell had taken a shine to a Latino model and the two of them danced most of the night away. “I was so upset—I kept waiting for him to dance with me,” Dolores said in an interview conducted online for High & Tight, a blog by Jimmy Scott, in 2010.3 Finally, late in the evening, Stargell asked Dolores to dance. “I said, ‘No—definitely not,” she said. A day or two later, Dolores saw Stargell’s picture in one of the Pittsburgh newspapers—it was a story about some surgery that Stargell was scheduled to have—and she felt badly because she thought she had treated him poorly at the fashion show. Dolores, who did not even know Stargell was a professional athlete the night she met him, went to visit him in the hospital and brought him some flowers. And he asked if she’d go out with him when he finished his hospital stay. The two began a serious relationship after Stargell separated from Lois. “He originally said he’d never get married again,” Dolores told Scott. “He’d just gotten a divorce—he wasn’t even thinking about getting married. But I was.”4
The two got engaged and then he sent for her to come to California after the 1966 season. On November 19, 1966, near Nevada’s scenic Lake Tahoe, the two exchanged vows and Dolores Parker became Dolores Stargell. But being married to a ballplayer was not easy, in part because of the schedule. “He was gone a lot,” she told Scott. “The guys are gone so much. You don’t really have a husband. He’s married to the city. Devoted to the game. I thought you got married to your husband and he’d come home for dinner every night.” But that’s not the life of a ballplayer or his spouse. Instead, players normally head into work in the afternoon for a night game and don’t get home until midnight or close to it. And then there were long road trips that would keep Stargell away for days at a time. Dolores did not care for the schedule. “I thought, ‘This isn’t so great,” she said. “I have a marriage but I don’t have a husband. I was raising my kids on my own. He was never there.”
Dolores and Willie enjoyed going out in the early days in Pittsburgh, but it wasn’t long before Stargell’s celebrity status began working against the couple. As his fame grew, so did the difficulty in going out in public. One time, Dolores asked Willie to take the family to Kennywood Park—a well-known local amusement park—because the Stargells had never been there before. All was going well until a young boy noticed that Stargell was in the park. “Before I knew it, a thousand people were standing around us,” Dolores said. People crowded Stargell, pressing him for his autograph. “That was the first time and the only time we went to the amusement park together,” she said.
Dolores said her husband truly enjoyed playing in Pittsburgh, despite being a Californian for the most part. He appreciated the fact that the fans pulled for him and he liked to help other Pittsburgh athletes get acclimated to the city when they first arrived. “Everybody kind of looked up to him,” she said. “That’s why they called him Pops. When Franco [Harris] came into town, he liked to lead him around and show him the ropes. That was kind of fun for him.” And he definitely enjoyed hosting people as well. “We had the best parties,” she said. “Will was a party guy. We always had something fun going on, whether it was a party in a Chinese restaurant or he’d cook on the wok.”
Willie and Dolores set up their first home in Pittsburgh in an apartment near Highland Park, then a few years later moved to a house in the suburb of Penn Hills with young son, Wilver Jr., who was born in 1967. Then, after daughter Kelli was born in 1969, the family moved to a bigger home in Point Breeze. Dolores characterized her husband as a caring and loving father but said his many commitments in Pittsburgh—even during the off-season—made him somewhat of an absentee father at times. “He was very much the humanitarian,” she said. “He always wanted to go into the depressed areas and help. On Christmas Eve, he and his friend would buy turkeys out of his own pocket and distribute them. And he did a lot of work for sickle cell. He was always occupied, doing something to help someone.” The drawback, though, was that he wasn’t always around to help with the little things at home. Dolores recalled an incident when Willie Jr. was playing ball and trying to put on an athletic supporter for the first time. He wasn’t sure if it went on over his shorts or under them and he came to ask his mother. “Willie was probably out teaching at a baseball camp,” she said. “When he was home, he still wasn’t home. He’d play golf in the morning. Everybody was pulling at him every which way. He was out helping kids, helping people. He would do all kinds of things. And then there was the banquet circuit. In the off-season, he was around, but I never could find him.”
Willie relaxes at home with his two youngest children—Kelli (left) and Wilver Jr. (courtesy The Associated Press).
Being married to a professional athlete—particularly a young, attractive and powerfully built athlete—also had its disadvantages in that other women would go to great lengths to be with Stargell. “It was always there—there was always someone hanging on,” she said. “It was a lot in my face.” Dolores said she and Willie “kind of, sort of” talked about the women—known as groupies or “baseball Annies.” She said she took the attitude that “whatever he does on the road is his business; just don’t let it get back home.” She said her husband “wasn’t an angel before I met him, so why should I expect him to be one now? I had no idea what was going on when they were on the road and I didn’t want to know. People tried to get into his room. Some got in and some didn’t. It was a very vulner
able time.”
Both she and Willie discussed some of the difficulties of married life in the controversial book, Out of Left Field. Dolores even had plans to write her own book, which she tentatively titled, The Glamorous Life of the Ballplayer’s Wife. “I don’t really know Willie that well,” she said in Out of Left Field.5 “I used to try and figure him out, but Willie is a very secretive person. Very private. He keeps things from me. I don’t think he is hiding anything or covering up. It’s just his personality.” Stargell, who admitted in the controversial book that he didn’t give his family enough support, said he learned that love is “communication and understanding and trust. When there’s a problem, and one’s mind is going in one direction while the other’s flying away, you’ve got to find a happy medium. Dee and I are working toward a better understanding.”6
But the Stargells’ marital relationship took a turn for the worse following Dolores’s medical problems, which started on May 24, 1976, when she suffered an aneurysm and worsened when she had a stroke. She was in a coma for six weeks and then spent six months in rehabilitation, trying to regain use of her paralyzed left side. She said the experience not only affected her physically—she walked with a limp and had to use a cane and “old lady” shoes to help her with her stability—but left her confused, and she believes that contributed to the downfall of their marriage. “My comprehension was just shot, pretty much,” said Dolores, who today serves on the board of directors for the Joe Niekro Foundation, established to aid in the research and treatment of aneurysm patients and families. “I was jealous of him, I think. I needed him to be more attentive at that time, which he wasn’t, I guess.” She said her husband was there for her while she was in the hospital but when he wasn’t as responsive while she was in rehab, she began to get suspicious. And Willie, she said, “didn’t reassure me that everything was cool. And if he did, I didn’t remember. All of that helped to tear the marriage down. I became pretty unstable with my thinking.”
Dolores sought to end the marriage and the two separated, living in their own homes just minutes apart from one another for several years before the divorce became final in September, 1983—about a year after Stargell retired as a player. Like many children caught in the middle of marital discord, Willie Jr. and Kelli did not want to see the couple go their separate ways. Dolores said young Willie was angry at her for years over her wanting to end the marriage and ultimately moved to Atlanta and lived with his father. Mother and son—he was actually known as Son-Son to those close to him in his younger days—have since mended their fences.
In a deposition related to the divorce, Stargell talked about Dolores’s recovery from her stroke. He said the specialists at the Harmarville rehabilitation center were able to motivate her by “infuriating” her. “When they got her mad enough, she just went from zero back to practically one hundred in less than a year’s time,” Stargell said. “She has shown in that particular case that she has a tremendous amount of drive.”
When the attorney asked Stargell if he had anything else to add, he replied, “She’s a hell of a woman.”
Dolores and Willie remained on good terms for the most part following their divorce until Willie married for the third time. She said she and Margaret have “no relationship” and that Stargell’s third wife—who turned down repeated requests to be interviewed—“did not care for me at all. But I could care less. I don’t have anything against her or anyone else. She was like 30 years younger than me. She was just a kid and I’m a mature lady. I don’t fret over stuff like that.”
Stargell and Margaret did not have children. Wilver Jr. was Stargell’s only son among his five children and while Willie Jr. was given his father’s name, he didn’t carry on the tradition. He and his wife, Nicole, chose to name their sons Cody and Dakota rather than pass on the name Wilver. “I figured maybe, just maybe, they might want to name one of their own kids after their grandfather and make him the third,” he said. “They could do it like that.” Willie Jr. said the name is a burden of sorts. “It’s like, you know what, I’m going to use my name as I got it, but I don’t think I want to put that on my child,” he said. “I want them to grow up with the legacy of Willie Stargell being their grandfather, but I also want them to be able to do it on their own, at the same time.”7
Willie Jr. tried to shield his own sons as well as his daughter, Cheyenne, from their grandfather’s legacy when they were growing up and playing Little League baseball and other sports. One time, Cody came up to the plate in a Little League baseball game and started to windmill his bat, just like his famous grandfather. “The coach asked me, ‘Did you teach him how to do that?’” Willie Jr. said. “Everyone in the stands is looking at him and saying, ‘He’s his grandfather.’ And we’re like, ‘What is he doing? We better talk to him about not swinging the bat like that.’ Our children didn’t know who he was. But the other kids on the team and their families knew. And they were in awe that they had Willie Stargell’s grandchildren on the team.”
Willie Jr. said he first became aware that his father was different from most dads when he was about 7 years old. He was going to Three Rivers Stadium and hanging out during practices and games. After the games would end, he would go into the clubhouse and meet his dad, and they would walk through the tunnel and out onto the field, as Stargell would park his car in a lot beyond center field. “One of my first memories is doing that walk every day,” Willie Jr. said. “The tarp would be out already. If it was windy, the tarp would have those big air bubbles and I’d go running out over the tarp, knocking the air bubbles down. Some of the best memories I have was of taking that walk out to center field.”
The center-field exit was one way that Stargell avoided the throngs of autograph seekers, although some savvy fans caught on to the strategy and would be waiting for him and other players to emerge there. “They’d still be out there and they’d be running at him, ‘Willie, Willie, can I get your autograph?’” Willie Jr. recalled. “I’m just walking next to him, looking up at my dad, stars in my eyes, on the other side of this partition and saying, ‘Wow, I just can’t believe all these kids my age—and even older adults—are calling for my dad. He’d walk over and sign some autographs and then say, ‘Okay, we gotta go.’ Then we’d jump in the car and head on to the house. That was awesome. We’d have nice little father-son conversations. I’d say like, ‘Nice home run’ or something like that as we were riding home. It was fun.”
Stargell never brought his on-field problems home to the family. “Bad games to him weren’t really bad games,” Willie Jr. said. “And if they were, he never talked about it. It was more like, it was still a game. Even if they lost, he was still having fun. Of course it mattered if they won. But if they lost, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, my God.’ It wasn’t like that at all. Lots of people can’t differentiate between winning and losing. They’re always striving to win. But it’s a game. You have to understand you’re going to lose some time. You’re not going to win every game. When you’re out there in the field, you’re going to make an error. Being a hitter you’re going to strike out or pop out—you’re not always going to get a hit. For him, he was trying to hit it out of the park. Kiss it goodbye.”
That was the way that Prince, the Pirates’ radio and television voice, would send off each Stargell home run—a call that brought a smile to young Willie’s face back in the day. “I loved when [Prince] would say that,” he said. “My dad would be at bat and they’d be talking about him—Stargell this and Stargell that—then you’d hear the crack of the bat and it would be, ‘back, back ... kiss it goodbye.’ And I’d be, ‘Yeahhhh!’ I didn’t care where I would be—I would just go totally crazy. Every time my dad hit a home run, it was amazing.”
Young Willie made several road trips with his dad; he fondly recalled a visit to Chicago’s Wrigley Field, where he got to play in the ivy that climbed the outfield wall—one of the park’s trademark features. Only boys—no girls—were permitted to make those road trips. But young Kelli d
id break her own barriers of sorts when she burst into what had been an all-male Pirates clubhouse one day.
Willie Jr. was 12 years old during the magical 1979 “We Are Family” season, when the Sister Sledge hit was blaring through the Three Rivers Stadium sound system and “Pops” Stargell was handing out his famous “Stargell Stars” to his teammates for deeds well done. “We had rolls of stars at the house,” the younger Stargell recalled. “I’m grabbing them, taking them to my friends at school—cutting them off, and I’m like, ‘Okay, 50 cents a star!’ My friends loved those stars. That whole season was just phenomenal. Especially when it came down to the playoffs and the World Series. I didn’t get to go to Baltimore, but I was home watching the games diligently, talking to him every night after the games. And when they won, it was just crazy. During the Series, we would always go to the airport and pick them up. Back then, you could go all the way to the terminal and wait for passengers. So we’re there waiting for Dad to come out. Fans want autographs left and right—I always loved the rides, going or coming back from the stadium or the airport.”
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