Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  11

  LIL

  HE WAS a familiar sight around Donora, a slender young man pulling a cart, lugging boxes of groceries to front doors.

  People remembered his quirky left-handed hook shot for Jimmy Russell’s Dragons. The Musial boy. Hadn’t he signed with the Cardinals? Why was he delivering kielbasa and cheese?

  In a town the size of Donora, most people soon came to know that Stan was going with Lillian Labash, whose family owned a grocery store on McKean.

  Lil was fourteen when her dad took her to a Zincs game. Sam Labash (pronounced LAY-bash) had been born on this side, was American enough to have played baseball as a youngster, and had been good enough to think about pro ball, but there was more money in groceries than the minor leagues, so he wound up running the family business.

  “My grandparents married so young,” Musial’s daughter Gerry Ashley has said, calling her maternal grandfather “a frustrated baseball player,” which would work out to Stan Musial’s advantage.

  The Labash family had a good reputation in Donora, extending credit, trusting neighbors to settle up on payday. The family was regarded as middle-class, almost bourgeois; Sam was comfortable enough that he could take time off to watch a ball game.

  One day in 1934, Sam took his fourth daughter, Lillian, to a Zincs game and told her to keep an eye on “that Polish kid” who was pitching. She liked the Polish kid even more the next winter when she saw him in the abbreviated basketball shorts of the time—shorts that actually displayed knees and thighs, not the baggy ones of today. Over the next seventy-five years, Lil would often tell Stan she had been attracted to him because of the way he looked in his satin shorts.

  Lil was two months older than Musial, pretty and blond, a shade over five feet tall and thereby nicknamed “Shrimp.” She may have carried herself with a touch of confidence because of her parents’ relative stability. Lil’s older sister Ann was dating Dick Ercius, Musial’s lanky basketball teammate, and one day Lil went along with them to a skating rink, where they spotted Musial, and Ercius arranged a date.

  “Always neat as a pin,” Lil said of Stan, who managed to be presentable despite his family’s limited finances. He had not dated much, or at all, but he was hardly a recluse.

  “Stan was never idle,” recalled Eddie Pado, the second pitcher on the Donora team. “After school, he worked at the Spur Gas Station. On several occasions, they’d have a dance at the Polish hall down by the church where Stan attended, and we’d go down and peek in the window and say, ‘Boy, look at that Stash dance!’ He could do the polka and was an outstanding dancer.”

  “Sometimes Stan would infuriate me by being late for dates,” Lil said in 1958. “He’d watch ball games or other sports events while I’d be at home stewing. But other times he’d be late because he’d stopped to attend Sunday-afternoon benediction at the church—and how could I be mad at him then?”

  She recounted this in an article in Parade magazine under the byline of Mrs. Stan Musial—her public identity. Those who knew her best asserted that Lil ran the family over the years, allowing Stanley to be Stanley.

  “It’s tough to be the wife of a superstar,” Tom Ashley, her former son-in-law, said. “She is totally dedicated to Stan. She is the one who raised the kids. They are great kids. I’d give her ninety-five percent of the responsibility.

  “She has a nose for smelling out phonies. She’s a fighter for their privacy. We’ve had our ups and downs but I respect her.”

  People who met Lil at the ballpark, at parties in Cooperstown, or around town in St. Louis described her as a lot of fun, no pushover. Stanley probably knew that the day he met her.

  LIL’S BALLPLAYER father was born in Pennsylvania, but his parents, Samuel and Susie, are both listed as born in Slovakia. Given the vagaries of shifting borders and ethnic fortunes, Sam was considered to be of Russian ancestry.

  Lil’s mother, Anna Mikula, arrived in New York on December 21, 1912, on the President Lincoln, after leaving Hamburg, Germany, on December 7. Her home country was listed as Hungary, but she herself was listed as Slovakian and the legal minimum age of sixteen. The 1920 census listed Anna as twenty-one, which would have made her thirteen at the time of her crossing, apparently unsupervised. When she arrived, she possessed $3, the legal minimum. She was sponsored by her sister’s husband in Donora; somebody made sure she had a train ticket for Donora.

  By the 1920 census, Anna was married to Sam Labash, also listed as twenty-one, and they already had three children five or under—Mary, Helen, and Annie. Lillian would come along that year, followed by two boys and then Dorothy. Another boy would be stillborn, what they called a “blue baby” in those days.

  The parents, the two Labash brothers, Sam and John, and their growing families all lived under the same roof, along with a boarder from Croatia named Mike Brkvenac, age twenty-nine, who is listed in the 1920 census as a laborer in a blast furnace.

  “I’ve been in that house and, believe me, it wasn’t big!” Gerry Ashley said years later.

  Many people who grew up in large families in small houses look backward and play the mental game of “who slept where.” On any given night, where did all those adults put all those children?

  Gerry tried to re-create the Labash family home above the store—kitchen and living room downstairs, three bedrooms upstairs. Gerry shook her head at the logistics of it, to say nothing of the boarder from Croatia. She had fond memories of visits to her mom’s home, calling her grandparents by the East European nicknames Dido and Baba.

  There was also the legend of how the Labash family had welcomed the shy boy from up the hill.

  “Stan had enormous respect for her parents,” Tom Ashley said. “They didn’t have much money, but they had food.”

  Long after they were married, Lil would tease Stanley: “You know why you went out with me? Only because my father owned that grocery store and fed you so well.”

  He would giggle, never quite denying the charge. From the assortment of salami and liverwurst and cheeses at the store, he never would choose bologna. He had eaten enough of that at home to last a lifetime.

  Musial understood he had been attracted to the family as well as the girl. He once told Roger Kahn: “I wasn’t sure in the beginning, either, but the girl I was going to marry, Lillian, her father owned a grocery store. No matter what happened in baseball, I knew I could always get a job in the store.”

  The store gave Musial a sense of an ordered life, based on food. He worked around the store, delivered groceries in the neighborhood using the wagon, watched Sam Labash run a business. No wonder he took so quickly to the restaurant business when he met Biggie Garagnani a decade later. From his middle teens, Stanley had been, in some overt way, taking mental notes.

  Gerry Ashley felt her grandfather was instrumental in the courtship and the marriage. “He pushed my mother to my father,” she said, in the most positive way.

  Perhaps Sam Labash saw something of himself in his daughter’s young beau. He thought it was exciting that Stan was going off to the minors, even at the modest salary of $65 a month.

  Even then, for an obscure young athlete without much experience out in the world, Musial displayed a personal gyroscope of what worked for him and what did not. The Cardinals wanted him to play his first season, 1938, at their farm team in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, about an hour from Donora, but he balked. Perhaps he sensed Greensburg was too close, that he would have family and friends looking over his shoulder; perhaps he was trying to put some distance between himself and his father after their dispute over his contract.

  The Cardinals had roughly six hundred players in their system, and players generally did what they were told, but somehow or other, Stanley prevailed and was sent to Williamson, West Virginia, in the Class D Mountain State League.

  Williamson was a coal town across from eastern Kentucky, approximately 250 miles away from home. It was a different world: people from the Mon Valley think of themselves as being from the Pittsb
urgh area and resist the suggestion of commonality with deepest Appalachia.

  Very much an outsider, Musial rented a room, paid five dollars a week for a meal ticket at the Day and Night Lunch, and played pool at the Brunswick Pool Room. In his first season, 1938, he pitched 110 innings, struck out 66, walked 80 batters, and had a 6–6 won-lost record with a high 4.66 earned run average. He also hit .258 in 26 games, with a home run.

  “I didn’t have confidence in my pitching,” he would say years later. “I had confidence in my hitting. Why they didn’t sign me as a hitter, I’ll never know.”

  In the winter of 1938–39 Musial worked at the Labash store and was also given a safe job at the zinc mill.

  Sent back to Williamson in 1939, Musial missed his high school graduation, but Lillian stood in for him. He won 9 games and lost 1, struck out 86, but he walked 85 in 92 innings with a 4.30 ERA. His manager, Harrison Wickel, recommended that the Cardinals cut him loose because of wildness, but almost as an afterthought mentioned that he was a nice young man who could hit—.352 with a home run.

  He also caused a stir late one night when he wandered into the identical house next door, after perhaps taking one beer too many. It could have been dangerous to ramble around the wrong house, looking for his room, but the Fiery family recognized the popular young ballplayer and escorted him home, making sure he was safe.

  On Sunday mornings Musial would attend Mass, and Geneva Zando, a senior in high school, would observe how devout and handsome he was on the Communion line. Soon she would marry Howard Fiery, who lived in the house Musial had entered by mistake. Over the decades they would listen to Cardinal games on the radio and tell their son, Randolph, why they rooted so intensely for Stan the Man.

  Back home in Donora, Lil was aware that her boyfriend was playing for pennies so far from home.

  “She wanted him to get a job,” Verna Duda, the widow of Musial’s teacher-mentor, said in 2009. “Her family had money. They weren’t wanting for anything.”

  With war looming, Lil’s father told Musial to give it another year, so the young man went off to Daytona Beach, Florida, in the spring of 1940, a minimal upgrade. His manager was Richard Kerr, who already had an honorable place in baseball history.

  In 1919, Kerr had been a rookie left-hander with the Chicago White Sox, ignored by some unscrupulous older teammates who were involved, to one degree or another, in a gambling scheme to lose the World Series. This scandal has been chronicled by Eliot Asinof in his book Eight Men Out and later by John Sayles in his movie of the same name. In both works, Dickie Kerr is a minor character, but an honest one.

  Ostracized by the sharpies, Kerr pitched a three-hit shutout in the third game and a ten-inning victory in the sixth game, but the conspirators managed to lose the Series to the Reds. When the scandal was exposed after the 1920 season, all eight players were found not guilty of legal charges but were banished for life by the new commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

  Dickie Kerr suffered in the wake of the scandal. The symbol of incorruptible decency, he asked for a better contract after 1921 but was turned down by the same haughty owner, Charles Comiskey, whose cheapness—dirty uniforms, substandard salaries, broken promises—had emboldened Kerr’s crooked teammates to blow the 1919 Series. Kerr quit the White Sox and pitched in independent leagues, returning to the majors only for a cameo in 1925.

  The reward for his honesty was that in 1940 Kerr was still scuffling for a modest minor-league managing salary when the Cardinals sent him the wild left-hander from up north.

  Stanley’s poker luck came through at a crucial time. He could have been managed by a bully, a drunk, a liar, an incompetent, or some combination thereof. The wrong manager could have sent him rushing back to Donora. Instead, Musial drew another inside straight in the card game of life.

  When Lil joined Stan in Florida early in the spring, she was visibly pregnant. They said they had been married in secret on Stan’s birthday, November 21, 1939. Kerr and his wife, Cora, had no children, and they took the young couple into their home.

  On May 25, 1940, Stan and Lil were married at St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in Daytona Beach. For Lil, this involved a conversion from the Orthodox faith of her family to the Roman Catholicism of her husband. They would always celebrate their anniversary in conjunction with Stan’s birthday; many years later, one family member was surprised to learn about the May wedding.

  Far away from her own protective family, Lil now had two kind people looking after her. In early August 1940, Lil gave birth to a son, whom they named Richard Stanley Musial, in tribute to their host.

  BECAUSE OF the small roster, Kerr began using Musial in the outfield. Later in August, Musial dove for a line drive, landing on his left shoulder. Pitching in pain the rest of the season, he managed to win 18 games and lose only 5, by far his best record as a pitcher, and his ERA was an excellent 2.62, but his wildness had gotten worse. Then again, he batted .311 in 113 games.

  At the end of the season, Stan and Lil stayed in Daytona Beach, where he worked in the sporting goods department at Montgomery Ward for $25 a week, to supplement his salary, which had been $100 a month for essentially six months. Ki Duda wrote letters telling him to be patient, but Musial realized the Cardinals were not about to bring in a lower-echelon pitcher for medical treatment.

  “I didn’t even see a doctor,” he said years later, recalling the legions of players in all those Cardinal camps. “You’re mostly a number.”

  Musial realistically began to fear he was finished as a pitcher. At some point Lil went home to Donora to stay with her family.

  “He called me one day and he was kind of despondent, and he said, ‘I might have to come and work in the Donora mills,’ ” Lil recalled. “I got my father on the phone and he said, ‘Now you just keep on playing baseball because I’ll take care of Lil and Dick here. Don’t worry about anything.’ ”

  Dickie Kerr would not let him quit.

  “You won’t make it to the top as a pitcher, but you’ll get there some way because you’re a damn fine ballplayer and a big-league hitter,” Kerr told him.

  SKIP AHEAD nearly two decades to 1958, when the Cardinals stopped in Houston on their way north and Musial visited Cora and Dick Kerr. Dick was now turning sixty-five and working as a bookkeeper for a construction company. Musial told him to go out and buy himself a birthday present—a house.

  “He had mentioned a house before but we had never taken it seriously,” Kerr said when the secret came out. “This time he told us to get busy. So we did.”

  The Kerrs moved into a subdivision where homes cost between $10,000 and $20,000 in 1958 dollars. Over the years it has been widely written that the Musials gave the house to the Kerrs, but in fact they held title to it, which suggests the Musials also paid the taxes on it, and who knows what else. Either way, it was a generous act toward a couple who had kept them going in a shaky time.

  The Kerrs and Lil’s family helped Musial keep his confidence and hit his way out of obscurity. By that summer of changes, Stan and Lil had known each other for six years. Their long and stable marriage would be a beacon for everybody who knew them.

  12

  TAKEOFF

  IN A nation that professes to love underdogs, very few great American athletes have come as far as Stan Musial did from 1940 to 1941. That glorious year is one of the great sagas of sport—the slow, sputtering toy firecracker of a minor-league career suddenly turned into a rocket.

  Musial had good reason to doubt himself as a pitcher, and he had only vague hopes he could make it as a hitter. In May 1940, Ollie Vanek, who had scouted Musial three years earlier back in Pennsylvania, was assigned to inspect the Daytona Beach club. His evaluation of Musial: “Good form and curve, fast ball a bit doubtful. Also a good hitter. May make an outfielder.”

  Bob Broeg once ruminated on how far his pal had traveled, noting how the 1940 All-Star Game had been held in St. Louis while Musial was mostly pitching in the low minor leagues.


  “And he is sitting in a room in Daytona Beach, trying to keep score,” Broeg said for a documentary. Pausing for effect, Broeg added, “I’ve seen this scorecard. Max West of the Braves hit a three-run homer to win the game, 4–0.” Broeg noted that West was a right fielder—and that twelve months later Musial would be playing right field in Sportsman’s Park.

  “Now that’s incredible,” said Broeg, who had a bit of a stammer. “I mean, I think it’s, uh, the most fantastic story you have.”

  It became even more fantastic after Musial injured his shoulder and faced the 1941 season fearing his career was over.

  Nineteen forty-one is most remembered for the attack on Pearl Harbor and the growing global involvement in World War II. But in the narrow world of American baseball, that year is remembered for Ted Williams’s .406 batting average, Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive-game hitting streak of 56, and Bob Feller’s 25 victories and 260 strikeouts.

  It was also the year Stan Musial roared upward, from virtual reject to astounding rookie.

  He began his fourth season at the Cardinals’ minor-league camp in Hollywood, Florida, a sore-armed pitcher scheduled to pitch batting practice to top prospects and then perhaps be released. Fortunately for him, the Cardinals had a vast cadre of managers and instructors who could recognize talent and bring it along.

  In the swarm at Hollywood, Musial came under the scrutiny of the manager of the Class AA farm team at Columbus, Ohio, an older gent named Burt “Barney” Shotton, who had once played the outfield for the Browns and Cardinals.

  Shotton watched Musial try to pitch on the sidelines and said, “Son, there’s something wrong with your arm. At least, I know you’re not throwing hard enough to pitch here. I think you can make it as a hitter. I’m going to send you to another camp with the recommendation that you be tried as an outfielder.”

  Years later, Musial would honor Shotton as “a man who never seems to have received enough credit for the help he gave me,” and would describe Shotton as “a dignified, bespectacled man best known for later managing the Brooklyn Dodgers to two pennants.” This was in 1947 and 1949, when Shotton would manage Jackie Robinson against Musial’s Cardinals.