Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  BY COINCIDENCE, in the fall of 1948, Stan had agreed to be interviewed by Jack Sher, a writer for Sport magazine in New York. When Sher arrived in mid-December, Musial apologized for having no time because his father was dying inside the house.

  “Every time my dad is with me he gets sick,” Musial said, as if somehow he were more to blame than the toxic air of Donora.

  Sher later described the sadness in the house, how Lukasz had left Donora because of “the smog disaster,” but for many years the family did not link the dying man with his occupation or the Halloween calamity in Donora.

  When the writer from New York showed up at the door, Musial did something extraordinary for any athlete, any celebrity, then or now: he did not turn him away. Jack Sher had a job to do, a paycheck to earn. Musial seemed to honor that.

  The Stan Musial of December 1948 was an example of instinctive grace under pressure. In a moment of crisis, the Musials opened their lives to the stranger. And while Stan apologized for not having time, Lil, who rarely gave an interview, sat in the living room and told how she had been introduced to Stan by his basketball teammate, and her long-standing suspicion that Stan had gravitated to the family store more for cold cuts than a date.

  Sher’s article came out in the March 1949 edition of Sport, depicting Musial as a homebody, an ordinary man, but also a great player, destined to be underappreciated. More than six decades later, Sher’s article remains one of the best glimpses of this very private family. For a writer, it is encouraging to know that something written in the winter of 1948–49 still informs, still touches the heart. It might be the nicest thing ever written about them, because they were so open, so decent.

  Somewhat to my surprise, Gerry Ashley had never seen the article, despite the large collection of clippings Lil has apparently kept in the house. I sent Gerry a copy, and it touched off memories, like her grandmother screaming when Lukasz died in Dickie’s bed. The sadness of a family endures in print to this day.

  During Sher’s visit, Lil also introduced their two children to him. “Dickie, who is eight years old, was wearing a bright-red, wee-size Chicago Cardinals football sweater. He is a handsome kid with the fine, dark eyes and hair of his father. Geraldine, the little girl, age four, is small, pert and blonde, like her mother.”

  Sher described how Mary Musial entered the room, crying, and how her son comforted her. When the doctor arrived, the writer realized it was time to leave, but Musial said, “You’ll never get a cab out here this time of night. I’ll drive you to Biggie’s. He’ll get you a cab and take care of you.”

  Biggie was Julius Garagnani, the restaurateur, who was in the process of taking in Musial as a partner. Biggie invited Sher to sit in a booth, and he described what a nice man Musial was—how his telephone was still listed seven years after coming to the majors, how he took calls from fans at all hours. Biggie was gracious, a surrogate family member, but the writer went back to his hotel room that night convinced he could not possibly do his story while Musial’s father was dying.

  The next morning, the phone rang and the booming voice of Bob Broeg told Sher not to leave town. A lot of Musial’s friends were going to be available.

  It was a few days before Christmas. Cardinals were playing with their children and shopping, resting their weary bodies and also working at second jobs, the way ballplayers did back then.

  Nevertheless, friends spent time with the writer from out of town: Red Schoendienst, Marty Marion, Terry Moore, Sam Breadon, Ollie Vanek, the clubhouse man Butch Yatkeman, and Ed and Sue Carson, two neighbors who had become close friends.

  ONE VISION of Musial came from Robert E. Hannegan, the former postmaster general of the United States, who briefly owned a share of the Cardinals. Hannegan had visited the Musials in the home they had purchased that fall, at 5447 Childress Avenue.

  Hannegan told how he had paid a courtesy call and found Musial as fully involved as any new home owner.

  “He showed me through every room in the house, as though I were his next-door neighbor. He told me all the plans for the house, the color scheme, what sort of curtains his wife was going to put up, how the kids’ rooms would look, everything, right down to the rugs. I never felt so much at home in a house.”

  Musial had expressed some ambivalence about committing to St. Louis, perhaps because he felt he should be living closer to his parents.

  “Frankly, I would just as soon have returned to Donora, or, at least, the Pittsburgh area close by our people,” Musial said in his autobiography, “but our son Dick was eight and we didn’t like him to have to miss or change schools. We had met many fine people in St. Louis. When Dick told Lil he wished we could live there year-round, that clinched it.”

  Hannegan told Sher about his salary negotiations with Musial right after the 1948 season, when Musial dug in for a base of $50,000 a year for two years, with a $5,000 bonus per year if the Cardinals surpassed an attendance of 900,000 (which they did, both years).

  “All I’ll tell you is that in all my years of experience in business deals I never talked to a man who was so humble but firm, so honest and definite in his opinions of his ability. There wasn’t an unpleasant moment,” Hannegan said, not bothering to note that Musial’s pay was far below that of Williams and DiMaggio.

  Hannegan also did not volunteer that he had been toying with selling Musial to the Pirates for $250,000 to ease his own finances. That detail did not fit into the narrative of the great loyalty between the Cardinals ownership and its greatest player.

  But Hannegan did tell Sher how proud Lukasz had been of his son. Whenever the father was around the ballpark, Hannegan had directed autograph-seeking fans to the modest little man.

  “That’s Stan Musial’s dad. There’s an autograph you should get,” Hannegan would say. And the fans would fuss over the older man, who never, in his days at the zinc mill, could have imagined signing his name for strangers.

  “And now,” Hannegan told Sher, “I’ll have to leave you. I’m going to catch a plane to Donora to the funeral of a friend of mine, Lukasz Musial.”

  ANOTHER OF Sher’s stops was at the Carsons’. Ed was “a large, soft-spoken, round-faced man who works for a machinery manufacturing concern,” and Sue was a “pretty, blue-eyed brunette, vivacious and genuine. They are a typical American family with a modest home.”

  Ed Carson had recognized Musial at the lunch counter of the Fairgrounds Hotel when Musial first came up in 1941, and they had gotten along—“talking, friendly, like a couple of ordinary guys would.”

  He described the private Stan Musial: “Whenever he wants to get Lil laughing, he’ll do his strip. This consists of removing his shirt, sucking in his stomach until it touches his backbone and then holding his breath. It doesn’t sound funny to tell, but it’s quite a sight and it always breaks Lillian up.”

  Sue said she had seen Stan eat seven sandwiches or eight ears of corn, and praised Lil as “a marvelous cook, does all the cooking herself, making complicated Russian and Polish dishes.” She recalled, “One night last year, when it was 110 degrees in the shade, Lil had a party of fifteen people and their kids at her house. She did all the cooking for the entire gang and it was the best food I’ve ever tasted. Stan’s sister comes to visit them often and spends all her time baking cakes for her brother. I’ve never seen anyone bake so many cakes.”

  Sue described how Stan was shy but would warm up at parties, a trait that would follow him forever: in a corner, hands in pockets, until later in the evening when he would pull out his harmonica.

  She also described the banter that went on between Stan and Lil. Not known to be demonstrative toward his wife in public, Stan once gave her a compliment during a small party: “Lil, you’re the most gorgeous wife a ballplayer ever had.”

  Sue then teased him: “Stan, why don’t you give your wife a rose?”

  Lil responded, “If Stan did give me a rose, it’d probably have a bug in it.”

  Sue Carson, in December 1948, defined Musial
to the writer: “I’ve got a title for your story. You ought to call it, ‘He Doesn’t Know It.’ I mean by this that Stanley doesn’t realize what a famous person he is. He is exactly the same as the day we met him when he was almost unknown.”

  On his way to the airport to fly to the funeral, Musial called Biggie and asked him to convey his apologies to Sher for not having more time for him.

  “You ought to get to know what kind of a guy he is,” Biggie told the writer.

  The last paragraph of the article goes like this: “ ‘I got to know him,’ I said. ‘I got to know what sort of a guy Stan Musial is.’ ”

  The title of Sher’s article: “The Stan Musial Nobody Knows.”

  STAN MUSIAL and Biggie’s would link the two men forever, like Martin and Lewis, like Sonny and Cher. The name still resonates in St. Louis the way Toots Shor does in New York—a memory from another age, never been anything like it since.

  Julius Garagnani was a St. Louis character, straight off the Hill, the Italian part of town. Even today, some old-time St. Louisans can imitate his rough-hewn “dems” and “doses.”

  Biggie was the son of a miner but a city boy. There are suggestions he worked for bootleggers as a teenager in the late days of Prohibition, which would not have been that unusual. Later he moved into patronage jobs stemming from his Democrat contacts, serving as a delegate at two Democratic conventions and helping get at least one friend appointed to a judgeship. He developed a close friendship with Warren E. Hearnes, who in 1965 would become the first Missouri governor to serve two full terms, with Biggie raising over $80,000 in campaign donations.

  Perhaps inevitably, given his Italian name, there were suggestions that Biggie had connections to the mob. But Musial had influential friends watching his back at all times; one well-connected pal said recently that Biggie had been checked out in every important way.

  “If he hadn’t, we’d have pulled Stan’s coat,” the friend said not long ago. “Biggie was a restaurant guy.”

  Garagnani was thirty-four when he met Musial around 1947—“larger than life,” was the way Tom Ashley, Musial’s former son-in-law, described him. “He had total control of the operation. A lot of his relatives were working there, so you never saw funny business at the bar. He was a true character.”

  “A bit rough around the edges,” Gerry Ashley said about Biggie, quickly adding, “To me, he was always nice.”

  Biggie and Stanley met somewhere—the ballpark, the golf course, maybe in St. Pete. Before long, Stan and Lil were welcome in Biggie’s restaurant on Chippewa. The men began playing golf, and somewhere on a fairway or in the clubhouse one of them brought up the restaurant business. Perhaps because of his Donora mentor, Frank Pizzica, Musial already had an image of himself as an entrepreneur, not just a front man.

  “I had a moderate amount of capital to invest,” Musial said in his autobiography. “My principal asset was my baseball name.”

  “Biggie said, ‘You get an accountant and I’ll get an accountant,’ ” Tom Ashley said. “They met the next day at lunch time and the two accountants agreed on how much the business was worth, and how much 50 percent would be worth. Biggie said, ‘You don’t have to pay anything down. You’ll pay me back in profits.’ They made it back in a year.”

  The partnership was formed in January 1949, with Musial’s share coming to $25,000.

  “Biggie and my dad worked with a handshake all those years. They never had a contract,” Gerry Ashley said, adding, “My dad always told this story: ‘You know how to make a small fortune in the restaurant business? You start with a big one.’ ”

  The truth was, Stan and Biggie’s, as it was popularly known, soon rivaled the famous Italian restaurants on the Hill, serving that major St. Louis culinary invention, toasted ravioli, which had become popular around 1943 or 1944 at Oldani’s and then at Ruggeri’s.

  The restaurant caught on. Fans could drive hundreds of miles for a ball game and hope for a glimpse of Musial at mealtime. The place became something of a hangout for St. Louis athletes.

  The young catcher from the Hill, Larry Berra, spurned by Branch Rickey, came home after the 1948 season with the Yankees and chatted up a part-time waitress at Stan and Biggie’s named Carmen Short. Carmen would always remember that Yogi clumped into the restaurant, still wearing his golf spikes. Well, Yogi would rumble, he and the guys had just finished a round of golf; what else was he supposed to be wearing? This rather clattery first meeting led to a wedding early in 1949, and one of the most enduring baseball marriages ever.

  A lot of epic encounters took place at Stan and Biggie’s.

  “I had my first sour cream and chives on a baked potato at the old place,” Tim McCarver recalled with obvious enthusiasm. Bob Grim, an older pitcher passing through the Cardinals, invited McCarver to dinner—“fall of 1959. I was seventeen years old and didn’t have a clue about life or anything,” McCarver said.

  “Stan put a lot of time in the restaurant,” McCarver continued. “They weren’t open on a Sunday, but it was common in those days to play day games on Saturday and Stan was there after the game. The food was terrific.”

  Everybody agreed the relationship between Biggie and Stanley was fair and equal.

  “Biggie just loved Stan,” McCarver said.

  Another view of Biggie comes from a strange article in Sport in July 1950: “My Partner Stan Musial,” by Biggie Garagnani, as told to J. Roy Stockton. A prominent columnist in St. Louis, Stockton employed the exaggerated malapropisms that Ring Lardner and other celebrated American writers used for ethnic characters of America. New York columnists were always writing about Greek diner countermen using exaggerated accents, and some of the syntax attributed to African Americans in midcentury is beyond parody and into racial stereotyping.

  Within Stockton’s Lardneresque language is the dead-serious, mother-wit, tired-and-poor ambition of Julius Garagnani. No angel, probably, but no fool, either, in talking about his partner:

  I don’t charge him nothing for good will because I’m smart enough to know he’ll have more good will than I got.

  He is very conscious-stricken about answering all mail.

  The only things he don’t pay any attention to is unanimous letters. He just throws them in the wastebasket.

  The real Biggie was not far from the ghosted Biggie. For a while, Jack Buck was the host of a talk show emanating from the restaurant, often using guests in town for baseball or the famed Muny Opera in nearby Forest Park. One night Arthur Godfrey was a little late, so Buck grabbed Biggie to help fill time. One old-timer remembered it this way:

  “Say, Big, have you been over to the new planetarium in Forest Park? It’s been open for two weeks now.”

  After a long pause, Biggie replied in stentorian tones, “No, Jack, I never cared much for all those fishes and whales and stuff!”

  There was a quick cut to a commercial, until Godfrey blessedly arrived.

  By all accounts, Musial was a hands-on presence who wanted to know how the business worked, wanted to know cuts of meat in the freezer. His expertise would pay off when he would direct teammates to the best steaks all over the league.

  The restaurant became Stanley’s other place of business, as important to him in its way as the ballpark was. He knew he might have a long life ahead of him, and wanted to have control of it. He and Biggie branched out to other restaurants as well as hotels in St. Louis, Miami, and Clearwater, Florida.

  “Stan lifted himself up,” Tom Ashley said. A friend, Clarence Diehl, who had a construction business, would meet at the restaurant and talk business. Diehl, who would eventually build the second version of Stan and Biggie’s, understood Stan’s conservative streak, his desire not to be greedy or get caught up in wild schemes.

  EVEN THOUGH he lived only a few blocks from the restaurant, Musial was not around much to help with homework or discipline the children. Lil sometimes blamed Biggie for her husband’s absences.

  “He and my mom didn’t get along,” Gerry
said. “Biggie wanted my dad to go to the restaurant and my dad would go at lunchtime and for an hour and a half in the evening, so that meant he wasn’t home.”

  Musial insisted he would always get home “so I could say good night to the kids.”

  Gerry has fond memories of toasted ravioli and spumoni in the form of a baseball at the restaurant, but she also learned she had to share her father with the public.

  “He’d be there for the lunch crowd and the evening crowd because he knew it increased his earning,” she said.

  The family soon moved from their first tiny house on Childress to a four-bedroom house on Westway Road, a few blocks up the hill, making sure to stay in the same parish. The house was not ostentatious, with its kitchen, breakfast room, and family room all blended into one, and a small dining room they rarely used.

  Two more children followed: Janet, five years younger than Gerry, and Jeanne, nine years younger than Janet. Dick was already on his way to Notre Dame when Jeanne was born, meaning there was rarely a time when all four were living full-time under the same roof. This could produce a Rashomon effect—everybody might have a different version of childhood. Lil’s theory was that every one of her children was an only child, special, unique.

  Since Lil had grown up in a large family, and so had Stan, four children, spaced well apart, seemed quite modest by the standards of 1920s Donora. Lil had grown up in a household where her father was a presence, even when he was working long hours downstairs in the store. She had to adjust to life with a husband who was mobbed for his autograph at the ballpark, who chatted up customers at the restaurant, who went on road trips for a week or two at a time. Gerry Ashley and her former husband both praise Lil for running the family.

  In a rare interview, Lil once talked a bit about her husband, saying he was pretty even-tempered but a useful disciplinarian when he was around. “Sometimes if they do something wrong and he raises his voice just a little, they stand there with their mouths open, as if to say ‘Look at Daddy. What’s the matter with Daddy?’ ”