Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  Musial seemed to respect Crowe’s professionalism. “I watched George punish himself in practice and asked him about it,” Musial said through Bob Broeg in a Sport magazine piece. Musial quoted Crowe as saying, “The more time you spend on the bench the harder you’ve got to work to be ready when you’re called.”

  Broeg made it sound as if Musial and Crowe were kindred old souls, working together to help the Cardinals, but half a century later Crowe did not profess the same memories. He had never been able to get a job in the majors after his playing career ended in 1961 and had become something of a curmudgeon and recluse in the woods.

  In 2009, Crowe was living in a nursing home in California, about to turn eighty-eight. He was not the presence he had been decades earlier, but he seemed alert, not interested in diplomacy.

  Crowe praised Musial as a hitter—“right up there with them”—but insisted he never got to know him in his two-plus seasons with the Cardinals. He also suggested Musial was encouraged to keep playing “whether he was producing or not, because of the past. He’d been there so long.”

  “He was kind of quiet … he didn’t say much,” Crowe said. “I stayed away from him pretty much. I was a newcomer and I was black so I just stayed away.”

  They didn’t get to know each other?

  “No, no,” Crowe replied.

  Crowe and Musial were from the same generation, from opposite sides of the racial divide. The younger African American players showed a double disconnect, mimicking Musial’s whaddayasay-whaddayasay persona.

  Curt Flood wrote about Musial in his autobiography:

  We played side by side for eight years, occupied space in the same locker room, negotiated with the same employer and, within those limits, had experiences in common. But he had other things going for him.

  Stan was one of the outstanding players of all time. He was so exceptionally talented, popular and durable that he played for twenty-one seasons, amassed substantial wealth and became a member of the Cardinal management. As an authentic superstar, he lived remote from the difficulties encountered by lesser athletes. Like Mays, he saw the world entirely in terms of his own good fortune. He was convinced that it was the best of all possible worlds. He not only accepted baseball mythology but propounded it. Whereas the typical player all but choked while reciting the traditional gibberish of gratitude to the industry, and whereas Bob Gibson, superstar of another hue, would simply change the subject, Musial was a true believer. Gibson and I once clocked eight “wunnerfuls” in a Musial speech that could not have been longer than a hundred words.

  “My biggest thrill is just wearing this major-league uniform,” Stan used to say. “It’s wunnerful being here with all these wunnerful fellas.’ ”

  At this point Flood described Gibson reciting a litany of profanity, sotto voce. Then he continued:

  We admired Musial as an athlete. We liked him as a man. There was no conscious harm to him. He was just unfathomably naive. After twenty years of baseball, his critical faculties were those of a schoolboy. After twenty years, he was still wagging his tail for the front office—not because he felt it politic to do so but because he believed every word he spoke.

  Raised in Oakland, California, Flood was wary in St. Louis. He told of taking a date to Musial’s restaurant and being refused service, and when Flood mentioned it, Musial “turned livid. He said he’d look into it. I never raised the topic with him again, nor did he with me.” Flood later confirmed that Musial had checked and been told the kitchen was already closed when Flood arrived. Either way, Flood admitted, he never had a problem at Musial’s restaurant after that.

  Musial was upset by Flood’s comments, one of the few times he had ever been publicly criticized in St. Louis, or anywhere.

  The sixties were beginning; the younger players were speaking up. In 1961, Bill White, born in Florida and educated at Hiram College in Ohio, told Joe Reichler, a well-connected baseball writer with the Associated Press, that he was tired of watching the white Cardinals being invited to the annual Salute to Baseball breakfast by the St. Pete Chamber of Commerce.

  “They invited all but the colored players,” White said. “Even the kids who never have come to bat once in the big leagues received invitations—that is, if they were white.… How much longer must we accept this without saying a word? This thing keeps gnawing away my heart. I think about this every minute of the day.”

  The Cardinals insisted they had invited only players living downtown and that Musial had not been expected to attend, since he lived out by the beach. The burghers of St. Pete hastily issued an invitation to White, who promptly informed them he did not like getting up early for a public appearance.

  White also complained to Reichler about the way the Cardinals housed their white players in the Vinoy Hotel, alongside Tampa Bay, but the black players were forced to stay in private homes in the black neighborhood.

  “When will we be made to feel like humans?” White asked.

  This had been going on since the Yankees and Cardinals first signed black players a decade earlier. The black players stayed with Dr. Ralph Wimbish, the head of the St. Petersburg chapter of the NAACP, and a dentist, Robert J. Swain, who built the Rosa Apartments next to his office and sometimes rented rooms in his home to black players.

  In 1961, the two doctors said they felt “degraded” at having to provide housing for major leaguers, in the words of Rosalie Peck, the former wife of Dr. Swain. “They said, ‘Damn it, we’re not going to do this anymore,’ ” Peck said in 2008.

  Curt Flood, who had access to Gussie Busch, took up the issue of housing with the owner. Flood quoted Busch as saying, “Do you mean to tell me, that you’re not staying here at the hotel with the rest of the fellas?”

  “Mr. Busch, don’t you know that we’re staying about five miles outside of town in the Negro section?” Flood asked. Busch said he would do something about it the next year.

  “Busch was just worried about profits,” Bill White said in 2009.

  The Cardinals teetered into the 1961 season, winning only thirty-three of their first seventy-four games, and Hemus was fired. Gibson still refers to 1961 as “the year I got out of prison.”

  The new manager was Johnny Keane, a former seminarian whose major-league hopes had been set back by a fractured skull in 1935. Keane had the wrinkled look of Colonel Potter, the avuncular officer in the television series M*A*S*H, but could occasionally stun umpires with language distinctly secular. His first move as manager was to hand the ball to Gibson and say, “You’re pitching, Hoot.”

  The Cardinals could not catch the Reds in 1961, as Musial hit .288 in 123 games, but they began to repair the clubhouse.

  For the spring of 1962, Gussie Busch followed through on his promise to Flood. He arranged to rent two motels on the south end of town, near the skyway to Bradenton and Sarasota, and let it be known that all players and their families would be welcome. The announcement stopped just short of an order, and was something of an inconvenience to families used to living out by the beach, with space for visitors, cookouts, and privacy.

  Mildred White, who was married to Bill White at the time, was not sure the Musials and Boyers would be supportive. “All those years, they had a place by the beach and a lot of them put their kids in school or got themselves a tutor,” she said.

  On her first day at the motel, Mildred White noticed Stan and Lil and Jeanne staying in one room. The players went off to work every morning, leaving the wives and children behind.

  “There was really nothing for the kids to do,” recalled White, who had taken education courses in college. “I had two daughters. I said, why don’t I get all the kids together from nine to twelve, listen to records, play games, keep the kids busy.” The motel came up with a small building in the back and cleaned it out for her.

  “Every morning at nine o’clock, the little kids would come out of their hotel rooms and we would walk down and play ring-around-the-rosey, London Bridge, little dance games, or we would
color, just do anything that a kindergarten kid would be doing, keep them busy. Then they would go back to their little rooms, and they would have lunch and in the afternoon they would go to the swimming pool, and the fathers would come home and have dinner or do whatever they were going to do. But at least we kept them out of their moms’ hair for a while. It gave them something to do, just to let them sit around and talk.”

  White has an enduring memory of that spring: “Little Jeannie Musial would come and sit at the table because she and my girls were the same age. The kids all stuck together and played together.”

  Stan and Lil have never talked much about that spring in the motel. Did they contemplate asking Busch for a dispensation? Did they see living in the motel as noblesse oblige, a gesture for those times—or a total pain in the neck?

  Jeanne Edmonds, their youngest child, now a wife and mother, has told her sister Gerry she did not remember much about that spring or that motel. This suggests that whatever the Musials did, it was no big deal. They were with the team.

  When Walter Eberhardt, the physical educator who helped the Cardinals with their training, came down from St. Louis, he would meet the wives and girlfriends alongside the pool and lead them in calisthenics. Unobtrusive, in the middle of the pack, was Lela Keane, the wife of the manager. Front and center, big smile on her face, was Lil Musial.

  “Lil was great,” Mildred White recalled. “She had this attitude that everybody is here.”

  The Sporting News carried a short article with the headline “Bill’s Wife Solved Problem, Led Romper-Room Classes.” The article added, “Owner Gussie Busch expressed pleasure with her work.” Years later, White spoke of those weeks in Florida as a lovely time in her life.

  Even hard-shelled Gibson was impressed: “Musial and Boyer were living in beachfront bungalows, but they gave them up to come stay with the rest of us.”

  The players entered into the spirit, with White and Gibson cooking, coach Howie Pollet making the salad, and Boyer and Larry Jackson buying and grilling the meat.

  “People would drive by just to see all these black and white guys swimming and grilling steaks together,” Gibson said.

  The motel was their home. A championship team was being built, every morning in the Romper Room, every evening at the grille.

  “If you were driving by and wanted to stay there, you couldn’t,” Mildred White said. “We had the dining room, nobody could come in. We had the whole place. He leased the whole thing so he would have control of it. He said to us, ‘As long as you stay in any place I own, I will back you but if you go to a department store or anything, I can’t vouch for you because this is their town, their place. What I own, I can back it up.’ ”

  The Cardinals took the families to Weeki Wachee Springs to watch the pseudo-mermaids, and one day there was an outing to Busch Gardens.

  “Charlene Gibson and I had two girls about the same age,” Mildred White recalled. They took their girls to the bathroom, and one white woman made a comment. “I said, ‘Ma’am, Augie Busch owns Busch Gardens, and he is my husband’s boss, and if you don’t watch out, I will have you put out of here.’ And she looked at me like, ‘Oh.’ That’s what the South was like.”

  Mildred White said once in a while she would hear a wife say, “Last year, we stayed at the beach,” but in general “the wives were good, the wives got along very nicely, we did things together.”

  She recalled how friendly Lil Musial was in the organization of baseball wives, known as the Pinch Hitters, but that the wife of a prominent journalist used to back away from White and Beverly Flood.

  “She must have thought it would rub off or something,” White said. So she would be extra friendly to the woman, introduce herself every time, and shake her hand. “The older ones, we had to break in.”

  The same thing was happening with the players. The sly Gibson once spotted McCarver sipping from a soda bottle on the team bus and Gibson asked for a sip. McCarver said he would save some—a tip-off he did not want the bottle back after Gibson had used it. Gotcha, Gibson said. It was an early step in the education of James Timothy McCarver.

  With all this testing going on, the younger players tried to get a measure of Stan the Man.

  “Best hitter I ever saw,” White said in 2009. “Nice guy, I guess. I don’t know Stan. He was a great player, but I don’t know him. I don’t think any white guys knew him, either.”

  White had many careers: he helped the Cardinals win the 1964 World Series, tried to straighten out the syntax of Phil Rizzuto as a broadcaster with the Yankees, and served as president of the National League. He had mixed feelings about Musial but knew he was not one of the athletes who talked about striking when Jackie Robinson arrived in 1947.

  “The Pittsburgh area has a lot of great athletes,” White said. “I don’t think he had any prejudice toward blacks. I think Stan didn’t want to get involved either way.”

  When I suggested Musial had set an example to southern teammates like Harry Walker, White was defensive about the man who had been his hitting coach.

  “Walker was instrumental in my career,” White said, citing Walker’s advice to drop a few bunts early in the season, when nobody was on guard, just to get a few surprise hits in the ledger. They had also talked openly about race.

  “We’d yell and scream and get it out into the open,” White said, suggesting Musial was more opaque—even about hitting.

  “I think Stan was Stan,” White added. “He was serious about hitting. Nobody could hit like that. He couldn’t tell you how to hit.

  “In batting practice, he hit the ball to left field, left center, center field, and then he’d say, ‘Hey, hey, how do you like that hitting? Tee-hee, tee-hee.’ And then he’d get the hell out of there.”

  Late into the conversation, White remembered one time he and Musial indulged in shop talk: “He did tell me he cut his eyelashes so he could see the ball better, so after that I cut my eyelashes, too.”

  The way things happen in life, some black players softened their views over the decades. Gibson was much too complicated to go on perceiving Musial as merely a man who spouted “wunnerful” all the time. They also wound up having the same business agent in Dick Zitzmann. By 2010, Gibson had nice things to say about Musial.

  “The Cardinals were different. A group of us would go out to eat after a game on the road, and there’d be a dozen guys or so, black and white. Some of the white players—Stan Musial and Ken Boyer, to start with—were as adamant against segregation as the black players were.”

  Flood had found Musial saccharine in the early sixties and probably was not thrilled when Musial did not openly support his challenge to the reserve clause, but toward the end of Flood’s short and turbulent life, he ran into Musial at the ballpark during the making of a documentary about Stan the Man. In the sweetest way, Flood told Musial that everybody on the Cardinals had tried to win one more pennant for him in his final season.

  37

  OLD FOLKS

  IN THE final weeks of the 1961 season, Johnny Keane called Musial into his office. Probably even the most loyal Musial fans would have understood if Keane had shuffled his extra lineup cards, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “Stan, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

  Musial was getting the feeling that nobody thought he had much left, maybe even the owner, maybe even Bing Devine, a supportive presence but also a general manager rebuilding a ball club. Stanley could catch the drift.

  Only eighty games into his long-delayed chance to manage the Cardinals, Keane was about to show his independence. He had been admiring Musial from his days as a minor-league manager, when Keane was a perpetual candidate to take over the big club but was bypassed in favor of Walker, Hutchinson, and then Hemus. The front office finally brought Keane to the Cardinals in 1959 as a coach, maybe part of the master plan or maybe just a reward for a forty-seven-year-old lifer, to get him on the pension plan. Whatever the reason, Keane became a sane and unobtrusive buffer for t
he players, the way coaches can be. Then, probably to his own surprise, he replaced Hemus.

  Keane immediately established himself as his own man, abolishing the poker games in the back of the plane because he did not like the idea of players losing money to teammates, with resentments carrying from plane to clubhouse. Now Keane had to make up his mind about Musial.

  “Stan was on the bench,” Keane said a few years later. “And as far as the Cardinals’ organization was concerned, he was through as a player. He’d had it. I went over to him, and I said, ‘Stan, I want you to play. What are you resting for? You haven’t got far to go. Let’s run the string out, but let’s run it out on the ball field.’

  “Stan Musial is the greatest guy in the world, and he reacted right away. He said, ‘That’s just exactly what I want to do, Johnny.’ ”

  It is not enough to believe in oneself. Self-motivation and self-delusion are mirror images. What Musial wanted to hear was: “We need you, big guy.”

  Keane was not threatened by Musial, as managers are often threatened by fading superstars. He did not have the insecurity of Trader Lane or Solly Hemus, who had to shake up the team on a daily basis, to make the team over in their images. Keane and Musial seemed comfortable with each other, both of them disciplined men who understood they were not perfect.

  The manager could blister the ears of an umpire with language that would have gotten him tossed out of Kenrick Seminary (where he cut class to moonlight as a high school quarterback). Musial could drop a bawdy line. They both smoked cigars. Musial drank a bit more than Keane, who sipped only out of politeness. It takes a great deal of inner security to say, “I want the old guy back.” And toward the end of the 1961 season, that was what Keane said.

  With Keane’s encouragement, Musial went back to the gym in the winter of 1961–62, performed some of the old Falcons agility exercises, and came back more slender and lithe than he had been in a while. He had weighed 175 as a rookie and had gone up as far as 187—imagine: a slugger who weighed only 187 pounds—but in 1962 he was back down to 180, “and I could tell the difference,” Musial said.