Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  Just before Musial was inducted in Cooperstown, a drizzle was falling on the open-air ceremony outside the Hall. But as Commissioner Bowie Kuhn introduced Musial, the sun came out.

  “With Musial, it figured,” said Pat Dean, the wife of Dizzy Dean.

  Stanley turned the induction into a Musial reunion.

  “I invited my old coaches from high school,” he recalled, laughing about the way his friends and family were looking for hotel rooms “all the way to Syracuse.”

  Years later, Musial’s strongest memory of the day was of the induction of Coveleski, an old-time pitcher who had been honored by the veterans committee at the age of eighty—“and he was Polish,” Musial said proudly. Musial, never a comfortable public speaker, was touched by the kindness of Kuhn when Coveleski could not get a word out. Kuhn walked over, put his arm around Coveleski, and said, “This is your day. Take as much time as you need.”

  And then, Musial said tenderly, the old player “made the most beautiful speech.”

  Small-town boy, man of the establishment, harmonica player to the world, Musial fell in love with the annual induction weekend in the picturesque little town in upstate New York, where baseball most emphatically was not invented. He became a regular at the midsummer ceremonies, with Lil at his side for many years, and pals like Joe Medwick and Red Schoendienst accompanying him.

  On Sunday mornings Musial would attend Mass at the pretty little Roman Catholic church.

  “The church was jammed and a priest from Brooklyn recognized a lot of people, and then he recognized Musial, who was there with Schoendienst,” said Fay Vincent, who became commissioner in 1989. “As they got to the front door, about a hundred people crowded around them, pulling out little scraps of paper, church bulletins, and they both signed.

  “The modern player would breeze right through,” Vincent said, “but they must have stood there, it must have been half an hour, and just right on the step of the church. A few people asked me to sign. A little later I went up to Stan and I said, ‘That was so nice of you to stand there,’ and he said, ‘If those people want my autograph, I’m always delighted to help.’ And I thought that was so nice. They were of a different generation. They would never have been rude.”

  Late into the night, Musial could be found at the bar facing the lake in the Otesaga Hotel, playing his harmonica with the jazz combo.

  He could show up anywhere. In 1994, eighty-one-year-old Dom Corio of New York attended the induction of Phil Rizzuto, whom Corio knew from sandlot ball many decades earlier. That night, at the Pepper Mill restaurant, Dom and his newspaperman son, Ray, were introduced to Musial by a mutual friend, who told Stanley that Dom played a mean harmonica. Later, when Dom took a long time getting back from the men’s room, his son went off to search for him. In the next room, his dad and Musial were playing a duet of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” for the patrons.

  “My father died eight years later,” Ray Corio said, “but for one night in Cooperstown, he tasted heaven.”

  41

  HOMETOWN

  WHENEVER STAN was honored, his mother was there—for the dedication of the bulky statue outside the ballpark in August 1968, for his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969. As soon as her son was introduced, Mary Musial would start crying out in the audience, and Stan would see her and he would start crying, too.

  And when Stan was honored on This Is Your Life, Mary flew out to Los Angeles, accompanied by Verna Duda, their old friend from Donora.

  “Stan included her in things,” Verna said with obvious fondness. “I drove to Cooperstown with her. She was a home-loving mother and never capitalized on him.”

  Mary had gone to St. Louis when Lukasz took sick in the fall of 1948, but she was too young and had too much energy to be a guest of her daughter-in-law for long, so she went home to Donora.

  While Stan was still playing, Roger Kahn showed up in Pittsburgh to do a cover story on him for Newsweek. A cover story was a big deal, and Musial was comfortable with Kahn, who had covered the Dodgers back in Brooklyn, but he could cooperate only so much. Musial said he was driving down to Donora on a day off, but certain subjects would have to be off-limits.

  “I promised someone I’d visit sick kids in the hospital,” Musial told Kahn. “If you write that, it’ll look like I’m doing it for publicity.”

  That was fine, Kahn said, but the magazine really wanted him to write about Musial’s mother, what her life was like, what she thought of his success. Musial said he was sorry but his mom was off-limits, too.

  “My mother lives above a store there,” Musial told Kahn. “That’s where she wants to live. We had her in St. Louis, but she missed her old friends, so we found a place she liked. And no matter how you write it, it will come out, ‘Stan Musial Makes $100,000 a Year and His Mother Lives Above a Store.’ ”

  So Kahn did not go down to Donora but instead got Musial to make some unusually coherent comments about hitting. Kahn would have preferred something more personal but was running into the barricade, high and powerful, that Musial was erecting around his family and his childhood.

  It was too bad Kahn did not get to visit Donora because he would have found a tasteful way to describe how Mary Musial was very much her own person. By some accounts, she continued to clean houses for a while, with no sense of embarrassment, because that was who she was, that was what she did.

  “She had a hard life,” Tom Ashley said with evident sympathy. “She was ill at ease with the fame. She was uneducated. When anybody would talk to her about Stan, she would start crying. Her life was changed. She would burst into tears, after that enormous poverty. She didn’t fit into the limelight, ever. Even in Donora, she was ill at ease.”

  Ashley visited Donora a few times with his father-in-law and could see how Musial began to change as they drove south from Pittsburgh.

  “He was really affected by being as poor as he was. Something he hated. When he saw it, he would do what he could.”

  Whenever the Cardinals played in Pittsburgh, all family members were welcome. Broeg described watching the Pirate broadcasters, Bob Prince and Rosey Rowswell, a couple of characters, hang out of the booth and “holler down to her, and she was cheerful as heck.”

  Broeg said his pal had gotten his “liveliness” from his mother’s side. “She was a statuesque woman, kinda cute, a handsome woman,” Broeg said.

  Stan’s nephew Edward S. Musial remembered his first trips to Forbes Field with his grandmother, sitting behind the dugout, and how his dad would lift him onto the field, where his uncle would introduce him to some of the Cardinals. All four of Stan’s sisters had moved with their husbands closer to Pittsburgh and were often at the Cardinals games. Pirates-Cardinals games at Forbes Field were one of the rare occasions when the Musial family could move closer together again, if only for a few hours.

  “We would see him with the Cardinals, but other than that, he didn’t come back at Christmas,” the nephew said, adding that Stan would usually appear when Donora invited him for one celebration or another. He was helping to support his mother, but the five other children saw her more often than he did. Lil would come home occasionally to visit her own family, which meant her children knew her family better.

  In 1965, Musial had a ranch house built for his mother at 21 Second Street Extension, up on the hill in a nice section of town. Broeg accompanied his friend to Donora one week when the old football Cardinals were playing in Pittsburgh, and described Mary Musial at home as “a real strong, bare-legged woman, you know, a great hostess.”

  To balance things out, Broeg quickly added, “He really loved his father. He really worshipped his dad.”

  The grandchildren in Pennsylvania got to see Mary regularly at birthdays and holidays. Edward S. Musial, Stan’s nephew, recalled: “She made these beautiful Easter eggs, paisley-style. Put them in some kind of oil. They were just beautiful. She would never tell us how she did them. And she would crochet things, too.”

  In later
years, Mary Musial was sometimes seen walking around outside her home, not at all unusual for the elderly.

  Some people have suggested she displayed erratic behavior, but other old-timers in Donora say nothing serious ever crossed their radar.

  “In a small town, you know a lot of things about people,” one pillar of the community said, citing a longtime resident who was known to lift things from downtown stores and whose affluent relatives would quietly make restitution.

  “I never heard a thing about Mrs. Musial,” the man added.

  Her grandson Edward said, “I was young. I don’t know much about my grandmother. You look back, you wish you did. She might have had some kind of Alzheimer’s deal. She’d ask you a lot of questions. It’s hard to remember. I was a little kid.”

  Mary Musial died early in 1975 at the age of seventy-eight and was buried in the finest cemetery in town.

  STAN WOULD also return for family reunions, where relatives would tell the same old stories, as families will do, bringing everybody back to some earlier time. His brother, Ed, would express wonderment at Stan’s success in business. “It’s hard to figure out, because he barely got through high school,” Ed said with a laugh during an interview years later. “He was a bad student, so I don’t know—let’s put it this way.”

  Ed lived with a famous name and the memories of his own career. Just like his brother, he had signed as a pitcher, with Oshkosh in the Wisconsin State League in 1941, but he wound up spending the entire war in Europe, losing four full years from his career. After the war he was converted to the outfield with Fayetteville in the Coastal Plain League in 1946, when he hit .334. Then he shuttled around the low minors, finishing up in 1950 with a career total of 469 games, 23 home runs, 188 runs batted in, 67 stolen bases, and an average of around .300. In later years, Ed admitted he had let himself get distracted by life on the road, but then he came home and settled down, working for the Westinghouse Electric Company near Pittsburgh as a machinist and boilermaker.

  “I wasn’t that good in school, but when I worked for Westinghouse, I got the opportunity to work different machines,” Ed said, proud of having become a good operator.

  Stan had a sanguine understanding of what it took to be a major leaguer, the same respect that led him to welcome rookies to the big time. He would sometimes say, apparently casually, that he had played three games a day back in Donora, but Ed had played fewer. Was he saying he had wanted it more?

  The nephew said there was no jealousy between his father and uncle. “There was nothing like, ‘You made it, I didn’t make it, I don’t like you.’ ” If there was any jealousy in his father, Edward added, “he never let on.”

  The younger brother seemed aware of all the time that had passed, all the changes in their lives. “When we were younger, we were close,” Ed once said, but after the war, he added, “We separated.”

  Ed did work with Stan and Dick in a short-lived baseball equipment business, but as he said in 1990, “I went the other way, because I says, ‘You have your following, and I have my following, what little I have. And that’s it, that’s the way we worked it, but we always knew that if we needed help, where I can get it.” Ed acknowledged they had moved apart over the years, but added, “Lately now it’s real good.”

  A heavy smoker, Edward J. Musial developed lung cancer and died on December 10, 2003, at the age of eighty-one. Stan, two years older, put himself on a small regional flight and made it to the funeral.

  Ed’s son, Edward, a retired steelworker, spoke well of his uncle and said he was proud to have the same last name.

  “Certainly—all the time,” he said. “He’s one of the greatest baseball players of all time, right up there with Ruth and DiMaggio.”

  From a few trips to St. Louis, Edward understood how much the people loved his uncle. “Can’t say enough good things about him. When he came to town, every kid in town wanted his glove signed. He’d sign every glove I could carry.”

  From living in the Mon Valley all his life, Edward certainly heard the complaints that Stan did not come back often enough, did not do enough for the valley.

  “People expect a lot,” the nephew said. “Same thing with Joe Montana. These people moved on. I don’t know how much you are supposed to give. Are you supposed to build roads? Libraries?

  “He wasn’t making that much money in those years, not the millions they do today. He made more as a businessman. If you look at it, baseball was an avenue for him. He did very well. They liked him. He was an ordinary kind of guy, a nice house but I wouldn’t say a mansion.

  “I know a lot of people say, ‘They don’t give back.’ But this isn’t your home. You don’t live here. It’s your hometown, but my uncle has lived in St. Louis for almost seventy years.”

  Stan remained loyal to old friends like Dr. William Rongaus, one of the heroes of the 1948 smog, who often bragged: “I delivered Stan Musial, and I delivered Ken Griffey Sr.”

  When Donora named ball fields for both players, Griffey Senior could not be there for the dedication because he was managing a minor-league team, but Musial sat in a small tent in the heat for three hours, signing autographs. Other times when Musial came back for reunions, he would often pay for the entertainment.

  Still, while visiting Donora in 2009, I heard somebody tell me Musial had set too steep a price for memorabilia for a display case at his old high school. Nobody could verify it, but somebody told it to me as gospel.

  “Maybe it is characteristic of athletes from western Pennsylvania,” said Charles Stacey, the retired superintendent of schools, but some people were always looking to see “if you got too big for your britches.”

  Musial’s old school, Donora High, and Joe Montana’s old school, Monongahela High, had been folded into Ringgold High School, leaving both great athletes more or less without an alma mater. People told me that residents of Monongahela were annoyed when Montana chose to watch his son play in a high school game in California rather than come back for a sporting function. Hometowns can be rough.

  IN MARCH 2009, I got a guided tour of Donora from Bimbo Cecconi, the great Pitt tailback. He took me up to the old high school, where Musial had hit his epic grand slam into the trees, and he showed me the gym, where he used to watch Musial work out during the baseball off-season.

  We drove past all the ethnic clubs that were still open for a beer and a shot. Bimbo showed me where some of the old athletes had lived, and then we visited the library, whose staff was extremely helpful. A few older female patrons of the library fluttered around Cecconi, still handsome at eighty. He still lived near Pittsburgh, which apparently did not qualify as moving “away.”

  Somebody mentioned recent shootings involving youths from Donora and Monessen, just across the river. One version was that the shootings were over girls, but another version was that the shootings were over drugs.

  Charles Stacey, now the head of the historical society, showed us the new headquarters in a former Chinese restaurant. Then the three of us took a walk down McKean, the main drag, virtually silent at midday, like a scene out of High Noon. One young man, waiting in a doorway, greeted Stacey, who recognized him as a former student. My reporter instincts told me the young man was a lookout.

  As Stacey walked along, he suddenly had a memory of Lukasz Musial shortly after the Cardinals beat the Yankees in the 1942 World Series: “He was walking down the street and he had a baseball in his hand and he was tossing it up in the air and catching it and singing.”

  We stopped in front of Costas Restaurant, where Donorans used to go for lunch or to celebrate a sports victory. It was shuttered now.

  “It seemed bigger,” Cecconi said, peering in.

  The two men recalled a state basketball tournament in Philadelphia in the mid-forties, when Donora got screwed by the big-city timekeeper.

  “I passed to Pope and he missed and that was it,” Cecconi said, reverently mentioning his late friend Arnold Galiffa, who went on to play quarterback for Army.

&n
bsp; Just about everything was shuttered on McKean. Most commerce now took place in a graceless mall on what looked like a reclaimed strip mine on the hill across the river. I did not see where anybody could buy a sandwich in Stan Musial’s hometown.

  “It’s bad because I remember the good times,” Cecconi said. “We’d walk from the top of the hill, walk down Main Street, we walked everywhere, we knew everybody, it was so personal. So many churches. So many small groups. So many people.”

  Cecconi and Stacey heard some people say that Musial did not support his hometown. They shook their heads mournfully, recalling him sitting under an awning on a hot day, shaking hands, signing autographs, chatting with people. He cared about his town, they said. And they paid him the highest compliment they could give to a man: he took care of his mother.

  42

  STANLEY GOES TO A REUNION

  “I NEED to stop at a bank,” Musial told Tom Ashley.

  Ashley had been a key executive in the early days of Ted Turner’s network, and later he made a documentary about his father-in-law—a labor of love, really.

  This was sometime in the eighties, when Ashley was accompanying Musial to a reunion of the Cardinals, ranging back to the old days, the forties. Stanley popped into a bank and came out pocketing a thick roll of hundreds.

  At the reunion, Stan hoisted a glass, played the harmonica, went into his crouch. Wouldn’t be Stanley without the crouch. He also huddled with this old teammate or that old teammate—names from old bubble-gum cards, names from World Series box scores. Sometimes they would hug, sometimes they would shake hands.