Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  During the interview, Mary Musial gave Robinson the impression the father had sometimes struck the son.

  “I didn’t write it,” Robinson said. “It was for a kid’s book, and you didn’t write things like that in those days.” However, the memory stayed with Robinson for decades.

  Mary had spoken sympathetically of her late husband, telling Robinson: “Mr. Musial never had an easy time of it. There wasn’t much money.”

  The house was built into a rugged hillside, which had already been mined of its major veins of coal. The two Musial boys would scrunch into the seam to forage for chunks of coal to keep the family alive through the night.

  “We had a shaft thirty foot deep, don’t ask me how they dug it,” Ed Musial said, describing a makeshift crank that lowered a rope with a barrel at the end, to haul the coal more easily.

  One time an uncle came by with an old Appalachian solution for loosening coal from a stubborn vein—a stick of dynamite, more than a little dangerous in a derelict shaft. When the smoke cleared, the uncle and the two boys emerged with their booty, to the relief of their family. Decades later, Ed was still chuckling about the close call as the boys filled the coal bucket to satisfy Lukasz.

  “He was tough,” Ed said of his father. “He had these rules, regardless. I mean, we had to do our chores first, and then baseball, whatever, came second.”

  Lukasz was not interested in the games of the New World, but Mary understood they were important for boys growing up in this country. When Stan became an American celebrity, he would always tell how his mother had stitched rags into a makeshift baseball and played catch with him between chores. When he told that story he would weep, and so would she.

  “But I was mostly busy working,” Mrs. Musial would add.

  Gerry Ashley thinks baseball liberated her father, helped him survive. “I can see how a kid like that would just be out playing all day long, just running. He would be outside so he wouldn’t have to be concerned with troubles in the house.”

  Stashu was the star athlete even in grade school, but not the kind of jock who tossed his weight around in class or the hallways. For the rest of his public life he would remind people that he had not been a good student.

  “He was always the nice boy he is now,” Mary told Roger Kahn in 1958. “He never sasses anybody. Ask his teachers. But he has changed. His head is still the same. It’s got no bigger. But now he speaks a whole lot better than he did.”

  The speech problem began in grade school, after teachers insisted he write with his right hand. Because the alphabet and numbers were essentially created for right-handed people—90 percent of the population, by most counts—teachers tried to make handwriting conform, to the inconvenience of natural left-handers. Lefties also had to deal with the tradition that left-handedness was something unusual or eccentric—perhaps even sinister, which comes from the Latin word sinistra, meaning “left hand.”

  Not all stutterers were left-handed, of course, but in a classic study, “Left-Handedness and Stuttering,” in the Journal of Heredity in 1933, Bryng Bryngelson and Thomas J. Clark suggested: “The usual practice of shifting a left-handed child to the non-preferred right hand could be said to be responsible for the changing of inherent neurophysiological patterns in the brain.” They added that stuttering or other traits could also be linked to subtle differences in left-brain/right-brain makeup.

  These days, students are generally not forced to write right-handed—and in fact have profited from the fame of Sandy Koufax, Martina Navratilova, John McEnroe, and that left-handed basketball player who went into public service, Barack Obama.

  Musial would retain a trace of a stammer into his adult life, sometimes speaking fast in the local accent of his childhood, sometimes using familiar mantras—whaddayasay-whaddayasay, wunnerful-wunnerful—as a defense mechanism, to soften having to speak seriously.

  Teachers recalled Stan’s pink complexion, his athlete’s grace, his sweet smile. Katherine (Kappy) Hayes, the Donora school psychologist, remembered a junior high school discussion of the migrant workers in The Grapes of Wrath.

  “I saw a group of women like that the other day,” Musial had said. “They were camped right on the edge of town and they were dressed just like hoboes. They even wore pants.” For whatever reason, giving that much detail about the clothing of these female vagabonds touched off a deep red flush on the boy’s face.

  “I think Stan blushed for the rest of the period,” Hayes recalled. “He was sensitive and shy and a swell kid.”

  Stan was alert, observant, involved, bright-eyed, and looking for his main chance. He was also blessed to have the body, the reflexes, and ultimately the confidence of a superior athlete.

  Lukasz did not go to his son’s games, but he did make a mighty contribution to his son’s athletic career by enrolling him in the Falcons, a club movement that began in Poland in 1867, honoring the ancient Latin phrase mens sana in corpore sano—sound mind in a sound body. The Donora branch, Nest 247 to be precise, featured gymnastics as well as track and field meets and social gatherings, and it supported charities and other causes back in Poland.

  “Three times a week, from the time I was nine or 10, we went to the Falcons,” Musial said in his autobiography. “We’d march and drill and then work out on the apparatus and mats. We’d swing on the parallel bars, leap over the ‘horse’ and do all the tumbling that helped me avoid injury in my playing career. In the spring our instructors took us outdoors to compete in track and field events with other towns. I can’t say enough for the three body-building years I spent with the Falcons.”

  At least four athletes named Musial were prominent in Donora—Joseph, Chuck, Josephine, and Frank, none related to Lukasz. Frank was a national star in the Falcons, winning medals in track and field and in gymnastics, and sometimes he would show up at traveling carnivals and box against the resident strong man for prize money.

  Upon Frank’s death, years later, a column in the Sokol Polski, the publication of the Falcons, compared him to another Musial, who by that time was known nationally as Stan the Man. Ever gracious, Stan gave an interview saying he was never the athlete Frank Musial was.

  As long as he played the American game of baseball, Stan remained an advocate for the skills he had learned in the Nest in Donora. He praised his father for steering him to the Falcons but was reticent about the hard times and his father’s drinking, and he always would be.

  “He doesn’t like to think about it. He doesn’t like to go there,” his oldest daughter, Gerry, would say years later.

  In many ways, Musial mirrored Ronald Reagan, the son of an alcoholic, who also, in his later years, praised his mother. Reagan’s sunny, diverting personality was often said to be typical for the son of an alcoholic father. He wanted to smile, make everything turn out all right, not give much away.

  In an essay in Time on January 2, 1981, naming the newly elected Reagan as Person of the Year, Roger Rosenblatt wrote:

  One thing the children of alcoholics often have in common is an uncommon sense of control—control of themselves and control of their world, which they know from harsh experience can turn perilous at the click of a door latch. Not that Jack Reagan was known to be a mean drunk; but brutal or not, all alcoholics create states of alarm in their children. They learn a kind of easygoing formality early on, like the Secret Service, and they are often acutely alert to danger, for the very reason that the parent’s binges are periodic. That receding look and sound of Reagan may be the hallmarks of such control. One cannot retain anger in the presence of such a man, and thus in a sense he makes fathers of us all.

  In fact, Reagan seems ever to place himself in the position of being adopted. He has, in a sense, been adopted by a plethora of fathers over the years, wealthy patrons and protectors who recognized a hope for the country’s future in their favorite son.

  According to a recent study by the National Association for Children of Alcoholics (NACOA), more than twenty-eight million Americans are
children of alcoholics:

  Addicted parents often lack the ability to provide structure or discipline in family life, but simultaneously expect their children to be competent at a wide variety of tasks earlier than do non-substance-abusing parents.

  The study added that children of alcoholics have a higher rate of various disorders and often perform less well in school than children of non-alcoholic parents.

  However—and this is a giant however in the life of Stanislaus Musial—the study emphasizes the dependence on a non-alcoholic parent as well as “other supportive adults.” The study also says that children who find mentors develop “increased autonomy and independence, stronger social skills” and better coping skills.

  Stan Musial’s childhood remained tucked away, perhaps even from himself, but it did teach him to laugh his way through life, to seek control, to dress nicely. He also demonstrated a tropism toward father figures, men who knew how to handle themselves, who had education, who knew how things worked. He found them, they found him; on both sides, their instincts were spectacular.

  8

  INVITATION TO LUNCH

  IN THE spring of 2002, Ulice Payne Jr. was the new president of the Milwaukee Brewers, the first African American ever to hold that high position with a major-league team.

  A lawyer recruited out of the corporate world, Payne was looking forward to opening day, when the Brewers would open in St. Louis, because he was hoping to introduce himself to Stan Musial—another guy from Donora.

  They had never met, but Musial had been a regular presence in Ulice Payne’s childhood. The men in Payne’s family would sit on the front porch after work, drinking Iron City beer and listening to the ball games. Whenever the Pirates played the Cardinals, Bob Prince would tell Musial stories.

  “It was always about Donora,” Payne said. “Everybody was so proud of him.”

  Stan Musial was a beacon to all the boys in town, who taught themselves to hit left-handed, in a coiled position—well, except for Ken Griffey, who batted left-handed naturally and did not need to borrow anybody else’s stance.

  “We used to flip baseball cards,” Payne recalled, “but you’d never flip a Stan Musial card because that would mess up the corners.”

  When Payne was a child, legend had it that anybody with a Pennsylvania driver’s license and a Donora address would eat on the house at Stan Musial and Biggie’s.

  “That’s what we heard,” Payne said. “But not many people could ever get to St. Louis.”

  There was also a legend among blacks in Donora that when some of the southerners on the Cardinals had started yapping about not wanting to play against Jackie Robinson in 1947, Musial’s response had been, in effect: I grew up with black guys, I played basketball with them. That was no small thing.

  PAYNE’S UNCLE, Roscoe Ross, had run in the same Donora High backfield as Deacon Dan Towler, who went on to star for the Los Angeles Rams. Their Donora team went undefeated two straight years in the mid-forties.

  “The story was, my uncle was running on the field against Charleroi one day and a rabbit ran on the field,” Payne said. “My uncle picked up the rabbit and kept on going into the end zone. That was the legend.”

  Donora sent steel and zinc downriver to Pittsburgh, and it also exported athletes into the world. Bimbo Cecconi played tailback at Pitt; Arnold Galiffa earned eleven varsity letters at West Point; Buddy Griffey, the football star at Donora High when Musial was the baseball star, produced a couple of pretty fair left-handed hitters, Ken senior and Ken junior. And Ulice Payne, six feet six inches tall, played basketball for Al McGuire at Marquette, where he got the feeling many blacks did not trust their white teammates, and vice versa. But Payne felt he had gotten that out of his system in Donora, years earlier.

  “We were known as the Home of Champions,” Payne said. “We were from a small town, but I grew up believing we could do anything. My teachers were white and black, men and women—you didn’t have any choice, man. We were all steelworkers’ kids.”

  He was talking about the sixties and early seventies, not the twenties and thirties, when Musial went to school in Donora. But the mix was the same—blacks living near whites, a basic fact that influenced Ulice Payne’s life.

  “People had houses,” Payne said, years later. “Whether you rented them or not, people had houses. For the most part, everybody was employed. My best friend was Anthony Lazzari, an Italian kid. I grew up in the house my mother was raised in, and Anthony was raised in the house his mother was raised in.

  “I eat more Italian food than anything because my best friend was Italian,” Payne continued. “I wasn’t Catholic but my best friend was, and I went to St. Philip Neri Church on Saturdays with him, so we could go fishing on Sundays.”

  Payne’s family attended the St. Paul Baptist Church on McKean Avenue. He would hold back a dime from the collection plate so that he could slip into the grocery store on the same block, run by the Labash family. Stan the Man and his wife had moved away by then, but Payne got a thrill out of spending his dime for candy with Stan Musial’s in-laws.

  A FEW days before opening day in 2002, Ulice Payne received a phone call from St. Louis, saying Stan Musial wanted Payne to be his lunch guest at the stadium club.

  “I’d have gone to the game and tried to find him,” Payne recalled. “Honest to God, he asked me to lunch.”

  On opening day, Musial was wearing a red Cardinals blazer as he greeted Payne.

  “He was proud of the fact that I was from Donora and I was president of a major-league baseball team,” Payne said.

  “Just to be in a restaurant with him was great,” Payne continued. “He knew all about the Brewers, he knew all about his team. I will never forget it. For me to get to meet Stan Musial, that was big for me. Like meeting the president.”

  A few weeks later, Payne received a bat, a Stan Musial model, autographed by Stan the Man. Many other people tell similar tales about receiving a surprise souvenir from Musial, with his elegant script on the label.

  Payne barely lasted two years with the Brewers, running into power struggles that convinced him to get right back into corporate law. When asked about his brief interlude in baseball, he starts with the luncheon with the man in the bright red jacket, the man from his hometown.

  9

  HOW DONORA GOT ITS NAME

  PEOPLE SAID Stan Musial put Donora on the map, but actually a young surveyor named George Washington did.

  In 1753, working for the British in the French and Indian War, Washington made a historic map of the region. The Iroquois who fished and hunted along the river referred to the “high banks or bluffs” or “falling banks” in their language; on his map Washington turned it into the closest approximation in English, Monongahela.

  As a result of Washington’s explorations, a treaty signed in Baltimore on August 31, 1779, allocated the region to the fledgling state of Pennsylvania, and retained the Iroquois name for the river.

  Twenty miles down from what would become Donora, the Carnegies and Fricks made steel in Pittsburgh, at the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, forming the Ohio. The factories moved up to Homestead, site of a bloody confrontation between imported Pinkertons and striking steelworkers in 1892.

  In May 1899, the Mellon family purchased land farther upriver at a place first called Horseshoe Bottom and later West Columbia. A year later the Mellons broke ground for the American Steel and Wire Works, and engaged a businessman named W. H. Donner to organize a factory town.

  Donner did such a good job that Andrew Mellon wanted to honor him. At first, the town was going to be called Meldon, but then Mellon fell in love.

  While on a European vacation, he proposed to a woman of nineteen, half his age, from an Irish brewing family. She was resistant at first but he pursued her to her family’s rented castle in Hertfordshire, England. She married him after his fifth visit to the castle.

  Soon Mellon was escorting his young bride to his stolid brick mansion hard by the cla
ttering trolley tracks and spewing smokestacks of unregulated, nineteenth-century boomtown Pittsburgh. According to legend, her reaction upon seeing her husband’s home was “You live here?” or words to that effect.

  Her name was McMullen, Nora McMullen.

  In one of the more romantic gestures of his gloomy life, Mellon decided to honor his young wife by putting her name on the new town, although giving W. H. Donner first billing. There is no record of Nora McMullen Mellon ever visiting the town partially named after her. She was soon involved in a scandalous affair with an English rake that led to a divorce, leaving her two children, Ailsa and Paul, in the paid care of housekeepers and governesses. After a tempestuous life, Nora died in 1973, in leafy Greenwich, Connecticut.

  W. H. Donner did not stick around Donora. In 1933, alarmed by the tax policies of the new Roosevelt administration, he moved to Switzerland.

  Andrew Mellon later served as treasury secretary for three Republican administrations, favoring the reduction or even abolition of income taxes. He later donated his magnificent art collection to the National Gallery, and died on August 27, 1937, at the age of eighty-two, in Southampton, New York, far from the smokestacks of Pittsburgh.

  Mellon’s son, Paul Mellon, inherited much of the wealth, which became diversified as the steel industry went into decline. He became a patron of Yale University and a frequent visitor to London, a collector of Constables and Turners, Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs.

  Paul Mellon was also the owner of thoroughbreds lodged at his estate in Upperville, Virginia. Familiar with the sports pages through racing, Mellon undoubtedly heard about Stan Musial from Donora. It is not known what Mellon thought about the fact that a great slugger came from the town named for Nora McMullen Mellon.

  THE MON Valley needed people to work the mills. English and Scotch and Welsh and Irish came first, on train tracks that carried human cargo as well as freight. Belgians settled farther up the river and called their town Charleroi after the city they had left behind. Germans came from Essen, the city of the Krupps, and settled on the east bank of the river in a town that came to be called Monessen. There was talk of building a munitions factory there, although that never happened.