Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  Donora received the zinc plant, forty acres alongside the river, smokestacks spewing, essentially as a reward for Donora’s workers having opposed the Homestead strike and resisted unionization. At its peak, the zinc works employed about 1,500 workers—Italians and Spanish, African Americans, East Europeans. In 1910, Donora’s population was 8,174; by 1920, when Lukasz and Mary Musial’s first son was born, the count was up to 14,131. In 1940, when Stan and Lil Musial had their first child and Stan hurt his shoulder making a diving catch in the outfield, 13,180 people remained in Donora despite the Depression. By the 2000 census, the population would be 5,653.

  In Musial’s boyhood years, the steel mills and the zinc factory worked around the clock because the world had an insatiable need for American goods. If the fires were ever quenched, the furnaces would crack.

  The factories were dangerous. In his epic book Homestead, William Serrin notes that 313 workers were killed in the Homestead Works alone between 1914 and 1980. Serrin writes:

  The monstrous crucibles of molten iron and steel, the white-hot ingots, the great slabs and billets, the fast-moving cranes, the great cutting machines, the locomotives and railroad cars, the exploding furnaces, the splashing steel, the scalding water from bursting pipes, the high, dark walkways—all this made the mill a natural place for injury and death. Wives and children in their homes came to dread the sound of whistles, the screaming sirens that meant that an accident had occurred, the telephone call, particularly late at night, that could mean that a steelworker, “the mister,” was injured or perhaps dead.

  Sometimes death happened fast. On January 20, 1920, Andrew Posey, a veteran of World War I, was engulfed by three-thousand-degree molten steel when a restraining wall cracked suddenly. There was no body to be removed, but his co-workers did bury a human-sized ingot just outside the mill, being unable to transport it uphill to the cemetery. During World War II, the chunk of steel was removed as part of the scrap metal drive. He would have wanted it that way, people said.

  Working in the steel mills debilitated people. Serrin quotes John A. Fitch, a sociologist who worked in Homestead in the early twentieth century, as saying that around the age of thirty-five, workers “had begun to feel a perceptible decline in strength. The superintendent and foremen are alert to detecting weakness of any sort, and if a man fails appreciably, he expects discharge.”

  Lukasz Musial was already broken down by 1937, when the union finally made inroads. His son seemed to understand that improvements had taken place when workers organized. When some baseball players began to organize after the war, Musial was at least a moderate, which in ballplayer terms was like being a flaming liberal.

  One athlete who saw the benefit of collective action was Lou “Bimbo” Cecconi, a star quarterback at Donora High and later a star tailback and beloved icon at the University of Pittsburgh. Cecconi spent a few summers working at the zinc plant, where workers still had to supply their own makeshift gear.

  “That’s why I appreciate the unions,” Cecconi said. “They fought for all those things. You didn’t have your own shower. You finally got a locker where you could carry your clothes. Guys came home dark and dirty.”

  In 2009, Cecconi drove me past the ghostly banks where the mills used to be. I could feel his old sense of fear rise as he described the dangerous chore of getting close to the sizzling ingot and whacking off the residue before it cooled: “You had to knock it off with a big steel bar. Shit, I didn’t realize how heavy they were, those big steel bars. Slag, junk. You had to throw all this stuff in there.”

  And then a foreman would order sacks of chemicals to be thrown into the vat for the next round. “You’d throw that stuff in, sacks of magnesium. It would splash up, coming up at you from everywhere,” he said with considerable feeling.

  How did he protect your face? I asked.

  “They’d give you glasses,” Cecconi said, “but I would take one of those things the cowboys wear, what do you call them? Right, a bandana. I’d put it around my face, put my glasses on, protecting you from sparks and heat. My dad had big scars on his face and neck and I’m sure a lot of other injuries.

  “Their main concern was safety,” Cecconi said. The foremen did not want to slow down production just because something unfortunate happened to one of the workers.

  This was Stan Musial’s world growing up. In his autobiography, Musial mentioned “the strong smell of sulphur from the zinc works” and described the view from near his house, with “the switch engines darting between the smoke stacks and the barges moving slowly along the river. Across the Monongahela, the hills were completely bare, vegetation killed by the smoke and chemical fumes carried over from Donora by the prevailing west wind.”

  People were just beginning to figure out what those chemicals were doing to their land, to themselves. In her powerful book When Smoke Ran Like Water, Dr. Devra Davis wrote about Donora, her childhood home:

  Fumes from the mills, coke ovens, coal stoves and zinc furnaces were often trapped in the valley by the surrounding hills. They gave us astonishingly beautiful sunsets and plenty of barren dirt fields and hills to play on.

  Davis’s family used to sit outdoors on camp chairs on a summer evening, the way families in other places watch the sunset or fireflies. In Donora, people watched the “fiery spray” from burning graphite spewing off the emerging steel ingots. Motorists driving on the other side of the Monongahela River would slow down to watch the sparks from the zinc mill, like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  In 1933, Davis wrote, Native American graves had been “washed out of the hillside downwind of the zinc plant’s plumes.” It was a hint, a warning.

  Even backyard gardens were affected by the plumes from the mills. Davis’s neighbor Mrs. LaMendola “told me she could never get tomatoes to grow in the path where the plume from the ovens ran. On the other side of her house, they did just fine.”

  The factories were just there, part of life. Davis said her mother used to tell her: “That’s not coal dust, that’s gold dust.”

  Ulice Payne’s family lived on First Street, seventy yards from the gate of the steel mill. His dad worked across the river in Monessen, as many shifts as he could. During the war Payne’s mother began working a regular shift at the mill, and she kept working after the men came home.

  “There was always a store where guys got their lunch,” Payne recalled. “And a hotel. I just knew it as a hotel. I got to college, I found out it was a house of ill repute, but to me it was a hotel.”

  The bad air was part of the deal of living in Donora.

  “You breathed that air all the time,” Payne said. “It was always dirty. My grandfather, who retired out of the mill, made a living washing cars. He passed at ninety-four. That’s how I made my money for many summers, washing cars. The cars were always dirty. We lived right outside the gate, so especially paydays, Fridays and Saturdays, you would be busy. Guys come out of work, man, we’d wash their car, simonize their car, I’d make $3–4 a car. So I remember, it was an accepted way of life, I don’t think anybody thought about the impact. And of course the mill was 24/7. Never stopped.”

  When Payne went away to play basketball at Marquette, he could not believe winters in Wisconsin. Clean snow. So beautiful.

  THE TRADE-OFF was that in the boom days, Donora promised a better life. Devra Davis lovingly recalls some landmarks of her childhood—the Fraternal Order of Eagles, Masons, Polish Falcons, Sons of Croatia, bowling alley, Weiss’s drugstore, Niccolanco’s candy store. Time was measured by the mill whistles, which also called the volunteer fire department into action. The sign atop the factory gate read WORLD’S LARGEST NAIL MILL.

  Davis also recalls how the men would come home and work on their houses, and the women would wash the windows and the curtains. When they had worked their way around the house, it was time to start all over again.

  Old photographs suggest the gritty middle-class life of the main streets: awnings, women all dressed up to go shopping, troll
ey cars. In one photo of those bustling days, I count fourteen people near one intersection, waiting to cross—critical mass downtown.

  Here is the Irondale Hotel at Sixth and McKean, one of four hotels in the center of town. There is the Polish church and rectory, rising proudly on a hillside, one of twenty-two churches, almost all of them ethnic. There is the mansion—that is what they called it—for the superintendent of the mill, a Colonial Revival building looming on a hillside above a dignified-looking trolley car. The building later became the Spanish Club, haven for hundreds of new laborers. There is the hulking American Steel and Wire Company with its twenty smokestacks, bordering the river for blocks and blocks. And there is Donora’s own Penn Station, circa 1912, a major stop on the Mon Valley train line, down from South Side Station in Pittsburgh. At the peak of the railroad days, the station employed nineteen men.

  In Musial’s boyhood, the town had three movie theaters. “On the southern end of town, there was the Princess Theater, between Fourth and Fifth streets. That sort of specialized in western movies, and it was known as the Ranch House,” said Dr. Charles Stacey, the former superintendent of schools, later the town historian.

  The Liberty Theatre showed second-run movies, Stacey said, and the Harris Theatre, which Mary Musial swept out, showed most of the first-run movies.

  “This tells how big Donora was but also how important movie theaters were,” Stacey said. “We have a picture at the Historical Society of people lined up maybe half a block ready to buy their tickets to get into it. People seemed to have their Sunday best on. The Harris Theatre used to have some stage shows. One of the fellows who used to come up from Pittsburgh was Dick Powell. One time Tex Ritter performed on the stage. That was our entertainment, prior to TV.”

  Higher above the town was Palmer Park, where children played baseball. In the winter, the children would take their sleds to the top of the hill and barrel down toward the river, crossing the main streets, always an adventure. A child could manage only a couple of runs a day, because it was six or eight blocks to trudge up to the top again.

  Musial went to the public schools, but some of the children whose families could afford the tuition went to Catholic grade schools. Sundays were segregated by race and ethnicity. Musial was baptized at St. Mary’s but went to church at St. Michael’s, an Orthodox Catholic church, with married priests.

  “Their priests were very flamboyant, great speakers,” Bimbo Cecconi said. “I got married in that church. Their priest was Father Chegin, who was like a singer at the opera.”

  Cecconi gave me a guided tour of where some of Donora’s most famous sons and daughters lived. That empty plot used to contain the home of Deacon Dan Towler. There was the block where Arnold Galiffa, known as “Pope,” lived. Cecconi’s voice grew husky as he told how his teammate died young, of cancer.

  There was the house where the Griffeys lived—first Buddy, then Ken senior, who moved back to town so his wife at the time could give birth to their oldest son, Ken, later known as Junior.

  On these hills, Cecconi said, people continued the customs of the old country. This was no ethnic cliché: the Italians loved their gardens and their kitchens.

  “My father worked at the mill. He was a crane man,” Cecconi said. “When they needed him, they’d call for him.” That freedom meant his father would be cooking in his spare time—sauces, chickens, groundhogs—or canning fruits and vegetables. The Romantinos, down the block, kept pigs, and Cecconi’s father would help butcher them, help make sausage—“barter system,” he said.

  Some of the Italian families would cross the river to Webster Hall, climb the hills to the elderberry patches, spend the day picking, then go home and make white wine.

  “At a certain time of year, a whole boxcar full of grapes would come to town and all these different families would get wheelbarrows and go down and fill them up, and for three weeks after that, if you had lit a match this town would have blown up,” said Bill Bottonari, who was the same age as Musial.

  “Whenever I brought over anybody Irish or English or Scotch, my house always smelled,” Bottonari said. “Their houses were antiseptic, you couldn’t smell a thing, and that embarrassed the hell out of me.”

  People were often judged by their father’s job down at the mill. “Stan’s father, not to be snobbish about it, but he was primarily a laborer,” Bottonari said.

  There was no major segregation into ethnic or racial neighborhoods.

  “Our barber was black,” Bottonari recalled. “Blacks were working when the whites were working.” A photo in a Donora diamond jubilee book shows proud old lifers standing in front of the mill. Four or five of the old-timers are clearly African American. Bottonari said that all five blacks in his graduating class went on to college.

  AND SOME Donorans went beyond. The Honorable Reggie B. Walton, the United States District Judge for the District of Columbia, grew up in the same neighborhood as the Cecconis and the Griffeys.

  In 2007, Judge Walton presided over the trial of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was convicted of leaking government secrets, including the identity of a covert agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Judge Walton is proud of not coddling youthful offenders. He often talks about how his father, a laid-off steelworker who held two jobs to keep the family together, monitored him when Reggie was heading toward serious trouble. Ultimately, Reggie went away to West Virginia State College on a football scholarship.

  After law school, Walton was appointed to the district court by President Ronald Reagan and later was second in command of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

  Judge Walton never met Stan Musial, who had moved away by the time Walton was born early in 1949, but he did come under the sway of another great person from that town, Dr. Charles Stacey, the superintendent of schools. (When I said I would love to chat with Walton, the judge called me a few days later, letting me know that Stacey had told him to call. That is the way things work in Donora.)

  “I think you had a really good core of people who had migrated to Donora because of the relative affluence of the steel industry,” Judge Walton said, adding, “It had a good education system. I had excellent teachers, although I was not a stellar student.”

  Judge Walton, who is African American, added: “To be candid, race was not a non-issue. My mother could not get a job as a salesperson in a store downtown. Very few blacks in the steel mills had supervisory positions. But we intermingled in the town, especially when it came to education. I never feel slighted when I talk about my education.

  “Sure, there were some restaurants where you wouldn’t go. They didn’t have a sign that said blacks were not served, but you knew you were not welcome.

  “I never had a black teacher. But I never felt my teachers treated me any differently because of my race.”

  The judge concluded: “It was a tough city and it made you tough. I attribute all my success to my parents and coaches.”

  The judge’s memories sounded familiar. He came out of that hard town with a lifelong bond with Stacey and other mentors who looked after him, much the way people had looked after young Stan Musial.

  10

  MENTORS

  IN HIS long public life, Musial seemed so spontaneous, so merry, that it was hard to imagine his having ulterior motives with the words he used so apparently casually. However, in at least one case, he may very well have created a parallel childhood, to match other boys’ memories of that staple of American childhood—their dad taking them to their first game.

  His possible mythmaking took place in 1969, for a documentary about his childhood. The trip was planned around the Cardinals’ visit to Forbes Field, which would close in June 1970.

  “We were standing near the batting cage and Musial says to me, ‘Come on, Slim, let’s take a walk,’ ” a journalist, Scott Dine, recalled. “He had started calling me Slim earlier in
the day. And walk we did. Across the infield, then the outfield to the bleachers. Musial wasn’t saying much. He opened a gate and we walked up several rows and sat down.

  “After a long silence Musial explained that his dad would bring him to baseball games and his dad would get a pail of beer (pretty sure he said it was a pail—but I may be confusing it with another story). I sort of visualized him as a fledgling pitcher studying the guy on the mound or carefully sizing up a batter.

  “So there we sat, in silence, on a gorgeous summer day. Then Musial said quietly, ‘It was here that I figured that baseball was my way out of Donora.’ He said nothing more and I was too stunned to respond. We quietly returned to the batting cage.”

  It is a lovely memory, connecting a boy and his father and his childhood dream. No doubt Dine recalled the conversation accurately, whether or not Musial said his father ordered a “pail” of beer or just a cup. But according to other Musial words on the subject, Lukasz never took his son to a game at Forbes Field, and Musial often said it was his mother who had played catch with him. The only revealing part is that Musial felt the need to place his dad in the old ballpark.

  The trains ran regularly from Donora to downtown Pittsburgh and were not expensive. People from Donora went “up” to Pittsburgh on a daily basis for one thing or another. But Lukasz was not a baseball fan, and once he had made his way from Poland to the west bank of the Monongahela, his peregrinations may not have gone beyond factory and ethnic clubs and the trudge home up the hill.