Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  Coming through the ubiquitous Broeg filter, this comment suggests a distance between father and son. By the time Musial retired in 1963, Dick was already a father, who continued to work with—or for—his father for many decades. Dick managed hotels in St. Louis, Florida, and the Ozarks, along with the bowling alley in St. Louis, a dealing that ultimately became toxic.

  Musial and Joe Garagiola had become business partners in 1958 with the Red Bird Lanes on Gravois in South St. Louis. This was a logical extension of the psychic partnership they had formed back in Springfield in 1941, when Garagiola had been salted away by Branch Rickey. Although he was five years younger than Musial, the kid from the Hill showed far more public assurance than the slender young man from the Mon Valley.

  When Garagiola arrived to help win the 1946 World Series, Musial recognized that Garagiola possessed what is called the gift of gab, and they developed a tandem, an act. Musial would be invited to sports functions and would bring along his pal, the talking catcher. Stan would chatter for as long as he could, then he would ask Garagiola to say a few words, or more than a few words.

  “You know, Joe and I both have mike fright,” Musial would say. “I’m afraid to get the mike, and he’s afraid he’s not going to get it.”

  Their friendship grew as they drove the highways of Missouri and Illinois to their speaking engagements. When Musial retired in 1963, Garagiola served as master of ceremonies at the huge celebration.

  In 1986, St. Louis residents were stunned to learn that two of their greatest civic heroes were involved in litigation.

  “The headline in the newspaper, ‘Garagiola Sues Musial,’ made Cardinal fans wince. It was a dagger in Stan’s heart. Who the hell could sue Stan Musial?” said Jack Buck.

  Actually, headlines in the Post-Dispatch included: “Musial Cries ‘Foul’ on Garagiolas’ Suit” and “Stan and Joe: Business Splits Old Friends,” but give Buck credit for poetic license.

  The suit was filed in April 1986 in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District Court of Missouri. Garagiola and his wife, Audrie, claimed that Dick Musial, Theresa Garagnani, Biggie’s widow, and Jack Garagnani—as management of Red Bird Lanes—had lent approximately $130,000 to the restaurant Stan Musial and Biggie’s, which was now going through hard times. The two sons had tried switching the menu from steak to French, producing a loss of around $3 million.

  The suit also claimed that Dick Musial and Jack Garagnani had received approximately $54,000 in management fees from the partnership over three years without the knowledge of the Garagiolas.

  The Musial lawyers said the loans from the bowling alley to the restaurant, and other businesses, had been paid back, but the Garagiolas claimed this happened only after the suit was filed. Lawyers for the Musials said the Garagiolas had moved from St. Louis long ago and had not taken an active part in the business, and that the two sons had taken a more active role in 1982 out of necessity.

  It is hard to imagine Stan Musial kiting money or approving of it. Whether the two sons consciously hid their management fees from Garagiola is not easy to determine. A confidante of Musial said years later that when Garagiola raised the issue, “Stan’s position with Joe was, ‘Give me a number.’ ”

  The suit was settled just before a court appearance, with both sides pledged to confidentiality and sharing the court costs. Like a messy divorce that haunts weddings, funerals, and birthdays, the Musial-Garagiola feud complicated St. Louis gatherings both public and private for decades, catching loyal friends in the middle.

  Garagiola rarely spoke about the rift, once telling somebody he had come to realize Musial was not a nice person. There were suggestions that Musial, prior to settling, had shown a heretofore unseen brusque side, in effect saying, Who are they going to believe, you or me? Having known Garagiola since the 1960s, I thought he might talk about the rift, but he declined, graciously. His pain came through the phone.

  “It was no coincidence that the only year Musial did not go to Cooperstown for the Hall of Fame ceremonies was the year Garagiola was inducted into the broadcaster’s wing of the Hall,” wrote Jack Buck (with the assistance of, you guessed it, Bob Broeg).

  Buck/Broeg added: “If I want to get a rise out of Musial even today, I’ll say, ‘Heard from Joe lately?’ Stan will answer, ‘You mean DiMaggio?’ Then I’ll respond, ‘No, Garagiola’ and he will become airborne. It’s a shame, but they’ll never patch it up. I know Joe feels badly about it and when Stan was ill a few years ago, Joe was really hoping they could get back together, but it never happened.”

  The Cardinals’ staff learned to separate Musial and Garagiola when they absolutely had to be at the ballpark at the same time, but sometimes there was the occasional gaffe. When the Cardinals played in the 2006 World Series, somebody on the promotion staff arranged for Musial and Garagiola to throw out the ceremonial first ball together. On the morning of the game, Musial called in sick and Ozzie Smith was hastily recruited to replace him. As soon as Garagiola was out of St. Louis airspace, Musial recovered sufficiently to toss out the ball the next day.

  The ruined friendship hung over Musial, exposed a melancholy side, a trace of vindictiveness. Or maybe it was old age coming on.

  “Stan hated confrontation. He could get down, to where you didn’t want to approach him. He wasn’t a lot of fun for a year or so after that,” somebody close to him said.

  EARLY IN 1996, James N. Giglio, a professor from what is now known as Missouri State University, began working on a biography of Musial, but he soon discovered that Musial did not want to help anybody writing a book about him.

  In July of 1996, Giglio published an article in the Missouri Historical Review about Musial’s few months in Springfield in 1941. While depicting Stan and Lil as doting young parents, Giglio quoted an elderly bartender saying she did not like baseball.

  It was a fairly innocuous and understandable remark from a young wife with a child far from home, who had seen her husband play four years in the minors for minimal pay. Ultimately, Giglio did not use the comment in his very thorough biography, Musial: From Stash to Stan the Man, published by the University of Missouri Press in 2001. By that time, Musial had closed doors to some people who talked about him.

  One shunned acquaintance was William Bottonari, a high school classmate from Donora who had gone away to college and settled in a suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Occasionally he and Musial would get together in St. Louis when Bottonari came to town on shoe business.

  Bottonari said Musial once told him: “You can hold the meeting in my hotel, you can meet at my restaurant and you can bowl at my bowling alley. The only thing you can’t have is the shirt off my back.” Musial often sent gifts to Bottonari, a Musial bat or a Musial poster, addressing them himself with his elegant cursive script, signing them to his good friend Bill.

  Sometimes they would meet at reunions in Donora, where Musial would greet everybody, pass out autographed cards, and even slip money to one cause or another, although never enough to satisfy everybody.

  “Heroes are not appreciated,” Bottonari said in 2008. “I suggested to one of the businessmen there ought to be a Stan Musial museum and he just made a face.”

  Bottonari was a civic gadfly who attended public hearings in his town to complain about school taxes, who fought for public gardens. He also went back home and gave Giglio a walking tour of Donora.

  Shortly thereafter, Musial called Bottonari at home, “which he had not done in many years, or ever,” Bottonari said. Musial fished around—Hey, Bill, what are you up to?—until Bottonari finally got his drift and said, “Aw, heck, Stan, I was over at Donora.” Musial probably already knew this, since he had his eyes and ears in his hometown. He did not confront Bottonari about the tour but chatted a few more seconds and then said goodbye. Bottonari never heard from him again.

  STAN AND Lil hunkered down for the long haul, loving grandparents by all accounts. Bob Costas, watching his daughter play soccer in the park, would spot Musial rooting for a gr
anddaughter.

  “Stan would sit on a lawn chair and he would bring with him, not out of any sense of entitlement but because he had learned that people would ask, autographed cards for everyone. I never, ever, saw him say no.”

  Costas said he learned a Musial family lesson on the soccer sidelines.

  “It’s natural for the children of very famous persons to be asked, ‘How’s your dad?’ ” Costas said. “But whenever you ask one of his kids, his daughter, Jeanne Edmonds, who’s roughly my age, would say, ‘He’s well … and my mom is doing well, too.’ A small act of decency. And I never again did not ask about both of them.”

  Stan and Lil were a couple for the ages, but with vastly different roles. She was the queen of the house. He was the king of the road. This comes through in the documentary The Legend of Stan the Man Musial, produced in 1990 by Tom Ashley, along with Mark Durand.

  In one outdoor scene, Stan and Lil are sitting on a bench on a nice sunny day, talking about their lives. Clearly, giving interviews is Stanley’s job, keeping things going with his wunnerfuls.

  When Lil is asked about their lives, she begins to talk, and Stan begins to fidget, as if batting against some wild rookie. His eyes dart; his admirable short-twitch muscles seem to be contracting inside his bright sport jacket. Lil does not say anything controversial, but Stan’s nervousness is tangible. It seems as though, in his mind-set, it is still the forties, when the little woman stayed home.

  “We’ve learned a lot and done a lot in our lives, and travelled all over,” Lil says. “Everybody just loves us here in St. Louis. Everywhere we go, people call me Lil. It’s nice to be known like that. Everything is God-given to us, and we know it. We have such a wonderful life, with a lot of wonderful children, and everything is so perfect in our lives. What kind of story would that be?”

  Stan dutifully responds: “A fairy tale.”

  Fairy tales usually end with the words “lived happily ever after,” but fairy tales are not real life. Lil began to suffer from arthritis and eventually began using a wheelchair, still running the household with the help of valued housekeepers.

  Lil was protective of her family, particularly her oldest child. One family friend has said that Lil did not like to hear the Garagiola matter discussed, period. After many jobs and many moves, Dick and Sharon moved to Houston, where he had a leg amputated because of cancer. When his health improved, Dick and his family were able to drive to St. Louis for Christmas in 2009. He and Sharon have a son, Jeffrey, and two daughters, Laura and Natalie.

  Gerry and Tom Ashley lived in New York when Tom worked for Ted Turner’s network, TBS. Stan and Lil would visit them in their summer hideaway in the Rockaways, near the ocean; the Musials fit in with the police officers, teachers, and other working people of Queens. The couple later divorced, with Tom staying in New York and Gerry moving to San Francisco, both speaking well of the other. They have three children—Tom Junior, and twins, Camille and Christopher, known as Kit.

  The two younger Musial daughters stayed in town and remained a daily presence in their parents’ lives. Janet, five years younger than Gerry, married Dr. Martin Schwarze, and has two children, Julie and Brian, the athletic young man who escorted his grandfather to the office, to lunch, to Cardinals’ games, and referred to Stanley as his best friend.

  Jeanne is married to Dave Edmonds, a lawyer, and they have three children, Andrew, Lindsay and Allison.

  IT TOOK Stan a while to bounce back from prostate cancer, but by June 1990 he was able to get back on the circuit, including an induction into the Brooklyn Dodgers Baseball Hall of Fame, in the category of “Outstanding Opponent.”

  The celebration had its own bizarre Stanley twist. He was forty minutes late in arriving at the hall in the Flatbush section, and when he arrived, a worried Roger Kahn blurted out, “Stan, where the heck have you been?”

  Musial then told about his odyssey through modern Brooklyn. His cabbie had dropped him off at the wrong place, over a mile away, he said, and, because he was recovering from surgery, he could not walk that far. He was standing on the corner, wondering what to do next, when an old car pulled up to the curb and a man in black Hasidic garb, including black hat and flowing white beard, rolled down the window.

  In a lush accent that Musial tried to imitate, the man had gushed, “Stan! Stan Musial! Vot are you doing here in Brooklyn?” When Musial showed him the address, the man told him to get in, and drove him to the hall.

  On another return to Brooklyn, Tom Ashley accompanied him to dinner at Gage and Tollner, the classic steakhouse, with nineteenth-century gaslight decor and waiters also of ancient vintage. As soon as Stanley materialized, old-time waiters, many of them African American, with chevrons on their sleeves denoting decades of service at the restaurant, clustered around his table, chattering about the time Stanley went five for five and other glory days.

  Gage and Tollner closed in 2004, but in Brooklyn he would always be Stan the Man.

  HE CONTINUED to explore corners of the world he had never seen before.

  “I quit while I still enjoyed it, but I put in my time,” he told Roger Kahn. “I like to travel now, but not with a ball club. Have you ever seen Ireland? Do you know how beautiful it is?”

  In 1990, on the way back from a Little League excursion to Poland, Lil and Stan stopped off in Dublin for the Irish Derby. Jim Hackett recalled Musial playing the harmonica at a castle in the presence of Tony Bennett, or maybe it was Donald O’Connor, or maybe both. On the same trip, Stan and Lil took in the tennis at Wimbledon.

  No longer due at the ballpark every day, Musial still cared about the Cardinals. When Joe Torre managed the club from 1990 to 1995, the Musials sometimes invited Torre and his wife, Ali, out to dinner, but not to talk baseball. Stan and Lil understood: the Torres needed a family, needed a night out.

  Torre also went on a cruise to South America with Musial, Willie Stargell, Bob Gibson, and their wives. “He’s always onstage for everybody,” Torre said. “One little gem every night. He would pull out a dollar bill and make something out of it. And his jokes were always terrible.”

  Musial still went on the road to the collector shows, too lucrative to pass up, but he increasingly stayed close to home, a regular at lunches in pubs and taverns. Mickey McTague, who has long roots in town, recalled seeing Stan, Red, Broeg, Tom Eagleton, and dozens of other aging St. Louis guys who now had time for camaraderie. Stanley would almost always show up at banquets and luncheons. After one trip to Poland, he was roasted in St. Louis, with Jack Buck noting that Poland now had “the only baseball field with goalposts.” Musial laughed, overlooking his acquired aversion to Polish jokes.

  When he was in town, Musial would pop into his office, Stan the Man, Inc., in suburban Des Peres, to see what Dick Zitzmann had lined up for him.

  “Stan would sign all the pictures and all the baseballs and tell stories,” Larry Christenson recalled of one visit. “And Zitzmann would roll his eyes because he’s heard them over and over again.”

  Another constant in Stan’s life was Pat Anthony, his loyal secretary for decades—“like a member of the family,” Gerry Ashley said. “If you need anything, you go to Pat. She’s devoted to Dad.” She was still in the office as of 2010, still indispensable.

  For a very long time, Musial remained the same old Stanley. John McGuire, a pixielike reporter, respected by police and gangsters alike, once made the mistake of showing up for an interview with Stanley while wearing his old straw boater plus a designer tie depicting several baseballs. McGuire’s outfit put Stanley in a playful mood, so he grabbed a felt pen and signed his autograph—right across McGuire’s tie. McGuire kept it to the day he died.

  Most days, Stanley and Zitzmann would go out for lunch, sometimes to the Charcoal Lounge, sometimes to the Missouri Athletic Club out in the suburbs. If the ladies who lunch did not wave at him quickly enough, Stanley would walk over and serenade them.

  “Put his arm around you, laugh, such an outgoing friendly smile,” Chri
stenson said. “And after lunch he would say, ‘I’m tired,’ and go home and take a nap.”

  IMPORTANT PEOPLE continued to die.

  On September 29, 1989, Gussie Busch died at ninety, after driving his Clydesdales and his carriage around the ballpark almost to the end. Julius Hunter, the television personality who had shared the literary dinner with Musial and Michener, dropped by the house for a comment. Lil was in her wheelchair—“pleasant, always gracious, she, too, extended us a warm welcome,” Hunter said—and Musial recalled how Busch had voluntarily made him the first $100,000 player in the National League. “Stan told me, with a very sad look in his eyes, that he would really miss his boss and his pal,” Hunter recalled.

  The year 2002 was brutal. Jack Buck died on June 18, Ted Williams died on July 5, and Enos Slaughter died on August 12.

  “Well, I’m hanging in there,” Musial told a reporter. “You know, when you get to be eighty-one, every day is a blessing and every year is a blessing. I’m feeling pretty good.”

  The Big Three had kept in touch in their later years. “Williams, DiMaggio and Stan were real close. They corresponded. When a statue was dedicated to DiMaggio in Chicago’s Italian section, he wanted Stan there. And Ted only spoke at a dinner in St. Louis because Stan wanted him to,” Pat Anthony said in 2004.

  Musial and Williams served on the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, empowered to add deserving old-timers to the Hall. One year Williams showed up in a wheelchair, and the committee members, hearing he had been named an honorary colonel by the Marines, honored him with “The Marines’ Hymn,” with Musial on the harmonica. The old jet pilot forced himself up from his wheelchair and saluted during the anthem.

  The two great rivals from the 1946 World Series were kindred souls, dedicated to correcting inequities of the past. Williams had previously used his induction to the Hall to make a plea for the inclusion of Negro League players. He and Musial became activists on the committee, according to Monte Irvin, the Negro League and New York Giant veteran who later worked for the commissioner.