Stan Musial (25 page)

The relationship between Williams and DiMaggio was respectful, with the occasional zinger dropped into the conversation.

“
Sure, he can hit. But he never won a thing,” DiMaggio once said.

In 1948, DiMaggio said: “He may out-homer me, but I will out-percentage him, I can out-throw him, I can out-run him, and out-think him.”

DiMaggio thought of Williams as Teddy Tantrum. And one time Joe D. said: “He throws like a broad, and he runs like a ruptured duck.”

Williams was more circumspect toward DiMaggio. In 1941, when DiMaggio was voted Most Valuable Player despite Williams’s .406 batting average, Williams said, “Yeah, awright. But it took the Big Guy to beat me!”

ALL THREE
had brothers.

DiMaggio’s brothers were fishermen or major leaguers: Vince hit 125 homers in parts of ten seasons in the National League, while Dommy—as
Williams called the bespectacled DiMaggio—roamed far into left field, saving Williams’s legs for his true calling, hitting. The Clipper sometimes seemed a trifle frosted when his little brother took away doubles and triples from him. Williams and Dommy would remain loyal friends, and Dominic would have a stable marriage and business success, able to function out in the real world.

Williams’s brother, Danny, did a little time in San Quentin, then straightened out, and after that Ted conscientiously kept him solvent.

Musial’s brother, Ed, made a decent life for himself after his minor-league career faltered; their lives mostly went separate ways.

Even in matrimony, Musial was the boring one—no divorces, no scandals, no notoriety. If he stayed out of the limelight, that was fine with him.

WILLIAMS PRAISED
Musial as a peer, as a hitter. The Kid loved his calling so much he opened a museum in Florida dedicated only to hitters. As far as Teddy was concerned, pitchers could open their own freaking museum.

“He once told me about a time when he and Musial were at some old-timers’ event,” said Jim Prime, who collaborated with Williams on a book about hitting. “Ted’s young son, John Henry, was with him, and Williams pointed to Musial and said, ‘There’s Stan Musial over there, John Henry. He was one hell of a hitter.’ John Henry was skeptical and asked if Musial really was as good as his dad. Ted said he replied, ‘Yes, I really think he was.’ ”

Williams went on to say that their hitting styles were vastly different and that he had more power than Musial. In fact, Williams said, if he had been blessed with Musial’s speed, “there wouldn’t have been that much comparing,” Prime added. But speed, versatility, and reflexes happened to be part of Musial’s arsenal, and he used them admirably.

Williams ranked Musial seventh among all-time hitters, comparing him to Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Black Sox’ banned star whom Williams constantly pushed for the Hall of Fame despite his murky role in the Black Sox scandal.

“Musial was a slashing, all-around-the-ballpark hitter but he also hit to left-center and certainly to right center quite a bit,” Williams said. “That’s
where he could pull the ball more—and Musial was definitely a guy who learned how to pull the ball. When he first came up he was hitting like he had two strikes all the time. Then he got to where he was taking a pitch and waiting for a certain pitch, and finally he reached the point where he was a lot more selective. Then they didn’t know how to pitch him, so they’d try him inside and he’d rip the ball to right. I’m making an educated guess when I make that comparison with Jackson. It’s a theory of mine.”

Williams also said of Musial: “He was a better all-round hitter than Hank Aaron.” And he added, “He was a quiet leader on the field and in the clubhouse and was one of the most universally respected ballplayers of our generation. He wasn’t the biggest guy in the world but he was a lithe six-one and 175 pounds, and he was whippy.”

Musial, always the first to admit DiMaggio and Williams had been held back by their longer military hitches, once said of Williams: “
All he ever wants to do is talk about hitting. I don’t say he doesn’t know about anything else, but that is always the first thing he always wants to talk about.” He also said: “Ted was a great student of baseball. He was the greatest hitter of our era.”

But was Williams better than Stan the Man?

“
When I get asked about Ted Williams, I always say, ‘He was good, too,’ ” Musial said.

THEY WERE
all good. Joe Cronin, who was Williams’s manager in the 1946 World Series and the Red Sox’ general manager from 1948 through 1958, was one of the voters in the
Sporting News
poll that chose Musial as the Player of the Decade from 1946 through 1955.

Cronin did not vote for his own man. He voted for Stan Musial.

J
IMMY RUSSELL
could not see his players at the other end of the football field. Donora was known for its fogs, thick and brown and vile-smelling, but this was like nothing they had ever seen or inhaled. When Russell realized he could not keep track of his players, he sent them home.

The air kept getting worse on Friday evening, October 29, 1948.

Verna Duda, the vivacious wife of Musial’s high school mentor, Ki Duda, was serving as
Miss Halloween on a parade down McKean Avenue, tossing apples and candy to the townspeople. The air was bad, but then again, it was usually bad, so the parade continued.

By Saturday morning, nine people had died.

In the middle of the football game on Saturday afternoon, one player was urgently instructed by the public-address announcer to rush home. According to legend, the player’s father was dead by the time he got home, but historians say that part is apocryphal.

The game went to its conclusion, a 27–7 victory for Monongahela City, and then people went home and discovered Donora had suddenly, in the middle of a football game, become infamous.

“I was a senior in high school,” said Dr. Charles Stacey, who would become the superintendent of schools. “I heard Walter Winchell talk about the killer smog in Donora, and I said that must have been a different Donora.”

Winchell was the radio predecessor to the shock jocks and cable screamers of the next century. He was likewise known to exaggerate, but in
this case he was entirely accurate. By Saturday night eighteen people were dead.

Devra Davis, author of
When Smoke Ran Like Water
, was an infant in 1948. Years later, as an internationally known scientist and writer, she acknowledged that Donora’s industry, thick air and all, had drawn her family to Donora.

“
My
zadie
said, ‘It smells like money,’ ” Davis said, using the Yiddish word for grandfather. Her grandfather was a big, strong man who lived to be ninety-seven, but her
bubbe
, her grandmother, was already infirm, from bearing children in the foul air of the Mon Valley.

“When I was very young, I simply assumed that all blue-haired grannies stayed in bed, tethered to oxygen tanks,” Davis wrote.

LUKAZS AND
Mary Musial were home on Halloween weekend. He had retired in 1943, after a stroke, and had suffered several others after the war.

People collapsing in the street, funerals up and down the main streets, made bad publicity for the steel industry. Once Walter Winchell’s rat-a-tat-tat news had ricocheted into the consciousness of America, Roger Blough, the chief counsel for American Steel and Wire, called Michael Neale, the superintendent of the zinc works, at three o’clock on Sunday morning and told him to dead-fire the furnaces—turn them down halfway.

They both knew the situation: A coke oven, or battery, runs above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. If it goes below 800 degrees, the bricks will crack. “Once cooled, it can never be restarted,” Davis would write. The halfway step would protect the furnace but temporarily reduce the plant’s emissions.

Neale took three hours to follow Blough’s instructions; only after company officials arrived at his plant did he finally turn down the fires. Fortunately, rain began on Sunday, cutting the thick air, and by Monday, November 2, the mill was able to resume full production. But at least eighteen funerals had been held or planned.

Lukasz Musial grew weaker and was moved to St. Louis, where he was given Dickie’s room.

KILLER SMOGS
in cities like London were regarded as local. Dozens of people had died in the steel city of Liège, Belgium, during an inversion in 1930, but a world war had rolled through the Meuse Valley since then, and nobody had time to study the cause of the smog.

The Public Health Service labeled the deaths in Donora as “a one-time atmospheric freak.” In the age before computers, before the Internet, before curiosity, before outrage, the concepts of “pollution” and “environmental health” had not yet been articulated. Nobody linked Donora to its sister city in death until many years later.

“Zinc is one of those elements that the body needs in very small doses in certain forms, but zinc can be poisonous in larger amounts and other forms,” Davis wrote in 2002.

Another material used in the zinc mill is fluorspar, “a rock made of crystals of fluorine tied with calcium,” Davis wrote. One sign of excess fluorspar in the air is mottled teeth. “My father had teeth like that,” Davis wrote. “We figured he simply hadn’t brushed enough as a kid.” Many years later, a chemist would find twelve to twenty-five times the normal levels of fluoride in the residents of Donora.

Scientists would learn that large amounts of sulfur leave “distinct marks on the linings of the lungs, but fluoride gases do not,” Davis wrote. “They pass right into the bloodstream and attack the heart and other organs, without marring the nasal passages, throat, or lungs. The lungs of those who died in Liège were clean. Nobody noticed.”

It would take science half a century to link fluoride gases with what had happened in Donora in 1948.

“Where there are valleys, the colder air from the hills can create an inversion layer that keeps warmer air from rising,” Davis would write, describing the “massive, still blanket of cold air over the entire Mon Valley. All the gases from Donora’s mills, furnaces, and stoves were unable to rise above the hilltops and began to fill the homes and streets of the town with a blinding fog of coal, coke, and metal fumes.”

Davis took a topographical map of her hometown and marked where the eighteen deaths had taken place. “Most of the deaths occurred in the parts of town that sat just under the plume that spewed within a half-mile circle of the zinc mill.” The Musial home was well within that circle.

“The fifty people who died in the month following the smog are nowhere counted,” Davis wrote. “The thousands who died over the following decade are nowhere counted. And there is no counting of the thousands whom Clarence Mills called the non-killed—all those who went on to suffer in various poorly understood ways.”

LYING IN
his grandson’s bed, Lukasz began to go downhill.

“
Our grandfather Musial spoke very little English,” Gerry Ashley said. “Dick had to give up his bedroom for our dying grandfather, who died right before Christmas. We knew when he died because Grandmother Musial screamed. We opened our gifts early because we were going back to Donora for Christmas.”

Lukasz died on December 19 and the funeral was held at St. Mary’s on December 24. Lukasz Musial was buried on the hill above Donora, where the air is relatively good.

B
Y COINCIDENCE
, in the fall of 1948, Stan had agreed to be interviewed by Jack Sher, a writer for
Sport
magazine in New York. When Sher arrived in mid-December, Musial apologized for having no time because his father was dying inside the house.

“
Every time my dad is with me he gets sick,” Musial said, as if somehow he were more to blame than the toxic air of Donora.

Sher later described the sadness in the house, how Lukasz had left Donora because of “the smog disaster,” but for many years the family did not link the dying man with his occupation or the Halloween calamity in Donora.

When the writer from New York showed up at the door, Musial did something extraordinary for any athlete, any celebrity, then or now: he did not turn him away. Jack Sher had a job to do, a paycheck to earn. Musial seemed to honor that.

The Stan Musial of December 1948 was an example of instinctive grace under pressure. In a moment of crisis, the Musials opened their lives to the stranger. And while Stan apologized for not having time, Lil, who rarely gave an interview, sat in the living room and told how she had been introduced to Stan by his basketball teammate, and her long-standing suspicion that Stan had gravitated to the family store more for cold cuts than a date.

Sher’s article came out in the March 1949 edition of
Sport
, depicting Musial as a homebody, an ordinary man, but also a great player, destined to be underappreciated. More than six decades later, Sher’s article remains
one of the best glimpses of this very private family. For a writer, it is encouraging to know that something written in the winter of 1948–49 still informs, still touches the heart. It might be the nicest thing ever written about them, because they were so open, so decent.

Somewhat to my surprise, Gerry Ashley had never seen the article, despite the large collection of clippings Lil has apparently kept in the house. I sent Gerry a copy, and it touched off memories, like her grandmother screaming when Lukasz died in Dickie’s bed. The sadness of a family endures in print to this day.

During Sher’s visit, Lil also introduced their two children to him. “Dickie, who is eight years old, was wearing a bright-red, wee-size Chicago Cardinals football sweater. He is a handsome kid with the fine, dark eyes and hair of his father. Geraldine, the little girl, age four, is small, pert and blonde, like her mother.”

Sher described how Mary Musial entered the room, crying, and how her son comforted her. When the doctor arrived, the writer realized it was time to leave, but Musial said, “You’ll never get a cab out here this time of night. I’ll drive you to Biggie’s. He’ll get you a cab and take care of you.”