Stan Musial (6 page)

Broeg was a writer, one of those curious types who always want to know more. He prevailed on Musial to drive to 1139 Marelda, where strangers now lived, and urged his friend to slow down, maybe even get out and walk around and dredge up a few memories.

Undoubtedly, Broeg was hoping his friend would knock on the door
and say,
Hello, my name is Stan Musial, and I used to live here
. What a chapter that would have been—digging into Stanley’s Rosebud, Stanley’s madeleines—but Musial showed no interest in revisiting what had taken place inside that tiny house. Musial kept the car rolling, did not want to go there.

Family members told Broeg how in the old days, when nobody was watching, the young Stashu might take a swig of the sweet canned milk used for coffee. The father might get annoyed by this bit of mischief, but the women would say,
Look at that smile. Stashu is a good boy
.

Musial alluded to spankings, but Broeg, ever sensitive to his friend’s mixed feelings about his childhood, added a modifier: “Not unkindly, either.”

Lukasz remained a man of the old country, the perpetual outsider, the greenhorn, even among the large Polish community. He said he was born on a farm near Warsaw, but
according to immigration records he was actually born in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary. Since Warsaw was the only city in Poland that most Americans knew, in some small way Lukasz may have been trying to fit in, to sound a bit more mainstream.

Either way, Lukasz left Hamburg, Germany, on January 24, 1910, sailing out of the massive Elbe River, arriving at Ellis Island in New York Harbor six days later. He was pointed directly to Donora and the American Steel and Wire Company, where he loaded wire into freight trains, becoming a small speck in the great mosaic of the new American factory class.

The family’s name was pronounced MEW-shill, the Polish way. When Stan got to the major leagues, he pronounced his name for reporters and broadcasters, but they turned it into three syllables, MEWS-ee-al, and it has been that way ever since.

Musial’s tone always softened when he spoke about his mother. Mary Lancos was born in New York City with a Hungarian name but of Czech origin, due to the blurring of borders back in Europe. She arrived in Donora when she was around eight years old and soon was rowing across the Monongahela River every day to deliver a hot lunch to her father, who was working in a coal mine. At fourteen she went to work at the wire mill.

They met at a dance—a tiny man who spoke mostly Polish and a large girl, five foot eight, who spoke Czech and English—and they were married
on April 14, 1913, when Lukasz was nearly twenty-three and Mary was sixteen,
although the marriage certificate said she was twenty-one. In a hard company town, the details on a marriage certificate were not scrutinized too closely.

There was a pecking order among the town’s fifteen thousand residents. The Spanish lived closest to the mill and the Italians lived farther up the hill, with their gardens and their decorations. On the East Coast there had been NINA signs—NO IRISH NEED APPLY—but in Donora the Irish were virtually landed aristocracy. The East Europeans lived where they could; for the most part, so did the African Americans.

For those who had jobs, the salaries were enough to make many people feel they were living better than they ever had in the old country. Women dressed up to go shopping on McKean or Thompson, the main drags. At one point there were three movie theaters downtown, including the Harris, which Mary Musial swept out as one of her part-time jobs. She also cleaned other people’s homes.

“
Mommy did a lot of housework,” Ed Musial recalled for a documentary years later, “and we lived almost, might as well say, rent-free, because we lived with my grandma, it was her house.” Ed added, “Between my grandma and my mother and that, we weathered the storm pretty good. Well, them old-timers can stretch a dollar, boy, I’ll tell you.”

Bill Bottonari, who lived in the same part of town and would stay in touch with Musial into old age, remembered watching Mary Musial, a tall, powerful woman,
carrying homemade bread to the church to be blessed on Palm Sunday.

“
My grandmother would tell me that she would go buy a sack of potatoes each week for the kids, and that’s how she would feed them,” Gerry Ashley said. “She said she had to go work in the church just to make extra money to feed her family.”

For most meals, there was always cabbage, which could be stored all winter in a cold room, as could potatoes. The meat was usually bologna, known in Appalachia as coal miners’ steak, but for holidays Mary learned to make the Polish dishes her husband liked.

In later years, Musial would learn the best cuts of meat as the proprietor of a famous restaurant with his name on it. On the road, he would not seek out the East European pockets in the big cities; major leaguers were
expected to patronize upscale restaurants. But when he talked about his childhood, he would grow weepy, never abandoning the Polish culture.

“
I’ll never forget the ‘hunky’ dishes Mom turned out, such as pierogi, halucki and kolatche,” Musial wrote in his autobiography. “Kolatche is a kind of sweet roll, halucki the more familiar cabbage roll and pierogi a delicate combination of flour, potato and sugar folded into a thin turnover and baked.”

He liked being called Stash by teammates and would go along with Polish jokes until later in life, when he’d had enough of them. His pride in carrying a Polish name would lead him to adventures and contacts that enriched his life.

He loved talking about Polish delicacies, but his childhood was not open to retrospection. After Musial had become a star, a New York writer named Ray Robinson, a subsequent biographer of Lou Gehrig and Christy Mathewson, was working on a children’s book about Musial, and called Mary Musial on the telephone.

“
She did not care to talk to me and I figured it was a lost cause, so I said, ‘Mrs. Musial, you have a very young voice on the phone,’ ” Robinson recalled. “That made a difference because she suddenly became more animated, and kept talking for a while, very giving.”

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: