Stan Musial (9 page)

Parents can loom large in their children’s memories. Twenty years after his father’s death, Musial may have been trying to portray Lukasz as a man with big dreams, the way Judy Collins did in her classic song “My Father,” about a miner who promises his daughter that someday they would live in France.

Sitting in the bleachers in doomed Forbes Field, Musial may have been indulging in a touching bout of wishful thinking.

THE BOY’S
journey began with the rudimentary baseballs Mary Musial manufactured with spare rags and strings, and the few minutes of catch she could muster just outside the house.

As the two Musial boys began to roam around Donora, other adults were often willing to act in loco parentis.

“We all had ‘relations’ in any part of town who would whip your ass if you were doing wrong, which you can’t do today,” Ed Musial said in 2000. “Anybody was allowed to take care if you was up to no good … so you had to be good, because somebody’s going to see you.”

There was no Little League in those days, so boys played ball wherever they could. Flat land is precious in Donora. The steel mills had priority, laid against the Monongahela River, sending their precious product downriver to Pittsburgh. A block or two from the river, the Appalachian hills rise steeply.

The boys played at Weed Field, an odd name for such a dusty flat patch
on the hillside. Nothing grew there because of the plumes of smoke from the American Steel plants directly below.

Stash’s training at the Polish Falcons’ gymnastics classes had made him comfortable with his body, instantly adept in this most American of sports. He was a natural left-handed hitter who could hit the ball farther than anybody else, and his long drives to right field would go bouncing down the arid, rocky gully.

“
You had to wait five minutes for the outfielder to get the ball,” Musial recalled with a laugh many years later.

Right field was out of bounds, so the young man tried to hit the ball to center or left, where there was more space.

From his gymnast’s training, he discovered a coiled stance—right hip facing the pitcher, head tucked down behind his right shoulder, weight back.

The young man also learned to pitch from watching the men. With the same superb timing and selectivity he would develop at bat, young Stash found his first mentor—
Joe Barbao, who had played minor-league ball and now lived for baseball in his hours away from the mill.

Barbao allowed the Musial boys, both lefties, to play catch on the sideline while he was working out with his buddies, and he would teach them the game. Because Stan was two years older than his brother, he was first to serve as batboy for the team Barbao managed, the Donora Zincs. Stan was slender, in the manner of the Depression, when Americans visibly had ribs and sternums, but anybody could see the boy was an athlete, had a competitive drive.

One day the Zincs were playing Monessen and their pitcher ran out of gas early. Barbao asked the skinny batboy if he would like to pitch. According to Musial’s memory, he pitched six innings and struck out thirteen, but even if his stint was a little less spectacular, he pitched well enough to retire grown men. He also managed to annoy some of the Zincs, who grumbled that he was not an employee of the mill and had not paid his club dues. Eventually Barbao smoothed it out and soon Musial was a regular with the Zincs, one time breaking Barbao’s ankle with a hard foul to the coaching box at first base.

Ed also was a hitter and soon earned a spot on the Merchants team.
One story, told at many Musial family gatherings, dates back to when Stan lashed a drive that was rolling toward the outfield fence, a triple for sure, until Ed surreptitiously kicked the ball under the fence, turning the hit into a ground-rule double.

“
When I came in, I told him,” Ed said, still cackling about it after many retellings. “I says, ‘You know, I beat you out of a triple.’ First time up, he put one right between the shoulder blades. He was very competitive, very competitive,” Ed added with a laugh.

Stan also found mentors at school.
The head coach was James K. Russell, a Notre Dame man who had been recommended by the legendary Irish football coach Knute Rockne shortly before Rockne’s death in 1931.

Russell became aware that Musial was a sandlot quarterback, probably good enough to play for his varsity, but Lukasz considered that sport too violent and would not give his permission. Lukasz won that battle, although he did not know his son continued to play informally, with minimal equipment and no supervision. Blocked from varsity football, Musial became a prominent member of Russell’s basketball team as a sophomore.

Another adult keeping an eye on Musial was Michael Duda, who taught English composition and civics. Duda was known as Ki, short for Kaiser, not from any adult admiration for the former leader of Germany but because he had once portrayed the kaiser in childhood neighborhood war games. A local boy, Duda had gone to St. Vincent College in nearby Latrobe, returning in 1934 with a degree as well as a bride, Veronica (Verna), a classically trained violinist.

The young couple lived in a third-floor apartment above the Union National Bank downtown. They would later have a daughter, but in the mid-thirties they had time and energy to pay attention to the young Stan who may have needed it more than some of his teammates did.
In the summer, Duda worked at a camp in Latrobe and brought along some Donora boys; Stanley was always included.

Donora High had not fielded a baseball team for a dozen years, so Musial pitched for the American Legion post. Word got around to the scouts, doggedly wearing out shoe leather and tire rubber to find talent.

Two miles away in Monessen, the St. Louis Cardinals fielded a team in the Class D Penn State League. Branch Rickey had built a farm system on
the theory that he could make more money by owning entire teams rather than having to purchase single players at a premium. The crafty Rickey had lined up teams stacked with Depression-era youths, mostly southerners, competing with one another for a ragged uniform that had been worn, several incarnations earlier, by somebody higher in the organization.

The business manager at Monessen, Andrew J. French, invited Musial to a tryout at Page Park, with its flimsy wooden stands, and introduced him to the manager, Ollie Vanek, who had broken his index finger that spring while catching for Decatur. To amortize the vast amount they were undoubtedly paying him, the Cardinals sent Vanek to manage at Monessen, a steep fall from his own playing ambitions. As part of his job, he had to supervise tryouts.

“
It was deep in the Depression, we didn’t have any lights and we didn’t start our games until four thirty in the afternoon,” Vanek would recall. “That way we figured we might draw a few of the men who were lucky enough to be working in the few mills that weren’t shut down.”

The Musial boy crossed the river for a tryout on a Saturday. He weighed 135 pounds and wore a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and canvas sneakers. “
He looked, as Ollie described him, like a grammar school kid with his pink cheeks and gangling arms,” Jack Sher wrote. The boy pitched batting practice—“pretty fair curve,” Vanek would recall—and could also hit pretty well, for a pitcher.

“He seemed to love to play ball but he was very shy, almost the sort of kid you’d forget if you didn’t look twice at the way he slugged the ball. I watched the stuff he threw and recommended that Andy French sign him.”

The scouting report of June 5, 1937, signed by French, called Musial a “green kid,” but praised him for being aggressive with good habits.

Vanek kept up with Musial over the summer of 1937, as other teams, but not the Pirates, began showing an interest. In late August, French turned up at the Musial house, trying to sign Musial for the vast Cardinal system and touching off negotiations with as many variables as a World War II summit involving Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.

Because he would not turn eighteen for another fifteen months, Musial could not legally sign a professional contract. Musial has always maintained
his father balked at signing the Cardinals’ contract because Lukasz wanted Stan to accept a basketball scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh.

This version is plausible at best.
Musial was a very ordinary student, but in high school he had taken the somewhat humbling step of making up a necessary algebra credit at the junior high—a star athlete sitting in with children three years younger than he. More likely, Stash’s real goal was to play professional baseball, while Lukasz wanted him to work in the zinc mills and play semipro ball on the weekend.

“
His father wanted him to work and make money, because they were poor,” Verna Duda said emphatically in her retirement apartment in Pennsylvania in 2009.

Asked about the parallel version that Lukasz wanted his son to go to college, Duda said with ironic inflection that there had been “mixed emotions,” and she let it go at that.

One constant in the telling about this crisis is that Musial always gave credit to the high school librarian, Helen Kloz. While he never spent much time in the library, somehow Kloz recognized his torment and told him to follow his heart. (In 1961, long retired, Kloz came to see him play in Philadelphia and asked him to hit a home run for her, on the premise they might never see each other again. The wind was blowing in that day—but Stanley managed to hit one out, and he laughed for joy around the bases.)

Andrew French came back on September 24, 1937, contract in hand for $65 a month for the short minor-league season. Through the typewriter of his longtime friend and biographer, Bob Broeg, Musial described the meeting, starting with his mother’s role:

Somebody who has heard the Musial family variations on this meeting over the years says there is another detail to that summit: to make her husband more amenable to signing, Mary Musial plied him with a drink. Or two.

Lukasz signed the contract, but there was a social cost: father and son were not on good terms for several years after that, perhaps did not even speak. Good son that he is, Musial has never talked much about that time; sitting for the documentary in Forbes Field in 1969, he placed his father at the core of his youthful ambitions.

BECAUSE HE
signed with the Cardinals after the 1937 season, Musial was still eligible to play basketball for Donora High as a junior that winter. He had grown to six feet by seventeen and became one of the stars as
the Donora Dragons surprised the Mon Valley by winning eleven of twelve league games.

Just before the regional tournament in Pittsburgh, Musial came down with the flu. Fearing the boy would not recover quickly enough in his crowded home, Jimmy Russell and his wife took him in and got him well enough to play.

Donora upset Washington in the first game, and Russell later said, “We probably wouldn’t have won it without Stan. But sick or not, he did what you’d expect. He played a wonderful game.” Donora was then eliminated by Har-Brack in the next round.

The team was also tested off the court during the tournament, as the players were put in a side room at the hotel restaurant because of their two African American players, Grant Gray and Buddy Griffey. Musial and his teammates said they were willing to forfeit rather than be treated that way, which pleased Russell, who once had taken them out of a Donora restaurant after a similar incident.

Musial never gave long dissertations on race, but in later years he would cite this episode as crucial to his own tolerant vision of race.

Through his basketball ability, Musial gained another mentor—Frank
Pizzica, who owned a DeSoto-Plymouth dealership in Monongahela and sponsored a team called the Garagemen. The perks included a few dollars here and there, but, more important, Frank and Molly Pizzica often invited Musial to eat with their family.

Pizzica gave Musial an example of how to dress, carry himself, run his own business, be confident, get ahead in this world. He would tell the boy, “Keep your head high, look ’em in the eye and give ’em a warm, firm handshake, not a dead fish.”

In later years, Musial would invite the couple to visit him in St. Louis or on the road and would consult Pizzica before making business decisions.

When Pizzica was quite old, Musial stopped off at the Pizzica household on Sunday with his grandson, Tommy Ashley. “Mr. Pizzica wore a coat and tie to watch the Steelers,” the young man recalled. “He dressed up as if he were going to church.” Pizzica’s legacy was that in his adult life Musial rarely went out in public without a sport jacket.

In the spring of 1938, Ki Duda decided to start a baseball team. Whether or not he did this for the benefit of the young prodigy is unclear, but he even hired an assistant coach, Charles “Chuck” Schmidt from nearby Cement City, who knew the game far better than Duda did. Musial was the star of the new team, often striking out ten or more batters and hitting long home runs.

One of those shots became a legend. Long after Donora High was blended with Monongahela High and the old high school building was turned into an elementary school, Bimbo Cecconi took me to the old athletic field and pointed to a grove of trees in deep right field.

“
We played baseball on the football field,” said Cecconi, who was only eight years old and not present when Musial hit his most celebrated shot. But the old Pitt tailback had heard plenty about it from eyewitnesses. “Guys would come to school the next day and say, ‘Bim, you should have seen the one Musial hit yesterday,’ ” Cecconi said.