Stan Musial (32 page)
Authors: George Vecsey
Musial and entourage with Pope John Paul II. On that same visit they had dinner with the Pope in his apartment.
Larry Christenson
Musial was inducted into the Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Fame in June 1990, and was greeted by former Dodgers … and writers and fans.
Marty Adler
Sharing the same birth date (November 21) and the same hometown (Donora, PA), Ken Griffey Jr., dropped everything to have his photo taken with Musial at Cooperstown. Musial was a high-school teammate of Junior’s grandfather, Buddy Griffey.
Dick Collins
Growing up in Oklahoma, Mickey Mantle admired Musial. Here, Willie Mays seems dubious about Mantle’s story. This photo was taken early in 1995, just months before Mantle’s death.
Dick Collins
Although not thrilled with the posture of the Carl Mose statue, Musial was nevertheless proud to have it remain a meeting point at the new ballpark in St. Louis. William O. DeWitt III stands beside him at the second unveiling.
AP
Musial liked the energy of the smaller 1998 statue by Harry Weber and loved posing alongside it.
AP. Photographer: Tom Gannan
Opening Day, 2009. The always-reverential Albert Pujols adjusted Musial’s jacket. “It was cold,” Pujols said. “I was afraid he would be cold out there.”
Chris Lee
, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The Cardinals imitated a popular literacy project, Flat Stanley, in 2010, mounting a Flat Stan campaign for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Courtesy of Ron Watermon, Director of Public Relations & Civic Affairs, St. Louis Cardinals, LLC
In February 2011, Musial was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
Courtesy of Doug Mills
/The New York Times
TEMPER, TEMPER
No matter who you talk to on this project, you’re not going to find one person that’s going to say one bad word about Stan Musial.
It’s going to be very difficult. You’re going to want to have somebody tell you they saw Stan kick an old grandma in the knee one time when she asked for an autograph, but you’re not going to hear that. He’s been gracious his entire life and he’s going to be that way the rest of his life, I am sure.
—Dal Maxvill, teammate, colleague, friend
F
OUND ONE
.
After collecting thousands of examples of Musial’s kindness and good humor, it was downright refreshing to hear of an instance when Stanley actually got angry—at a kid! Otherwise, we should be submitting his name for sainthood. Much better to think of him as a nearly but not quite perfect human being.
The eyewitness report of Stanley’s Bad Moment came totally unsolicited from Steve Kaufman, a writer for trade magazines, who once was an eleven-year-old urchin on the North Side of Chicago. He heard I was doing a book on Musial and, with no malice and a wry detachment over the decades, recalled a moment in the summer of 1954 when Musial grumped at him.
On that fateful day, Kaufman recalled, he took the Kedzie bus and transferred to the Addison bus to Wrigley Field, paying 75¢ for a general-admission ticket.
“
The Cubs were awful, but who cared?” Kaufman said years later. “In the opposite dugout were Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider, or Willie Mays, or Richie Ashburn and Robin Roberts, or Eddie Mathews and Henry Aaron and Warren Spahn, or Ted Kluszewski … or Musial.”
Visiting players would leave Wrigley through a side gate, where youths would congregate, asking the ballplayers for their autograph. Kaufman spotted Musial walking with Vic Raschi, the former Yankee who had moved over to the Cardinals.
Kaufman did what kids have always done outside ballparks: he stood in Musial’s path and plaintively asked, “Would you sign this, Stan?”
In those days there was no market for autographs. Children were not greedy little speculators. Cajoling a scribbled signature was a way to be in the proximity of a ballplayer for a second or two.
For whatever reason, this was not one of Musial’s better days.
“Without breaking his stride, he looked down at us and hissed, through gritted teeth, I’ll never forget: ‘Get outta my way or I’ll kick you in the shins.’ ”
In the shins? Stanley threatened to kick a kid in the shins?
“Not every player signed that afternoon,” Kaufman said. “Most of those who didn’t simply ignored us, like you try to do with beggars on Calcutta streets. But none was so openly hostile as the great Musial,” Kaufman said.
“Over the years, as I’d read about his friendly nature, his grand generosity, and especially his endless patience with fans, I thought about that afternoon in Chicago. I wondered if he’d just had a bad afternoon. I’m guessing he didn’t. Musial rarely had bad afternoons against the Cubs.”
This outburst, which I am assuming happened just that way, is hard to understand. That summer happened to be one of the hottest ever in the Midwest. The Cardinals were not in contention. Musial was on his way to his normal .330. Who knows? All that is left for one aging fan is the memory of Stan Musial ducking down a North Side street, threatening to kick a kid in the shins.
MUSIAL DID
have a temper. People said it happened fast, a flare of anger.
Jack Buck attested to the night he and Red and Musial visited Toots Shor’s oasis in New York and a group of five men from Omaha asked Musial to autograph a menu. When Musial handed it back, one of the men ostentatiously ripped it in half.
“
Why would anybody do a thing like that?” Buck asked years later. “Stan flipped and started after the guy, but Toots’s bartenders got there first. They jumped over the bar and had four of those people out on the street in a blink. They kept one guy inside to pay the bill and then hustled him to the sidewalk. It was a good thing Stan never got to them.”
So Stanley could get riled up at a cluster of jerks who were probably, in Casey Stengel’s phrase, whiskey-slick. Buck added, “By the way, I asked Musial once what he would have done if he had not been a baseball player, and he said he thought he would have been a boxer.”