Stan Musial (44 page)

Piszek also became friendly with Philadelphia’s John Cardinal Krol, who was of Polish extraction. In 1980, Piszek sent forty million fish cakes to Poland, whose people were hungry under Communism.

Musial first met Piszek in 1962 when Michener made a losing campaign for Congress.

“
The relationship between Dad and Stan Musial was more of a brother relationship,” said Piszek’s daughter, Helen P. Nelson. “My father was a driven man, very autocratic, he had a quick temper, which you never saw in Stan Musial. Of all the people I’ve ever met through my father, and I’ve met a lot of famous people, he’s probably my number one person. Just his honesty, his integrity, he’s just one simple, nice human being.

“When the three of them were together, I recall Stan was something of a conservative,” Nelson said. “Dad was a pick-and-choose, and Michener was very liberal.”

Nelson added, “The relationship with Dad and James Michener was more of a business relationship. Jimmy Michener was a different person. He was always nice to me and my husband. You didn’t get the warm and fuzzies from him that you got from Stan.” Nelson felt a reserve in Michener, perhaps because he relied on his wife for logistics and security. “His wife was extra protective,” Nelson said. “When she was around, forget it.”

Mari Michener was formidable. On one early trip to Poland, Michener, a Quaker, and his wife, who was of Japanese ancestry, met a young prelate who innocently noted that he did not meet many Japanese ladies in Poland.

“
She corrected him, as she does all people who use that term, by saying proudly, ‘Japanese-American. I was born in the United States,’ and he accepted the correction,” Michener wrote.

And that was how the Micheners got to meet Karol Jozef Wojtyla, the archbishop of Krakow and a cardinal.

At first Michener did not gauge the potential of Wojtyla, but Piszek advised him, “Keep your eye on that one. He could go far.” When Michener asked why, Piszek said, “That one has guts of steel. He’s been in the front-line battles since the age of six.”

Piszek accompanied Stan and Lil to Poland in 1970, upon the invitation
of the Polish Olympic Committee. Musial carried letters from John Cardinal Carberry of St. Louis to the archbishop of Warsaw plus the energetic young archbishop of Krakow.

In 1976, Stan and Lil returned to Poland in the company of Tom Fox of the
Philadelphia Daily News
and his wife, Karen Wessel Fox.

“
Mr. P. was relentless in getting the media to go along on his trip with Cardinal Krol to Poland,” Karen Fox said years later. At first, the Foxes were put off by Piszek’s aggressive manners, but they upgraded their impression the more they saw of him.

“When I first met Mr. P.—before the first trip to Poland with Cardinal Krol—I asked him what his compulsion was,” Karen Fox said. “Why was it that he was going to all the trouble and expense of the travel? And he said that it was important for him, to ‘travel back up the river, and find from whence I came.’ That I remember clear as yesterday. He was sitting in his humble office of Mrs. Paul’s on Henry Avenue, and at the time was making multimillions with his products.”

Tom Fox called Piszek’s journeys “the Papal Primaries,” a suggestion that Piszek was looking ahead to the next conclave, on the theory that Pope Paul VI was probably not going to live forever.

Musial’s 1976 trip to Poland (Michener was not on this one) was in Piszek’s Learjet, starting with a stop in Norway for a look at the fjords.

“We were in Oslo on National Day and had a lot of fun watching the parades—beautiful families in colorful regional dress,” Karen Fox recalled. “Musial never had a bad day—he always greeted the day early, with a song in his heart, and a litany of teases for his beloved Lil. I recall he was delighted with the Norwegian breakfast—what a spread—breads, warm rolls and spiced loaves, fishes, pickles, jams, an assortment of eggs from baked to deviled, oatmeal and other hot cereals. I think he and Lil tasted every dish.

“On flying out of Oslo on a beautiful day we all remarked how patriotic and moving that every farm was flying the national flag. The flags punctuated the well-manicured patchwork below.”

Having fallen in love with Norway, the Musials now explored Poland.

“I think the revelation for Musial was that he could be proud to be Polish,” Karen Fox said years later. “I am not sure if he ever previously concentrated on the fact that he was Polish, and that it was important.

“From my observations, it was Mr. P. who wakened Musial’s Polish roots,” she added. “It was amazing to Musial, like a movie, sort of, that his genes were from this wonderful, beautiful country, with its lovely people, who had been so torn by war—and yet, survived in fine style, and great determined spirit, despite living under the boot of Communism at the time we visited.

“He and Mr. P. spent a lot of time together, away from the rest of us, like brothers really, absorbing from whence they came. There were times when Musial was like a schoolkid—he couldn’t believe he was on this trip. He is a great ambassador. His personality is so winning. I don’t think most Poles even knew who he was. That didn’t matter; he went his merry way, winning over everyone with his impish, happy-go-lucky self.”

Musial was also observing and learning. In a conversation with Roger Kahn in 1976, Musial noted how he once had made Polish jokes and laughed at Polish jokes but no longer could.

“
I don’t think Polish jokes or Jewish jokes or black jokes are really funny,” Musial said. “My dad came out of Poland and worked like hell all his life. What was funny about that? Pulaski came out of Poland and helped out in the American Revolution. Was that a joke?”

ALWAYS LOOKING
for his next project, Piszek began working on Michener to write a book about Poland, introducing him to Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement, and talking up Cardinal Wojtyla from Krakow.

“Wojtyla wanted to know, what is this guy doing?” Nelson recalled, adding: “They believed in the same things.”

Piszek traveled with large amounts of American dollars on his person, to distribute to clerics in Poland or the Vatican, to keep the Polish church solvent under Communism. His persistence in Polish politics and religion may have had more influence in the selection of Wojtyla as pope than has ever been understood.

Nelson added that her father “was very tight with Krol. They spent a lot of time together. I would assume that was a conversation they had.”

Perhaps not even knowing it, Musial was on the fringe of a dynamic that probably impacted church and world politics for decades.

As it happened, I was covering religion in 1978 and was at the first conclave in Rome after Pope Paul VI died in August. The cardinal from Venice, Albino Luciani, was elected and chose the name John Paul I. (The housekeeper at our borrowed flat in the Piazza Navona, a Sardinian named Grazia, was the only person in all of Rome who had predicted the Venetian would win, citing the cardinal’s family’s socialist views.)

A day or two later, at a press conference of the North American cardinals at the Vatican, I heard Cardinal Krol say how delighted he was that the Holy Spirit had chosen the new pope, which is what all cardinals say after a conclave. Then Krol volunteered—and I paraphrase—that he had also been highly impressed with the cardinal from Krakow, that is to say, Karol Wojtyla. These were unusual words, since a conclave is not a presidential primary, in which a promising contender who falls short may immediately be set up to run four years hence. However, the Polish American cardinal from Philadelphia put out an unusual tribute to the Polish cardinal from Krakow. A month later Luciani died suddenly, forcing a second conclave, while memories of the first conclave were still vivid.

Ed Piszek went to the second conclave of 1978, carrying $25,000 in a briefcase to finance the unexpected expenses of the Polish cardinals. When he arrived at Fiumicino Airport, in haste and jet-lagged, Piszek forgot his briefcase. He discovered the absence when he arrived at the Vatican and quickly retraced his steps to the airport. To everyone’s shock, he retrieved the briefcase intact.

Everybody in the streets and coffee bars of Rome knew that only an Italian could become pope. However, on October 16, 1978, Michener was at his desk in Maryland when he heard that a Polish cardinal had been elected pope. Michener assumed it was Stefan Wyszynski, the archbishop of Warsaw. It was not. It was the cardinal from Krakow.

AS SOON
as Wojtyla was elected, Piszek went back to work on Michener.

“He drove Michener insane,” Helen Nelson said. “I was there when Michener agreed, and my dad was on cloud nine.”

Nelson insisted her father did not pay Michener for writing the book. “What my dad did was provide all the support,” she said.

Well aware that Michener was in the habit of hunkering down for years on a project, Piszek made sure Michener was introduced to every Polish scholar he wanted. Sometimes Piszek even rented helicopters and hired researchers to make Michener’s work go faster.

“
The clock was ticking,” Nelson said.

Under Piszek’s prodding, Michener finished his novel,
Poland
, in one year rather than his more typical three to five years. His depiction of Communism and religion in Poland immediately made Michener persona non grata for many years, but Piszek kept working on the government to relax its ban.

In 1988, because of Piszek’s lobbying, Michener was invited back to Poland to give a talk and was allowed to bring friends.

Piszek, Musial, and Michener met at the Miami airport, joined by Larry Christenson, a pitcher with the Phillies from 1973 to 1983 who had done well in finance in Philadelphia and was close to the Piszek family.

Ed Piszek expected formality from his own children, demanding they call him “sir,” but Christenson, who had a distant relationship with his own father, bonded with older men like Musial and Piszek. Years later, Christenson would grow tender as he referred to Piszek as “my best buddy.”

Christenson had met Walesa when the leader of Solidarity stayed at the Piszek home; Christenson was very much part of the team on the road trip to Europe.

The party landed in Warsaw in November, and Michener was delighted by the friendly reception.

“
But that was explained by the fact that with me when we met was Stan Musial, the Hall of Fame baseball player whose amazing feats and hilarious nature made him a favorite everywhere,” Michener wrote. “Stan’s mission to Poland was an amusing one, as explained by Piszek: ‘Baseball is to be a sport in the 1992 Olympics at Barcelona, and Cuban experts are training the Russians. Musial is twice as smart as any Cuban, and he’ll train the Poles to beat the Russians.’ Stan said he doubted that any one man could make that much difference, but he was entering the competition joyously, so our joint mission was off to a flying start.”

Michener was given a medal and asked to make a speech, as government officials did their best to mend the rift, surely a tribute to Piszek’s diplomacy (or his briefcase filled with dollars).

Musial met some Polish relatives and spent an evening comparing notes and laughing and singing. He and Michener also made a side trip to the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, where an estimated 79,000 people, including 59,000 Polish Jews, had died during World War II. That excursion put the jolly trip in sober perspective for them.

On the night of November 30, Musial was present for an epic event in Polish history. Walesa, by then the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was debating Alfred Miodowicz, the head of the government trade union, on television, as part of the Communist regime’s professed openness to dialogue. Because Miodowicz was seen as a smooth politician and Walesa was viewed as a gruff electrician, out of his element, Miodowicz was expected to score points for state competence.

A staggering portion of the Polish citizens—78 percent of adults—was estimated to be watching on television that night as Walesa stood up to Miodowicz. The public immediately judged that Walesa had won the debate.

Musial and the rest of the American party watched in the home of the archbishop of Warsaw. Within minutes after the debate ended, an exuberant Walesa came bounding into the room. As Michener described the moment, the Pole seemed like “some notable opera star who had come into Sardi’s theatrical restaurant on Broadway at the end of the grand performance to receive the applause and adulation of the crowd awaiting him there.”

Two years later, Walesa would be elected president of Poland, and would serve for five years. Musial had been there the night Walesa won over the Polish nation.

ON DECEMBER
3, the tour continued to Rome, where the three amigos were invited to dinner at the pope’s quarters in the Vatican, a rare honor.
Michener greeted the pope by saying, “I am so glad to see you, my dear friend,” a Quaker touch that seemed to boggle the Polish pope. Twice during dinner, Michener duly reported, John Paul II “looked across the table at me and said: ‘So you are the man who called me his friend.’ ”

Michener added, “I could not tell whether this was a rejection of what
he had deemed an unwarranted familiarity or simply a reflection of an unusual greeting. But I did get the feeling that at his second repetition there was a sharp edge to his voice.” Given that Wojtyla was an actor, writer, and linguist as well as a prelate, the odds are essentially 99–1 that he knew exactly what he was saying and what inflection he intended.

A master of detail, Michener also recorded the meal. “
Three courses served by a nun: some of the best cannelloni I have ever had; an excellent chicken dish, and, I feel sure, some kind of dessert; but I was so busy listening that I took no specific notice of it. The pope ate none of this: he had soup with crackers and a plate of fruit.”

There is no record of how closely Musial followed the byplay between the pope and the author. By all recollections the pope knew Musial as a famous retired American athlete and a Roman Catholic of Polish ancestry, and the two robust, secure men were physically and psychically comfortable with each other.