Stan Musial (48 page)

STAN AND
Lil hunkered down for the long haul, loving grandparents by all accounts. Bob Costas, watching his daughter play soccer in the park, would spot Musial rooting for a granddaughter.

“
Stan would sit on a lawn chair and he would bring with him, not out of any sense of entitlement but because he had learned that people would ask, autographed cards for everyone. I never, ever, saw him say no.”

Costas said he learned a Musial family lesson on the soccer sidelines.

“It’s natural for the children of very famous persons to be asked, ‘How’s your dad?’ ” Costas said. “But whenever you ask one of his kids, his daughter, Jeanne Edmonds, who’s roughly my age, would say, ‘He’s well … and my mom is doing well, too.’ A small act of decency. And I never again did not ask about both of them.”

Stan and Lil were a couple for the ages, but with vastly different roles. She was the queen of the house. He was the king of the road. This comes through in the documentary
The Legend of Stan the Man Musial
, produced in 1990 by Tom Ashley, along with Mark Durand.

In one outdoor scene, Stan and Lil are sitting on a bench on a nice sunny day, talking about their lives. Clearly, giving interviews is Stanley’s job, keeping things going with his
wunnerful
s.

When Lil is asked about their lives, she begins to talk, and Stan begins to fidget, as if batting against some wild rookie. His eyes dart; his admirable short-twitch muscles seem to be contracting inside his bright sport jacket. Lil does not say anything controversial, but Stan’s nervousness is tangible. It seems as though, in his mind-set, it is still the forties, when the little woman stayed home.

“
We’ve learned a lot and done a lot in our lives, and travelled all over,” Lil says. “Everybody just loves us here in St. Louis. Everywhere we go, people call me Lil. It’s nice to be known like that. Everything is God-given to us, and we know it. We have such a wonderful life, with a lot of wonderful children, and everything is so perfect in our lives. What kind of story would that be?”

Stan dutifully responds: “A fairy tale.”

Fairy tales usually end with the words “lived happily ever after,” but fairy tales are not real life. Lil began to suffer from arthritis and eventually began using a wheelchair, still running the household with the help of valued housekeepers.

Lil was protective of her family, particularly her oldest child. One family friend has said that Lil did not like to hear the Garagiola matter discussed, period. After many jobs and many moves, Dick and Sharon moved to Houston, where he had a leg amputated because of cancer. When his health improved, Dick and his family were able to drive to St. Louis for Christmas in 2009. He and Sharon have a son, Jeffrey, and two daughters, Laura and Natalie.

Gerry and Tom Ashley lived in New York when Tom worked for Ted Turner’s network, TBS. Stan and Lil would visit them in their summer hideaway in the Rockaways, near the ocean; the Musials fit in with the police officers, teachers, and other working people of Queens. The couple later divorced, with Tom staying in New York and Gerry moving to San Francisco, both speaking well of the other. They have three children—Tom Junior, and twins, Camille and Christopher, known as Kit.

The two younger Musial daughters stayed in town and remained a daily presence in their parents’ lives. Janet, five years younger than Gerry, married Dr. Martin Schwarze, and has two children, Julie and Brian, the athletic young man who escorted his grandfather to the office, to lunch, to Cardinals’ games, and referred to Stanley as his best friend.

Jeanne is married to Dave Edmonds, a lawyer, and they have three children, Andrew, Lindsay and Allison.

IT TOOK
Stan a while to bounce back from prostate cancer, but by June 1990 he was able to get back on the circuit, including an induction into the Brooklyn Dodgers Baseball Hall of Fame, in the category of “Outstanding Opponent.”

The celebration had its own bizarre Stanley twist. He was forty minutes late in arriving at the hall in the Flatbush section, and when he arrived, a worried Roger Kahn blurted out, “Stan, where the heck have you been?”

Musial then told about his odyssey through modern Brooklyn. His cabbie had dropped him off at the wrong place, over a mile away, he said, and, because he was recovering from surgery, he could not walk that far. He was standing on the corner, wondering what to do next, when an old car pulled up to the curb and a man in black Hasidic garb, including black hat and flowing white beard, rolled down the window.

In a lush accent that Musial tried to imitate, the man had gushed, “Stan! Stan Musial! Vot are you doing here in Brooklyn?” When Musial showed him the address, the man told him to get in, and drove him to the hall.

On another return to Brooklyn, Tom Ashley accompanied him to dinner at Gage and Tollner, the classic steakhouse, with nineteenth-century gaslight decor and waiters also of ancient vintage. As soon as Stanley materialized, old-time waiters, many of them African American, with chevrons on their sleeves denoting decades of service at the restaurant, clustered around his table, chattering about the time Stanley went five for five and other glory days.

Gage and Tollner closed in 2004, but in Brooklyn he would always be Stan the Man.

HE CONTINUED
to explore corners of the world he had never seen before.

“
I quit while I still enjoyed it, but I put in my time,” he told Roger Kahn. “I like to travel now, but not with a ball club. Have you ever seen Ireland? Do you know how beautiful it is?”

In 1990, on the way back from a Little League excursion to Poland, Lil and Stan stopped off in
Dublin for the Irish Derby. Jim Hackett recalled Musial playing the harmonica at a castle in the presence of Tony Bennett, or maybe it was Donald O’Connor, or maybe both. On the same trip, Stan and Lil took in the tennis at Wimbledon.

No longer due at the ballpark every day, Musial still cared about the Cardinals. When Joe Torre managed the club from 1990 to 1995, the Musials sometimes invited Torre and his wife, Ali, out to dinner, but not to talk baseball. Stan and Lil understood: the Torres needed a family, needed a night out.

Torre also went on a cruise to South America with Musial, Willie Stargell, Bob Gibson, and their wives. “He’s always onstage for everybody,” Torre said. “One little gem every night. He would pull out a dollar bill and make something out of it. And his jokes were always terrible.”

Musial still went on the road to the collector shows, too lucrative to pass up, but he increasingly stayed close to home, a regular at lunches in pubs and taverns. Mickey McTague, who has long roots in town, recalled seeing Stan, Red, Broeg, Tom Eagleton, and dozens of other aging St. Louis guys who now had time for camaraderie.
Stanley would almost always show up at banquets and luncheons. After one trip to Poland, he was roasted in St. Louis, with Jack Buck noting that Poland now had “the only baseball field with goalposts.” Musial laughed, overlooking his acquired aversion to Polish jokes.

When he was in town, Musial would pop into his office, Stan the Man, Inc., in suburban Des Peres, to see what Dick Zitzmann had lined up for him.

“
Stan would sign all the pictures and all the baseballs and tell stories,” Larry Christenson recalled of one visit. “And Zitzmann would roll his eyes because he’s heard them over and over again.”

Another constant in Stan’s life was Pat Anthony, his loyal secretary for decades—“like a member of the family,” Gerry Ashley said. “If you need anything, you go to Pat. She’s devoted to Dad.” She was still in the office as of 2010, still indispensable.

For a very long time, Musial remained the same old Stanley. John McGuire, a pixielike reporter, respected by police and gangsters alike, once made the mistake of showing up for an interview with Stanley while
wearing his old straw boater plus a designer tie depicting several baseballs. McGuire’s outfit put Stanley in a playful mood, so he grabbed a felt pen and signed his autograph—right across McGuire’s tie. McGuire kept it to the day he died.

Most days, Stanley and Zitzmann would go out for lunch, sometimes to the Charcoal Lounge, sometimes to the Missouri Athletic Club out in the suburbs. If the ladies who lunch did not wave at him quickly enough, Stanley would walk over and serenade them.

“Put his arm around you, laugh, such an outgoing friendly smile,” Christenson said. “And after lunch he would say, ‘I’m tired,’ and go home and take a nap.”

IMPORTANT PEOPLE
continued to die.

On September 29, 1989, Gussie Busch died at ninety, after driving his Clydesdales and his carriage around the ballpark almost to the end. Julius Hunter, the television personality who had shared the literary dinner with Musial and Michener, dropped by the house for a comment. Lil was in her wheelchair—“pleasant, always gracious, she, too, extended us a warm welcome,” Hunter said—and Musial recalled how Busch had voluntarily made him the first $100,000 player in the National League.
“Stan told me, with a very sad look in his eyes, that he would really miss his boss and his pal,” Hunter recalled.

The year 2002 was brutal. Jack Buck died on June 18, Ted Williams died on July 5, and Enos Slaughter died on August 12.

“
Well, I’m hanging in there,” Musial told a reporter. “You know, when you get to be eighty-one, every day is a blessing and every year is a blessing. I’m feeling pretty good.”

The Big Three had kept in touch in their later years. “
Williams, DiMaggio and Stan were real close. They corresponded. When a statue was dedicated to DiMaggio in Chicago’s Italian section, he wanted Stan there. And Ted only spoke at a dinner in St. Louis because Stan wanted him to,” Pat Anthony said in 2004.

Musial and Williams served on the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, empowered to add deserving old-timers to the Hall. One year Williams showed up in a wheelchair, and the committee members, hearing he had
been named an honorary colonel by the Marines, honored him with “The Marines’ Hymn,” with Musial on the harmonica. The old jet pilot forced himself up from his wheelchair and saluted during the anthem.

The two great rivals from the 1946 World Series were kindred souls, dedicated to correcting inequities of the past. Williams had previously used his induction to the Hall to make a plea for the inclusion of Negro League players. He and Musial became activists on the committee, according to Monte Irvin, the Negro League and New York Giant veteran who later worked for the commissioner.

“
I’ve always liked him,” Irvin said, calling Musial a positive figure from the Jackie Robinson days to his time on the committee. “Never had one cross word with him. Never saw him say anything bad about anybody. Just because he didn’t think somebody didn’t belong, he didn’t make it personal. Just voicing his opinion.

“Stan was fair,” Irvin said. “If somebody’s name was mentioned and he didn’t believe they belonged, he’d say, ‘I think they’re a little short,’ or ‘What about this guy?’ and he’d say, ‘I liked him. I think he belonged.’ He’d say something like that.”

From the time Musial joined the committee in 1973, some of the veterans voted into the Hall included Sunny Jim Bottomley, Billy Herman, Earl Averill, Hack Wilson, and in 1981 Johnny Mize, whose trade had weakened the Cardinals for a generation. In 1984, the Cardinals’ respected rival, Pee Wee Reese, got in, and in 1985, Enos Slaughter.

“I do know that Bob Broeg told Slaughter to issue a statement stating his intentions and so on,” Irvin said, referring to the strike rumors in 1947, “and he apologized for some of the stories that were told, some of them true, some of them not.” Irvin believed Slaughter was “a great ballplayer, raised in the South,” who had learned, who had grown.

In 1986, Williams joined the committee, which promptly voted in his old teammate, Bobby Doerr. In 1987, Ray Dandridge (“same country you did”) was voted into the Hall, although that could not make up for his never getting to play a single game in the majors. In 1989, Musial and Williams made sure that good old Red made it. In 1989, it was Al Barlick, Musial’s favorite ump; 1991, Bill Veeck and Tony Lazzeri; 1994, Phil Rizzuto and Musial’s old buddy, Leo Durocher; 1995, Richie Ashburn; 1998, Lee MacPhail and Larry Doby; 1999, Orlando Cepeda, the jolly first baseman
who coined the name “El Birdos” for Musial’s championship season as general manager in 1967; and in 2001, Bill Mazeroski from Musial’s hometown team, the Pirates.

The Big Three got together in rural Florida on February 9, 1994, for the opening of the Ted Williams Museum, devoted to hitters. Muhammad Ali was there, and so was the Marine Corps Band. DiMaggio’s lawyer tried to get his client to time his arrival in his rented limousine fashionably late, for maximum effect, but DiMaggio understood the pecking order that day: “
No, this is Ted’s day; I’ve got to go in before him.”

Later that evening, the Big Three huddled at Williams’s home and “talked into the night,” according to Leigh Montville, Williams’s biographer.

“It might have been the longest single stretch of conversation between Williams and DiMaggio in their entire lives. It definitely was the first time one had visited the other’s house.” Soon afterward, Williams had a stroke.

THE CLIPPER
went first, at the age of eighty-four, on March 8, 1999. The funeral in his home neighborhood in San Francisco came after a power struggle between Joe’s brother, Dominic, and his lawyer, Morris Engelberg. Dominic, a successful businessman in Boston and Florida, ultimately had the legal power to bring his brother home to North Beach.

The funeral was held in the neighborhood at Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church, with its white Gothic Revival façade and a quotation from Dante’s
Paradiso
, in Italian, on the façade. The English translation is: “The glory of Him who moves all things penetrates and glows throughout the universe.”

The neighborhood, settled by Italians, was now considerably Asian. As the cortege arrived, more than a hundred Chinese elders were conducting their daily regimen of the robust motions and tonal chants of tai chi.