Stan Musial (7 page)

According to a recent study by the National Association for Children of Alcoholics (NACOA), more than twenty-eight million Americans are children of alcoholics:

The study added that children of alcoholics have a higher rate of various disorders and often perform less well in school than children of non-alcoholic parents.

However—and this is a giant however in the life of Stanislaus Musial—the study emphasizes the dependence on a non-alcoholic parent as well as “other supportive adults.” The study also says that children who find mentors develop “increased autonomy and independence, stronger social skills” and better coping skills.

Stan Musial’s childhood remained tucked away, perhaps even from himself, but it did teach him to laugh his way through life, to seek control, to dress nicely. He also demonstrated a tropism toward father figures, men who knew how to handle themselves, who had education, who knew how things worked. He found them, they found him; on both sides, their instincts were spectacular.

I
N THE
spring of 2002, Ulice Payne Jr. was the new president of the Milwaukee Brewers, the first African American ever to hold that high position with a major-league team.

A lawyer recruited out of the corporate world, Payne was looking forward to opening day, when the Brewers would open in St. Louis, because he was hoping to introduce himself to Stan Musial—another guy from Donora.

They had never met, but Musial had been a regular presence in Ulice Payne’s childhood. The men in Payne’s family would sit on the front porch after work, drinking Iron City beer and listening to the ball games. Whenever the Pirates played the Cardinals, Bob Prince would tell Musial stories.

“It was always about Donora,” Payne said. “Everybody was so proud of him.”

Stan Musial was a beacon to all the boys in town, who taught themselves to hit left-handed, in a coiled position—well, except for Ken Griffey, who batted left-handed naturally and did not need to borrow anybody else’s stance.

“We used to flip baseball cards,” Payne recalled, “but you’d never flip a Stan Musial card because that would mess up the corners.”

When Payne was a child, legend had it that anybody with a Pennsylvania driver’s license and a Donora address would eat on the house at Stan Musial and Biggie’s.

“That’s what we heard,” Payne said. “But not many people could ever get to St. Louis.”

There was also a legend among blacks in Donora that when some of the southerners on the Cardinals had started yapping about not wanting to play against Jackie Robinson in 1947, Musial’s response had been, in effect:
I grew up with black guys, I played basketball with them
. That was no small thing.

PAYNE’S UNCLE
, Roscoe Ross, had run in the same Donora High backfield as Deacon Dan Towler, who went on to star for the Los Angeles Rams. Their Donora team went undefeated two straight years in the mid-forties.

“The story was, my uncle was running on the field against Charleroi one day and a rabbit ran on the field,” Payne said. “My uncle picked up the rabbit and kept on going into the end zone. That was the legend.”

Donora sent steel and zinc downriver to Pittsburgh, and it also exported athletes into the world. Bimbo Cecconi played tailback at Pitt; Arnold Galiffa earned eleven varsity letters at West Point; Buddy Griffey, the football star at Donora High when Musial was the baseball star, produced a couple of pretty fair left-handed hitters, Ken senior and Ken junior. And Ulice Payne, six feet six inches tall, played basketball for Al McGuire at Marquette, where he got the feeling many blacks did not trust their white teammates, and vice versa. But Payne felt he had gotten that out of his system in Donora, years earlier.

“We were known as the Home of Champions,” Payne said. “We were from a small town, but I grew up believing we could do anything. My teachers were white and black, men and women—you didn’t have any choice, man. We were all steelworkers’ kids.”

He was talking about the sixties and early seventies, not the twenties and thirties, when Musial went to school in Donora. But the mix was the same—blacks living near whites, a basic fact that influenced Ulice Payne’s life.

“People had houses,” Payne said, years later. “Whether you rented them or not, people had houses. For the most part, everybody was employed. My best friend was Anthony Lazzari, an Italian kid. I grew up in the house my mother was raised in, and Anthony was raised in the house his mother was raised in.

“I eat more Italian food than anything because my best friend was Italian,” Payne continued. “I wasn’t Catholic but my best friend was, and I went to St. Philip Neri Church on Saturdays with him, so we could go fishing on Sundays.”

Payne’s family attended the St. Paul Baptist Church on McKean Avenue. He would hold back a dime from the collection plate so that he could slip into the grocery store on the same block, run by the Labash family. Stan the Man and his wife had moved away by then, but Payne got a thrill out of spending his dime for candy with Stan Musial’s in-laws.

A FEW
days before opening day in 2002, Ulice Payne received a phone call from St. Louis, saying Stan Musial wanted Payne to be his lunch guest at the stadium club.

“I’d have gone to the game and tried to find him,” Payne recalled. “Honest to God, he asked me to lunch.”

On opening day, Musial was wearing a red Cardinals blazer as he greeted Payne.

“He was proud of the fact that I was from Donora and I was president of a major-league baseball team,” Payne said.

“Just to be in a restaurant with him was great,” Payne continued. “He knew all about the Brewers, he knew all about his team. I will never forget it. For me to get to meet Stan Musial, that was big for me. Like meeting the president.”

A few weeks later, Payne received a bat, a Stan Musial model, autographed by Stan the Man. Many other people tell similar tales about receiving a surprise souvenir from Musial, with his elegant script on the label.

Payne barely lasted two years with the Brewers, running into power struggles that convinced him to get right back into corporate law. When asked about his brief interlude in baseball, he starts with the luncheon with the man in the bright red jacket, the man from his hometown.

P
EOPLE SAID
Stan Musial put Donora on the map, but actually a young surveyor named George Washington did.

In 1753, working for the British in the French and Indian War, Washington made a historic map of the region.
The Iroquois who fished and hunted along the river referred to the “high banks or bluffs” or “falling banks” in their language; on his map Washington turned it into the closest approximation in English, Monongahela.

As a result of Washington’s explorations, a treaty signed in Baltimore on August 31, 1779, allocated the region to the fledgling state of Pennsylvania, and retained the Iroquois name for the river.

Twenty miles down from what would become Donora,
the Carnegies and Fricks made steel in Pittsburgh, at the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, forming the Ohio. The factories moved up to Homestead, site of a bloody confrontation between imported Pinkertons and striking steelworkers in 1892.

In May 1899, the Mellon family purchased land farther upriver at a place first called Horseshoe Bottom and later
West Columbia. A year later the Mellons broke ground for the American Steel and Wire Works, and engaged a businessman named W. H. Donner to organize a factory town.

Donner did such a good job that Andrew Mellon wanted to honor him. At first, the town was going to be called Meldon, but then Mellon fell in love.

While on a European vacation, he proposed to a woman of nineteen, half his age, from an Irish brewing family. She was resistant at first but he
pursued her to her family’s rented castle in Hertfordshire, England. She married him after his fifth visit to the castle.

Soon Mellon was escorting his young bride to his stolid brick mansion hard by the clattering trolley tracks and spewing smokestacks of unregulated, nineteenth-century boomtown Pittsburgh. According to legend, her reaction upon seeing her husband’s home was “You live
here
?” or words to that effect.

Her name was McMullen, Nora McMullen.

In one of the more romantic gestures of his gloomy life, Mellon decided to honor his young wife by putting her name on the new town, although giving W. H. Donner first billing.
There is no record of Nora McMullen Mellon ever visiting the town partially named after her. She was soon involved in a scandalous affair with an English rake that led to a divorce, leaving her two children, Ailsa and Paul, in the paid care of housekeepers and governesses. After a tempestuous life, Nora died in 1973, in leafy Greenwich, Connecticut.

W. H. Donner did not stick around Donora. In 1933, alarmed by the tax policies of the new Roosevelt administration, he moved to Switzerland.

Andrew Mellon later served as treasury secretary for three Republican administrations, favoring the reduction or even abolition of income taxes. He later donated his magnificent art collection to the National Gallery, and died on August 27, 1937, at the age of eighty-two, in Southampton, New York, far from the smokestacks of Pittsburgh.

Mellon’s son, Paul Mellon, inherited much of the wealth, which became diversified as the steel industry went into decline. He became a patron of Yale University and a frequent visitor to London, a collector of Constables and Turners, Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs.

Paul Mellon was also the owner of thoroughbreds lodged at his estate in Upperville, Virginia. Familiar with the sports pages through racing, Mellon undoubtedly heard about Stan Musial from Donora. It is not known what Mellon thought about the fact that a great slugger came from the town named for Nora McMullen Mellon.

THE MON
Valley needed people to work the mills. English and Scotch and Welsh and Irish came first, on train tracks that carried human cargo as
well as freight.
Belgians settled farther up the river and called their town Charleroi after the city they had left behind. Germans came from Essen, the city of the Krupps, and settled on the east bank of the river in a town that came to be called Monessen. There was talk of building a munitions factory there, although that never happened.

Donora received the zinc plant, forty acres alongside the river, smokestacks spewing, essentially as a reward for Donora’s workers having opposed the Homestead strike and resisted unionization.
At its peak, the zinc works employed about 1,500 workers—Italians and Spanish, African Americans, East Europeans. In 1910, Donora’s population was 8,174; by 1920, when Lukasz and Mary Musial’s first son was born, the count was up to 14,131. In 1940, when Stan and Lil Musial had their first child and Stan hurt his shoulder making a diving catch in the outfield, 13,180 people remained in Donora despite the Depression. By the 2000 census, the population would be 5,653.

In Musial’s boyhood years, the steel mills and the zinc factory worked around the clock because the world had an insatiable need for American goods. If the fires were ever quenched, the furnaces would crack.

The factories were dangerous. In his epic book
Homestead
, William Serrin notes that 313 workers were killed in the Homestead Works alone between 1914 and 1980. Serrin writes:

Sometimes death happened fast. On January 20, 1920, Andrew Posey, a veteran of World War I, was engulfed by three-thousand-degree molten steel when a restraining wall cracked suddenly. There was no body to be removed, but his co-workers did bury a human-sized ingot just outside the
mill, being unable to transport it uphill to the cemetery.
During World War II, the chunk of steel was removed as part of the scrap metal drive. He would have wanted it that way, people said.

Working in the steel mills debilitated people. Serrin quotes John A. Fitch, a sociologist who worked in Homestead in the early twentieth century, as saying that around the age of thirty-five, workers “had begun to feel a perceptible decline in strength. The superintendent and foremen are alert to detecting weakness of any sort, and if a man fails appreciably, he expects discharge.”

Lukasz Musial was already broken down by 1937, when the union finally made inroads. His son seemed to understand that improvements had taken place when workers organized. When some baseball players began to organize after the war, Musial was at least a moderate, which in ballplayer terms was like being a flaming liberal.

One athlete who saw the benefit of collective action was Lou “Bimbo” Cecconi, a star quarterback at Donora High and later a star tailback and beloved icon at the University of Pittsburgh. Cecconi spent a few summers working at the zinc plant, where workers still had to supply their own makeshift gear.

“
That’s why I appreciate the unions,” Cecconi said. “They fought for all those things. You didn’t have your own shower. You finally got a locker where you could carry your clothes. Guys came home dark and dirty.”

In 2009, Cecconi drove me past the ghostly banks where the mills used to be. I could feel his old sense of fear rise as he described the dangerous chore of getting close to the sizzling ingot and whacking off the residue before it cooled: “You had to knock it off with a big steel bar. Shit, I didn’t realize how heavy they were, those big steel bars. Slag, junk. You had to throw all this stuff in there.”