Stan Musial (10 page)

Cecconi pointed to where Musial’s shot lofted over the football field—360 feet, including end zones—and over the running track, heading toward the trees, an inside-the-park grand slam. The distance used to be accepted as 388 feet; sometimes it reaches 450 feet, depending on the teller.

After hitting .455 as a junior, Musial was clearly a baseball prospect, but Jimmy Russell may have been trying to talk him into playing basketball in his senior year and then attending Pitt. Years later, Musial said he had been put in touch with Pitt by
Jerry Wunderlich, a gym teacher at Donora High.
But Ki Duda recommended that Musial play minor-league ball and attend college in the off-season. Nothing was totally settled yet.

At the same time, Musial became disenchanted with the Cardinals. Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, angry after Branch Rickey tried to purchase several teams in the same league or even buy entire leagues, described Rickey as a “
hypocritical Protestant bastard wrapped in those minister’s robes,” and accused Rickey of being in violation of fair trade laws.

Musial may have been influenced by Landis’s hanging-judge rhetoric. He had a lifelong aversion to conflict, wanted things as stable as possible, and began to develop doubts about the Cardinal organization.

In March 1938, Landis cracked down on Rickey’s domination of the Three-I League, releasing a number of the Cardinals’ farmhands, alternatively counted as ninety-one and seventy-four. The most prominent of those players was Pete Reiser, a St. Louis boy who would become a star in Brooklyn but had the unfortunate habit of running into unpadded outfield walls.

“
I honestly hoped I had been among them,” Musial would say of the released players. “If the Cardinals really were as bad as Judge Landis said they were, I didn’t want to be part of that organization.”

In the spring of 1938, the sports editor of the
Donora Herald-American
, Johnny Bunardzya, invited Musial to drive up to Pittsburgh to see a game, getting him in on a press pass.

There are several reasons to believe this was Musial’s first visit to Forbes Field. He sometimes told the story of saving up money to see Babe Ruth come to Pittsburgh during Ruth’s brief run with the Boston Braves in 1935, after the Yankees had spurned him. But Musial lent the money to a friend and could not afford the carfare and the ticket, thereby missing seeing Ruth hit three home runs shortly before his retirement.

“
Even though Donora is only twenty-eight miles from Pittsburgh, I had never seen my favorite team play,” Musial wrote in his autobiography. “The distance was short, but the price was high for a kid who didn’t have
the money or, when he did, didn’t have the time because of a summer job or ball game he was playing in himself.”

Admittedly, this was Bob Broeg doing the typing, not Musial, but Broeg was as close to Musial as anybody and derived a good side income from presenting Musial in a positive way. Broeg would have known better than to describe a first trip to Forbes Field with a friend if Lukasz Musial had escorted Stashu at an earlier age.

“Bunardzya remembers that I was bug-eyed when, from the upper tier behind first base, I got my first glimpse of the field and the tree-shrouded backdrop of Schenley Park,” Musial wrote.

In his account, Musial said he turned to his hometown friend and said, “John, I think I can hit big-league pitching.” This memory also suggests Musial was thinking like a hitter more than a pitcher, even though he had signed as a pitching prospect.

There was another trip to Forbes Field that spring, courtesy of Irv Weiss, “a sports-minded Donora merchant and ardent Pirates’ fan,” as Broeg/Musial called him, who may have been trying to steer Musial to the Pirates.

The Pirates let Musial pitch batting practice, and the Pirates’ manager, Pie Traynor, made some inquiries about his status. Always honest, Musial informed Traynor that he was under contract but suggested the Cardinals might have forgotten him. Traynor assured him that Branch Rickey never overlooked a signature on a piece of paper. Soon afterward, the Cardinals notified Musial that it was time to report to the minor leagues.

No matter what kind of loving revisionism Musial might present down the line, his words suggest that a sportswriter and then a businessman, rather than his father, escorted him on his first forays to Forbes Field. He did not lack for kindly father figures.

H
E WAS
a familiar sight around Donora, a slender young man pulling a cart, lugging boxes of groceries to front doors.

People remembered his quirky left-handed hook shot for Jimmy Russell’s Dragons. The Musial boy. Hadn’t he signed with the Cardinals? Why was he delivering kielbasa and cheese?

In a town the size of Donora, most people soon came to know that Stan was going with Lillian Labash, whose family owned a grocery store on McKean.

Lil was fourteen when her dad took her to a Zincs game. Sam Labash (pronounced LAY-bash) had been born on this side, was American enough to have played baseball as a youngster, and had been good enough to think about pro ball, but there was more money in groceries than the minor leagues, so he wound up running the family business.

“
My grandparents married so young,” Musial’s daughter Gerry Ashley has said, calling her maternal grandfather “a frustrated baseball player,” which would work out to Stan Musial’s advantage.

The Labash family had a good reputation in Donora, extending credit, trusting neighbors to settle up on payday. The family was regarded as middle-class, almost bourgeois; Sam was comfortable enough that he could take time off to watch a ball game.

One day in 1934, Sam took his fourth daughter, Lillian, to a Zincs game and told her to keep an eye on “that Polish kid” who was pitching. She liked the Polish kid even more the next winter when she saw him in the abbreviated basketball shorts of the time—shorts that actually displayed
knees and thighs, not the baggy ones of today. Over the next seventy-five years, Lil would often tell Stan she had been attracted to him because of the way he looked in his satin shorts.

Lil was two months older than Musial, pretty and blond, a shade over five feet tall and
thereby nicknamed “Shrimp.” She may have carried herself with a touch of confidence because of her parents’ relative stability. Lil’s older sister Ann was dating Dick Ercius, Musial’s lanky basketball teammate, and one day Lil went along with them to a skating rink, where they spotted Musial, and Ercius arranged a date.

“
Always neat as a pin,” Lil said of Stan, who managed to be presentable despite his family’s limited finances. He had not dated much, or at all, but he was hardly a recluse.

“
Stan was never idle,” recalled Eddie Pado, the second pitcher on the Donora team. “After school, he worked at the Spur Gas Station. On several occasions, they’d have a dance at the Polish hall down by the church where Stan attended, and we’d go down and peek in the window and say, ‘Boy, look at that Stash dance!’ He could do the polka and was an outstanding dancer.”

“Sometimes Stan would infuriate me by being late for dates,” Lil said in 1958. “He’d watch ball games or other sports events while I’d be at home stewing. But other times he’d be late because he’d stopped to attend Sunday-afternoon benediction at the church—and how could I be mad at him then?”

She recounted this in an article in
Parade
magazine under the byline of Mrs. Stan Musial—her public identity. Those who knew her best asserted that Lil ran the family over the years, allowing Stanley to be Stanley.

“
It’s tough to be the wife of a superstar,” Tom Ashley, her former son-in-law, said. “She is totally dedicated to Stan. She is the one who raised the kids. They are great kids. I’d give her ninety-five percent of the responsibility.

“She has a nose for smelling out phonies. She’s a fighter for their privacy. We’ve had our ups and downs but I respect her.”

People who met Lil at the ballpark, at parties in Cooperstown, or around town in St. Louis described her as a lot of fun, no pushover. Stanley probably knew that the day he met her.

LIL’S BALLPLAYER
father was born in Pennsylvania, but his parents, Samuel and Susie, are both listed as born in Slovakia. Given the vagaries of shifting borders and ethnic fortunes, Sam was considered to be of Russian ancestry.

Lil’s mother,
Anna Mikula, arrived in New York on December 21, 1912, on the
President Lincoln
, after leaving Hamburg, Germany, on December 7. Her home country was listed as Hungary, but she herself was listed as Slovakian and the legal minimum age of sixteen. The 1920 census listed Anna as twenty-one, which would have made her thirteen at the time of her crossing, apparently unsupervised. When she arrived, she possessed $3, the legal minimum. She was sponsored by her sister’s husband in Donora; somebody made sure she had a train ticket for Donora.

By the 1920 census, Anna was married to Sam Labash, also listed as twenty-one, and they already had three children five or under—Mary, Helen, and Annie. Lillian would come along that year, followed by two boys and then Dorothy. Another boy would be stillborn, what they called a “blue baby” in those days.

The parents, the two Labash brothers, Sam and John, and their growing families all lived under the same roof, along with a boarder from Croatia named Mike Brkvenac, age twenty-nine, who is listed in the 1920 census as a laborer in a blast furnace.

“
I’ve been in that house and, believe me, it wasn’t big!” Gerry Ashley said years later.

Many people who grew up in large families in small houses look backward and play the mental game of “who slept where.” On any given night, where did all those adults put all those children?

Gerry tried to re-create the Labash family home above the store—kitchen and living room downstairs, three bedrooms upstairs. Gerry shook her head at the logistics of it, to say nothing of the boarder from Croatia. She had fond memories of visits to her mom’s home, calling her grandparents by the East European nicknames Dido and Baba.

There was also the legend of how the Labash family had welcomed the shy boy from up the hill.

“Stan had enormous respect for her parents,” Tom Ashley said. “They didn’t have much money, but they had food.”

Long after they were married, Lil would tease Stanley: “You know why
you went out with me? Only because my father owned that grocery store and fed you so well.”

He would giggle, never quite denying the charge. From the assortment of salami and liverwurst and cheeses at the store, he never would choose bologna. He had eaten enough of that at home to last a lifetime.

Musial understood he had been attracted to the family as well as the girl. He once told Roger Kahn: “
I wasn’t sure in the beginning, either, but the girl I was going to marry, Lillian, her father owned a grocery store. No matter what happened in baseball, I knew I could always get a job in the store.”

The store gave Musial a sense of an ordered life, based on food. He worked around the store, delivered groceries in the neighborhood using the wagon, watched Sam Labash run a business. No wonder he took so quickly to the restaurant business when he met Biggie Garagnani a decade later. From his middle teens, Stanley had been, in some overt way, taking mental notes.

Gerry Ashley felt her grandfather was instrumental in the courtship and the marriage. “He pushed my mother to my father,” she said, in the most positive way.

Perhaps Sam Labash saw something of himself in his daughter’s young beau. He thought it was exciting that Stan was going off to the minors, even at the modest salary of $65 a month.

Even then, for an obscure young athlete without much experience out in the world, Musial displayed a personal gyroscope of what worked for him and what did not. The Cardinals wanted him to play his first season, 1938, at their farm team in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, about an hour from Donora, but he balked.
Perhaps he sensed Greensburg was too close, that he would have family and friends looking over his shoulder; perhaps he was trying to put some distance between himself and his father after their dispute over his contract.

The Cardinals had roughly six hundred players in their system, and players generally did what they were told, but somehow or other, Stanley prevailed and was sent to Williamson, West Virginia, in the Class D Mountain State League.

Williamson was a coal town across from eastern Kentucky, approximately 250 miles away from home. It was a different world: people from
the Mon Valley think of themselves as being from the Pittsburgh area and resist the suggestion of commonality with deepest Appalachia.

Very much an outsider, Musial rented a room, paid five dollars a week for a meal ticket at the Day and Night Lunch, and played pool at the Brunswick Pool Room. In his first season, 1938, he pitched 110 innings, struck out 66, walked 80 batters, and had a 6–6 won-lost record with a high 4.66 earned run average. He also hit .258 in 26 games, with a home run.

“
I didn’t have confidence in my pitching,” he would say years later. “I had confidence in my hitting. Why they didn’t sign me as a hitter, I’ll never know.”

In the winter of 1938–39 Musial worked at the Labash store and was also given a safe job at the zinc mill.

Sent back to Williamson in 1939, Musial missed his high school graduation, but Lillian stood in for him. He won 9 games and lost 1, struck out 86, but he walked 85 in 92 innings with a 4.30 ERA. His manager, Harrison Wickel, recommended that the Cardinals cut him loose because of wildness, but almost as an afterthought mentioned that he was a nice young man who could hit—.352 with a home run.

He also caused a stir late one night when he wandered into the identical house next door, after perhaps taking one beer too many. It could have been dangerous to ramble around the wrong house, looking for his room, but the Fiery family recognized the popular young ballplayer and escorted him home, making sure he was safe.

On Sunday mornings Musial would attend Mass, and Geneva Zando, a senior in high school, would observe how devout and handsome he was on the Communion line. Soon she would marry Howard Fiery, who lived in the house Musial had entered by mistake. Over the decades they would listen to Cardinal games on the radio and tell their son, Randolph, why they rooted so intensely for Stan the Man.