Stan Musial (26 page)

Biggie was Julius Garagnani, the restaurateur, who was in the process of taking in Musial as a partner. Biggie invited Sher to sit in a booth, and he described what a nice man Musial was—how his telephone was still listed seven years after coming to the majors, how he took calls from fans at all hours. Biggie was gracious, a surrogate family member, but the writer went back to his hotel room that night convinced he could not possibly do his story while Musial’s father was dying.

The next morning, the phone rang and the booming voice of Bob Broeg told Sher not to leave town. A lot of Musial’s friends were going to be available.

It was a few days before Christmas. Cardinals were playing with their children and shopping, resting their weary bodies and also working at second jobs, the way ballplayers did back then.

Nevertheless, friends spent time with the writer from out of town: Red Schoendienst, Marty Marion, Terry Moore, Sam Breadon, Ollie Vanek, the clubhouse man Butch Yatkeman, and Ed and Sue Carson, two neighbors who had become close friends.

ONE VISION
of Musial came from Robert E. Hannegan, the former postmaster general of the United States, who briefly owned a share of the Cardinals. Hannegan had visited the Musials in the home they had purchased that fall, at 5447 Childress Avenue.

Hannegan told how he had paid a courtesy call and found Musial as fully involved as any new home owner.

“He showed me through every room in the house, as though I were his next-door neighbor. He told me all the plans for the house, the color scheme, what sort of curtains his wife was going to put up, how the kids’ rooms would look, everything, right down to the rugs. I never felt so much at home in a house.”

Musial had expressed some ambivalence about committing to St. Louis, perhaps because he felt he should be living closer to his parents.

“
Frankly, I would just as soon have returned to Donora, or, at least, the Pittsburgh area close by our people,” Musial said in his autobiography, “but our son Dick was eight and we didn’t like him to have to miss or change schools. We had met many fine people in St. Louis. When Dick told Lil he wished we could live there year-round, that clinched it.”

Hannegan told Sher about his salary negotiations with Musial right after the 1948 season, when Musial dug in for a base of $50,000 a year for two years, with a $5,000 bonus per year if the Cardinals surpassed an attendance of 900,000 (which they did, both years).

“All I’ll tell you is that in all my years of experience in business deals I never talked to a man who was so humble but firm, so honest and definite in his opinions of his ability. There wasn’t an unpleasant moment,” Hannegan said, not bothering to note that Musial’s pay was far below that of Williams and DiMaggio.

Hannegan also did not volunteer that he had been toying with selling Musial to the Pirates for $250,000 to ease his own finances. That detail did not fit into the narrative of the great loyalty between the Cardinals ownership and its greatest player.

But Hannegan did tell Sher how proud Lukasz had been of his son. Whenever the father was around the ballpark, Hannegan had directed autograph-seeking fans to the modest little man.

“That’s Stan Musial’s dad. There’s an autograph you should get,” Hannegan
would say. And the fans would fuss over the older man, who never, in his days at the zinc mill, could have imagined signing his name for strangers.

“And now,” Hannegan told Sher, “I’ll have to leave you. I’m going to catch a plane to Donora to the funeral of a friend of mine, Lukasz Musial.”

ANOTHER OF
Sher’s stops was at the Carsons’. Ed was “a large, soft-spoken, round-faced man who works for a machinery manufacturing concern,” and Sue was a “pretty, blue-eyed brunette, vivacious and genuine. They are a typical American family with a modest home.”

Ed Carson had recognized Musial at the lunch counter of the Fairgrounds Hotel when Musial first came up in 1941, and they had gotten along—“talking, friendly, like a couple of ordinary guys would.”

He described the private Stan Musial: “Whenever he wants to get Lil laughing, he’ll do his strip. This consists of removing his shirt, sucking in his stomach until it touches his backbone and then holding his breath. It doesn’t sound funny to tell, but it’s quite a sight and it always breaks Lillian up.”

Sue said she had seen Stan eat seven sandwiches or eight ears of corn, and praised Lil as “a marvelous cook, does all the cooking herself, making complicated Russian and Polish dishes.” She recalled, “One night last year, when it was 110 degrees in the shade, Lil had a party of fifteen people and their kids at her house. She did all the cooking for the entire gang and it was the best food I’ve ever tasted. Stan’s sister comes to visit them often and spends all her time baking cakes for her brother. I’ve never seen anyone bake so many cakes.”

Sue described how Stan was shy but would warm up at parties, a trait that would follow him forever: in a corner, hands in pockets, until later in the evening when he would pull out his harmonica.

She also described the banter that went on between Stan and Lil. Not known to be demonstrative toward his wife in public, Stan once gave her a compliment during a small party: “Lil, you’re the most gorgeous wife a ballplayer ever had.”

Sue then teased him: “Stan, why don’t you give your wife a rose?”

Lil responded, “If Stan did give me a rose, it’d probably have a bug in it.”

Sue Carson, in December 1948, defined Musial to the writer: “I’ve got a title for your story. You ought to call it, ‘He Doesn’t Know It.’ I mean by this that Stanley doesn’t realize what a famous person he is. He is exactly the same as the day we met him when he was almost unknown.”

On his way to the airport to fly to the funeral, Musial called Biggie and asked him to convey his apologies to Sher for not having more time for him.

“You ought to get to know what kind of a guy he is,” Biggie told the writer.

The last paragraph of the article goes like this: “ ‘I got to know him,’ I said. ‘I got to know what sort of a guy Stan Musial is.’ ”

The title of Sher’s article: “The Stan Musial Nobody Knows.”

STAN MUSIAL
and Biggie’s would link the two men forever, like Martin and Lewis, like Sonny and Cher. The name still resonates in St. Louis the way Toots Shor does in New York—a memory from another age, never been anything like it since.

Julius Garagnani was a St. Louis character, straight off the Hill, the Italian part of town. Even today, some old-time St. Louisans can imitate his rough-hewn “dems” and “doses.”

Biggie was the son of a miner but a city boy. There are suggestions he worked for bootleggers as a teenager in the late days of Prohibition, which would not have been that unusual.
Later he moved into patronage jobs stemming from his Democrat contacts, serving as a delegate at two Democratic conventions and helping get at least one friend appointed to a judgeship. He developed a close friendship with Warren E. Hearnes, who in 1965 would become the first Missouri governor to serve two full terms, with Biggie raising over $80,000 in campaign donations.

Perhaps inevitably, given his Italian name, there were suggestions that Biggie had connections to the mob. But Musial had influential friends watching his back at all times; one well-connected pal said recently that Biggie had been checked out in every important way.

“If he hadn’t, we’d have pulled Stan’s coat,” the friend said not long ago. “Biggie was a restaurant guy.”

Garagnani was thirty-four when he met Musial around 1947—“
larger
than life,” was the way Tom Ashley, Musial’s former son-in-law, described him. “He had total control of the operation. A lot of his relatives were working there, so you never saw funny business at the bar. He was a true character.”

“
A bit rough around the edges,” Gerry Ashley said about Biggie, quickly adding, “To me, he was always nice.”

Biggie and Stanley met somewhere—the ballpark, the golf course, maybe in St. Pete. Before long, Stan and Lil were welcome in Biggie’s restaurant on Chippewa. The men began playing golf, and somewhere on a fairway or in the clubhouse one of them brought up the restaurant business. Perhaps because of his Donora mentor, Frank Pizzica, Musial already had an image of himself as an entrepreneur, not just a front man.

“I had a moderate amount of capital to invest,” Musial said in his autobiography. “My principal asset was my baseball name.”

“Biggie said, ‘You get an accountant and I’ll get an accountant,’ ” Tom Ashley said. “They met the next day at lunch time and the two accountants agreed on how much the business was worth, and how much 50 percent would be worth. Biggie said, ‘You don’t have to pay anything down. You’ll pay me back in profits.’ They made it back in a year.”

The partnership was formed in January 1949, with Musial’s share coming to $25,000.

“Biggie and my dad worked with a handshake all those years. They never had a contract,” Gerry Ashley said, adding, “My dad always told this story: ‘You know how to make a small fortune in the restaurant business? You start with a big one.’ ”

The truth was, Stan and Biggie’s, as it was popularly known, soon rivaled the famous Italian restaurants on the Hill, serving that major St. Louis culinary invention, toasted ravioli, which had become popular around 1943 or 1944 at Oldani’s and then at Ruggeri’s.

The restaurant caught on. Fans could drive hundreds of miles for a ball game and hope for a glimpse of Musial at mealtime. The place became something of a hangout for St. Louis athletes.

The young catcher from the Hill, Larry Berra, spurned by Branch Rickey, came home after the 1948 season with the Yankees and chatted up a part-time waitress at Stan and Biggie’s named Carmen Short.
Carmen would always remember that Yogi clumped into the restaurant, still wearing
his golf spikes. Well, Yogi would rumble, he and the guys had just finished a round of golf; what else was he supposed to be wearing? This rather clattery first meeting led to a wedding early in 1949, and one of the most enduring baseball marriages ever.

A lot of epic encounters took place at Stan and Biggie’s.

“
I had my first sour cream and chives on a baked potato at the old place,” Tim McCarver recalled with obvious enthusiasm. Bob Grim, an older pitcher passing through the Cardinals, invited McCarver to dinner—“fall of 1959. I was seventeen years old and didn’t have a clue about life or anything,” McCarver said.

“Stan put a lot of time in the restaurant,” McCarver continued. “They weren’t open on a Sunday, but it was common in those days to play day games on Saturday and Stan was there after the game. The food was terrific.”

Everybody agreed the relationship between Biggie and Stanley was fair and equal.

“Biggie just loved Stan,” McCarver said.

Another view of Biggie comes from a strange article in
Sport
in July 1950: “My Partner Stan Musial,” by Biggie Garagnani, as told to J. Roy Stockton. A prominent columnist in St. Louis, Stockton employed the exaggerated malapropisms that Ring Lardner and other celebrated American writers used for ethnic characters of America. New York columnists were always writing about Greek diner countermen using exaggerated accents, and some of the syntax attributed to African Americans in midcentury is beyond parody and into racial stereotyping.

Within Stockton’s Lardneresque language is the dead-serious, mother-wit, tired-and-poor ambition of Julius Garagnani. No angel, probably, but no fool, either, in talking about his partner:

The real Biggie was not far from the ghosted Biggie. For a while, Jack Buck was the host of a talk show emanating from the restaurant, often using guests in town for baseball or the famed Muny Opera in nearby Forest Park. One night Arthur Godfrey was a little late, so Buck grabbed Biggie to help fill time. One old-timer remembered it this way:

“
Say, Big, have you been over to the new planetarium in Forest Park? It’s been open for two weeks now.”

After a long pause, Biggie replied in stentorian tones, “No, Jack, I never cared much for all those fishes and whales and stuff!”

There was a quick cut to a commercial, until Godfrey blessedly arrived.

By all accounts, Musial was a hands-on presence who wanted to know how the business worked, wanted to know cuts of meat in the freezer. His expertise would pay off when he would direct teammates to the best steaks all over the league.

The restaurant became Stanley’s other place of business, as important to him in its way as the ballpark was. He knew he might have a long life ahead of him, and wanted to have control of it. He and Biggie branched out to other restaurants as well as hotels in St. Louis, Miami, and Clearwater, Florida.

“Stan lifted himself up,” Tom Ashley said. A friend, Clarence Diehl, who had a construction business, would meet at the restaurant and talk business. Diehl, who would eventually build the second version of Stan and Biggie’s, understood Stan’s conservative streak, his desire not to be greedy or get caught up in wild schemes.

EVEN THOUGH
he lived only a few blocks from the restaurant, Musial was not around much to help with homework or discipline the children. Lil sometimes blamed Biggie for her husband’s absences.

“
He and my mom didn’t get along,” Gerry said. “Biggie wanted my dad to go to the restaurant and my dad would go at lunchtime and for an hour and a half in the evening, so that meant he wasn’t home.”

Musial insisted he would always get home “so I could say good night to the kids.”

Gerry has fond memories of toasted ravioli and spumoni in the form of
a baseball at the restaurant, but she also learned she had to share her father with the public.

“He’d be there for the lunch crowd and the evening crowd because he knew it increased his earning,” she said.