Stan Musial (27 page)

The family soon moved from their first tiny house on Childress to a four-bedroom house on Westway Road, a few blocks up the hill, making sure to stay in the same parish. The house was not ostentatious, with its kitchen, breakfast room, and family room all blended into one, and a small dining room they rarely used.

Two more children followed: Janet, five years younger than Gerry, and Jeanne, nine years younger than Janet. Dick was already on his way to Notre Dame when Jeanne was born, meaning there was rarely a time when all four were living full-time under the same roof. This could produce a
Rashomon
effect—everybody might have a different version of childhood. Lil’s theory was that every one of her children was an only child, special, unique.

Since Lil had grown up in a large family, and so had Stan, four children, spaced well apart, seemed quite modest by the standards of 1920s Donora. Lil had grown up in a household where her father was a presence, even when he was working long hours downstairs in the store. She had to adjust to life with a husband who was mobbed for his autograph at the ballpark, who chatted up customers at the restaurant, who went on road trips for a week or two at a time. Gerry Ashley and her former husband both praise Lil for running the family.

In a rare interview, Lil once talked a bit about her husband, saying he was pretty even-tempered but a useful disciplinarian when he was around. “
Sometimes if they do something wrong and he raises his voice just a little, they stand there with their mouths open, as if to say ‘Look at Daddy. What’s the matter with Daddy?’ ”

Lil continued, “Stan takes a personal interest in everything about our children.… Stan never loses his temper, although sometimes he gets a little impatient when I’m late. Early in our marriage I’d get annoyed when Stan had to leave home for banquets—but I soon realized I must accept that as part of his life.”

Gerry learned to live with a father who was not always home. “In those
days, men were away a lot and the mother had to be the disciplinarian. My father was like the backup disciplinarian: ‘If you don’t go to bed, I’m taking my belt off.’ He’d take his belt off and swing it on the ground. I think everybody is afraid of their own father. You don’t cross your father.”

Gerry did not say Stan used the belt. He just displayed it, Mr. Deep Voice, the theoretical enforcer for Lil, who did the heavy lifting.

“My father was a smart businessman,” Gerry said. “My mom, she could run a company. She could be a CEO. She knows when things are missing around the house. He was a great driving force. It was tough to be a baseball wife. The players were always on trains. The wives had to do everything for themselves.”

The telephone had been invented, of course, but cell phones, personal computers, and other gadgets were unimaginable, meaning that when ballplayers were on the road, the wives “were on their own,” as Gerry put it.

Stan did have his useful side at home. Lil praised him for taking care of the shrubbery and being able to panel a room, and she said he dabbled with a camera and could play a piano by ear.

The Musials’ lives seem straight out of
Life, Reader’s Digest
, or the official handbook of the Eisenhower years. Gerry would become sentimental about life on Westway: her young and energetic parents, friendly neighbors, common backyards, picnics in the summer—“really nice, some of our best memories,” she said.

Gerry recalled how one of her friends reached sixteen and was able to drive into the countryside and load up on fireworks for the Fourth of July. The children would set off firecrackers all day and then Daddy would come home from work—in this case the ballpark—and set off the big stuff after dark.

“Rockets, in a bottle,” Gerry recalled, giggling. “It was kind of dangerous if you think of it—a talented ballplayer setting off rockets.”

At Christmas, Stanley would climb up on the roof and install figures of Santa Claus and the reindeer, plus lights. “One time he won third prize in St. Louis Hills,” Gerry proudly recalled.

“It was a nice neighborhood,” Tom Ashley said. “No fences. Upper-middle-class, not fancy. Stan was just one of the guys.”

The Musials were friendly with their neighbors, had friends who were
neither celebrities nor ballplayers. Claude Keefe, an insurance salesman from Minnesota, was a good friend who taught Musial his first magic tricks.

Clarence Diehl and his wife, Gerry, plus George and Mary Strode, would sometimes keep the Musial children when Stan and Lil were on a trip.

“I think the Diehls and Strodes were a good respite from some of the more glamorous people they took trips with after my father’s career was over,” Gerry Ashley said.

Stan was a regular at the early Mass on Sunday and religious holidays. The children went to parochial school, observed the sacraments, dressed well for school and church and any public outing.

Musial had learned from his mentors, had developed an old-fashioned guildsman’s view of his craft, an ideal of how he should look and act. His wife and his children were part of his self-image.

“Until very recently I dressed up to go to the ballpark,” Gerry said. “That was our station in life.”

Stan smoked sometimes; so did a lot of people in those days. He took a drink or two—social drinking by the standards of the time. He was known to tell a bawdy story, spoke the vernacular of the clubhouse.

“My father isn’t perfect,” Gerry said. “I mean, what father is?”

An example of imperfection? Musial performed in a driver safety video, but Gerry said, “That was funny because he was such a wild driver. I remember as a little girl, they didn’t have the highways the way they do now. They only had two-lane highways. I’m still terrified to this day.

“We used to drive down to spring training, you know how far that is, how long it takes, St. Louis to St. Petersburg.

“When I was old enough to drive, my mom would say, ‘Please take your father to the airport,’ and he would leave at the last minute. Oh my God, it was a wild ride.
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride
. Now in the last few years, he doesn’t drive anymore so he says, ‘Hey, you’re driving too fast.’ Done a complete turnaround.”

IN OTHER
ways, Stan and Lil were not the prototypical suburban family.

“My parents were so glamorous,” Gerry said, recalling Stan and Lil all dressed up, going out.

“It was so normal for him to be my father, for him to do great things,” Gerry said. “We’d wait for him after the games and all these people would wait, just to get his autograph, and then he comes, just running out of the clubhouse, and we would take off with him, running, because he was our ride home. The crowd would shove us out of the way because they thought we were autograph seekers, but then you would get in the car, and they would surround the car and you could barely drive off.

“In those days, there was no secret passage the way they might have now. He was across the street from Sportsman’s Park and, you know, we could barely drive. He just signed and signed and he would say, ‘What do they do with all of those? We must have signed a million of them by now.’

“I remember one day, we were in a convertible,” she continued. “This kid just kept hanging on the side and I said, ‘We’re going to drive off, you’d better get off,’ and he said, ‘I can’t, my finger’s stuck in the door.’ ” Fortunately, Stan got the message before he gunned the car.

Gerry said she did not feel resentment about sharing her father’s time with the crowds. That was the deal. “You knew you had to share him, and that was okay, and once you got home he was Dad. You learned how to share, you had to.”

There is a famous story about Lil pushing a fan who had knocked her down, and Stan telling Lil not to shove his fans. Gerry has heard Lil’s more complete version.

“It was during World War II and she had silk stockings and they were really hard to get in those days,” Gerry said, alluding to the wartime shortages of luxuries like nylons. “The fans were running after him and one of them knocked her down. She got up and she had ripped her stockings, and she said, ‘You made me rip my stockings.’ ” Apparently Lil did give the fan a shove. What woman wouldn’t have?

STAN AND
Lil were very much part of the gang, according to teammates like Hank Sauer, an older slugger who played for the Cardinals in 1956.

“
He’d always be holding open house,” Sauer told Roger Kahn. “He has a tremendous family. I mean, they’re the nicest family and home and wife you’ve ever seen.”

Sauer added that if somebody’s child broke something, the parent would start to scold, but Musial would say, “Never mind what they do. Just let them alone.”

This was a man whose first childhood plaything had been a homemade rag ball from his mother. Given some of the less pleasant moments between Lukasz and Stashu, Musial now had a chance to run a house where children could enjoy themselves.

“There are kids all over the place,” Sauer told Kahn. “You go to his house and you step on kids everywhere. ‘That’s what my home is for,’ Stan says. ‘It’s for kids, yours and mine.’ ”

The neighborhood was a projection of their home—comfortable, accessible. Boys would ride their bicycles up and down Westway, hoping to spot Stan Musial mowing his lawn.

When Gerry met her brother, Dick, in St. Louis in 2008, they took what she called “a nostalgia drive” to the old neighborhood of St. Louis Hills and were thrilled to see the Ted Drewes frozen custard stand, a landmark of their youth, still open on Chippewa. The brother and sister, close in age and experience, felt reinforced about what a nice childhood they had had.

FOR ROMAN
Catholics, the town was divided into parishes. While they lived on Childress, Dick and Gerry remained at St. Gabriel the Archangel, but after St. Raphael the Archangel opened in 1950, closer to their home, the family transferred there.

“You would say, ‘Where do you go?’ ” said Ben Vanek, the son of Ollie Vanek.

The Vaneks attended Mary Magdalen, within walking distance of the Musials’ parish, but the two families had different lives.

“
My dad was interested in his territory, his bird-dog scouts, where he was going, who he could sign,” Ben Vanek said. “It’s a day-to-day job.”

Fans would get hysterical, could jab out somebody’s eye with a pen in the rush to get Stan the Man’s signature, but Ben Vanek felt insulated from hero worship.

“I hate to get on my soapbox, but we have elevated professional athletes
much higher than it used to be,” Ben said. “I mean, if you saw Musial’s house, it was not a mansion, it was a house among other houses. Neighbors right next to him. No security fence out front. You probably could walk up, paperboy or something, walk right up to the door, get paid, give him change, stuff like that. Fact was, a couple of scouts lived in the area.

“Most ballplayers were not excessively paid,” Vanek continued. “The average guy was making $50,000, now it’s $1–2 million, $10–15 million. There wasn’t that discrepancy. They were making good money, but not twenty, thirty, forty times what the average fellow was making.”

The son of the scout and the son of the superstar played football against each other for rival high schools—Dick at Christian Brothers, Ben at St. Louis University High.

“Dick and I were not close,” Vanek said, making it sound like a result of attending different schools, nothing personal. “Dick hung around with his group at mixers and stuff like that. We’d say hello and talk for a little bit, but that’s just the way it was.

“Nobody was looking at him as the son of the fantastic first baseman of the St. Louis Cardinals. He was just another kid. At that time, St. Louis was full of all-girls schools and all-boys schools. During social season, there were mixers, dances, guys from St. Mary’s, guys from SLU and CBC, everybody was cordial. You were a rival on the field but not a rival on the street.”

If harsh words were exchanged, Vanek said, “it was more like ‘Your grandma wears combat boots.’ It wasn’t a big deal then. He was a ballplayer and my father was a scout. They did their jobs. Everyday life. I don’t think anybody made a big deal of being Stan Musial’s son.

“When you put your shoulder pads on or your baseball uniform, you wanted to beat those guys because they were your rival, but at the end of the game you could just as soon go out and have a hamburger. You didn’t give ’em the finger or anything, although it got to that. You wanted bragging rights. Once you got past it, there wasn’t anything. It wasn’t an issue.… I can honestly say I can’t remember a fight breaking out. It was a kinder, gentler time.”

IT WAS
not easy being Richard Stanley Musial, first name from a heroic pitcher and family benefactor, second name from a celebrity father. Dick’s early childhood was spent in Daytona Beach, Springfield, Rochester, and shuttling between Donora and St. Louis. He was always going to have a ticklish relationship with baseball.

Was he going to hit like his daddy? Who could? Multigenerational baseball families were rare in that day, although Donora did produce a lineage of Griffeys from the thwarted Buddy to the very fine Ken to the excellent Junior. Recently there have been Bells and Boones and Hairstons all over the major leagues, but not in those days.

“
Dick isn’t interested in baseball, and in a way I’m glad,” Musial told a reporter in 1958. “I knew George Sisler and he was a fine baseball player. His father, George, though, was a finer baseball player.”

Back in 1946, Musial had been a teammate of Dick Sisler, the younger son of George senior. Dick was a lovely man who did not hit enough, which meant Stan had to move to first base. Later, Sisler had a fine career, hitting a pennant-winning homer for the Phillies in 1950 and managing the Reds, but it was a fact of life that he could not hit like his daddy; neither could Dick Musial.

“And this fact Dick never could live down, or live up to. It hurt him,” Musial said of his son. “Besides, Mrs. Musial and myself have always believed in letting our children lead their own lives. The boy is a fine student and he earnestly desires to be a doctor. I think it’s wonderful.”