Stan Musial by George Vecsey Read Free Book Online

reported from my grandmother,” said Gerry Ashley, the second child of Stan and Lil, as she tried to reconstruct the life of her grandfather, whom she barely remembered.
    Watching Lukasz struggle did not turn Stan into a teetotaler. He was loyal to his father and a proud son of Donora, but parts of his life were off-limits. His friend Bob Broeg discovered this reticence in 1963 when they were collaborating on Musial’s autobiography, right after Musial’s retirement.
    Broeg was a writer, one of those curious types who always want to know more. He prevailed on Musial to drive to 1139 Marelda, where strangers now lived, and urged his friend to slow down, maybe even get out and walk around and dredge up a few memories.
    Undoubtedly, Broeg was hoping his friend would knock on the doorand say,
Hello, my name is Stan Musial, and I used to live here
. What a chapter that would have been—digging into Stanley’s Rosebud, Stanley’s madeleines—but Musial showed no interest in revisiting what had taken place inside that tiny house. Musial kept the car rolling, did not want to go there.
    Family members told Broeg how in the old days, when nobody was watching, the young Stashu might take a swig of the sweet canned milk used for coffee. The father might get annoyed by this bit of mischief, but the women would say,
Look at that smile. Stashu is a good boy
.
    Musial alluded to spankings, but Broeg, ever sensitive to his friend’s mixed feelings about his childhood, added a modifier: “Not unkindly, either.”
    Lukasz remained a man of the old country, the perpetual outsider, the greenhorn, even among the large Polish community. He said he was born on a farm near Warsaw, butaccording to immigration records he was actually born in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary. Since Warsaw was the only city in Poland that most Americans knew, in some small way Lukasz may have been trying to fit in, to sound a bit more mainstream.
    Either way, Lukasz left Hamburg, Germany, on January 24, 1910, sailing out of the massive Elbe River, arriving at Ellis Island in New York Harbor six days later. He was pointed directly to Donora and the American Steel and Wire Company, where he loaded wire into freight trains, becoming a small speck in the great mosaic of the new American factory class.
    The family’s name was pronounced MEW-shill, the Polish way. When Stan got to the major leagues, he pronounced his name for reporters and broadcasters, but they turned it into three syllables, MEWS-ee-al, and it has been that way ever since.
    Musial’s tone always softened when he spoke about his mother. Mary Lancos was born in New York City with a Hungarian name but of Czech origin, due to the blurring of borders back in Europe. She arrived in Donora when she was around eight years old and soon was rowing across the Monongahela River every day to deliver a hot lunch to her father, who was working in a coal mine. At fourteen she went to work at the wire mill.
    They met at a dance—a tiny man who spoke mostly Polish and a large girl, five foot eight, who spoke Czech and English—and they were marriedon April 14, 1913, when Lukasz was nearly twenty-three and Mary was sixteen,although the marriage certificate said she was twenty-one. In a hard company town, the details on a marriage certificate were not scrutinized too closely.
    There was a pecking order among the town’s fifteen thousand residents. The Spanish lived closest to the mill and the Italians lived farther up the hill, with their gardens and their decorations. On the East Coast there had been NINA signs—NO IRISH NEED APPLY—but in Donora the Irish were virtually landed aristocracy. The East Europeans lived where they could; for the most part, so did the African Americans.
    For those who had jobs, the salaries were enough to make many people feel they were living better than they ever had in the old country. Women dressed up to go shopping on McKean or Thompson, the main drags. At one point there