Stan Musial by George Vecsey Read Free Book Online Page A

were three movie theaters downtown, including the Harris, which Mary Musial swept out as one of her part-time jobs. She also cleaned other people’s homes.
    “Mommy did a lot of housework,” Ed Musial recalled for a documentary years later, “and we lived almost, might as well say, rent-free, because we lived with my grandma, it was her house.” Ed added, “Between my grandma and my mother and that, we weathered the storm pretty good. Well, them old-timers can stretch a dollar, boy, I’ll tell you.”
    Bill Bottonari, who lived in the same part of town and would stay in touch with Musial into old age, remembered watching Mary Musial, a tall, powerful woman,carrying homemade bread to the church to be blessed on Palm Sunday.
    “My grandmother would tell me that she would go buy a sack of potatoes each week for the kids, and that’s how she would feed them,” Gerry Ashley said. “She said she had to go work in the church just to make extra money to feed her family.”
    For most meals, there was always cabbage, which could be stored all winter in a cold room, as could potatoes. The meat was usually bologna, known in Appalachia as coal miners’ steak, but for holidays Mary learned to make the Polish dishes her husband liked.
    In later years, Musial would learn the best cuts of meat as the proprietor of a famous restaurant with his name on it. On the road, he would not seek out the East European pockets in the big cities; major leaguers wereexpected to patronize upscale restaurants. But when he talked about his childhood, he would grow weepy, never abandoning the Polish culture.
    “I’ll never forget the ‘hunky’ dishes Mom turned out, such as pierogi, halucki and kolatche,” Musial wrote in his autobiography. “Kolatche is a kind of sweet roll, halucki the more familiar cabbage roll and pierogi a delicate combination of flour, potato and sugar folded into a thin turnover and baked.”
    He liked being called Stash by teammates and would go along with Polish jokes until later in life, when he’d had enough of them. His pride in carrying a Polish name would lead him to adventures and contacts that enriched his life.
    He loved talking about Polish delicacies, but his childhood was not open to retrospection. After Musial had become a star, a New York writer named Ray Robinson, a subsequent biographer of Lou Gehrig and Christy Mathewson, was working on a children’s book about Musial, and called Mary Musial on the telephone.
    “She did not care to talk to me and I figured it was a lost cause, so I said, ‘Mrs. Musial, you have a very young voice on the phone,’ ” Robinson recalled. “That made a difference because she suddenly became more animated, and kept talking for a while, very giving.”
    During the interview, Mary Musial gave Robinson the impression the father had sometimes struck the son.
    “I didn’t write it,” Robinson said. “It was for a kid’s book, and you didn’t write things like that in those days.” However, the memory stayed with Robinson for decades.
    Mary had spoken sympathetically of her late husband, telling Robinson: “Mr. Musial never had an easy time of it. There wasn’t much money.”
    The house was built into a rugged hillside, which had already been mined of its major veins of coal. The two Musial boys would scrunch into the seam to forage for chunks of coal to keep the family alive through the night.
    “We had a shaft thirty foot deep, don’t ask me how they dug it,” Ed Musial said, describing a makeshift crank that lowered a rope with a barrel at the end, to haul the coal more easily.
    One time an uncle came by with an old Appalachian solution for loosening coal from a stubborn vein—a stick of dynamite, more than a littledangerous in a derelict shaft. When the smoke cleared, the uncle and the two boys emerged with their booty, to the relief of their family. Decades later, Ed was still chuckling about the close call as the boys filled the coal bucket to satisfy