Stan Musial by George Vecsey Read Free Book Online Page B

Lukasz.
    “He was tough,” Ed said of his father. “He had these rules, regardless. I mean, we had to do our chores first, and then baseball, whatever, came second.”
    Lukasz was not interested in the games of the New World, but Mary understood they were important for boys growing up in this country. When Stan became an American celebrity, he would always tell how his mother had stitched rags into a makeshift baseball and played catch with him between chores. When he told that story he would weep, and so would she.
    “But I was mostly busy working,” Mrs. Musial would add.
    Gerry Ashley thinks baseball liberated her father, helped him survive. “I can see how a kid like that would just be out playing all day long, just running. He would be outside so he wouldn’t have to be concerned with troubles in the house.”
    Stashu was the star athlete even in grade school, but not the kind of jock who tossed his weight around in class or the hallways. For the rest of his public life he would remind people that he had not been a good student.
    “He was always the nice boy he is now,” Mary told Roger Kahn in 1958. “He never sasses anybody. Ask his teachers. But he has changed. His head is still the same. It’s got no bigger. But now he speaks a whole lot better than he did.”
    The speech problem began in grade school, after teachers insisted he write with his right hand. Because the alphabet and numbers were essentially created for right-handed people—90 percent of the population, by most counts—teachers tried to make handwriting conform, to the inconvenience of natural left-handers. Lefties also had to deal with the tradition that left-handedness was something unusual or eccentric—perhaps even sinister, which comes from the Latin word
sinistra
, meaning “left hand.”
    Not all stutterers were left-handed, of course, butin a classic study, “Left-Handedness and Stuttering,” in the
Journal of Heredity
in 1933, Bryng Bryngelson and Thomas J. Clark suggested: “The usual practice ofshifting a left-handed child to the non-preferred right hand could be said to be responsible for the changing of inherent neurophysiological patterns in the brain.” They added that stuttering or other traits could also be linked to subtle differences in left-brain/right-brain makeup.
    These days, students are generally not forced to write right-handed—and in fact have profited from the fame of Sandy Koufax, Martina Navratilova, John McEnroe, and that left-handed basketball player who went into public service, Barack Obama.
    Musial would retain a trace of a stammer into his adult life, sometimes speaking fast in the local accent of his childhood, sometimes using familiar mantras—
whaddayasay-whaddayasay, wunnerful-wunnerful
—as a defense mechanism, to soften having to speak seriously.
    Teachers recalled Stan’s pink complexion, his athlete’s grace, his sweet smile. Katherine (Kappy) Hayes, the Donora school psychologist, remembered a junior high school discussion of the migrant workers in
The Grapes of Wrath
.
    “I saw a group of women like that the other day,” Musial had said. “They were camped right on the edge of town and they were dressed just like hoboes. They even wore pants.” For whatever reason, giving that much detail about the clothing of these female vagabonds touched off a deep red flush on the boy’s face.
    “I think Stan blushed for the rest of the period,” Hayes recalled. “He was sensitive and shy and a swell kid.”
    Stan was alert, observant, involved, bright-eyed, and looking for his main chance. He was also blessed to have the body, the reflexes, and ultimately the confidence of a superior athlete.
    Lukasz did not go to his son’s games, but he did make a mighty contribution to his son’s athletic career by enrolling him in the Falcons, a club movement that began in Poland in 1867, honoring the ancient Latin phrase
mens sana in corpore sano
—sound mind in a sound body. The Donora branch,