I just spent three hours watching Stan Musial’s funeral on
TV. I’ve never done this – not for presidents, not for Lady Di, not for Michael
Jackson. Never.
I don’t have as good
a Stan Musial story as Bob Costas (who does?) or probably even as good a story
as you, Dear Reader. I managed to spend nearly 30 years in St. Louis and never
met ‘The Man’.
I tried.
As most of you know, I grew up in a small town in southern
Iowa in a household where, right after Lawrence Welk, Cardinal baseball was the
main source of entertainment (fishing probably came third). Baseball on TV was
limited to ‘The Game of the Week’, but I can’t remember us missing too many
Cardinal games out of KBIZ in Ottumwa. I learned to talk listening to Jack Buck
and, later, Mike Shannon. I was a baseball nut.
I was also a bit of a book worm and a stats geek. I spent a LOT
of time with a book called the Baseball Encyclopedia (from the town’s Carnegie Library)
where I found out all about this old guy Musial that kept getting talked about
on the radio and by the other Cardinal fans in the family. I’ll be honest - I
had little interest in this guy that was out of baseball before I turned one
(my batting hero was Roberto Clemente and when I pitched tennis balls against
the garage, I was Scipio Spinks – non-Cardinal fans are going to need to look
that one up).
And then I found the record.
My dad worked for the local Chevy garage as the Parts
Manager for 40 years and would occasionally come home with promotional items or
sales rewards. In those days, LPs were common give-aways: we had more than a
few Christmas albums handed out exclusively at Chevy dealerships, but the one I
found was something called “Stan the Man’s Hit Record”. I popped that thing on
the turntable and the first thing I heard was the broadcast of Stan’s 3,000th
hit.
I was confused. Where’s Buck? Who’s this Harry Caray guy?
The rest of the album was Stan telling you how to hit a baseball which, to a
gangly eleven year-old, was as helpful as watching Clean House is to
getting your house clean.
Fast forward fifteen years.
I’m in St. Louis. I was probably always going to end up in
St. Louis. I wanted out of Iowa and St. Louis was the BIG CITY (but not so big
and scary a city as Chicago or New York). There was a job here, my college
friends were here, and the Cardinals were here. I was working three blocks from
the stadium and going to at least one game every home stand. I was also
drinking a lot of beer and following sports a lot closer than I do now.
Those two hobbies occasionally met at a bar called The
Wiffledome (so-called because they had a side room where you could play
corkball and, yes, whiffleball) in South St. Louis. My friend Dan & I would
go down once a week when a local radio show would broadcast live.
One week they announced that Stan the Man would join them,
talking, meeting & greeting, and signing autographs. As luck would have it:
1) Father’s Day was coming up and 2) I was going home that weekend and could
pick up the album. I was pretty sure my Dad would be the only guy in town with
an autographed Stan Musial record.
Fate intervened.
Stan got sick and had to cancel. I never
followed up. My Dad passed away a few years later and now Stan is gone.
As regrets go, this is pretty minor, but today just reminded
me of that generation slipping away. I attended my Aunt’s funeral Monday and
heard stories of country kids boarding with town families, war brides, and the Greatest
Generation there as well.
I’ve written often that men did not wear shorts when I grew
up. Most people I know from that generation would have been ashamed to have
still been someone’s ‘dependent’ on their health insurance or otherwise at age
26. Men and women were just that: adult men and women, even those that played a
kid’s game like Musial.
So my hat’s off to the Old Men and Old Women like Stan and
my parents (and probably yours). The stories of Stan’s genuine decency were
everywhere this week; the same with my parents at their services.
I’m now approaching Old Man status myself and look around
and wonder if my generation will live up to the example set for us. I hope so.
