Stan the Man

I read in the news today that Stan Musial died. I was about to parenthetically identify him, but for this audience, that would be unnecessary. By the time we were old enough to be aware of baseball, Stan was already was the stuff of a legend. His career with the St. Louis Cardinals took us through our year of graduation. He retired at the end of the 1963 season at age 42, an age that was ancient for a professional athlete at the time. For us, of course, 25 was old.

It would be nearly another decade before major league baseball came to Dallas, as a result many of us became fans of the teams and players from major league cities elsewhere. The Kansas City Athletics were perhaps the closest team geographically, but St. Louis wasn’t much farther and the Cardinals had more panache during those years – Stan Musial certainly being one reason. He had many, many fans here.

Back in those days, major baseball stars were held out as not only sports heroes on the field, but also as paragons of virtue. When revisionist historians and biographers took over, along with the diminished reticence of the media to report unsavory private conduct of public figures, we found that so many of the heroes of that time had serious clay feet. By all accounts, Musial was not one of them. If he had been, doubtless that would have been discovered and reported.

 

In the half-century since he retired Musial mostly kept to himself. He was induced n to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969, the first year he was eligible. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Stan had been married to his wife Lillian for three weeks shy of 72 years, when she died in May last year.