Free Stan Musial by George Vecsey

People seemed to have their Sunday best on. The Harris Theatre used to have some stage shows. One of the fellows who used to come up from Pittsburgh was Dick Powell. One time Tex Ritter performed on the stage. That was our entertainment, prior to TV.”
    Higher above the town was Palmer Park, where children played baseball.In the winter, the children would take their sleds to the top of the hill and barrel down toward the river, crossing the main streets, always an adventure. A child could manage only a couple of runs a day, because it was six or eight blocks to trudge up to the top again.
    Musial went to the public schools, but some of the children whose families could afford the tuition went to Catholic grade schools. Sundays were segregated by race and ethnicity. Musial was baptized at St. Mary’s but went to church at St. Michael’s, an Orthodox Catholic church, with married priests.
    “Their priests were very flamboyant, great speakers,” Bimbo Cecconi said. “I got married in that church. Their priest was Father Chegin, who was like a singer at the opera.”
    Cecconi gave me a guided tour of where some of Donora’s most famous sons and daughters lived. That empty plot used to contain the home of Deacon Dan Towler. There was the block where Arnold Galiffa, known as “Pope,” lived. Cecconi’s voice grew husky as he told how his teammate died young, of cancer.
    There was the house where the Griffeys lived—first Buddy, then Ken senior, who moved back to town so his wife at the time could give birth to their oldest son, Ken, later known as Junior.
    On these hills, Cecconi said, people continued the customs of the old country. This was no ethnic cliché: the Italians loved their gardens and their kitchens.
    “My father worked at the mill. He was a crane man,” Cecconi said. “When they needed him, they’d call for him.” That freedom meant his father would be cooking in his spare time—sauces, chickens, groundhogs—or canning fruits and vegetables. The Romantinos, down the block, kept pigs, and Cecconi’s father would help butcher them, help make sausage—“barter system,” he said.
    Some of the Italian families would cross the river to Webster Hall, climb the hills to the elderberry patches, spend the day picking, then go home and make white wine.
    “At a certain time of year, a whole boxcar full of grapes would come to town and all these different families would get wheelbarrows and go down and fill them up, and for three weeks after that, if you had lit a match this town would have blown up,” said Bill Bottonari, who was the same age as Musial.
    “Whenever I brought over anybody Irish or English or Scotch, my house always smelled,” Bottonari said. “Their houses were antiseptic, you couldn’t smell a thing, and that embarrassed the hell out of me.”
    People were often judged by their father’s job down at the mill. “Stan’s father, not to be snobbish about it, but he was primarily a laborer,” Bottonari said.
    There was no major segregation into ethnic or racial neighborhoods.
    “Our barber was black,” Bottonari recalled. “Blacks were working when the whites were working.” A photo in a Donora diamond jubilee book shows proud old lifers standing in front of the mill. Four or five of the old-timers are clearly African American. Bottonari said that all five blacks in his graduating class went on to college.
    AND SOME Donorans went beyond. The Honorable Reggie B. Walton, the United States District Judge for the District of Columbia, grew up in the same neighborhood as the Cecconis and the Griffeys.
    In 2007, Judge Walton presided over the trial of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was convicted of leaking government secrets, including the identity of a covert agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.
    Judge Walton is proud of not coddling youthful offenders. He often talks about how his father, a laid-off steelworker who held