Free Stan Musial by George Vecsey Page A

two jobs to keep the family together, monitored him when Reggie was heading toward serious trouble. Ultimately, Reggie went away to West Virginia State College on a football scholarship.
    After law school, Walton was appointed to the district court by President Ronald Reagan and later was second in command of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
    Judge Walton never met Stan Musial, who had moved away by the time Walton was born early in 1949, but he did come under the sway of another great person from that town, Dr. Charles Stacey, the superintendent of schools. (When I said I would love to chat with Walton, the judge called me a few days later, letting me know that Stacey had told him to call. That is the way things work in Donora.)
    “I think you had a really good core of people who had migrated to Donora because of the relative affluence of the steel industry,” Judge Walton said, adding, “It had a good education system. I had excellent teachers, although I was not a stellar student.”
    Judge Walton, who is African American, added: “To be candid, race was not a non-issue. My mother could not get a job as a salesperson in astore downtown. Very few blacks in the steel mills had supervisory positions. But we intermingled in the town, especially when it came to education. I never feel slighted when I talk about my education.
    “Sure, there were some restaurants where you wouldn’t go. They didn’t have a sign that said blacks were not served, but you knew you were not welcome.
    “I never had a black teacher. But I never felt my teachers treated me any differently because of my race.”
    The judge concluded: “It was a tough city and it made you tough. I attribute all my success to my parents and coaches.”
    The judge’s memories sounded familiar. He came out of that hard town with a lifelong bond with Stacey and other mentors who looked after him, much the way people had looked after young Stan Musial.

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MENTORS
    I N HIS long public life, Musial seemed so spontaneous, so merry, that it was hard to imagine his having ulterior motives with the words he used so apparently casually. However, in at least one case, he may very well have created a parallel childhood, to match other boys’ memories of that staple of American childhood—their dad taking them to their first game.
    His possible mythmaking took place in 1969, for a documentary about his childhood. The trip was planned around the Cardinals’ visit to Forbes Field, which would close in June 1970.
    “We were standing near the batting cage and Musial says to me, ‘Come on, Slim, let’s take a walk,’ ” a journalist, Scott Dine, recalled. “He had started calling me Slim earlier in the day. And walk we did. Across the infield, then the outfield to the bleachers. Musial wasn’t saying much. He opened a gate and we walked up several rows and sat down.
    “After a long silence Musial explained that his dad would bring him to baseball games and his dad would get a pail of beer (pretty sure he said it was a pail—but I may be confusing it with another story). I sort of visualized him as a fledgling pitcher studying the guy on the mound or carefully sizing up a batter.
    “So there we sat, in silence, on a gorgeous summer day. Then Musial said quietly, ‘It was here that I figured that baseball was my way out of Donora.’ He said nothing more and I was too stunned to respond. We quietly returned to the batting cage.”
    It is a lovely memory, connecting a boy and his father and his childhood dream. No doubt Dine recalled the conversation accurately, whether ornot Musial said his father ordered a “pail” of beer or just a cup. But according to other Musial words on the subject, Lukasz never took his son to a game at Forbes Field, and Musial often said it was his mother who had played catch with him. The only revealing part is that Musial felt the need to place his dad in the old