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Stan Musial: All the Difference

Stan Musial.  
A St. Louis Cardinal from 1941 to 1963.
My first baseball hero.

 I never saw a major league baseball game until I moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1954, at just about the same time the New York Giants became the San Francisco Giants:  Hello, Willy Mays!  

 How did Stan Musial become a hero to a sub-sized, not very athletic kid in Washington State?  Maybe for that reason.  

 I played basketball at Weyerhaeuser Grade School #303, in what we called, "The Old School House", which had been where my mother had gone to school, twenty years earlier.  It had become a gymnasium/auditorium, with a ceiling about twelve feet up.  We worked on our layups.  I wasn't very good at basketball.  

 Baseball was more fun.  The field between the new grade school and the old school house was a ball field, if a ball field could do without grass on the infield.  It was ubiquitous Washington State gravelly dirt, but it did have a backstop, and a field of fir trees in the outfield.  Other fir trees on the hillside on the north were sometimes useful in keeping foul balls from rolling all the way down to the Trask's house, where trespassing baseballs were not appreciated, or so it seemed to us, even if Bob played baseball.  

 We came to school early to play baseball before school began, and again at recess, and at lunchtime.  I wasn't very good at baseball, either, but I was better than at basketball.  

 1941:  I was probably in about the third grade when Stan Musial became a Cardinal.  
1963:  In 1964 I left the Bay Area to go to graduate school at the University of Chicago, a year after Musial retired as one of our all-time, great and good major leaguers.  

 Sometime during those Weyerhaeuser Grade School years, and on into Eatonville High School, I developed a huge desire for a Stan Musial baseball glove; no, not a glove, a "mitt".  I wore the pages of the Montgomery Ward catalog thin, admiring Stan's nameplate mitt.  It was a thin hope.  I do not recall the price, but I knew it was more than ever I could save. 

 One day--I think it was in winter, on a birthday--Dad kicked a package lying on the floor, under the table where we sat, toward me.  (Dad had a way of hiding his soft side.)  Mom had to tell me that it was for my birthday.  It was a Stan Musial outfielder's mitt, from Montgomery Ward!  

 The fact is that it was a very bad glove.  In the first place, I did not play outfield:  I pitched.  And in the second place, it had a pocket that was almost precisely the size of a baseball, with a roll of padding around the heel and sides.  Anything that did not land exactly in the pocket had a very good chance of bouncing off.  It was even more hopeless as an infielder's glove.  I treasured that glove, even as I learned what a misfit it was.  It suited me.  

 I do not recall when--perhaps about the time Stan Musial retired--I held my Stan Musial glove, and decided it was time for it to go.  I do remember thinking that it should not be given to another boy because it would train him, not to play baseball, but to adapt himself to a badly-designed glove.  

 I cannot believe that Stan Musial ever tried on a Montgomery Ward Stan Musial outfielder's mitt.  I have.  I gave it my best shot.  At about the same time Stan was playing in St. Louis.  

 It has made all the difference.  


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