Stan Musial, the greatest player for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team and one of the city’s most beloved figures, died at age 92 on Saturday, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other media outlets.
We’ll let sports writers across the globe wax eloquently about Stan the Man’s awesome batting statistics and his humble public persona. Obviously, St. Louis sits as a prominent city on Route 66. But here’s the most relevant point — Musial played a role in sparking the writing career of a man who helped led the Mother Road’s revival in the 1990s, Michael Wallis.
It started when Wallis, at age 12, won an essay contest and earned at trip to a Cardinals game. Wallis’ father was given a box seat, while the boy was escorted to the home team’s dugout. We’ll let a 2011 article in Urban Tulsa tell the tale:
So excited he could barely breathe, he quickly found himself ensconced on the Cardinal bench between two of his heroes, third baseman Ken Boyer and outfielder Stan “the Man” Musial — the former on his way to becoming a St. Louis legend and the latter already there. To this day, Wallis can recall the peculiar aroma of sweat and tobacco juice, even urine, permeating the filthy, dank dugout, ballplayers being the vilest of professional athletes in terms of their personal habits.
But the young dugout visitor felt no revulsion to the smell. To him, it was merely another element in an experience that was nearly incomprehensible in its grandeur.
“I was catatonic,” Wallis said, laughing, recalling how he sat glassy eyed and slack-jawed among the spitting, swearing, crotch-scratching ballplayers for two and a half hours before the fabled Musial ended the proceedings with a walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth to win it for the Redbirds — the perfect end to a perfect day for the young visitor.
Riding home in a limo after the game, Wallis’ father gazed at the autographed baseballs his son received and said: “You know, this writing is not a bad deal.” The younger Wallis agreed.
Wallis later became the author the best-selling “Route 66: The Mother Road,” which spurred the renaissance of Route 66.
Expect a lot of glum faces and remarkable stories about Stan the Man in the next few days in the Gateway City and much of the Midwest. Having once lived near St. Louis for a number of years, I can attest that it’s difficult to exaggerate how esteemed Musial was.
(Photo of the Stan Musial statue and the Gateway Arch by ChrisGoldNY, via Flickr)