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Stanley was not a showbiz celebrity. The television highlight show had not yet been invented, which is another reason some of us call them the good old days. Stanley just wanted to make contact. Nobody took it personally.
    Newcombe respected Musial going back to when the league was being integrated and Musial was a symbol of moderation.
    “He was one of the true professionals,” Don Newcombe said. “That’s what I say about Stan Musial. A true professional. In that era when Jackie came in and then Roy [Campanella] and then me, and Mays and all those others, Musial was a man who hit you hard but never showed you up. He hit the ball out of the ballpark, he wouldn’t clown going into the dugout. He’d go in and shake hands with a few guys and get a drink of water. He would never show you up. You wouldn’t have to knock him down.”
    That was important in the old days, when showboating was discouraged. If a hitter lost sight of that nicety, he might get his uniform dirty, fast.
    “Today, if me and Drysdale and Gibson pitched like that, we’d wind up in jail because we’d be killing somebody,” Newcombe said in 2009. “They’re trying to show you up, going around the bases waving their hands and all that high-fiving when they get to the dugout. Our guys didn’t do that. They hit the ball out of the ballpark and they ran around the bases. We watched ’em, you know, to see what they would do and how they would do it, and Stanley never showed you up.”
    The Dodgers did not hate Stanley, which was the highest respect possible in that harsh rivalry. Everybody recognized that the man with the unusual stance was a gentle man, a kind man.

    6    
A HAND ON THE SHOULDER
    J OHN HALL’S father died when the boy was seven. To bring some life back into the house, John’s mother bought an RCA Victor radio and phonograph. One day John’s uncle was doing some work around the house, and he turned on the radio and he told the boy, “I want you to listen to this.”
    It was a baseball game, emanating from St. Louis but coming over the local station in nearby Carthage, Missouri, one of eighty-four stations that carried Cardinals games all over Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.
    The boy listened to Harry Caray blustering names like Slaughter and Marion and Musial, and from then on he was a Cardinals fan, like much of the American South and Southwest.
    On July 2, 1950, when the boy was eleven, family friends drove him and his mother along Route 66 all the way up to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, where George “Red” Munger outpitched Bill Werle of the Pirates, 2–1. Half a century later, Hall could remember the details.
    After the game, there was only one choice for a restaurant—Stan Musial and Biggie’s, where, legend had it, Musial himself appeared whenever he did not have a game.
    During the meal, John set off in search of a men’s room.
    “Being a country boy, or at least one from a small town, I went outside to see if there might be an outhouse somewhere,” Hall would recall. “When making a visual search for an outside privy, I observed something that I hadn’t seen in my hometown—a parking lot full of Cadillacs.” In hisimagination, one of those Cadillacs belonged to Musial. However, he did not spot a restroom in the parking lot.
    “When I came back in, I guess I looked lost,” Hall said. “All of a sudden there were two hands on my shoulder, and a voice said, ‘Son, can I help you?’ and my heart stopped.”
    His heart stopped because it felt good to be called “son,” particularly by Stan Musial, wearing a nice suit. The boy promptly forgot his other mission and darted back to his table to see if anybody had a paper and pencil.
    “I had never asked for an autograph in my life, and when I went back he was seated with the guy that I later figured out was Amadee”—Amadee Wohlschlaeger, the renowned illustrator for the
St. Louis