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Post-Dispatch
and the
Sporting News
, known by his first name.
    Eyeing the pencil and scrap of paper, Musial said, “Come here, bud,” and he led the boy into his office, where he produced a photograph of himself and a fountain pen.
    “I was surprised, he was writing with his right hand,” Hall said years later, after learning the left-handed boy had been forced to write right-handed by his teachers.
    “He signed it in green ink, ‘To John Hall, from Stan Musial,’ and he asked, ‘How’s this, is this better than a piece of paper?’ ” The boy said, “Yes, sir, it is. Thank you very much.”
    Nearly sixty years later, a historian of minor-league baseball, Hall had met Musial a time or two. He wanted it known that the man was just as decent as he had seemed on that evening back in 1950. John Hall still had the autographed photo, still cherished the memory of being called “son.”

    7    
LUKASZ AND MARY
    H IS FAMILY lived down by the river, close to the mill. This was bottomland in every sense, where the newest immigrants lived, closest to the noise and the grime. The ground was barren, and people understood that was because of the smoke that flowed twenty-four hours a day; they had yet to learn just how much the smoke was damaging their bodies.
    In the afternoon, the boy would sometimes wait for his father outside the mill.Lukasz Musial was not much more than five feet tall, and he spoke mostly Polish, calling the boy Stashu, the diminutive of Stanislaus.
    At home there was Lukasz and Mary Musial and the girls, Ida, Victoria, Helen, and Rose, all born within six years, and then Stanislaus, born on November 21, 1920.
    “They didn’t even have enough money to baptize my father until his brother came along and they were baptized together. That was poor!” Musial’s oldest daughter, Gerry Ashley, said. “I don’t even think they had indoor plumbing for quite a long time,” she added.
    Just before Stashu’s second birthday, he was joined by Edward, so the family arranged a bargain christening at the Polish church overlooking the steel mill. The church was the Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, popularly called St. Mary’s.
    When the boy was seven or eight, the family moved from 465 Sixth Street up the hill to 1139 Marelda Street—eight Musials plus Mary’s mother in a two-bedroom house. Because the house was farther from the mill, Lukasz took more time getting home, stopping in the Polish socialclub and maybe the Russian social club or the Croatian social club or the Czech social club or any of the other ethnic clubs on the hillside.
    The beer and the shot, or some variation, helped dissipate the metallic particles in the men’s throats, took the pain from the fresh burns from the sparks and spattered drops of acid. Lukasz Musial was not healthy and did not always work, but even when he did work he made more stops than some of the men, trudging home without his full paycheck.
    “As far as drinking, the guys in the steel mill worked hard,” said Mark Pawelec, whose maternal grandfather was a prominent Donora gymnast named Frank Musial, no relation to Lukasz. In 2009, Pawelec was living high on the hill in a family home, commuting to Pittsburgh on a modern toll road a few miles to the west, and in his spare time he studied the history of the Poles of Donora.
    “My grandfather, Frank Musial, was an alcoholic,” Pawelec said. “He did drink. That’s not something I tell people, but I know for a fact it was true.” Pawelec would not speculate about Lukasz Musial but said he would not be surprised if anybody thought he needed a drink or three on the way back from that mill.
    Stan Musial never talked much about Lukasz within his family; men of the thirties and forties did not say much about what they saw at work or at war, and they tended not to discuss destructive behaviors under the roof of their childhood home.
    “I think he struggled with alcohol, that’s what I would prefer to say, as