I’ll be talking about my book, Stan Musial: An American Life, on Saturday, Nov. 10, in Harrisburg, Pa.
The talk will also be streaming live at 3 pm at: http://pcntv.com/ The talk is part of the Harrisburg Book Festival, Friday through Sunday, at the terrific Midtown Scholar Bookstore-Café, 1302 N. Third Street in Harrisburg. Tel: 717-236-1680. My appearance has been arranged through my daughter Corinna Vecsey Wilson, vice president of programming and host at PCN. The book was a New York Times best-seller in 2011. For a couple of glimpses of Musial, please see: http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/11191/1159123-148-0.stm http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/the-story-of-stan-the-man/ Musial will turn 92 on Nov. 21, and is the icon of St. Louis. I will be linking his modest, hard-working persona to his Pennsylvania roots in Donora in the western part of the state. Stan the Man was one of the great baseball players of his time, or any time. At first I thought the subtitle should be The Forgotten Man (reference to the song in High Society) but when I began researching his roots as an immigrant's son in zinc-and-steel-and-smog country, I realized the subtitle An American Life was much better. It is always an honor to talk about one of the sporting heroes of my childhood.
Sanford Sklansky
11/9/2012 04:26:37 am
I think he has been forgotten. He never gets mentioned in the same breath with Mays, Aaron and some other greats of the game.
George Vecsey
11/9/2012 10:28:57 am
Thanks, I make a case that he was considered the equal of Wms and DiMaggio -- he was voted the best player of the post-war decade. The book goes into reasons their aura grew and his declined -- except in St, Louis and a cadre of aging fans (like me) who adore him. GV
Brian Savin
11/9/2012 12:48:37 pm
I'm not sure, Sandy -- I'm trying to think back to give proper perspective. As I remember my baseball card trading days, he was in the same league but different. He was an ancient - a venerable "generation" (to us) older than Mays and Aaron and so we kids weren't quite sure how to value his card for our trades. The other names were bigger to us, but there was still this guy Musial who we all knew was there even before and still doing really incredible things and would be in the All-Star games, too. 11/9/2012 09:45:35 am
Good to see that your Musial book is still in demand. You are getting to be part of today's world now that you have added streaming.
Philip Barnett
11/10/2012 04:40:26 am
We Brooklyn Dodger fans were the people responsible for the "Stan the man" nickname, probably because he regularly beat up on our pitching staff. I'm pretty sure, but not positive, that it was at Ebbets Field when he had five home runs in a doubleheader.
George Vecsey
11/14/2012 02:08:09 am
His five home runs in a DH were in St. Louis against the Giants. Legend says Mays pulled another one back, but it was a long fly to CF.
Ed martin
11/10/2012 11:59:51 am
A really fine book, on my recommendation list. Best wishes. Ed
Elliott Kolker
1/14/2016 01:02:39 am
"(Musial) had always talked about doing things other Americans did...and became something of a regular at the Kentucky Derby." Comments are closed.
|
QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God! Then I would wake into keening grief all over again. Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days. After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy. Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s. Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone. ----- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html Jan. 30, 2023 Categories
All
|