A few months ago I took some of my old baseball cards out of their binder and put them in a picture frame for cards. It's much easier to see them that way. I think I remember my wife making a comment about one of them - a 1963 Stan Musial - something like, "who is that; I've never heard of him." Well, here is something interesting from a 50 cent yard-sale book that my sister-in-law brought over this week. It's called, "October 1964." It's about baseball. There is some interesting history in chapter 5, including a blurb about Stan Musial.
"Yet, more than most teams, the Cardinal players came to deal with race with a degree of maturity and honesty rarely seen in baseball at that time." It mentions how some of the traditions of segregation were broken. Fore example, there was "...resentment over segregating white and black players in separate living facilities - the whites staying at the best local hotels, the blacks forced to stay as boarders with black families in the black section of town." Finally, a wealthy friend of the team owner bought a motel, and the Cardinals leased it and rented some rooms in an adjoining one so that, "the entire team and their families could stay together." Here was the "...rarest of sights: white and black children swimming in the motel pool together, and white and black players, with their wives, at desegregated cookouts. That helped bring the team together."
"Even Stan Musial, who had both the right, as a senior star, and the money to rent a house for his family during spring training - something he had looked forward to in the past - stayed at the motel and was part of the team. That made a great difference, for Musial was not only one of the two or three greatest players of his era, he was one of the most beloved as well: he seemed to live in a world without malice or meanness, where there was no prejudice, and where everyone was judged on talent alone."
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