Stengel's Death at 85 Widely Mourned (Published 1975) (2024)

Casey Stengel, who died Monday night in California at the age of 85, was mourned yesterday by a public that had marveled for more than 60, years at his antics and achieveIments as a baseball player, coach, manager and nonstop showman.

Tributes poured in during the hours after “the Ol' Professor” died in Glendale Memorial Hospital from around the country —from public officials like Governor Carey and Mayor Beame, who recalled that he had worked for all four of New York's major league teams in this century, to former players like Yogi Berra, who remembered him as “a great man.”

Mr. Stengel died at 10:58 P.M., Pacific Time, only a few hours after a family spokesman disclosed that he was suffering from cancer of the lymph glands. He had entered the hospital two weeks earlier for tests, not far from the home he had shared for half a century with his wife. Edna. who was in a nursing home nearby.

The legends that he had created continued long after his retirement 10 years ago and, as recently as June, he enlivened the Mets' annual oldtimers' reunion by riding into Shea Stadium in a Roman chariot dressed in a toga and gladiator's helmet.

“Casey Stengel had the baseball mind ofa genius,” Governor Carey said yesterday, “the heart of Santa Claus and St. Francis, and the face of a clown, and something very good has gone from our lives.

“Casey Stengel will be ranked in the history of baseball with such great managers as John McGraw, Connie Mack and Joe McCarthy. And New Yorkers will always hold him in their hearts, with warm memory, because he is the only baseball figure who wore the uniforms of the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees and Mets.

“He made a unique contribution, too, to American letters with his inimitablet ‘Stenglese,’ a language “ for which he invented his ownprose and syntax. He was a joy in more ways than anyone in public life. We shall not see his like again.”

The man” behind the legend—Charles Dillon Stengel of Kansas City, the man from K.C.—owned oil wells in Texas, was vice president of a bank in California and controlled real estate that made him a millionaire. But for all his status, he was best known as a baseball man with a wrinkled, expressive face and a guttural voice.

He was transported to his early baseball games as a boy in Missouri in horse‐drawn surreys and wound up flying coast to coast in jetliners. He reached the major leagues in 1912 when William Howard Taft was President and retired in 1965 during the Administration, of Lyndon B. Johnson.

He was a player, coach or manager on 17 professional teams. He was traded “four times as a left‐handed outfielder in the major leagues. He was dropped or relieved three times as a manager in the big leagues. He was even paid twice for not managing.

From 1910 to 1931, he played on four teams in the minors, then five in the majors and finally two more in the minors. Then, as a manager, he lived through 25 years of frustration at both levels, finishing no higher than fifth in an eight‐team league during one decade.

Then he suddenly graduated to the New York Yankees in 1948 as the 15th manager in their 46‐year history of dominating the sport and won 10 pennants and 7 world championships in 12 years.

Finally, at the age of 72, he wound up as the first manager of the New York Mets where he had started—at the bottom of the ladder.

Through it all, he was one of the busiest characters on the American scene and one of the most theatrical. His pantomime, monologues and storytelling defied description, until he was accused (with some reason) of carrying on to distract the public from the less effectual performances of his teams.

He spoke in a nonstop style that came to be known as Stengelese — a kind of circuitous doubletalk laced with ambiguous antecedents, dangling participles, a lack of proper names and a liberal use of adjectives like “amazing” and “terrific.”

He drew on baseball lore back to the days of John J. McGraw, his idol as a manager, and would clinch points in rhetoric by saying with finality: “You could look it up.” When a listener's attention waned, he would recapture it by suddenly exclaiming, “Now, let me ask you,” and would be off and running again.

The perpetrator of this commotion was born in Kansas City, Mo., on July 30, 1890. His father had emigrated from Germany in 1851 and had set?? tied in the farm country across the Mississippi River from Da?? venport, Iowa. A first child Louise, was born in 1886; a son, Grant, in 1887, and Charles three years later.

Charles became an all‐around athlete, at Kansas City Central High School and pitched (and won) against Joplin for the state championship in 1909. He turned professional the follow. ing year with the Kansas City Blues, who farmed him out to Kankakee, Ill., in the Northern Association.

Baseball was a means to an end: Stengel was working his way through the Western Dental College in Kansas City. But two things swerved him from his course. He was left‐handed, which raised some problems for his instructors. And left‐handed dentists had a less riotous future than left‐handed baseball players.

The dental college, Stengel recalled, also did not have the daring to turn him loose on society with a “weapon” in his hand.

Called Up by Dodgers

For whatever reasons, he became a fulltime ballplayer and was discovered by Larry Sutton, a scout for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In September of 1912, the Dodgers—then known as the Trolley Dodgers and Superbas—called him up from Birmingham, and he was in the big leagues.

For the next 14 seasons, Stengel played the outfield in the National League — with Brooklyn until 1917, Pittsburgh until 1920, Philadelphia until the middle of 1921, New York until 1924 and Boston until 1925.

He batted .284 and hit 60 home runs in 1,277 games. His best year was 1922, when he hit .368 in 84 games with McGraw's Giants. His best moments came in the World Series of 1923, when he hit two home runs and won two games —only to be upstaged by the young Babe Ruth, who hit three home runs as the Yankees won the Series.

After the 1923 Series, Stengel, was traded to the Boston, Braves and two years later, began his career as a manager with Boston's farm club at Worcester, Mass.

He already had gained a sizable reputation as a brawler land clown, and promptly increased it when the Boston club installed him as a one‐man triumvirate at Worcester —president, manager and right fielder.

Casey fretted until the final day of the season, then hatched a monumental triple play to escape. As manager, he released Stengel the player; as president, he dismissed Stengel, the manager; and as Stengel, he resigned as president.

The owner of the Boston team, Judge Emil Fuchs, was outraged by this impertinence, but nobody was too surprised. After all, Stengel had long since become famous as “the king of the grumblers,” a locker ‐ room clique whose chief talent was trouble.

He had been the bane of umpires and of managers like Wilbert Robinson of Brooklyn, who became the butt of one Stengel prank at Daytona Beach, Fla., in the spring of 1915. On that occasion, Casey was inspired by the recent feat of Gabby Street, who had caught a baseball dropped from the Washington Monument. The question now became: Could a man catch a baseball dropped from an airplane?

The airplane was supplied by Ruth Law, the pioneer woman flier, and the baseball was supplied by C. D. Stengel, except that somehow it became a grapefruit by the time it was dropped.

“Uncle Robbie,” Stengel recalled, “was warming up this pitcher on the sidelines—we didn't have six coaches in those days. And this aviatorix—it was the first one they had—she flew over and dropped it. And Uncle Robbie saw it coming and waved everybody away like an outfielder and said, ‘I've got it, I've got it.’

“Robbie got under this grapefruit, thinking it was a baseball, which hit him right on this pitcher's glove he put on and the insides of it flew all over, seeds on his face and uniform, and flipped him right over on his back. Everybody came running up and commenced laughing, all except Robbie.”

In one of his most fabled escapades, Stengel returned to Ebbets Field in 1918 with the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had just acquired him from Brooklyn. He was greeted by a rousing round of catcalls from the fans. In reply, he marched to home plate, bowed with courtliness to the grandstand, doffed his cap — and out flew a sparrow. He had given them the bird.

On another occasion, he went to right field, found a drainage hole and simply disappeared from sight. A moment later he rose majestically, the manhole cover under his arm, just in time to catch a fly ball.

Later, when he became a manager, Stengel looked back on his wayward years and said:

“Now that I am a manager, I see the error of my youthful ways. If any player ever pulled that stuff on me now, I would probably fine his ears off.”

Stengel's success as a manager, meanwhile, was lean. In seven years in the minor leagues from 1925 to 1931, his teams won only one pennant. But he was developing skills that became his trademark in later years: He was thriving as a buffoon who could draw attention away from inept players to himself, and he was learning the business side of baseball—buying players low, selling them high and converting farm clubs into pools of talent for the major leagues.

He also was pranching out in his personal life. In 1924 he had married Edna Lawson, a tall, lively brunette from California who once had acted in silent films with Hoot Gibson and who later was an accountant with a shrewd business sense.

They settled in a two‐story house at the foothills of the Sierras in Glendale, Calif. And for the next 40 years it was their base as both roamed the country on Casey's travels.

Investment In Oil

They had no children, but had hordes of relatives who lived nearby, plus young ballplayers who often stayed with them. They also had interests in real estate, established the Valley National Bank with Mrs. Stengel's family, and literally struck oil in Texas on a chance investment Casey had made with some baseball friends.

With all this going for him, Stengel was hardly considered the type of man who would flower late in life into a baseball manager of renown—not even when he was called to the Brooklyn Dodgers as a coach in 1932 and became manager two years later.

From 1934 until 1943, his teams at Brooklyn and Boston never finished higher than fifth in an eight‐team league. Then in 1943, when he was struck by a taxi in Boston and suffered a broken leg, it appeared that his career was finally ended.

However, the following year he agreed to leave his swimming pool and patio in Glendale to take over the Milwaukee club in the American Association. He did it as a favor for a friend, but it proved to be a turning point. After one season as manager at Milwaukee and another at Kansas City, he spent three at Oakland in the Pacific Coast League, won 321 games and suddenly at the age of 58 was offered the job as manager of the lordly Yankees.

His selection as the replacement for Bucky Harris evoked surprise. It was widely thought that the Yankees had hired “Professor” Stengel to throw a screen of hilarity around the club for a season or two while rebuilding. But the “interim” manager, who had never spent a day in the American League, stayed 12 years and the‐Yankees reached spectacular heights.

In 1949, his first season, the Yankees suffered 72 injuries. Joe DiMaggio even missed half the season. But Stengel kept juggling lineups and the Yankees defeated the Boston Red Sox in the last two games, won the pennant and defeated the Dodgers in the World Series.

A year later they won again and they kept on winning until they had taken five straight pennants and world championships. It was a record streak for a team and a manager. In a rash moment Stengel remarked that if the Yankees didn't make it six in a row in 1954, the manager should be dismissed. They didn't, but he wasn't.

In 1955, they won the pennant again and also took it in 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1960. But they won only two World Series during that time, and in 1959 even slipped to third place.

Stengel was earning, $85,000 a year by now and was the foremost manager in baseball. He was surrounded by stars like Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Phil Rizzuto, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. But the second half of his administration was a somewhat troubled time, and he grew increasingly arbitrary with players and bitter to suggestions that he was “too old.”

His bitterness reached a peak on Oct. 18, 1960, five days after the Yankees had lost the series to Pittsburgh.

In an acrimonious press conference at the Savoy Hilton Hotel, the Yankee brass—led by Dan Topping — announced that Stengel had “retired.” A short time later George M. Weiss, Stengel's friend and sponsor, was released as general manager.

“I was fired,” Casey commented.

After a year in the Califon nia sunshine, though, he was hired again — by Weiss, who now was organizing the Mets, the successors to the Giants and the Dodgers, who had left New York in 1957 for the West Coast.

So, at the age of 72, Stengel began a new career, one that crystallized all his talents for teaching, acting and enchanting the public. The Mets needed such talents, too, since they lost 452 games while winning 194 during the next four years, finishing dead last each time

They were as downtrodden as the Yankees had been exalted. But they were cast in the image of the stumpy, waddling old man who directed them, a team whose sins were pardoned by an adoring public, whose life was surrounded by legend whose bank account grew with the legend.

In 1965, Stengel's last year in a baseball suit, 1,768,389 persons paid up to $3.50 each to watch the Old Man and his celebrated Youth of America in their new Shea Stadium on Flushing Bay; and 1,075,431 paid to see them on the road.

The partnership began to fold on July 25, 1965, when Stengel fractured his left hip —somewhere between an oldtimers party at Toots Shor's restaurant, where he slipped and fell, and a house in Queens, where he slipped and fell again while getting out of an automobile.

Missed Birthday Fete

In any event, he was in Roosevelt Hospital that afternoon while 39,288 persons celebrated his 75th birthday at Shea Stadium. Two days later he underwent an operation on his hip and one month later he retired to the side of his swimming pool as titular vice president of the Mets.

One year later, however, leaning on a crooked black cane, he limped into baseball's Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y., alongside Ted Williams. Stengel, the 104th person inducted into the shrine, told the crowd in valedictorian Stengelese:

“I want to thank my parents for letting me play baseball, and I'm thankful I had baseball knuckles and couldn't become a dentist. I got $2,100 a year when I started in the big league, and they get more money now.... I chased the balls that Babe Ruth hit.”

Funeral services will be held next Monday at 1 P.M., Pacific Time, at the Church of the Recessional in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale. In lieu of flowers, the family requested donations in his name be made to the Association of Professional Baseball Players of America, 630 East Wardlow Road, Long Beach, Calif. The association helps men formerly associated with baseball.

The body will lie in state on Sunday from 9 A.M. until 9 P.M. at Scovern Mortuary in Glendale.