2 KANSAS CITY

The term “Stengelese” first appeared in print in the 1930s, but instead of describing his method of speech, it was a nickname for the players he was managing, as “Sudanese” would be used to describe the people of Sudan.

In 1940, The New York Times began to use it for his unique way of turning short answers into run-on sentences. Sometimes this was a tactic to bury what he really thought; at other times he might seem to be tangoing with the English language until he remembered what he wanted to say.

“They brought me up to the Brooklyn Dodgers, which at that time was in Brooklyn.”

“Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice versa.”

“Sometimes I get a little hard-of-speaking.”

“When you’re losing, everyone commences to playing stupid.”

He always had his own unique way of talking, but the term “Stengelese” wasn’t really popularized until he went to the Yankees in 1949, and the New York sportswriters adopted it when quoting him at length or describing his speech patterns.

During spring training in 1940, while Casey was managing the Boston Braves (then called the Bees), the Times’s John Drebinger wrote:

Life with the Giants these days seems to be pretty much up and down, and today it was down indeed as Professor Casey Stengel and his Bees polished off Colonel Bill Terry’s vast army for the second time this Spring. The score was 4 to 3 and was achieved in typical Stengelese fashion.

This consists of Professor Casey’s engaging the enemy in some of his most entertaining conversation while his helpers grab a few hits and run them out for all they are worth.

Because part of Casey’s charm was surely in his colorful use of language, this seems like a good time to introduce it, as he described his childhood to a group of sportswriters in Kansas City in 1956:

Lots of people think I was born in California because I live in Glendale and when they get you out there they forget where you come from and anything I read it states I was a Californian and when I am in Chicago I am taken for a fellow who was born in Illinois because no doubt I played there but it is never further than Davenport, Iowa, which is not too far off and which I also played in New York I never know where I was born to read it because they get all the stories there and I don’t know if anybody is ever going to build me a monument, but I will bet they have some time to spend deciding where I was born because they put that on those things. What I know is a fact, that I was born right here in Kansas City but I ain’t sure of the street but I think it was Agnes Avenue, because my father sold water from a truck and people said he was pretty smart to sell something that didn’t cost anything but we had to move a lot of times to sell the water and we never had a cellar and we couldn’t store the potatoes which they did when I was around here and that meant we had to do something with the potatoes and I guess I can tell you nobody was as smart with a potato as my brother Grant out there who was a much better ballplayer than I was and very smart.

We’d like to think that Casey (and his audience) took a breath here, but it’s possible he continued right on, as though it was all one endless sentence.

One day we were carrying around the potatoes in our pockets when we have to play a game and Grant is at second base when the pitcher tries to pick off a guy and he missed, but Grant just reaches in his pocket and throws it back to the pitcher and when the runner walks off the base Grant takes the ball out of his glove and tells the guy, “I have something to show you.” I was never that smart but I remember we used to root for Central High and we would beat Manuel High pretty good and then we would go down and have a real fight, but I know I only won one thing at Central High and that was a sweater with a letter on it and you don’t know how I loved that sweater because I was the seventh man on the basketball team when they only needed five. I wore that sweater you know how hot it is today and I wore that sweater, a thick heavy sweater right through the summer so everybody would see the letter from Central High.

As with all Stengelese, most of what Casey says here is essentially true. But then comes the task of interpretation, and that indeed brings us to Kansas City, Missouri, in the summer of 1890, when Charles Dillon Stengel was born, the third and last child of Louis and Jennie Stengel. Though various journals claimed he was born in 1889 or 1891, he settled the matter in 1953 by admitting that the time had come to accept his actual birth date as July 30, 1890. He had often said it was 1891—like most players of his day, cheating a little off his age.

The idea, for him and many players, was that he might extend his playing career if he was thought to be younger. But thanks to his early wrinkles and a rather grizzly face, he was already being called “Ol’ Casey Stengel” by the early 1920s, an unfortunate development in a game that always put a high price on youth.

The Stengels moved eight or nine times during Casey’s childhood, but Kansas City was always home until he got married—even when he became a professional player. Before he married, at age thirty-four (I will always use his real age when referring to events), he would spend off-seasons living with his parents. And, yes, his nickname, “Casey,” came from the initials of his hometown, with a little bow to the popularity of “Casey at the Bat.” (When Casey was a member of the New York Giants in the twenties, his manager, John McGraw, introduced him to DeWolf Hopper, who had popularized the poem onstage). At home, he’d been “Charlie,” and at school “Dutch.”

His birthplace was a modest-sized three-bedroom single-family home at 1229 Agnes Avenue, which still stands, just off East Thirteenth Street and just north of I-70, in the working-class Independence Plaza part of town. The house was brand-new when the Stengels moved in. Charlie would share a room with his brother, Grant, three years older; his sister, Louise, four, could have a room of her own.

Even though their home was in the city, not a rural area, for a time they had a cow in the backyard; Charlie and Grant would peddle her milk around the neighborhood.

The family moved often, but eventually settled at 4149 Harrison Street, in the more fashionable South Hyde Park section. Here his parents continued to live long after Casey had achieved fame; Louise, who never married, would live there until her death. It was always “home.”

It was a close family, and Casey often managed to work Grant into his stories, citing him as the better player of the two (and better cow-milker), whose potential baseball career was prevented by a horse-and-buggy accident that caused him to lose part of his foot. Grant married and had a stepdaughter, and eventually settled in Prairie Village, just outside Kansas City, to operate a taxi company and drive one himself. (Casey, early on, helped run the company as well.) He and Casey had a nice relationship, and Casey occasionally sent him money, but it was his big sister, Louise, whom he kept an especially close eye on, always calling to see if there was anything she needed, stopping in Kansas City to see her as his travels permitted.

Whenever Casey traveled by plane later in his life, he would buy an insurance policy and name Louise as beneficiary. Maybe this was payback of sorts: when they were kids and a touch of shyness overtook him, she used to introduce Charlie to girls he liked.

Charlie’s most responsible behavior as a child was turning the pump of the organ at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church—Episcopalianism being a religious compromise between Lutheranism and Catholicism in the Stengel home. He also entertained neighbors by having his dog Sport perform tricks.

In his early years, Charlie had curly golden hair, which his grandfather eventually had trimmed into a more boyish cut. The family story was that Louise raced to the barbershop to sweep up the lost curls and preserve them.

Charlie was a mischievous boy, playing Jesse James outlaw games with his friends, engaging in wrestling bouts, firing snowballs at men with pipes (seeking to dislodge the pipes), breaking the city’s 9:00 p.m. curfew for kids, or swiping an ice cream freezer off the back of a parked truck while the driver was attending a party. He and Grant harbored a flock of pigeons, but also stole from a neighbor’s collection to increase their own numbers. They sold watered-down milk from their cow. Inseparable and rambunctious, the brothers did manage to avoid any serious trouble as they traveled around on roller skates or a tandem bicycle.

Charlie nearly drowned when he was four. He fell off a small wagon Grant was pulling, landed in a deep hole filled with water, and had to be rescued. It was the first time he ever got his name in the newspaper. A second near-drowning came when he jumped into a swimming hole near a Milwaukee Railroad bridge outside of town and again had to be rescued.

There were only forty-three states in the Union when Charlie was born. It was before radio, before the automobile, before the Wright brothers’ first flight, before there was an American League—even four and a half years before Babe Ruth was born.

In fact, it was because this was still the pre-automobile age that his father, Louis Stengel, found a profession.

Louis worked as an insurance agent with the Joseph Stiebel Company and eventually took full ownership of their road-sprinkling service. Leaving insurance behind, he would drive a horse-drawn water wagon around town, shooting water out of a tank with a foot pedal to keep the dust on the roads from invading people’s homes, or the shops along Grand Avenue.

Not everyone signed up, so he had to take his foot off and on the pedal on each block and check off his customers’ names. Of course, if one household was a “no,” the dust in front of their home might blow onto the adjoining home of a customer.

That was considered tough luck, and led to disputes among neighbors.

It was also tough luck when rain or snow made Louis’s water-sprinkling route unnecessary. But, as Casey pointed out, it was nice to have a business in which your goods cost essentially nothing. (This quip conveniently excluded the cost of feeding the horse.)

Still, “the city finally came in with modern apparatus and took over the job,” wrote Casey in his autobiography, “and my father’s business was what you’d call defunct.”

Kansas City was the childhood home of some other notable achievers around this time, including Walt Disney (during his teen years, 1914–21), the future film siren Jean Harlow, and her companion of the 1930s, leading-man actor William Powell, who happened to go to Central High School with Charlie. He achieved fame in the Thin Man films in the thirties.

Although they were classmates, Powell and Stengel had little in common. In fact, other classmates would remember that when Powell acted in a Shakespearean drama on the Central High stage, Charlie and his friend Harold Lederman would sit in the front row and heckle him, teasing him about his “winter underwear” costume. But they did play varsity basketball together, and Charlie was surprised by Powell’s tenacity.

Ivy Olson, a tough major-league infielder from 1911 to 1924, was five years older than Charlie, but they went to elementary school together, and were later teammates in Brooklyn.

The Hall of Fame outfielder Zack Wheat (along with his younger brother Mack, also a future major leaguer) moved to Kansas City when he was sixteen and Charlie was fourteen, and they became teammates in Brooklyn and lifelong friends.

—

Charlie’s ancestors on his father’s side, the Schtengals, came from the Bavarian section of Germany, in the southeastern portion of the country. His mother’s side was from Ireland. The pursuit of a better life sent both families sailing to America. The Stengels settled in Rock Island, Illinois. His mother Jennie’s parents, descended from Dillons and Jordans, settled across the Mississippi River, eight miles from Rock Island, in Davenport, Iowa. That is where Louis and Jennie met and married.

Jennie Jordan, Casey’s mom, was born in 1861, when Abraham Lincoln became president and the Civil War broke out.

His mother’s uncle was John F. Dillon, counsel to the Union Pacific Railroad, a judge on the Iowa Supreme Court, and later a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge, appointed by President Grant.^*

The Dillon family is where Casey’s middle name came from, and he was known to brag about his ancestry (on his mother’s side) when people said that Edna came from a prosperous family. This could be a touchy subject for Casey.

Louis Stengel’s father, Casey’s grandfather, found his name changed from Karl Schtengal to Charles Stengel when he arrived in the United States. Louis was born in 1860 and was only four when his father died of tuberculosis. Louis’s mother, the former Katherine Kniphals, remarried a gunsmith also named Charles—Charles Wolff.

Louis and Jennie, both first-generation Americans, married in 1886 and settled in Kansas City, where Louis got his job with the insurance company. Charlie was probably named after both Charleses—his grandfather and his step-grandfather.

Kansas City was in a major growth spurt; its population almost doubled during Casey’s childhood, from 133,000 in 1890 to 248,000 in 1910. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway helped make the city a bustling metropolis and home to the 1900 Democratic National Convention. The Parade Grounds and Exhibition Park were destinations for ball playing, but there were plenty of vacant lots in Northeast Kansas City, on whose rough terrain ball games were forever breaking out.

Charlie Stengel was hardly the Student of the Month at the Kansas City public schools; his two greatest takeaways were being forced to write right-handed, and his adventures with the McGuffey Readers.

At the turn of the century, left-handed students were indeed forced to write with their right hands, and for the rest of his life, largely thanks to his teacher, one Mrs. Kennedy, forcing lefties to write right-handed, Casey did everything left-handed except write. His handwritten letters, his autographs, his contracts were all done right-handed. He acknowledged the pain and annoyance of being forced to write right-handed, but claimed it made him a better player, because he was able to use both hands more effectively in catching baseballs.

Most American students of the time learned to read with the McGuffey Readers, and Casey latched on to “Ned,” the male character from the third-grade edition. Throughout his decades of talking to the press, he would often compare a naïve comment or speaker to “Ned in the Third Reader.” (Sometimes he would say “Fourth Reader,” and indeed, Ned was there, too.)

His continuing use of turn-of-the-century expressions was one of the things that would endear him to generations of sportswriters, including those who had no idea who Ned was but were charmed by the references. With the turn of a phrase, he could sweep his audience back to the Teddy Roosevelt administration and prairie schools.

He went to the Woodland school and then to the Garfield school for elementary and middle school before moving up to Central High. “His friends sometimes called him Sails because of his big ears,” recalled his sister, Louise.

“I guess we all had a grudge against the school,” said his Central High classmate George Goldman many years later. “So we bought the school building some years ago, and we tore it down. And we sent Casey the bell, because we knew he had a special grudge.”

They were the Eagles on sports fields, and it was there that Charlie Stengel made his mark. By now a broad-chested and muscular five foot eight, weighing 175 pounds, he played baseball, football, and basketball. Sports seemed to require nicknames, so Charlie became “Dutch,” thanks to his German heritage.

Central High, at Eleventh and Locust (around where City Hall is today), opened in 1884. (It was razed and rebuilt in a different location in 1953, and today is called Central Academy of Excellence.) It called itself the largest high school in the West, which in itself would have made it hard to make a varsity starting team. “The West” has changed definition, of course, with the growth of California and the use of air travel, but even into the 1950s, it meant Missouri, and baseball teams making “Western trips” were referring to Chicago and St. Louis.

Dutch played only football in his junior year; at that point, one of the players was seriously injured, and the school suspended the sport. He had been a fullback and captain of the team.

“I played football before they had headgear,” Casey later explained. “And that’s how I lost my mind.”

Dutch was a starting guard and occasional right forward on the basketball team; although not a high scorer, he was very athletic and a good defensive player. He claimed to be the “seventh man” on a seven-player roster, but newspaper box scores suggest he saw plenty of action. Basketball was played at a high level in Kansas City, and conference referees included Phog Allen, later the legendary basketball coach at Kansas University, and Ernie Quigley, later a National League umpire. Dutch played three years of varsity basketball, and in 1909 the Eagles won the city championship.

But baseball was his passion, from the days when he and his friends would copy batting stances and pitching poses they scrutinized on the colorful trading cards sold with cigarette packages. In 1906, he and his dad (and probably Grant) saw the future Hall of Famer Rube Marquard pitch in a minor-league game. Years later, Casey approached Rube, then a teammate in Brooklyn, and said, “When you were with Indianapolis, you came to Kansas City and my father took me to the ballpark to see you pitch.”

Casey and his dad probably saw more than that one game at Association Park. The Kansas City Blues featured Smoky Joe Wood, just eighteen in 1908, as an up-and-coming pitcher, as well as another future Hall of Famer, Eagle Eye Jake Beckley, who was actually cross-eyed and lived in Kansas City. Beckley was a big name; he had just concluded a twenty-year major-league career with a .308 lifetime average and nearly three thousand hits. Casey probably had his tobacco card.

At Central, he was a left-handed-throwing second baseman and third baseman, and also an occasional pitcher. With his barrel chest and bowlegs, he had a body type like that of Honus Wagner, the greatest name in baseball at the time. Dutch was a grinder, a player who made the most of what he had. “He made himself a ballplayer,” said Grant, many years later. “He never knew when he was whipped.”

In addition to high school, Charlie played for several local amateur baseball teams. The first was for Harzfeld’s, a department store, which had a team in the Merchants League. Dutch got $1.50 a game to pitch. Sieg Harzfeld was a business acquaintance of Louis Stengel’s, and that probably led to the offer to pitch. Sieg liked to tell people in later years that he was Casey’s first baseball employer.

Grant helped him get on the Armour Meat Packing team, then the Northeast Merchants, and then the Parisian Cloak Company team, who paid him three dollars a game. In 1908, he played for the Kansas City Bentons; a sketch of the eleven players appeared in the August 5, 1908, Kansas City Star, which called them “a strong amateur team.”

He and his friends were starting to travel great distances in and out of state for games. Once, they made a train trip to Ogden, Utah, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. He was with the “Kansas City Red Sox” on those journeys, and what fun those kids had, hiding from the conductor to avoid paying their fares, and just generally enjoying life. A few of his Red Sox teammates also became professionals, including the pitcher Claude Hendrix, who would wind up pitching in Casey’s major-league debut.

A classmate of Casey’s, Ira Bidwell, organized the amateur games and made a strong impression on him. This got him thinking about the business side of the game. Bidwell died in an aviation accident over Oklahoma in 1919, but Casey never forgot him when his various jobs as manager included helping to promote the team. “He had a great knack about him,” wrote Casey. “He was handsome; he had a good gab and a good line of talk. There’s no doubt in my mind that Ira Bidwell would have gone on to own a big league ball club and been a tremendous man as far as sports were concerned.”

In his senior year at Central, playing for the Missouri State Championship, Stengel pitched the full fifteen innings for a 7–6 Eagles victory over Joplin, a lofty achievement indeed. It turned out to be the last year for baseball at Central because of budget problems; Dutch Stengel left on a very high note, although two of his three sports were “defunct” by the time he left school.

And leave he did, despite being only a semester away from graduating. He had a chance to make real money playing baseball, and he felt he needed to take the offer at once.

His performance on the diamond and his high-profile victory in the state championship had brought him to the attention of the Blues, that high-minor-league team, just a step below the majors. And here was Dutch being offered a contract for $135 a month, contingent on his making the team.

“Money never seemed to mean anything to Casey,” said Grant.

But $135 a month? This was real money. His father was earning about sixty dollars a month. Even though a high school diploma would be nice, this was too good to pass up.

Louis Stengel had to sign the contract—at nineteen, Charlie was still underage—and sign it he did.

“You never could change that boy’s mind anyway,” Louis later explained.

One neighbor of the Stengels (Casey said he lived “across the street”) seemed to know a lot about baseball. He was another Charles—Charley Nichols. And it turned out he was worth listening to, because he was better known to baseball fans as “Kid” Nichols, a three-hundred-game winner in the National League (Boston, St. Louis, and Philadelphia) from 1890 to 1906, with a 361-208 record and seven thirty-win seasons. He lived in Kansas City from 1881 until his death in 1953. When Casey was a boy, only Cy Young and Pud Galvin had more career victories than Kid.

“Nichols always talked to me on his way to the park and I thought I was a big shot among the kids,” said Casey, who would call him his boyhood idol.

Kid Nichols, realizing what a fine talent young Stengel was, took him aside one day to give him some timely advice. “I understand you get in a lot of trouble at school and in a lot of arguments. Now when you start out in baseball, the best thing you can do is listen to your manager. And once in a while you’ll have an old player teach you. Always listen to the man. Never say, ‘I won’t do that.’ Always listen to him. If you’re not going to do it, don’t tell him so. Let it go in one ear, then let it roll around there for a month, and if it isn’t any good, let it go out the other ear. If it is any good after a month, memorize it and keep it. Now be sure you do that and you’ll keep out of a lot of trouble.”

By the time Casey became a manager, the name Kid Nichols might not have meant much to his young players. But there was a good chance that Casey himself remembered this advice and passed it on now and then to know-it-all prospects. The words of long-forgotten Kid Nichols may well have been spoken to young New York Mets prospects of the 1960s.

And so, in March 1910, while the rest of his class was in its final months before graduation, Dutch headed for Excelsior Springs, Missouri, twenty-eight miles from home, for his first training camp. He worked out with the Blues’ player/manager, Danny Shay, an infielder who had been with the New York Giants as recently as 1907. He, too, lived in Kansas City, and he knew that Dutch wasn’t going to be a left-handed infielder in the pros.

In an early exhibition game back in Kansas City, the Blues were to face Smoky Joe Wood and the Boston Red Sox—big leaguers. This was the same Smoky Joe that Dutch and his dad would have seen when he played for the Blues. Now Joe was a third-year major leaguer, not quite a star, but on his way to being one. Casey’s family and friends came to watch, but Shay had Dutch simply carry the water bucket to the starters, and rub up the day’s baseballs with mud. It was embarrassing, but Dutch was full of confidence and anxious for his opening. “There were a lot of them old fellers on the team I figured whose jobs I could take.”

Back at Excelsior Springs, known for the power of its “healing water,” Shay let Dutch pitch a couple of games, but he was not impressive. “I’m an outfielder, really,” explained Stengel—even though his high-school career included very little outfielding. He didn’t want to get cut on the basis of his pitching.

Shay gave him a chance in the outfield. He tried to explain the need to play the angles off the fences. “If you want somebody to play the angles, why don’t you hire a pool player,” Dutch allegedly said. Kid Nichols would have groaned. This could hardly have endeared him to Shay, either. Before the season could begin, Shay concluded that Dutch wasn’t yet a Double-A player. (What we today call Triple-A.) “ ‘You can’t stay here, Dutch, you’ve got the biggest hitch of any man I ever saw.’ ”

He was sent to Kankakee, Illinois, in the Northern Association, though Kansas City still owned rights to him.

Kankakee wasn’t Kansas City by any stretch, but the long professional baseball life of Charles Dillon Stengel was about to begin.