Casey was smitten by Edna and already thinking about proposing, despite their very limited time together. He may have thought his charm and style were all he needed. But now he was a national hero, all over the newspapers, because of his World Series triumphs. The problem was, everyone wrote about “Ol’ Case” and “Methuselah,” and Casey didn’t like it. He was afraid his prospective in-laws would wonder what the hell Edna might be marrying, and whether he’d live to see a wedding day.
There was no cause for concern, however. Out in Glendale, California, Edna’s father, John Lawson, saw Casey’s bow legs in a newspaper photo and thought he reminded him of his favorite player, Honus Wagner.
John Lawson was a contractor and developer from Menomonie, Wisconsin; he built its City Hall, where he then married Margaret Forvilly. In 1906, they moved to Glendale, where he helped lay out the city and built some 250 homes and offices—a good part of the city’s main artery, North Brand Boulevard. His contracting work brought him into movie-lot construction; on occasion, Edna was an extra in films.
It may sound as if Lawson was a rich man, but he lost most of his money around this time to some bad investments. Edna was by now working at the Hall of Records in Los Angeles, and she turned over her savings—$250—to her father so he could start over. He began to buy up decaying homes, repair them, and flip them for a profit. He continued this practice, buying more substantial properties, until his wealth—and position in society—returned.
Over the winter, Casey wrote often to Edna in Glendale, but “no sentence was ever finished that would make me think it was a love letter,” she said.
He would call, but if she thought it was going to be a romantic call, she was wrong. “How’s the weather there?” he’d ask her.
He reported to spring training in St. Petersburg in March to play for his former teammate, Dave Bancroft, who was younger than he was. His head may have been filled with thoughts of an upcoming managing or coaching career, based on his experience with McGraw, but on the Boston team he was just another outfielder on a bad roster.*1
On April 16, he hit a tenth-inning home run in Philadelphia to beat the Phillies 4–3. On April 19, their first return to the Polo Grounds, Bancroft got a “loud and vociferous cheer when he stepped to the plate,” as reported in The New York Times, “but no louder than that accorded to old Casey Stengel, who had to lift his cap a number of times. Baseball memories are short, but not so brief that the fans can’t still remember as far back as last October.” For a while, the Braves stayed out of the cellar, but a ten-game losing streak in July doomed them, and they never got out of last place after that. The team hit only twenty-five home runs the entire season. So much for Judge Fuchs’s prediction.
Bancroft developed appendicitis on July 1 after being hit in the stomach by a batted ball, which meant that the Braves were out their manager and shortstop until mid-September. If Casey thought he might be named “acting manager” while Bancroft was hospitalized, he was wrong. The coach Dick Rudolph, who had been a pitcher on the “Miracle” 1914 Braves for their amazing run from last to first after July 4, ran the team.
The fans, what few there were, seemed not to care. The Braves drew 177,478 at Braves Field that season, about twenty-five hundred a game. It was tough for Casey to offer peak performance with so many empty seats, after those glamour years at the Polo Grounds.
Casey may have been a little tongue-tied in the romance department when he first met Edna, but he was on top of his game in plotting his next move. Learning that Edna’s brother Larry was stationed with the U.S. Army Air Service in Belleville, Illinois (he was later promoted to general), Casey reached out to Larry to suggest inviting Edna the next time the Braves were in St. Louis, seventeen miles north.
Larry was good with this, writing to his father, John Lawson, “Casey Stengel seems real interested in Edna. He’s a very personable, presentable fellow, well dressed and mannered, and I like him.” Edna wrote:
Casey never really proposed to me. I had to assume he proposed, because he never said, “Edna I love you, will you marry me?”
What happened was that he worked through a “middleman”—my brother Larry. The two of them connived for me to come east and visit Belleville the following summer, 1924, on the grounds that I needed a “change.”
Wrote Larry to my father, “Casey and I have arranged things, and it’s up to you to see that Edna makes the Braves next road trip to St. Louis.”
I came east a week before Casey was scheduled to arrive and went to a few parties. Casey let it be known he might drop around—to see my brother.
The Braves arrived in St. Louis on a Monday morning, and Casey took a taxi directly from the depot out to my brother’s house. Did he know his way around? Well, he had the master’s touch, even then. By this time he had already been a house guest of Larry and his wife, Nancy, and won them completely over with his charm, and he had everything “arranged.” There was no doubt which side my brother and sister-in-law were on. When Casey arrived at noon, I discovered that Nancy was out shopping, Larry was at the air base, and Casey and I were completely alone in the house!
The exact details are a little vague to me, but I do remember that the morning was yellow-bright, the house was deathly-still, and that Casey, as immaculately dressed as ever, was slightly nervous as the two of us sat down for coffee in the dining room.
For a few moments, there was only the sound of our teaspoons stirring coffee, then, abruptly, Casey started in out of nowhere with “Well, do you want to be married in a church, or where? Should I become a Catholic, or what?”
That was my proposal.
I didn’t say “yes” the first day, not that I intended to say no, but he kept talking—throwing in a baseball honeymoon trip to Europe—my relatives kept disappearing, and by the third day we were officially engaged. Casey had to talk fast because the Braves were scheduled to pull out of St. Louis and he was supposed to go with them.
That night, we had dinner in St. Louis to celebrate, then called on Dave Bancroft, the Braves manager, in his hotel room.
“Dave,” began Casey, excitedly, “could I stay over an extra day so that Edna and I can get married?”
“Married?” Dave jumped to his feet. “…why wait a couple of days? Get married tomorrow!”
The Stengels wanted a quiet wedding, with no publicity. On August 15, Larry accompanied them to the Belleville City Hall to get a license. They went to a local jeweler for a wedding band—the engagement ring, a huge three-carat diamond, would follow weeks later. Casey, so recently a World Series hero, was recognized. He wound up telling the press, “This was the best catch I ever made.”
They were married in a Catholic ceremony on Saturday, August 16, at the home of the local bishop, with only Larry and Nancy present. (Casey remained an Episcopalian.) They had dinner at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis and took a midnight train to Chicago. In his first day back with the team, he went 4-for-7, with two doubles, a home run, and four RBIs, in a doubleheader sweep (both shutouts) of the Cubs at Wrigley Field.
On September 10, the Braves went to New York for a doubleheader, and his friends on the Giants gave him and Edna the wedding party they hadn’t yet had. They danced the night away.
“If Casey’s dancing helped win Edna’s heart,” said Ann Mulvey Branca (whose husband, Ralph, later played for the Dodgers and briefly for Casey with the Yankees), “then my mother, Dearie Mulvey, was the one who taught him. Dearie was the daughter of Steve McKeever, a Dodgers owner. And for the rest of her life, every time Casey saw me, he said, ‘Your mother taught me how to dance!’ ”
Since the Yankees were also at home, the party, at Hunter’s Island Inn in New Rochelle, was attended by about a dozen players, including Babe Ruth, although Ruth, being Ruth, had come there for another party and was a drop-in at the Stengels’.
Casey and Edna stayed at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn. They would live in hotels for a good chunk of the next forty years. Having no children to keep her home, Edna was generally by Casey’s side throughout his baseball career, spring training and all.
In researching his book on Casey, Maury Allen asked Edna’s brother about their being childless.
“I think they simply never wanted any,” he told Allen. “Casey was a little old when they got married and in those days it was considered dangerous to have children after thirty. Edna was also getting up there in age when they married and I think they felt they didn’t need children. Maybe Casey was too great a man, too busy with other things. They did so much, traveled so much, met so many people, they probably figured children would change all that and they didn’t want to get involved with them. Casey traveled all summer with the team and was away a good deal in the winter with banquets and dinners and such, and children had no place. I never heard them discuss it and as far as I know, they never seemed to miss having children.”
Casey was always courteous and polite with Edna, but he was far from a romantic. She wrote:
[He] turned his first pay check over to me, and he made a sort of speech. He said, “Edna, I understand that the average ball player brings gifts to his wife—you know, stockings, lingerie, and that sort of thing. I don’t know how to pick out that stuff, so you take the money and buy yourself anything you want.”
When I thought it over, I just couldn’t see Casey browsing in a department store, fingering lingerie or perfume either, so I accepted the understanding. From that day to this [1958], he has only bought me two gifts: a gold fountain pen the Christmas before we were married, and he came home carrying an orchid 15 years later, for some unknown reason. Oh yes, once he sent me a wire at Easter. But there has never been any other gift. No birthday, anniversary, or Christmas presents.
What does he give me? His love and affection. He is the most generous man in the world. He has always turned over his pay check to me to bank, and I know the money is mine for anything I want, without questions. I guess I’ve gotten out of the habit of giving Casey presents too. This last Christmas I gave him a $3.50 ashtray. But there’s nothing I can’t have if I want it.
Casey hit a respectable .280 in 131 games in 1924, led the club with thirteen stolen bases, and tied for the club lead in runs scored, aging legs and all.
It couldn’t have been easy for Casey to see the Giants win their fourth straight pennant in 1924. When the World Series ended, McGraw’s Giants and Charles Comiskey’s White Sox were to leave on a tour of Europe; the two teams had taken a world tour together in 1913–14. But McGraw invited the Stengels to rejoin the Giants for the trip! It would be their honeymoon. Thirteen Giants and fifteen White Sox players went, with two umpires, two sportswriters, and McGraw as manager.
Not only were any lingering bad feelings between McGraw and Stengel gone, but the four of them—John and Blanche, Casey and Edna—grew in their friendship. The two wives stayed friends for the rest of Blanche’s life. (She died in 1962, after the Mets’ first season. Her husband died in 1934.)
“I never saw a happier pair,” said Blanche of Casey and Edna.
Among the players who went along were Ross Youngs, Frankie Frisch, the retired Johnny Evers, Red Faber, Sam Rice, and Bancroft, the latter two loaned to Chicago for the tour. The Stengels spent much of the time with Irish and Van Meusel. Casey wore a Giants uniform again.
The tour began with four games in Canada, and then a voyage to Liverpool on the Mont Royal; after that, it was on to London by way of Dublin. Crowds were small, including a reported “crowd” of twenty for the Dublin game.
On November 6, during a well-attended game at the home of the Chelsea football club, Stamford Bridge Grounds in London, a royal emissary came down to the field-level seats to find Edna. “Queen Mary would very much like for you to join her for tea.” (This was Queen Elizabeth II’s grandmother.) At tea were also no less than King George V, his son the Prince of Wales (who would abdicate the throne in 1936), and Prince Henry (the future governor-general of Australia). After the game, all the players lined up and were introduced, and Casey was believed to have said, “Nice to meet ya, King.” This sounds more like something Babe Ruth might have said; the tale is another one that is best left uncontested.
They proceeded to Paris for a final game on November 13—games scheduled for Brussels, Nice, Rome, and Berlin were canceled because the European crowds were unenthusiastic. This meant the Stengels’ honeymoon was also “abridged,” but they had time to visit Rome before returning to Paris to embark on the trip home—a seven-day voyage with first-class accommodations on the Leviathan. They stayed with the McGraws in Pelham for a week, then visited Casey’s family in Kansas City (where the family met Edna), and then went to Glendale (where Edna’s family met Casey). Edna’s father had built a nine-room home for them there, on Grandview Avenue, near the foot of the Verdugo Hills, for twenty-five thousand dollars. It was the house Casey and Edna would live in for the next fifty-one years.*2
*1 The Yankees moved their spring training site to St. Pete in 1925, sharing facilities with the Braves, which meant that the Murderers’ Row Yankees of Babe Ruth would also share the area’s nightlife with Casey and the Braves.
*2 Casey and Edna did not own the house, or live there alone, until John Lawson died in 1947. John and his wife, Margaret, who predeceased him by four years, lived there, too. Casey and Edna occupied their own bedroom and enjoyed the benefits of the home until they took full ownership. Most Stengel biographies suggest the home was a wedding gift and the Stengels owned it from the start. That was not correct, although the Stengels could frame the answer to make it appear it was always theirs. “It was meant for us alone…and we asked them to move in with us,” wrote Edna. With all of Casey’s travels, owning a permanent residence seemed unnecessary.