ASIDE FROM HAVING TO CHANGE POSITIONS a time or two, prove to a couple of managers that he could hit left-handed pitching, battle a nagging weight problem and put up with perhaps more than his share of injuries, Willie Stargell sailed through his major-league career relatively unscathed on the baseball diamond.
His adult life off the diamond, though, had more than a few challenges. Two of his three marriages ended in divorce. Two of his five children were born to women to whom Stargell was not married. He was the subject of a controversial book, in which his off-field exploits were chronicled by a writer and photographer who were given surprisingly open access during the 1973 season. He was accused by two teammates of providing amphetamines, an accusation that later was found to have no substance by baseball’s commissioner. He watched helplessly as his second wife, Dolores, battled for her life after suffering a near-fatal brain aneurysm, then had to endure the media reports of the couple’s separation and ultimate divorce just a few years later. Yet after his divorce from Dolores he remained on relatively good terms with her. The same could be said of his post-marital relationship with his first wife, Lois. And all five of his children remained a major part of his life until the very end. Family—just as it was important to the 1979 Pirates—was one of the pillars upon which Stargell built his life.
One of the family members closest to Stargell was his sister, Sandrus Collier. Although technically Stargell’s half-sister—they shared the same mother, Gladys, but had different fathers—Stargell never thought of Sandrus as anything but his sister. Ten years younger than her famous brother, Collier had an up-close-and-personal view of the Hall of Famer during his teenage years, and much of his adult life as well. She remembers Willie the ballplayer had a persona that was different from Willie the brother or Willie the family man. “With his family, he was more down to earth. And in baseball, he was more focused. I mean, you never messed with him during baseball season. Don’t ask him to go anywhere, don’t ask him to do too much of anything because he had to focus on baseball. And if they were in the playoffs or anything, forget it. It’s strange—you look at the person as a family member, not as a baseball player. You want him to be interested in what’s happening in your life—‘There are things going on in my life, too,’ I’d say. But he’d say, ‘Oh, I wish I could, but I can’t.’ I didn’t understand it when I was younger. Once I got older, then I could understand where he was coming from.”1
Collier’s earliest memories of her brother were from his days at Encinal High School, back in Alameda, California. As an older brother, Willie treated her well—at least until his friends came over. “Then I was the pain-in-the-butt little sister,” she said. She can remember Stargell getting set to head off to his first spring training with the Pirates early in 1959. She and her parents took him to the airport, and her mother, Gladys, was nervous because her son was about to get on an old propeller-style airplane; this was in the days before jet engines were the rule. Collier said a local clergy member—a Reverend Bailey, who had large church in Oakland—was boarding the plane as well and because Gladys knew the reverend, she felt better about seeing her son off. Collier had no idea at that time exactly what her brother was up to. “I just thought he was going somewhere,” she said. “I think it didn’t hit me that he was playing baseball until his name started showing up in books or sports magazines or sports papers.”
By the time Collier turned 12 or so, her brother had reached the big leagues and it was then that it really hit home—her brother was a baseball player. When the Pirates made their West Coast road trips, Collier and her parents would go watch them play at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. And often times Stargell would bring teammates over to the family home in East Oakland after the games. “I remember when he first made it to the major leagues,” Collier said. “I think every relative we had showed up.” Baseball was a familiar pastime for Percy and Gladys, as one of Percy’s cousins played in the old Negro Leagues. Gladys began following the Pirates when Stargell made the club, but mostly she was focused on one player. “All she really cared about was Willie Stargell,” Collier said. “She wanted the Pirates to do well, but as far as she was concerned, there was only one player on that team.” Collier said her mother’s favorite announcer in the major leagues was the Dodgers’ Vin Scully because Scully referred to Stargell by his given name—Wilver—rather than Willie.
Collier, who became an elementary school teacher, understood baseball and enjoyed the game, and she would take her students on field trips to Candlestick Park because some of them never had the experience of seeing a game in person. “And I loved going to the games.” She spent parts of her summers traveling with her brother when he would make his West Coast road trips, going to Los Angeles and San Diego. He was protective of his younger sister even when she was plenty old enough to make her own decisions. “I wasn’t allowed to date baseball players,” she said. “Willie was very firm with them—he’d say, ‘You cannot date my sister. Don’t even look at her twice.’ I tried, but they would go, ‘Oh no, you are Stargell’s sister—you are hands-off.’ And I used to ask him why and he said, ‘I know what ballplayers are like and you’re not going to be involved in that.’ I hated it. When he finally said I could, I wound up being older than all of them. And he said, ‘Good—that’s just how I planned it.’”
As she grew older, Collier spent plenty of time with her brother back east during the season. She enjoyed visiting with Willie’s wife, Dolores, and when Dolores suffered her brain aneurysm in 1976, Collier spent more than a month with the family while Dolores was undergoing rehabilitation therapy in Harmarville, a suburb of Pittsburgh. “It was very hard for Willie to concentrate on baseball that year, what with the kids and him having to go out to Harmarville,” Collier said. A year or so later, Stargell asked his sister if she would give up her teaching job and consider relocating to Pittsburgh permanently to help him with his sickle cell foundation. “I looked at him like he was crazy. I said, ‘You’re sick aren’t you?’ It took me a year to think about it and I said, ‘I’ll give it a try.’ I gave myself five years.” Ultimately, Collier would get married and she would end up living the next 10 years in Pittsburgh, helping to run the Willie Stargell Foundation before financial issues forced its closure in 1984. “It was the right time to be there,” Collier said of her time in Pittsburgh, which included the 1979 “We Are Family” championship and all the good times that came with it. “It seemed like once I got there, things just fell into place for him,” she said. She ran interference for her brother, helping whenever he needed it. She never regretted moving to Pittsburgh because it benefited both her and her brother. “I think it really helped, especially during all that World Series madness,” she said. “You can always move somewhere and it doesn’t work out, but for me, something just clicked. I would not give up that time for anything. I really enjoyed the experience.” The Pirates—and Stargell’s—triumph in the 1979 World Series paid huge dividends for Stargell’s sickle cell foundation and his endorsement opportunities. “We were inundated with phone calls—people came out of the woodwork,” Collier said. “We had some things lined up before the World Series, but once people realized who they had, they capitalized on that.”
Relocating from California to Pittsburgh wasn’t easy at the outset for Collier. She experienced what she called “culture shock” at first. For one thing, she had never been to Pittsburgh in the winter before. So she didn’t know how to drive in the snow and ice. In fact, she didn’t know how to walk in the snow and ice, either. “My husband said, ‘You better stand in the window and watch how people are walking’ and that’s basically what I did,” she said. “You take short steps—you do not take long steps or think you can go running in the snow. And driving? That really took me a while. But after that first year, I could handle anything.”
Collier said she helped Willie with a number of charitable endeavors, including delivering food baskets to those in need. She used to think she had grown up in poverty, but one year on Christmas morning, she experienced something that put her childhood in the proper perspective. “This one family had plastic on their windows, some of the windows were cracked and there were eight or nine people living in this room,” she said. “And I remember coming out of that house and sitting in my car crying. My husband looked at me and said, ‘You thought you were poor? That was poor.’ Growing up in Oakland, I wasn’t privileged. But both my parents worked and provided for us, although we didn’t always get what we wanted. But to see what I saw that day, it really changed how I thought about things from that point on. I think I did a little growing up when I moved to Pittsburgh.”
Collier said when she was younger, Stargell was more like a father figure to her than a brother. She had a serious asthma problem and was sick much of the time, and can remember her brother taking care of her or making sure she was okay. “I think he used to hate it, too, sometimes,” she said. “He was the big brother but he was also a secure person that I could feel safe with.” Collier said Stargell was there to help her with her adjustment to Pittsburgh, too. She came to him once early in the process and he provided some needed advice. “I told him, ‘Okay, Willie, I can’t handle this.’ He said, ‘I experienced this, too, when I first left home. It’s going to hit you in about six months and then you’re going to be okay.’ So that father figure always remained with me.”
The tables were turned some 20 years later when Stargell’s health began to fail. “Then I became the mother figure,” she said. Stargell would call Sandrus, or ask his third wife, Margaret Weller Stargell, to call Sandrus and ask for her to come.” It was difficult in the beginning because I was going through a divorce and had to find someone to watch my son and call in my teaching job,” she said. “Lots of times I’d get calls on Saturday and I’d need to be there that night. I couldn’t drive that far in the middle of the night, so I’d have to fly. But I’d go. And lots of times I’d stay in the hospital. I noticed the reversal of roles. And I remember my mother always saying, ‘Make sure you take care of your brother.’”
Collier said her brother’s involvement in the sickle cell foundation reflected what he saw his role and purpose to be. “He just wanted to help people,” she said, “and to be there for the community. The community loved him—the whole town loved him because of what he would do, whether it was helping out in baseball clinics or making sure kids were off the street.”
Willie taking it easy during a cold winter day in Pittsburgh (courtesy of Sandrus Collier).
Collier said her brother didn’t express many regrets, even though he played in an era when salaries paled in comparison to those just years later. Stargell’s annual salary information is available for several years; court records filed in conjunction with his divorce from Dolores indicated that he earned $289,233.52 for his Most Valuable Player season in 1979 and then $416,908, $269,778 and $336,218 for his final three big-league seasons. Earlier salary figures were not available, but in Out of Left Field, Stargell’s attorney, Litman, referred to an offer of $165,000 that GM Joe Brown made for the 1974 season. Still, those figures pale in comparison to what players earn today and even what players took home shortly after Stargell left the game. “We talked about the fact that he was on the cusp of the big salaries and he said it would have been nice,” Collier said. “I think he had the opportunity to get more, but he chose to take benefits vs. the big-buck salary because he didn’t feel like bucking the system. There were people who told him he could have gotten more after the Comeback Player of the Year [in 1978] and the MVP season in 1979, and he could have. But he chose not to. I think he was comfortable. I don’t think he had any regrets.”
Collier said that while Stargell was always there for his family and was plenty active in the community, he was also his own man in the true sense of the word. “Willie was one of those who would do what he wanted to,” she said. “It wasn’t anything wrong or dangerous. But if he felt like going to Aruba today, he would pack up and go. And he’d say, ‘I’ll see you when I get back.’ Those kinds of things. He was very comfortable with just being Willie the person. I don’t want to say he had a premonition of his death, but I think he lived his life to the fullest, the way he wanted to. Not that he beat his own drum. He’d do things in the norm, but I think he just enjoyed life. It was the simple things in life he enjoyed, too, not something that was very extravagant.”
Although Stargell liked the freedom to come and go, Collier remembered her brother embracing the role of fatherhood. “He loved the kids and he loved taking them places. When they were small and he was home in the winter, wherever he would go, he would feel his kids should go, or he would do things that included the kids. They just had a good time—you could see it in their smiles.”
Collier said Stargell never talked to her about issues related to racism when he was in the minor leagues; after all, when he was 19 she was only 9. But she believes the experiences he had in Alameda and the Bay Area helped him negotiate those stormy seas. “He knew growing up in California that there were good people in the world. He was in a different place and he knew if he was going to be playing baseball, he was going to have to experience this. I think what Jackie Robinson went through played a big part in helping him manage to survive all that. That’s when Willie started reading a lot and that helped him get over those types of things.”
Years later, when Stargell left Pittsburgh and headed for Atlanta, Collier said she believed he never wanted to go. “He really felt he was going to get something with the Pirates,” she said. “Then when Chuck Tanner left, he went because Chuck asked him to go. That helped a lot. He liked it in Atlanta—he could have stayed there. But he also missed Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has something about it; you stay there for a while and it takes a piece of you.” Returning to Pittsburgh prior to the 1997 season was like “coming home” for Stargell, his sister said. “He was no longer a player, but he was still loved and respected. He still had things to offer to the younger guys, and he really loved coaching the younger ones and scouting for them. I’ve heard guys in passing say how much they learned from him. They respected him. And he was fair and respectful to them. I think that made a difference to a lot of players.”
Collier said she became aware of her brother’s medical problems right after he married Margaret, in January 1993. Collier was aware of Stargell’s high blood pressure; he had been treated for that issue since late in his playing days. In those days, team personnel would provide Stargell with the proper medication, Collier said, but after he retired—and especially after he left Pittsburgh—he wouldn’t always take that medication. “I wasn’t around anymore so I wasn’t there, Johnny on the spot,” she said. “He had to do it himself. I think he just forgot that he needed to do this until one day he had to take a physical and all these things came out. One thing led to another after he got married.” Collier said she believes Stargell’s travel schedule as a minor-league instructor might have played a role in his deteriorating health because it was not easy getting direct flights into and out of Wilmington. “You could be stuck in Charlotte for three to five hours at a time,” she said. Then there was Stargell’s appetite, which—like many other aspects of his life, was in a Hall of Fame category. “His weight issue was a family tradition,” Collier said. “He liked good food—gourmet food—and wine. There were certain things he wasn’t supposed to eat, but he would say, ‘I’m going to die with something—I might as well enjoy my ride.’ And we’d all say, ‘Don’t say that.’ His illness was very hard for all of us because he would always bounce back. But the last time he didn’t bounce back. The last time I saw him, which was a week before he passed, I just knew it. It wasn’t the same anymore. He had actually stopped talking. He couldn’t talk.”
Collier said her brother’s decision to marry for the third time caught her—and other family members—off-guard. “I think he was at a point in his life where he was tired of coming home from road trips and being by himself,” she said. “It was kind of a surprise for us, but it was a nice, pleasant surprise.”
Before there was Margaret Weller, there was Dolores Parker. And before Dolores Parker there was Lois Beard. Her family lived just a few blocks from the Stargell family in East Oakland, and she and Stargell began dating at Encinal High School in the late 1950s and remained together through Stargell’s early years in the Pirates’ organization. The two eventually were married on May 14, 1962, but the wedding did not occur without some drama involved. At the same time Lois was pregnant with the couple’s first daughter, Wendy, Stargell also had fathered another daughter, Precious, with a woman named Brenda Joyce Hyde. Lois, who later remarried after her divorce from Stargell and is known as Lois Booker, believed Stargell’s growing celebrity status—after all, he was an up-and-coming, handsome professional ballplayer—made people want to get close to him. Not that she was terribly understanding about it. “I told him, ‘You got yourself in this dilemma, what are you going to do?’”2 Stargell wasn’t sure Hyde’s baby was his—a California court ruled in 1964 that Precious Wilbern Vernel Stargell was indeed Stargell’s daughter—and because he had a longstanding relationship with Lois, the two were married. Stargell also provided monthly support for Precious—who was born less than a month after Wendy, in 1962—and in fact Precious spent plenty of time with Wendy, Lois and Willie. “I still tease her when I call,” Lois said of Precious. “I always say, ‘This is your other mother calling.’” What could have been a heated or at least terribly awkward situation remained more than civil in part due to the approach that Willie and Lois took. “We always tried to keep things light and Wilver had a great sense of humor—that’s something we all have,” she said. “Rather than get upset, we tried to keep things together and remember our purpose.” In fact, Lois said, all of Stargell’s children—he had another daughter, Dawn, with a third woman and two more children with his second wife, Dolores—were one big happy family for the most part. Even the various mothers of Stargell’s children corresponded regularly with one another and got along well throughout Stargell’s life. Lois said it was not at all unusual for Precious and Wendy to spend time together. “Precious would take Wendy to the movies or take her to lunch or dinner when she’d come out for the summer to be with her mother and my mother,” she said. “I’m big on family and I thought everyone in the family should know each other and know their history.”
Stargell and Lois parted ways following the 1964 season, although the divorce did not become final until early in 1966. Lois said that even after Stargell remarried in November of 1966, it was not uncommon for Wendy to spend part of the summers at the Stargell home in Pittsburgh. And Lois said Wendy also would visit Dawn and her mother in Atlanta from time to time. “We have what you would call a really extended family,” Lois said. “It all worked out well between Wilver and me because we concentrated on taking care of Wendy, keeping in touch and staying positive.” Lois recalled an incident in a Los Angeles court house where she and Stargell were involved in a hearing pertaining to Wendy’s child support. “We were going back and forth in the courtroom with the lawyers but when we went outside in the hallway, we were talking about where we were going to meet later,” Lois said. “My attorney said to me, ‘I don’t understand—you’re in there battling about Wendy’s benefits and then you come out here and it’s, “How’s your mother?” “How’s your mother?” But that’s the way we were raised. You still have a mission as far as taking care of your child. You still have family. Sometimes people get a divorce and they want to divorce everything. But I think you should stay positive. You can’t have too much love.”
Lois said Stargell’s death at the age of 61 hit her extremely hard, despite the fact that they had been divorced for more than three decades. “It was a life shut out too quickly,” she said. “I think he just pushed himself too much and it seemed like he just wore out. Even when he was playing he was always having surgery—one year he had surgery on both knees. He would just not stop and try to rehabilitate them. Sixty-one is so young. I knew he was sick, but sometimes he’d get sick and then he’d get well. But this time ... I was really surprised.” Lois recalled a trip she made back to Oakland from her southern California home in 2009 and it all flashed back to her—school dances, baseball practice, young love in bloom. “All of a sudden you think to yourself, ‘He’s not dead.’ But he is dead. You can’t believe it. Someone you’ve known since you were 14 and now you’re 66. That’s a long time. Not only were we friends, we were boyfriend and girlfriend and husband and wife.”
Stargell’s outgoing, positive personality and his love of music—and particularly dancing—is largely what attracted Lois back at Encinal High School. So it only made sense that dancing played a role in the first meeting between Dolores Parker and Stargell back in 1962. Not even 18 yet, Parker was attending a fashion show put on by Ebony magazine at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Pittsburgh when she first saw Stargell. Having just returned from his winter league stint in the Dominican Republic, Stargell had taken a shine to a Latino model and the two of them danced most of the night away. “I was so upset—I kept waiting for him to dance with me,” Dolores said in an interview conducted online for High & Tight, a blog by Jimmy Scott, in 2010.3 Finally, late in the evening, Stargell asked Dolores to dance. “I said, ‘No—definitely not,” she said. A day or two later, Dolores saw Stargell’s picture in one of the Pittsburgh newspapers—it was a story about some surgery that Stargell was scheduled to have—and she felt badly because she thought she had treated him poorly at the fashion show. Dolores, who did not even know Stargell was a professional athlete the night she met him, went to visit him in the hospital and brought him some flowers. And he asked if she’d go out with him when he finished his hospital stay. The two began a serious relationship after Stargell separated from Lois. “He originally said he’d never get married again,” Dolores told Scott. “He’d just gotten a divorce—he wasn’t even thinking about getting married. But I was.”4
The two got engaged and then he sent for her to come to California after the 1966 season. On November 19, 1966, near Nevada’s scenic Lake Tahoe, the two exchanged vows and Dolores Parker became Dolores Stargell. But being married to a ballplayer was not easy, in part because of the schedule. “He was gone a lot,” she told Scott. “The guys are gone so much. You don’t really have a husband. He’s married to the city. Devoted to the game. I thought you got married to your husband and he’d come home for dinner every night.” But that’s not the life of a ballplayer or his spouse. Instead, players normally head into work in the afternoon for a night game and don’t get home until midnight or close to it. And then there were long road trips that would keep Stargell away for days at a time. Dolores did not care for the schedule. “I thought, ‘This isn’t so great,” she said. “I have a marriage but I don’t have a husband. I was raising my kids on my own. He was never there.”
Dolores and Willie enjoyed going out in the early days in Pittsburgh, but it wasn’t long before Stargell’s celebrity status began working against the couple. As his fame grew, so did the difficulty in going out in public. One time, Dolores asked Willie to take the family to Kennywood Park—a well-known local amusement park—because the Stargells had never been there before. All was going well until a young boy noticed that Stargell was in the park. “Before I knew it, a thousand people were standing around us,” Dolores said. People crowded Stargell, pressing him for his autograph. “That was the first time and the only time we went to the amusement park together,” she said.
Dolores said her husband truly enjoyed playing in Pittsburgh, despite being a Californian for the most part. He appreciated the fact that the fans pulled for him and he liked to help other Pittsburgh athletes get acclimated to the city when they first arrived. “Everybody kind of looked up to him,” she said. “That’s why they called him Pops. When Franco [Harris] came into town, he liked to lead him around and show him the ropes. That was kind of fun for him.” And he definitely enjoyed hosting people as well. “We had the best parties,” she said. “Will was a party guy. We always had something fun going on, whether it was a party in a Chinese restaurant or he’d cook on the wok.”
Willie and Dolores set up their first home in Pittsburgh in an apartment near Highland Park, then a few years later moved to a house in the suburb of Penn Hills with young son, Wilver Jr., who was born in 1967. Then, after daughter Kelli was born in 1969, the family moved to a bigger home in Point Breeze. Dolores characterized her husband as a caring and loving father but said his many commitments in Pittsburgh—even during the off-season—made him somewhat of an absentee father at times. “He was very much the humanitarian,” she said. “He always wanted to go into the depressed areas and help. On Christmas Eve, he and his friend would buy turkeys out of his own pocket and distribute them. And he did a lot of work for sickle cell. He was always occupied, doing something to help someone.” The drawback, though, was that he wasn’t always around to help with the little things at home. Dolores recalled an incident when Willie Jr. was playing ball and trying to put on an athletic supporter for the first time. He wasn’t sure if it went on over his shorts or under them and he came to ask his mother. “Willie was probably out teaching at a baseball camp,” she said. “When he was home, he still wasn’t home. He’d play golf in the morning. Everybody was pulling at him every which way. He was out helping kids, helping people. He would do all kinds of things. And then there was the banquet circuit. In the off-season, he was around, but I never could find him.”
Willie relaxes at home with his two youngest children—Kelli (left) and Wilver Jr. (courtesy The Associated Press).
Being married to a professional athlete—particularly a young, attractive and powerfully built athlete—also had its disadvantages in that other women would go to great lengths to be with Stargell. “It was always there—there was always someone hanging on,” she said. “It was a lot in my face.” Dolores said she and Willie “kind of, sort of” talked about the women—known as groupies or “baseball Annies.” She said she took the attitude that “whatever he does on the road is his business; just don’t let it get back home.” She said her husband “wasn’t an angel before I met him, so why should I expect him to be one now? I had no idea what was going on when they were on the road and I didn’t want to know. People tried to get into his room. Some got in and some didn’t. It was a very vulnerable time.”
Both she and Willie discussed some of the difficulties of married life in the controversial book, Out of Left Field. Dolores even had plans to write her own book, which she tentatively titled, The Glamorous Life of the Ballplayer’s Wife. “I don’t really know Willie that well,” she said in Out of Left Field.5 “I used to try and figure him out, but Willie is a very secretive person. Very private. He keeps things from me. I don’t think he is hiding anything or covering up. It’s just his personality.” Stargell, who admitted in the controversial book that he didn’t give his family enough support, said he learned that love is “communication and understanding and trust. When there’s a problem, and one’s mind is going in one direction while the other’s flying away, you’ve got to find a happy medium. Dee and I are working toward a better understanding.”6
But the Stargells’ marital relationship took a turn for the worse following Dolores’s medical problems, which started on May 24, 1976, when she suffered an aneurysm and worsened when she had a stroke. She was in a coma for six weeks and then spent six months in rehabilitation, trying to regain use of her paralyzed left side. She said the experience not only affected her physically—she walked with a limp and had to use a cane and “old lady” shoes to help her with her stability—but left her confused, and she believes that contributed to the downfall of their marriage. “My comprehension was just shot, pretty much,” said Dolores, who today serves on the board of directors for the Joe Niekro Foundation, established to aid in the research and treatment of aneurysm patients and families. “I was jealous of him, I think. I needed him to be more attentive at that time, which he wasn’t, I guess.” She said her husband was there for her while she was in the hospital but when he wasn’t as responsive while she was in rehab, she began to get suspicious. And Willie, she said, “didn’t reassure me that everything was cool. And if he did, I didn’t remember. All of that helped to tear the marriage down. I became pretty unstable with my thinking.”
Dolores sought to end the marriage and the two separated, living in their own homes just minutes apart from one another for several years before the divorce became final in September, 1983—about a year after Stargell retired as a player. Like many children caught in the middle of marital discord, Willie Jr. and Kelli did not want to see the couple go their separate ways. Dolores said young Willie was angry at her for years over her wanting to end the marriage and ultimately moved to Atlanta and lived with his father. Mother and son—he was actually known as Son-Son to those close to him in his younger days—have since mended their fences.
In a deposition related to the divorce, Stargell talked about Dolores’s recovery from her stroke. He said the specialists at the Harmarville rehabilitation center were able to motivate her by “infuriating” her. “When they got her mad enough, she just went from zero back to practically one hundred in less than a year’s time,” Stargell said. “She has shown in that particular case that she has a tremendous amount of drive.”
When the attorney asked Stargell if he had anything else to add, he replied, “She’s a hell of a woman.”
Dolores and Willie remained on good terms for the most part following their divorce until Willie married for the third time. She said she and Margaret have “no relationship” and that Stargell’s third wife—who turned down repeated requests to be interviewed—“did not care for me at all. But I could care less. I don’t have anything against her or anyone else. She was like 30 years younger than me. She was just a kid and I’m a mature lady. I don’t fret over stuff like that.”
Stargell and Margaret did not have children. Wilver Jr. was Stargell’s only son among his five children and while Willie Jr. was given his father’s name, he didn’t carry on the tradition. He and his wife, Nicole, chose to name their sons Cody and Dakota rather than pass on the name Wilver. “I figured maybe, just maybe, they might want to name one of their own kids after their grandfather and make him the third,” he said. “They could do it like that.” Willie Jr. said the name is a burden of sorts. “It’s like, you know what, I’m going to use my name as I got it, but I don’t think I want to put that on my child,” he said. “I want them to grow up with the legacy of Willie Stargell being their grandfather, but I also want them to be able to do it on their own, at the same time.”7
Willie Jr. tried to shield his own sons as well as his daughter, Cheyenne, from their grandfather’s legacy when they were growing up and playing Little League baseball and other sports. One time, Cody came up to the plate in a Little League baseball game and started to windmill his bat, just like his famous grandfather. “The coach asked me, ‘Did you teach him how to do that?’” Willie Jr. said. “Everyone in the stands is looking at him and saying, ‘He’s his grandfather.’ And we’re like, ‘What is he doing? We better talk to him about not swinging the bat like that.’ Our children didn’t know who he was. But the other kids on the team and their families knew. And they were in awe that they had Willie Stargell’s grandchildren on the team.”
Willie Jr. said he first became aware that his father was different from most dads when he was about 7 years old. He was going to Three Rivers Stadium and hanging out during practices and games. After the games would end, he would go into the clubhouse and meet his dad, and they would walk through the tunnel and out onto the field, as Stargell would park his car in a lot beyond center field. “One of my first memories is doing that walk every day,” Willie Jr. said. “The tarp would be out already. If it was windy, the tarp would have those big air bubbles and I’d go running out over the tarp, knocking the air bubbles down. Some of the best memories I have was of taking that walk out to center field.”
The center-field exit was one way that Stargell avoided the throngs of autograph seekers, although some savvy fans caught on to the strategy and would be waiting for him and other players to emerge there. “They’d still be out there and they’d be running at him, ‘Willie, Willie, can I get your autograph?’” Willie Jr. recalled. “I’m just walking next to him, looking up at my dad, stars in my eyes, on the other side of this partition and saying, ‘Wow, I just can’t believe all these kids my age—and even older adults—are calling for my dad. He’d walk over and sign some autographs and then say, ‘Okay, we gotta go.’ Then we’d jump in the car and head on to the house. That was awesome. We’d have nice little father-son conversations. I’d say like, ‘Nice home run’ or something like that as we were riding home. It was fun.”
Stargell never brought his on-field problems home to the family. “Bad games to him weren’t really bad games,” Willie Jr. said. “And if they were, he never talked about it. It was more like, it was still a game. Even if they lost, he was still having fun. Of course it mattered if they won. But if they lost, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, my God.’ It wasn’t like that at all. Lots of people can’t differentiate between winning and losing. They’re always striving to win. But it’s a game. You have to understand you’re going to lose some time. You’re not going to win every game. When you’re out there in the field, you’re going to make an error. Being a hitter you’re going to strike out or pop out—you’re not always going to get a hit. For him, he was trying to hit it out of the park. Kiss it goodbye.”
That was the way that Prince, the Pirates’ radio and television voice, would send off each Stargell home run—a call that brought a smile to young Willie’s face back in the day. “I loved when [Prince] would say that,” he said. “My dad would be at bat and they’d be talking about him—Stargell this and Stargell that—then you’d hear the crack of the bat and it would be, ‘back, back ... kiss it goodbye.’ And I’d be, ‘Yeahhhh!’ I didn’t care where I would be—I would just go totally crazy. Every time my dad hit a home run, it was amazing.”
Young Willie made several road trips with his dad; he fondly recalled a visit to Chicago’s Wrigley Field, where he got to play in the ivy that climbed the outfield wall—one of the park’s trademark features. Only boys—no girls—were permitted to make those road trips. But young Kelli did break her own barriers of sorts when she burst into what had been an all-male Pirates clubhouse one day.
Willie Jr. was 12 years old during the magical 1979 “We Are Family” season, when the Sister Sledge hit was blaring through the Three Rivers Stadium sound system and “Pops” Stargell was handing out his famous “Stargell Stars” to his teammates for deeds well done. “We had rolls of stars at the house,” the younger Stargell recalled. “I’m grabbing them, taking them to my friends at school—cutting them off, and I’m like, ‘Okay, 50 cents a star!’ My friends loved those stars. That whole season was just phenomenal. Especially when it came down to the playoffs and the World Series. I didn’t get to go to Baltimore, but I was home watching the games diligently, talking to him every night after the games. And when they won, it was just crazy. During the Series, we would always go to the airport and pick them up. Back then, you could go all the way to the terminal and wait for passengers. So we’re there waiting for Dad to come out. Fans want autographs left and right—I always loved the rides, going or coming back from the stadium or the airport.”
Stargell’s celebrity status only increased with his performance in that ’79 Series and the flip side of that was that he was even more in demand than before. “It did take him away from us,” Willie Jr. said. “But we were already programmed to be used to that type of situation. Not that it was a good thing that he was being taken away. But that was the lifestyle he had to have by being a celebrity and a superstar. You’re going to be away from your family a lot. In ways it helped and in ways it hurt. It hurt in the way where we didn’t get all the quality time we should have had as kids. He loved playing baseball and that was his passion. So in order for him to be as good as he was at it, he had to give more than 100 percent. And that took away from family times sometimes.”
Celebrity did have its perks, though; for example, the family was able to travel to Hawaii in the off-season following the ’79 World Series run for the ABC television show “Superteams,” staying in a high-rise hotel on the island of Maui for 10 days. The show brought players and their families from four teams—the Pirates, Baltimore Orioles, Pittsburgh Steelers and Los Angeles Rams—together for some televised competitions. There were other trips, including one memorable deep-sea fishing trip to Mexico which father and son made as part of a contest sponsored by a major rod/reel manufacturer for which Stargell had done some promotional work. That morning, before the group headed out to sea, young Willie gorged himself at breakfast and when the boat hit the water, his stomach took a turn for the worse—and he ultimately lost his breakfast overboard. “I was about 12 or 13—it was so funny,” he said. “My dad is like, ‘Yeah, have whatever you want for breakfast. Have some more sausage.’ Knowing that I’m not supposed to eat. He was laughing and I’m like, ‘Thanks, Dad.’”
At home, the slugger was an attentive father who looked for opportunities to teach his children a lesson. One time, Stargell got wind that Kelli was experimenting with smoking cigarettes and told both her and Willie Jr. that if they wanted to smoke, they should try smoking with him. So he bought some cigars and cigarettes—and Tab soda—and they all sat down and smoked for half the evening. The kids spent most of the time coughing and choking—and feeling nauseated. They don’t smoke to this day. “It was her idea,” Willie Jr. said of Kelli. “I didn’t want to smoke anything. But I had to because it was a ‘one for all, all for one’ type of thing in our house. I got so sick, dizzy-like sick, I wanted to throw up. And he’s like, ‘Well, taste it with some Tab.’”
While Stargell certainly had no difficulty providing for his family during his playing days, the transition from player to retired player, particularly before he got the call from Cooperstown in January 1988, provided some financial challenges. Stargell’s divorce file, which included an entry dated November 4, 1983, indicated Stargell was earning $40,000 in salary from the Pirates in 1983—his first retirement year. It was a far cry from his final salary as a player—$336,218, in 1982, and an even steeper decline from the $416,908 he took home during the 1980 season. Stargell did list other income in the divorce documents—$900 from Willie Stargell Inc. in 1983, $10,000 from services rendered to Jiffy Foods, $47,333 from promotional and advertising work for Koolvent Aluminum products, $46,429 from Champale in 1982 and 1983 and $42,000 from HSE in 1983—but that didn’t come close to matching his final salary as a player. And it wasn’t as though Stargell had squirreled away thousands; a different court document, dated May of 1984, indicated that he had a less than $2,900 combined in four separate bank accounts.
Willie Jr. said he believed his father was disappointed the Pirates didn’t offer him a front-office position in the late 1980s after he worked for the team for several years following his retirement as a player. He said his dad never talked about being a field manager but said that if he’d been given a chance, he would have been a successful one. “He had a lot to teach,” Willie Jr. said. “He definitely went before his time because there were a lot more lessons to learn from my father.” Willie Jr., who attended Johnson & Wales University in Miami, where he studied culinary arts for two years and worked for years in the restaurant industry in and around Atlanta, said after his father got involved in the scouting/instructing/player development end of the business, he took to it very quickly. “I know he loved looking at the young guys coming up—that was one of his other passions. To help them and to teach those kids the different things they needed to come up in the game then because it was totally different from when he came up in the ’60s. There was a lot he wanted to show them, to teach those guys.”