Sports of The Times: A Summer With Uncle Casey in the Town He Owned

。

When Casey Stengel was putting his mark on all four New York baseball teams, he came off as many things. I have to admit I never thought of him as anybody’s uncle.

When he was managing old DiMaggio and young Mantle in 1951, he might have seemed like a lion tamer or a juggler but not an uncle. When he was creating the Amazin’ Mets in 1962, he may have seemed like a street magician but not exactly an uncle.

The writers who covered the team (“my writers”) called him Doctor because that is what he called them, putting that iron grip of a hand on your biceps and gritting, “Wait a minute, I’m trying to tell you something.” The best thing I learned from him was that if I was going to match drinks with him, I was not going to live to be his age. Tough old bird.

Turns out, he really had flesh-and-blood relatives (on his wife’s side) who called him Uncle Casey.

Here in the baseball spring of New York, when real life returns, one of the last of the children who knew Uncle Casey materialized. Toni Mollett Harsh, a great-niece of Edna Lawson Stengel, came to the Museum of the City of New York on Thursday for a symposium on her spirited uncle.

Attention must always be paid to Charles Dillon Stengel, the only man to have worn the uniforms of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, the New York Yankees and the New York Mets. Played for the first two, managed the first, third and fourth. Nobody is likely to duplicate this record.

When Toni visited in the summer of 1962, she was 15. She bought a pair of high-heeled shoes and “a cute little black dress,” which were not needed back home in Glendale, Calif., but were de rigueur at the Essex House on Central Park South, where the childless Stengels were ensconced.

It was the first season for the Mets, who had been formed in an expansion draft, and the Old Man had been resuscitated from the elephant boneyard to which the Yankees had consigned him after 1960.

?

“Every night after the game, everybody else would go upstairs, but Uncle Casey would take a walk,” Toni said over lunch on Thursday. “He would go out the front door, turn right to Sixth Avenue, walk down to 58th Street, turn right on Seventh Avenue and turn right to the hotel. That doesn’t sound like a long walk, but it would take forever because everybody recognized him and would stop him to talk and ask for his autograph. He said that was part of his job.”

Stengel could not have done better with a sandwich board over his shoulders or a jazz band strutting in his wake. Summer in the city. Nineteen sixty-two. J.F.K. in the White House, Beatles on the way and Uncle Casey on duty, distributing copious winks and quips. Come see my Metsies. Check it out, check it out.

Howard Cosell and Jackie Robinson told the world that the Old Man was snoozing in the dugout, was out of touch with the game. But every morning, on her amazing summer vacation, Toni would tap on the door of Casey and Edna’s suite.

There was her uncle, lying on the couch, facing the huge picture window onto Central Park, and on his powerful chest was a sheaf of legal-size papers containing hitting, pitching and fielding statistics. With his writers, Casey would refer to himself as the Slickest Manager in Baseball; his niece is here to attest that he was working at it.

He stole the summer from a championship team in the Bronx. Mantle and Maris, afterthoughts. Uncle Casey did his job.

After breaking his hip in 1965 and retiring after that season, Stengel worked at the family bank in Glendale. Toni’s mother, Margaret Mollett, was his secretary, in an office filled with black and red furniture and ornaments from his trips to Japan. He would speak double talk — the famous Stengelese — but would never give his nieces and nephews the feeling he was too busy to listen to them.

He had always spoken of the Youth of America, that mythical band of talented children who would someday sign with the Mets. The Youth of America arrived in earnest in 1969, and Toni went back east with Casey for the postseason.

“He loved Tom Seaver,” recalled Toni, who graduated cum laude from Southern California, where Seaver had pitched for the legendary coach Rod Dedeaux, a close family friend. She understood her uncle’s bond with the pitcher they called the Franchise.

“Uncle Casey would stand by the bus just to make sure Seaver was on it,” she said.

Toni watched her aunt come down with Alzheimer’s disease, breaking her uncle, too. No longer able to drive, he would walk two and a half miles each way to her nursing home. Casey died in September 1975 — Billy Martin slept in his father figure’s bed the night of the funeral — and Edna died in 1978.

?

Since then, Toni has raised her four children; remarried after a divorce; served on the city council in Reno, Nev.; and administered the memorabilia of Uncle Casey. She is establishing a mobile Casey Stengel Baseball Center, modeled on the successful New Jersey museum of Casey’s protégé, Yogi Berra.

The other night, she visited the Berras, and Yogi’s wife, Carmen, did a loving imitation of Edna wearing a red sheath gown during a trip to Asia. Yogi told how Casey allowed him to call every pitch, unlike some controlling managers of today, and if the pitcher was tiring, Yogi would rotate his right index finger while squatting behind the plate and Casey would never miss the signal.

People know Casey for his platoon tactics and his rubbery face and his salty and obscure language. Toni Mollett Harsh has added a new image of this man for all seasons: Uncle Casey.