Jimmy Scott's High & Tight: The Dee Stargell Interview Pt. 2

In January, 1993, Hall of Famer Willie Stargell got married for the 3rd time.  His bride was named Margaret Weller.  It was Weller who started The Willie Stargell Foundation, the goal being to raise funds for kidney disease, the disease that took Willie Stargell's life in 2001.  But before Margaret Weller, before Stargell's kidney disease, before thoughts of a foundation, there was Dee Stargell, Willie's second wife.

If you listen to the Jimmy Scott's High & Tight Interview with Dee Stargell Part 1, you'll get to know the second Mrs. Stargell quite well.  She was the wife who witnessed the Stargell Hall of Fame career first-hand, who was there from the 1960s through the 1982 retirement.  She was there for all of Willie's highs and lows.  There were plenty of both.  In the Jimmy Scott's High & Tight Interview with Dee Stargell Part 2, you hear more details and understand better why both sides of the marriage dissolved the partnership.

Go back to May 24, 1976.  On that day, Willie Stargell was home, preparing for a game against the Montreal Expos.  His wife, Dee, was having a horrible headache.  It turned out, her headache was a cerebral aneurysm.  Willie rushed her to the hospital, where she not only suffered through the aneurysm but also a stroke.  She survived both.

The marriage wouldn't.

Dee was a model when she met Willie.  She still had her "shapely figure" at the time of her anuerysm and stroke.  But she was a shell of that person as she recovered.  One side of her head was shaved.  She was paralyzed on her left side.  She rehabbed through that but was still left with a limp and a cane.  She wore large "granny looking" shoes for balance.  And her speech was slurred.  Not the physical characteristics of the kind of person a famous and successful baseball player is attracted to.

Women found their way to Dee.  "We love your husband," they'd say.  She grew to mistrust Willie as the groupies and the "other women," became a larger part of her fractured thoughts.  "He wasn't an angel before I met him," she says in the interview.  "Why should I expect him to be one now?"  She ended up giving Willie "enough rope to hang himself."  After his career ended, it wasn't long before she asked for a divorce.

Her story doesn't end there.  She had a bad lawyer, or at least a lawyer who, Dee says, didn't properly represent her.  She wasn't a rich woman after the divorce and couldn't hold down a job because of her disability, getting fired time and again for forgetting things.  But she had two children.  And she kept battling.  The will it took to overcome the aneurysm and stroke was what took her to today, where she's happy and living in Atlanta.  And where she is now a member of the board of The Joe Niekro Foundation.

That's right.  Dee Stargell has nothing to do with The Willie Stargell Foundation, but she's now a board member of the foundation put together by Natalie Niekro, Joe Niekro's daughter, to help raise funds and awareness for aneurysm research. 

Dee's biography reads like a Lifetime movie, but it is real.  Here is her life, in one paragraph, which you can find on The Joe Niekro Foundation website:

"Dolores 'Dee' Stargell was married to Hall of Famer Willie Stargell for 18 years.  As a veteran baseball wife, she was there for the Pittsburgh Pirates World Series championships in 1971 and 1979.  Her husband was the 1979 NLCS MVP, World Series MVP, and National League co-MVP.  In May, 1976,  Dee suffered a brain aneurysm and a stroke.  After spending 6 weeks in a coma, she slowly recovered.  34 years later, she is a living and breathing miracle.  A mother of two grown children and currently residing in Georgia, Dee hopes her story will help inspire others to get involved with the Joe Niekro Foundation." 

One thing her bio doesn't mention is this: Willie Stargell hit .421 against Joe Niekro, including six of his 475 career home runs.  Somewhere in heaven, those two are probably having a showdown.

Dee Stargell fought through illness, recovery, and the life of a baseball wife.  It's worth a few minutes of your time to listen to her story.  You'll be taken in before you know it.

THE MUSIC

John Lennon - Watching The Wheels

John Lennon - Woman

John Lennon - (Just Like) Starting Over

John Lennon - #9 Dream

Soundtrack - Field of Dreams