Say Hello to Unser Choe : That’s All Joe Hauser, 96 and Oldest Living Slugger, Wants to Hear These Days

SHEBOYGAN, Wis. —  In the top drawer of the dulled wooden desk belonging to major league baseball’s oldest living power hitter, there is a stack of one-page mimeographed sheets bearing 19 hitting tips.

Nearby are envelopes, stamps, and a felt-tip pen.

For that day when somebody might want a copy.

“Got plenty of those hitting tips,” says Joe Hauser, 96. “Take a few.”

Smoking is not allowed inside the retirement home where baseball’s oldest living power hitter lives, but he buys boxes of cigars anyway. He gives them to a nurse, who stores them in a drawer down the hall.

Who knows, maybe one day a fellow major leaguer will show up at the Sheboygan Retirement Home. Maybe he’ll want to sit with Hauser on that bench outside the back door, sharing a smoke and tales about old teammates.

“Everybody likes to hear about Ty Cobb,” Joe Hauser says hopefully.

When baseball’s oldest living power hitter is happy, he has a curious saying.

“Gin!” Hauser shouts.

It is a phrase Hauser probably used frequently in 1924, when he hit 27 home runs for the Philadelphia Athletics, ranking second in the American League to a guy named Babe Ruth.

It is the phrase he repeated in 1928, when his Athletics finished three games behind the legendary New York Yankees. His teammates then included Cobb, Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, Jimmy Foxx, Tris Speaker and Lefty Grove.

It is also something he shouted in 1930 in Baltimore, and three years later in Minneapolis. During those two triple-A seasons he hit 63 and 69 homers, respectively.

Only one man in baseball history has hit more home runs in a single season, and Hauser remains baseball’s only man to have broken the 60-homer barrier twice.

“Gin!” he shouts, then looks around expectantly.

He is waiting for somebody to share in his happiness by responding, “Double Gin!”

It is like a secret code. He used to hear it all the time.

Women chased him in Minneapolis. Connie Mack favored him in Philly. The Baseball Hall of Fame made room for him in its minor league section.

He was so beloved in his hometown of Milwaukee that when he played first base there, for both the home and visiting teams during his minor league career, the largely German fans scolded anybody who dared boo him.

“Leave him alone,” they would shout. “ Das ist unser Choe !”

Translation? “That is our Joe.”

And to this day, he is known throughout the Midwest as Unser Choe Hauser.

But, alone for the last 10 years, he sometimes wonders if he is anybody’s Joe.

“Gin,” he shouts into the sterile, medicinal-smelling hallway on this August night.

Returning from a particularly fine smoke, he slowly pushes into his tiny room with the clackety fan, single bed, and toilet stall with handles.

Almost every night is the same--only the sound of his voice and the scratch of his metal walker.

“Gin,” he shouts, pausing, waiting for somebody to please-God answer, waiting for baseball to remember.

*

On the day the Angels’ Chili Davis went to the edge of the stands and swatted a fan, Joe Hauser was awakened by nurses at dawn.

On the day the San Francisco Giants’ Barry Bonds insulted his fans, Hauser’s bed was made by 7 a.m., his clothes buttoned by 8.

On the day the New York Yankees’ Jack McDowell responded to boos with an obscene gesture, Hauser was sitting in his easy chair by 9.

He was waiting for visitors at the door or game shows on his tiny, manually operated TV.

He always knows what will come first.

He says he sees today’s players preening and posturing and acting like obnoxious fools, and he wonders.

Doesn’t Chili Davis know that he will one day be like Unser Choe?

Don’t the mostly ordinary players of today know that they too will one day be forgotten?

“These players today, it’s like they don’t know nothing,” Hauser says.

Hauser, who played parts of seven major league seasons in his 22 years of pro baseball, gave the game everything he had.

He gave baseball his shoulders, which are so worn from so many swings that he can no longer open a newspaper.

He gave baseball his knees. They were injured in the mid-1920s and no longer work. Hauser cannot move forward without the walker. He cannot get into the front seat of a car or up on a bar stool without a little prayer.

He even gave baseball his family.

He and his wife, Irene, never had children because, he says, they didn’t want them to endure the constant moving and their father’s prolonged absences.

Because he was so busy with his once-celebrated career, he also lost touch with many of his eight brothers and sisters. He is certain all have died except for a brother he last saw in 1933 in Minneapolis.

“He wanted to live with me, but I already had some people staying with me so I told him no,” Hauser says. “He left after two or three hours, and I haven’t seen him since.”

When Irene died nine years ago, that left him with only a brother-in-law who, depending on who you believe, either can’t or won’t help.

“I like children, I like them,” he says. “Not having them, that’s been rough.”

In return, baseball has given him little.

His last major league season was 1929, so he is not eligible for a pension, which is paid only to players who were on rosters at the end of the 1946 season.

His accountant figures Hauser’s savings will last at least three more years, but Joe thinks about money constantly.

He says he can no longer read box scores because of an eye problem, but he refuses to have it corrected because it would cost too much.

“I could spend a couple hundred bucks, but the next day, I could die of something else,” he says. “The hell with it.”

More important to him, however, is attention. He doesn’t want any awards, or TV appearances, or special days at nearby ballparks.

But a phone call would be nice.

He is the fourth-oldest living major leaguer, the oldest who made a significant impact, yet he has to learn these things from a reporter because baseball has never told him.

He has never seen his name in the Baseball Hall of Fame because he has never been invited.

Baseball’s acting commissioner, Bud Selig, owns a team 55 miles away in Milwaukee.

Yet the only time Hauser has met Selig is when Hauser has made the effort to venture from his room to a Sheboygan meeting place where the Brewers have stopped on a winter barnstorming tour.

The Brewers give Hauser free tickets when he drives down to one of their games. But he hasn’t been in two years, and driving there now is as comfortable as walking there barefooted.

“You say that Selig is like the commissioner now? Really?” Hauser says.

Because the uniforms and equipment were so flimsy during Hauser’s six-year big league career, he doesn’t have any souvenirs.

No Philadelphia Athletic shirt signed by his manager, Connie Mack. No Cleveland Indian caps borrowed from Earl Averill. Even his old gloves have fallen apart and been trashed.

“Our stuff back then was just cheap,” he says. “It wasn’t for saving, it was for playing.”

Nor does he have any framed photographs of himself in a baseball uniform. The only thing hanging on his wall at the Sheboygan Retirement Home is a small photo of him and his wife.

Even the building where he ran a sporting goods store for more than 40 years in this town has been razed. It is now a patch of grass between two buildings on a downtown street.

A man spends his best years chatting with Babe Ruth and staring down Walter Johnson and entertaining thousands during baseball’s golden age.

Then he wakes up one day and it’s as if he never played.

As if he never even existed.

“The guy’s a legend, and people don’t realize it,” said Kurt Thuemmler, 25, a second-grade teacher who has become Hauser’s best friend. “One day he’s gonna die, and it’s gonna be front-page news some places, and people are going to regret that they didn’t take the time with him.”

Frank Slocum, executive director of major league baseball’s Baseball Assistance Team, has heard this story before.

His organization offers money to needy former players. But they cannot give the old-timers what they miss most.

“Recognition we can’t deliver for him,” Slocum said. “Part of the problem is that people in baseball authority just don’t remember some of these very old players. It’s not a case of pushing [Hauser] aside, but they just don’t remember him.”

How did a young man like Thuemmler meet Joe Hauser? Same way everyone meets Joe Hauser these days.

Thuemmler sent him an autograph request, and Hauser invited him for a visit to his old apartment. Then Hauser invited him to help with the vacuuming and the dishes.

Hauser’s loneliness was palpable. Thuemmler has served him as secretary and pal ever since.

The baseball establishment turns up its nose at memorabilia collectors, but they are what keep Joe Hauser alive.

He receives as many as 15 letters a week from fans asking for his autograph on everything from programs to balls. Sometimes dozens of balls. In one recent six-week period, he received requests from 26 states.

For several years he happily signed everything, not realizing that, hey, players these days are actually paid to sign these things.

Today he wants $5 a signature. But--and keep this quiet--he will sign it for nothing if you enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

Being remembered--even if it is by a 15-year-old kid who claims to have seen him play first base in Minneapolis--is enough.

He likes it when people ask him about Ty Cobb. He likes it so much that he has mimeographed a letter he once wrote to a friend about Cobb.

He writes that Cobb, in the last year of a brilliant but embattled career, tried to psych Hauser out of a hitting streak.

“He didn’t want anybody to hit as well as him, so if you got hot, he started giving you tips that would put you in a slump,” he says.

Once, when Hauser hit a game-winning home run after Cobb had tried to have the game called because of darkness, they nearly fought in the clubhouse because Cobb thought Hauser was showing him up.

“We stood toe to toe, him calling me every name and challenging me to a fight,” Hauser recalled.

Hauser wistfully recalled that he never hit him.

“Nope, I kept my self-respect,” he says.

And lost a great story.

“So?” he says. “We didn’t play for things like that. We played because it was good competition. That’s all. Nothing else.”

That is why he doesn’t like it when people ask about Babe Ruth. The question implies that they were friends. Everyone should know that opposing baseball players were never friends.

“I can’t understand why everybody is so friendly today,” Hauser says. “I never spoke to Babe except when he was at first base. And that was just to say hello.

“Why would I know him? He was on the enemy.”

*

His enemy now is silence.

He hears it on many Christmases and Thanksgivings. If the general manager of the local semipro baseball team doesn’t invite him to his home, Hauser usually remains alone.

“Those holidays have become just another day,” he says.

He hears it after he throws his annual birthday party at nearby Rupp’s Lodge. A couple of dozen people show up, but he wonders if it is because he buys their drinks and used to pay for their meals.

Imagine today’s baseball player holding a birthday party where he buys.

“Sometimes Joe makes things worse than they really are, but I’m sure he’s lonely,” said Denny Moyer, general manager of the Sheboygan A’s semipro team. “Everybody that played with him is dead, and the rest have forgotten him.”

He does have a couple of buddies--Ray Leitner in particular--who drive him to Rupp’s Lodge for a soda and a cigar now and then. Leitner, 69, was a Hauser fan as a youngster.

Hauser does get noticed by every new visitor to the retirement home because his name is still as big in these parts as Bob Uecker’s.

And Joe Hauser does have hope for the future. He plans on talking to an undertaker about a special request for after his death.

If Mickey Mantle’s funeral can be nationally televised, then Joe Hauser’s wake can be extended.

He figures that all of his friends who had figured he was already dead, well, won’t they be surprised?

They’ll feel so bad, they’ll have to show up.

“I want my showing to last an extra day because . . . there is going to be so many people there, they will need an extra day to see me,” he says.

Double gin!