Dripping Life
A few days after Hack Wilson’s death in a Baltimore hospital, journalist Edwin A. Lahey wrote the following: “Wallace Jaco, the night attendant at the Mitchell Undertaking Parlor, seemed pleased to have his lonely vigil interrupted when I rang the buzzer and asked if Hack Wilson's body was there.
"’You bet,’ he said brightly. ‘Want to see him? Come on in.’
“We walked down a long corridor and turned into a dark little room. Jaco snapped a light switch and said triumphantly, ‘here he is.’
“This shrunken frame m a grey mortuary suit was all that was visible. In 1930, with the Chicago Cubs, Wilson hit 56 home runs (unbroken until steroids). He even out-slugged Babe Ruth of the Yankees that year. The National League, in which Hack Wilson's home run record still stands, sent undertaker John Mitchell $350 by Western Union for Hack's funeral expenses. But the mahogany casket in which Hack is laid out cost $370, Jaco explained. (This so-called “box” is the only bit of elegance connected with the passing of the former hero of Wrigley Field.)
“Mitchell laid out Hack for free, the suit included,” the attendant said. “The price of a single lot in Druid Ridge Cemetery was raised by rattling the cup in neighborhood saloon. It's one of the finest cemeteries in Baltimore," Jaco said proudly.
"’We'll have enough left over for a tombstone,’ grunted a bartender later in the Linden Grill.”
“The midnight visitor at the undertaking parlor, scanning the western union money order sent by the National League, asked whether $350 were not a rather modest sum. ‘Well,’ said Jaco, unwilling to speak ill of the quick, ‘I guess maybe that's all the fellows who notified the league about Hack's death asked for.’”
Lewis “Hack” Wilson was a short, muscular, barrel-shaped 200-pounder, was a wispy husk of 135 lbs. when he died.
Only a doctor and nurse were at hand when he succumbed to pneumonia, complicated by internal hemorrhages. The only personal belonging in Wilson’s clothes was a scrap of paper bearing two names, apparently of friends.
After his death, Wilson’s body lay unclaimed today in the City Hospital Morgue for two days.
Upon hearing about the once-home-run king’s unclaimed body, Philip K. Wrigley, president of the Chicago Cubs announced, “Hack Wilson will have "a proper funeral.”
Neighborhood undertaker John O. Mitchell, who had befriended the one-time "bad boy" of professional baseball, said neither he nor the hospital had received word from any of Wilson's relatives.
Mitchell said the hospital advised him a group of friends In Wilson' s neighborhood were rounding up money for burial expenses. “Even if their plan fails,” the undertaker said, he will ask for the body and conduct funeral services Friday or Saturday.
If no relative claims the body by 10:30 a.m., November 26th, it may be released to friends or the State Anatomical Board. Mitchell was confident the hospital would release the body to his care if the relatives are not heard from.
At Hack Wilson’s funeral in Mitchell’s chapel, on November 26, 1948, there were four floral pieces around the mahogany casket containing the body of Hack Wilson, the former National League star. Several weeks earlier, truckloads of floral tributes accompanied “Babe” Ruth’s casket to his grave as thousands of mourners looked on.
One of Wilson’s floral pieces was from Joe McCarthy, manager of the Boston Red Sox, one of base ball's immortals. McCarthy was Hack's manager in his old Chicago Cubs days. Two others were from people in Martinsburg, W. Va., Garland Dunn and Buddy Sullivan. The fourth was from "Al's corner, his friends
When funeral services were held for Hack Wilson, a group of 50 neighbors who knew him only as a "good guy" and by reputation alone, as once a mighty man with a baseball bat, attended.
It was up to Rev. Cobert Simms, the minister who volunteered his services, to pay eulogy to the slugger whose name still is in the record books. “I come to pay respect to one of the most courageous spirits that ever graced this land," said the minister. "It's a long road from a coal mine to a quarter of a million dollars and back again. If you can travel that road, then you have a commendable spirit."
Hack traveled that road in his 48 years, from the coal mining town of Ellwood City, Pa., to a Chicago Cub star paid $33,000 year and back to asking at the Baltimore City Hall for "any kind of work.
Hack Wilson was slated for a grave in Baltimore’s potter's field until Wilson’s second wife, Mrs. Hazel Wilson, arrived in Baltimore the day of the funeral from Martinsburg, West Virginia, to claim the body and take It to West Virginia for burial.
She requested burial be in Martinsburg where Wilson started his professional baseball career in the class D Blue Ridge League. Mrs. Hazel Miller Wilson escorted the body to West Virginia, and Martinsburg Funeral Home.
More than 200 persons stood in a chill rain in Martinsburg, on November 29, 1948, as the body of Hack Wilson, former home run king of the National League, was laid to rest. Earlier, more than 1,000 mourners, including many who remembered Wilson on the Martinsburg club (Class D Blue Ridge League), filed through the funeral chapel to view the body.
The Rev. Frederick F. Bush, Jr., rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, pronounced the final rites.
Among the pallbearers were George (Reggie) Rawlings, who played with Wilson in 1921 and 1922 at Martinsburg. and Charles (Lefty) Willis, of nearby Leetown, W. Va., who joined the Martinsburg team in 1923, the year after Wilson left. Willis pitched for the Athletics in the late 1920s.
The burial took place at Rosedale Cemetery in Martinsburg, W. Va. He was survived by two exwives and son, Bobby, who was 23 at the time.
Hack Wilson was posthumously inducted into the Major League Players Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veteran's Committee in 1979.