Hack Wilson - Life After Baseball

Life After Baseball

Wilson returned to Martinsburg where he opened a pool hall, but encountered financial problems due to a failed sporting goods business venture, and then a divorce. By 1938 he was working as a bartender near Brooklyn's Ebbets Field where he sang for drinks, but had to quit when customers became too abusive. A night club venture in suburban Chicago was another financial failure. In 1944 he took a job as a good will ambassador for a professional basketball team in Washington D.C., where he lamented that fans remembered his two dropped fly balls in the 1929 World Series far more vividly than his 56 home runs and 191 RBIs in 1930. Unable to find work in professional baseball, he moved to Baltimore where he worked as a tool checker in an airplane manufacturing plant and later as a laborer for the City of Baltimore. When municipal authorities realized who he was, he was made the manager of a Baltimore public swimming pool.

On October 4, 1948 Wilson was discovered unconscious after a fall in his home. Though the accident did not appear serious at first, pneumonia and other complications developed and he died of internal hemorrhaging on November 23, 1948 at the age of 48. Wilson died penniless and his son refused to claim his remains. NL President Ford Frick finally sent money to cover his funeral expenses. In marked contrast to Babe Ruth's funeral, which had been attended by thousands just three months earlier, only a few hundred people were present for Wilson's services. He was buried in Rosedale Cemetery in the town where he made his professional playing debut, Martinsburg, West Virginia. Ten months later Joe McCarthy organized a second, more complete memorial service, attended by Kiki Cuyler, Charlie Grimm, Nick Altrock and other players from the Cubs and the Martinsburg team (by then renamed the Blue Sox). A granite tombstone was unveiled, with the inscription, "One of Baseball's Immortals, Lewis R. (Hack) Wilson, Rests Here."

One week before his death, Wilson gave an interview to CBS Radio which was reprinted in Chicago newspapers. In 1949 Charlie Grimm, the Cubs' new manager, posted a framed excerpt from that interview in the Cubs clubhouse, where it remains. It reads, in part:

"Talent isn't enough. You need common sense and good advice. If anyone tries to tell you different, tell them the story of Hack Wilson. ... Kids in and out of baseball who think because they have talent they have the world by the tail. It isn't so. Kids, don't be too big to accept advice. Don't let what happened to me happen to you."

In 1979 Wilson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee. A Martinsburg street is named Hack Wilson Way in his honor, and the access road to a large city park within his home town, Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, is known as Hack Wilson Drive.