Oldest Pirate didn't cheat life (oldest former major leaguer dies at 100)

post-gazette.com ^ | Thursday, July 20, 2006 | Gene Collier

[lunarbicep]

It was not terribly convenient wrestling a minivan across the peninsula that hot day in March, nosing it through the traffic and the construction and the occasional plodding half-dead critters that turn up in the part of Florida's midsection traversed by Route 60.

Somewhere in the four hours between Bradenton and Vero Beach, I made myself wonder what the world's oldest living Pirate would look like.

Would he be holed up on a bobbing pontoon with an eye patch and a parrot on his shoulder, a parrot also wearing an eye patch? And what would the world's oldest Pirate remember about playing for the Pirates, if anything. This being a Tuesday, in fact, what would he remember about Monday?

He was about to turn 100 after all, but the fact that he was squeezing me in for this interview, giving me 30 minutes between a dental appointment and what -- rock climbing? -- seemed to indicate an enduring lucidity.

As it happened, for the 30 minutes I spent with Howard "Howdy" Groskloss, I'd have driven a tricycle through the Everglades.

"I'm gonna miss him like anything," his wife, Mary, was saying on the phone yesterday. "He was a great guy. Only once in your lifetime can you get a person like this, like him. They just don't come around.

"I was just lucky enough to have been chosen to be with him."

Howard Hoffman Groskloss, a native of Sheradan, not only the oldest living Pirate but the oldest living major-leaguer of any stripe, died this week mostly because, as Mary said, "he was just ready to go.

"He deteriorated pretty fast over the past month. His doctor was here on the 8th and she told him, 'You just can't fight old age,'

[lunarbicep]

Howdy Groskloss in his Vero Beach home in March.

[Cyclopean Squid]

He's going home. He was one of those who "were honored in their generation, and were the glory of their times."