Word: hanks
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Gorgon & Thor. Hank Bauer is the kind of man everybody wants for a friend-because only a suicide would want him for an enemy. When he frowns, Gorgon shudders. When he talks, Thor answers. He is all bituminous at heart, but he is hewn of anthracite. Bauer looks, says one Oriole player, "like an M-l ready to go off." He commands respect, he commands obedience, and he commands a certain amount of controversy. His own boss, Oriole General Manager Lee MacPhail, calls him "no great shakes as a baseball strategist" and says that he "manages by instinct." But Third...
...Yankee Owner Dan Topping. Was Yogi Berra available for the job? No, Topping replied: Yogi was going to manage the Yankees in 1964. Then MacPhail sounded out Eddie Stanky-but Stanky wanted a long-term contract. Finally, MacPhail found his man right in the Baltimore dugout: Oriole Coach Hank Bauer. Said Bauer, "I don't know whether I'm the first, second, third or 20th choice for this job, but I'll say one thing-if it was offered to anyone else, they were crazy not to accept. It makes me feel good...
...Louis, Ill., the youngest of nine children born to John Bauer, an Austrian immigrant who turned to bartending after he lost a leg working in an aluminum mill. Money was scarce around the Bauer household: he wore baby clothes made out of old feed sacks. In junior high school, Hank weighed only 102 Ibs., and his sister Mary begged him to give up smoking: "That's the reason you're not growing," she insisted. Hank kept right on smoking-and wading into street fights. "He was a real dead-end kid," says Brother Joe, 58. "Always going around...
...Central Catholic High School, Bauer won his Cs in baseball and basketball-plus a permanently misshapen nose (the result of a collision with an opponent's elbow under the basket). After graduation, Hank worked for a while repairing furnaces in a beer-bottling plant. In 1941 his older brother Herman, a White Sox farm hand, wangled him a pro tryout. Hank landed with Oshkosh in the Class D Wisconsin State League. But he hardly burned up the bushes. Alternating between infield and outfield, he batted a measly .262. The manager thought he might be a pitcher. Earned-run average...
...Oshkosh. One day in January 1942, he stopped by the local court house and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. Boot camp was a breeze ("I never had to scrub a barracks with a toothbrush or anything"), and there was even a baseball team at Mare Island, Calif., where Hank was awaiting shipment to the Pacific. But the easy life came to an abrupt halt. "One morning," says Hank, "this sergeant came up to me and said, 'Why don't you volunteer for the Raider battalion?' I said okay. But the first thing they told...