Peter Diana, Post-Gazette Howdy Groskloss in his Vero Beach home in March. Click photo for larger image.

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 Sheraden, 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,' " Mary said. "We were lucky in that he didn't really have much sickness. I know he really wanted to make that 100th birthday, and he did."

Howdy was gone on the 15th, and the fact that God gave him 100 years and three months and five days worth of a life to live did not do a thing to keep him from overstuffing it.

The fact that he played parts of three seasons for the Pirates and was a teammate of Pie Traynor and Paul and Lloyd Waner, or that he barnstormed with Honus Wagner and played against Jim Thorpe, were footnotes on a dossier of fairly staggering academic and medical achievement.

"He was simply a remarkable individual," said Dick Durrell, a friend of Howdy's who helped me with the interview that day and is the founding publisher of People Magazine. "Indeed, he was a Renaissance Man."

The son of a Pittsburgh opera singer who pegged him for a violin prodigy, Howard Groskloss chose instead to pursue a career in medicine, in no small part from watching his father die of influenza.

"My father was a great, great fan of the game," Howdy remembered that day in March. "We'd go to see the Pirates all the time. He was a friend of [then Pirates owner] Barney Dreyfuss, and he figured I could get around pretty good. So I guess he got Barney to give me a look."

Dreyfuss was so impressed with Howdy's quickness and athletic aptitudes that he signed him to a $10,000 contract before the 1930 season.

"That was a lot of money, but it wasn't publicized," Howdy said. "The Depression was on. I took that money and paid off my mother's house."

Almost from the moment Howdy first played for the Pirates in June 1930, he was distracted by his accelerating academic success. He had just graduated from Amherst and was on his way to medical school at Yale, an appointment not even the offer of a Rhodes scholarship could impede. His most successful summer as a Pirate came in 1931, when he played in 53 games, hitting .280 with seven doubles and two triples.

"I remember Traynor and the Waners," Howdy said. "They were great guys and good friends, but the Pirates knew I was more serious about school. They knew they weren't going to keep me."

In '32, the Pirates replaced manager Jewel Ens with George Gibson, and "the new guy didn't like him," according to Durrell. "Dr. Groskloss always had his head in a medical book on the train. He and the manager didn't hit it off because of that."

But ya know, it all kind of worked out for Howdy, at least inasmuch as he went on to teach obstetrics, gynecology and pediatrics at top universities (including Pitt) for more than 50 years. He helped found the medical school at the University of Miami. He pioneered the use of ultrasound as one of the nation's most prominent obstetricians. He had four children and eight grandchildren. He had lunch with Charles Lindbergh. After playing football, basketball and baseball at Amherst and accepting the Mossman Cup as the college's top student athlete from fellow alum Calvin Coolidge, after playing three years of major-league baseball, he went on to win numerous amateur golf and tennis titles all over Florida and the Bahamas. He was chief flight surgeon on the Naval carrier Makassar in the Pacific during World War II.

He turned 100 on the day the 2006 Pirates played their home opener.

I asked him what he remembered most about playing for them.

"I remember there were a lot of women standing around after the games," he said. "You couldn't get through all the women."

That's right. At 100, he was still talkin' baseball.