Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2007-07-04 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

Walter “Gus” Hansen made his living setting tile but made a life out of reaching out to family and friends, and to strangers, and to every down-and-out type he ever met with the most generous heart imaginable. He’s the one who spent every Thanksgiving handing out food to the needy. He’s the one who helped organize the huge Eastside reunions at Steelworkers Hall every year. He’s the one who’d stop schoolkids on the street.

“How’d you do on your report card?” he’d ask.

“Good,” the kid would say.

“Here’s $5,” Gus would say.

This, to neighborhood kids he knew or to strangers he never met before. And then he’d walk on, a tall, lanky figure with wispy blond hair and a goatee, friends with the immediate world.

He’s the guy who kept a decorated Christmas tree in his living room 12 months a year. He’s the one who went to a funeral home one time and found a piano in the hallway. He started playing boogie-woogie. He wanted to remember the deceased in happier times. When the priest heard him, he asked if Gus would play on Sundays in church.

Gus is the one whose father, Walter Hansen Sr., was a labor organizer. In the dangerous 1930s, the father gave pro-union speeches while his wife, Helen, stood by with a gun in her purse in case things got out of hand.

“You carry it,” Walter said to his wife. “They never search women.”

In the awful Depression years they passed on to their only son a simple notion: the dignity of a decent job at decent pay for all those who want to work.

The Hansens bought their row house on Collington Avenue, near Patterson Park, back in the ’30s, moving there from Fells Point, where Gus was born. They bought it for about $800 and never moved from the neighborhood. Gus went to Patterson High, served in Korea during the war, came home to marry and raise a family.

For the last few decades, he’d been back in the old family home, where he was living when his heart gave out, at 76, Sunday night. On Monday, some of his great-nieces and a nephew sat around his living room: Ronnie Dwan, Lori Mayhew, Teri Jarrard, Calvin “Butch” York. They mourned the man they called “the family icon.”

“Everybody wanted to be like him,” said Dwan, a great-niece. “He was the most loving man in the world.”

We’re all given lessons in living from our parents, and the best of us hold onto some of them. Gus held onto the important ones. Others with generous hearts toss a few bucks to the down-and-out. Gus gave them a room at his house until they got back on their feet. When he went to restaurants, he made it a point to go back to the kitchen and tell the cook how good the food tasted. He was always grabbing people from different parts of town and different backgrounds and throwing them together for big meals.

The symbolism was clear: Life’s a bounty; we have to learn to enjoy what each of us brings to the table.

Gus was part of a lunch group that’s met every Tuesday at Sabatino’s in Little Italy for the last quarter-century or so. Now and then he’d walk in with a young lady on his arm.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing with him?” the ex-cop George “Puddin’ ” Barry cried out one time when Gus strolled in with a woman perhaps 40 years younger.

“Hey,” Gus cried back, feigning hurt feelings, “go easy on her. She won me in a crap game.”

A few years ago, Gus discovered a young street fighter in the neighborhood and introduced him to Clem Florio, the former middleweight pro boxer. The two old-timers, Gus and Clem, turned young John Adkins into a terrific young amateur boxer who won most of his 20 fights.

It was fun to watch Adkins throw his lightning left hook. It was a lot more fun to watch the two veterans, in their 70s, with a final hurrah.

Gus was featured here back in February, when he and an old Patterson High School teacher, Bill Milner, discovered each other after a more than 50-year absence. Gus tracked down Bill, who was a treasured music teacher.

That was Gus. He’s the guy who never met a stranger. Everybody was a friend. He’s the one who held onto those who got away, too. He had a list of several dozen names of the dearly departed. Every night he said prayers for them. A lot of us should say prayers for people like Gus Hansen.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com