Hack Wilson, Ellwood City's Home Run King

Lewis Robert Wilson, known to baseball fans everywhere as Hack, was born and raised in Ellwood City. Standing only five feet six inches tall but built like a beer barrel, he became one of the most feared hitters in the game. In nineteen thirty, playing for the Chicago Cubs, he hit fifty-six home runs, a National League record that stood for sixty-eight years until Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire rewrote the books in nineteen ninety-eight.

That same season Wilson drove in one hundred ninety-one runs, a major league record that still stands and may never be broken. He finished his twelve-year career with two hundred forty-four home runs and a lifetime batting average of three-oh-seven. The Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him in nineteen seventy-nine. The kid from western Pennsylvania left statistics that endure a century later.