O. P Caylor of The New York Daily News said of seeing Cap Anson at the National League winter meeting after the 1893 season:
“He looked so young, fresh, and skittish that I had the temerity to ask him to tell me in confidence just what his age, according to the records I the family Bible, was:
Anson replied:
“Now look here, young man, I’m going to tell you a story about my father.”
Anson’s father Henry was the first European settler in Marshalltown, Iowa in 1851; the following year, Cap was the first child to born to settlers in the town. Anson said:
“He has lived there a good many years and in that time has contributed largely to Marshalltown’s fame by gifts of several kinds, including a boy who knows a little about playing baseball.
“Well, now pop is a rip-roaring Democrat and always has been. Therefore, we all think he should be recognized by the present administration in Washington. So we persuaded him to put in a claim for the Marshalltown (postmaster), and he did.”
Anson said he met with President Grover Cleveland twice while in Washington, “in the old man’s behalf, and each time Mr. Cleveland treated me tiptop.”
Anson said the president:
“(T)alked baseball fluently and promised to consider the old gentleman’s political claims with due regard.”
Despite his positive meetings with the president, Anson said he learned that “some of pop’s enemies” were using his age to try to persuade the president to not appoint the elder Anson.
“I telegraphed to him, ‘They say you are too old.’ This is what he replied, ‘I am not a kid, nor am I decrepit, but I don’t ask any concessions from any blankety blank blank on account of age, and don’t you forget it.’
“Now, that was pop’s reply to the charge that he was too old, and I guess the same answer will do for me.”
Anson’s father was never named postmaster of Marshalltown.
Baseball History Daily 
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