Before computers, the baseball Cardinals turned to Paul Fauks, who died last week, to help keep things going.

He was the behind-the-scenes guy in the front office. He was first to arrive, often the last to leave and never missed a day for illness.

Officially, he was the Cardinals' director of minor league operations. He planned and ran the club's minor league camp in St. Petersburg, Fla., and paid, fed, lodged and transported the team's prospects.

During 20 years with the Cardinals, he also did nearly every chore, including running the Busch Stadium message board and compiling play-by-play game accounts on a typewriter before mailing the sheets to Major League Baseball for posterity.

Paul Samuel Fauks died Wednesday (Jan. 4, 2012) at an assisted living home in an Atlanta suburb, where he had moved about 15 months ago for treatment of Alzheimer's disease, his family said. He was 87 and had been a longtime resident of Glendale.

Baseball was his first love but his second career.

He spent 26 years in the Navy, surviving the murderous D-Day fighting at Normandy during World War II. Then he was shipped to the Pacific to fight against Japan.

During the Korean War, the Navy recalled him to a second conflict.

Along the way, he won promotions from seaman to lieutenant commander. Despite a distinguished career, he saw himself as a little guy, a cog in a big machine.

"Everything would have happened the same whether I had been there or not," he wrote of his time in the Navy.

He was born in Oklahoma City, the son of a German immigrant who went to college and became a veterinarian for the government.

Paul Fauks (usually pronounced "fox,") played baseball on American Legion teams when his family lived in Pierre, S.D.

He was drafted into the Navy in 1943 and sent to London to train for the invasion of Europe. While on a two-day pass, he met a 16-year-old girl named Barbara Clare at a London dance pavilion. The next day, he met her parents.

He soon found himself on an assault craft off the coast of Normandy, watching the bodies of dead comrades float by in the water. He spent much of D-Day pinned down in sandy fox holes. He was a signalman, assigned to direct landing craft.

At first, there was no food, so he jumped aboard an amphibious truck and stole a box of Life Savers candy. "Not much to forestall hunger," he wrote in his war diary, "but our thefts improved as we gained experience."

That was in June 1944. By September, he was back in the U.S. training for the war in the Pacific, and by May 1945 he was back at war. His company was said to be the first intact military unit redeployed from Europe to the Pacific.

The war ended Sept. 1, 1945. In March 1946, he was discharged and back in Oklahoma City.

He hadn't seen Clare in nearly two years, but he sent for her, and they married. He graduated from Oklahoma City University, where he won two letters as a third baseman.

He served two more years during the Korean War, and by then he was career Navy. In 1967, he found himself in St. Louis as a recruiting director.

By then he was tired of transfers, so he called the Cardinals and landed a part-time job selling tickets. Four months later, he took a full-time job in sales and became a civilian for the first time in 26 years.

He moved up to an operations job overseeing the Cardinals' minor league teams. But he wasn't a scout and had no say in player moves.

"My job is to sit in the middle of this and make sure everything is done in a legal manner, according to baseball law," Mr. Fauks told the Post-Dispatch at his retirement in 1987.

He described himself as introverted and more at home with reports and stats than with baseball's glamorous side.

At work, he was known for being fast and accurate — and full of stamina — left over, he said, from his Navy days.

He volunteered to help the club's Latin players, doing their income taxes and compiling a baseball dictionary for Latin youngsters. He also assembled a five-volume history of the Cardinals farm system from its start in 1925 under Branch Rickey.

Away from work, he was a woodworker. He created 51 kinds of birdhouses and built more than 10,000 birdhouses over seven years.

Ever since he was a child, he said, he had loved two things: ships and baseball.

"And I got to do both. How lucky can a guy get?"

A memorial service will be held here at a date to be announced. Burial will be in Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery.

Survivors include his wife of 65 years, Barbara Fauks of suburban Atlanta; two daughters, Paula Riney of Town and Country and Pam Woddail of Alpharetta, Ga.; a son, William Fauks of Manchester; a brother, Dr. William Fauks of Oklahoma City; five grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters.