BUTLER TWP — When Joe Hasychak took office as a township commissioner in 1980, times were different. Township office workers used typewriters, not computers; they used adding machines, not calculators.

On Thursday, Hasychak will retire as the municipality’s longest-serving commissioner — eclipsing his mentor, Commissioner Paul Langland, by one month.

The U.S. Navy veteran and Butler native is approaching his departure the same way he has approached more than 32 years of public service. It’s just something that needs to be done.

“I never considered this a big deal,” Hasychak said of his time as an elected official. “It’s just something I do. It’s just my involvement in the community.”

But if not for a last-minute telephone call from Hasychak’s wife, Rhonda, more than 35 years ago, none of it might ever have happened.

Rhonda Hasychak was an executive assistant in the county commissioners’ office in 1979 when a ballot proof caught her eye. It was the Republican primary ticket for Butler Township commissioner, and it was empty.

She thought back to something she had said as she and Joe drove into Butler after years of living in Washington, D.C.

The Hasychaks, high school sweethearts who had married and moved to Washington after Joe finished a four-year stint in the Navy, decided to return to their hometown amid the riots that erupted following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

“We were moving back, making all these plans, and I said, ‘Gee, Joe, maybe someday you’ll run for office.’ I never forgot that,” she said.

Hasychak’s first primary election campaign would be, quite literally, a last-minute affair. Rhonda Hasychak secured her husband’s blessing and the signatures required to get his name on the ballot, all on the day of the filing deadline.

Hasychak would go on to win a spot on the general election ballot by 13 votes — something he learned of while in Chicago, attending a seminar for his job on election day.

Running for township commissioner had been a proposition Hasychak liked. But those 13 votes changed everything, he said.

“From then on I said ‘I’m gonna get serious,’” he said.

Hasychak started beating the pavement; campaigning door-to-door to win in November. He ended up being the race’s top vote-getter, something he’s achieved in about half of the eight campaigns he’s run.

However, it didn’t take the newly elected commissioner long to learn just how contentious politics could be.

In 1980 a statewide debate broke out over taxation of businesses. Hasychak, a financial professional, pushed for the township to implement a mercantile tax, saying it could be the last time the municipality had the chance to do so.

The pushback from businesses and workers scared of losing their jobs was shocking. Hasychak’s house was egged; Rhonda Hasychak fielded hostile phone calls in the middle of the night. A business, American Hardware, took out a full-page ad in The Butler Eagle lambasting the freshman commissioner and his proposed tax.

Before Hasychak won his first election, the refrain he most often encountered was, “Who are you?”

Now, the couple wondered if people had recast the question to, “Who do you think you are?”

“We were second-guessing ourselves, thinking, ‘Did we make a mistake,’” Rhonda Hasychak said. “But the old theory was, it doesn’t matter what they say about you in the paper as long as they spell your name right. And everybody did know who he was then.”

Hasychak got his mercantile tax — today it brings in more than $1 million in annual revenue for the township — and ended his first term more determined than ever.

He wanted to show people that his first win wasn’t a fluke, and knew there were things he wanted to accomplish — things that seemed self-evident to the detail-oriented Hasychak, who recalled being flabbergasted at a meeting when commissioners spent time voting to buy a new chair for a police clerk.

“That’s why I’m here? To vote on a chair?” Hasychak remembers thinking.

In 1983, at the urging of the second-term commissioner, the township hired its first manager, Jerry Patterson. Patterson would serve as the municipality’s lead administrator for 23 years, during which he watched Hasychak develop into what he called the consummate leader.

“He’s fair, he’s rational, he doesn’t get excited,” Patterson said. “There was never any politics with Joe. He could work with anybody.”

And work Hasychak did. He worked on issues that lacked flash, but that he felt moved the township in the direction it needed to go. That could be something as seemingly simple as hiring the right staffer. To Hasychak, that was just as important as anything else.

“I think one of the most important things we do is get the right people in the right position,” Hasychak said.

As the years ran on Hasychak would see fellow commissioners — 17 men and three women — come and go. He would help found a joint transportation service, the Butler Transit Authority, with Butler; and he would help oversee a $5 million project that moved the township’s headquarters from Lyndora to Duffy Road. That is a project the 74-year-old Hasychak still takes pride in, calling it a hallmark of the kind of long-term planning he has championed during more than 32 years in office.

“We weren’t building this for 2004; we built it for 2024,” he said of the municipal center.

Still, the center, for all its grandeur, doesn’t strike Hasychak as the most important thing he’s done as a commissioner. Asked about that, his thoughts turn to the transit authority, the township manager position, and the various boards — at least seven — he’s served on through the years.

If Hasychak leaves a legacy, he wants it to be one of leadership, not issues or feats of accomplishment. In that, Hasychak said, he took his cues from Langland, who he joined in 1980 as one of only two Republicans on the board.

“I don’t think he actually ever said anything (about leadership) to me. He just never acted like ‘it’s my way or the highway,’” Hasychak said. “That’s not how our board has been. I think the worst thing you can do is come into office with an agenda.”

Township manager Ed Kirkwood, who took over for Patterson in 2008, said Hasychak’s leadership continues to impress him.

“He can take bad situations, situations where people are very unhappy, and bring them together and resolve issues,’ Kirkwood said. “That’s a true art. Not everybody has that ability.”