I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story

485 Pages·1992·1.04 MB·English

by  Hank Aaron

I HAD A HAMMER

HANK

THE
AARON

STORY

HENRY AARON

WITH

LONNIE WHEELER
For the people who have always stood by me when the
going was rough—my wife, Billye; my parents, Herbert
and Estella Aaron; and my children, Gaile, Hankie, Lary,
Dorinda, and Ceci. I love you all.
—H.A.
For all those Negro League and sandlot players who might
have been Hank Aarons if they'd only been given the
chance.
—L.W.
Contents

Introduction v

1 The day I left Mobile, Alabama, to play ball… 1

2 Herbert Aaron and his teenage… 7

3 When Jackie Robinson joined… 36

4 In 1953, the major leagues… 69

5 America met Henry Aaron and civil rights… 113

6 There is a scene from the television… 162

7 By 1960, the few black players… 204

8 They called it “the city too busy to hate.” 246

9 At first, it was all about base hits.… 282

10 There were a few things, if only… 310

11 The record brought Hank Aaron into… 374

12 The man played in the major leagues… 414

Career Stats 458

Acknowledgments
Praise
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION

Hank Aaron is almost twenty years older than I am, which
is just about right. I have no baseball memories that predate
him, and he is an eminent presence in the earliest ones. Actu­
ally, they are glimpses more than palpable memories, single-
frame impressions of a figure who was at the same time re­
mote and salient. I recall listening to the radio beyond my
bedtime as the Cardinals tried to protect a lead against the
Braves in the late innings and thinking what a fearfully diffi­
cult thing that was with Aaron, Mathews and Adcock in the
middle of Milwaukee's lineup. I recall Aaron's unlined, inno­
cent face on my baseball cards. And I recall sitting on a picnic
table at the Art Gaines Baseball Camp in rural Missouri as
the coaches talked about hitting a baseball hard—not high
and far but hard—and raising my hand to tell them that I
had been to Busch Stadium in St. Louis and seen Hank Aaron
hit a ball that banged off the left-field wall quicker than, well,
I don't know what, but quicker than anybody else alive could
make a baseball bang against an outfield wall. I knew that
would impress them, because they were baseball people and
they would know that Hank Aaron was the right name to
drop in that situation.
In most company, though, the popular argument back then
was Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle, and the popular choice
was either of them. Hank Aaron had nothing to do with pop
culture; he was just the best guy at swinging a baseball bat,
whether or not they appreciated it on the coasts. He was a
hitter for the heartland. We knew him as consummately that
and nothing more than that, and never would, until he broke
Babe Ruth's record for home
v
vi / INTRODUCTION(cid:10)
runs. Even then, Aaron showed us only what he cared to.
He seemed a featureless hero, an impenetrable icon whose
effortless grace on the playing field was often taken for indol­
ence and whose wary reticence off the field was sometimes
mistaken for indifference. When he broke Ruth's record, he
was little more than the quiet man who broke Ruth's record.
But how could it be left at that? How could that be all
there was to Hank Aaron? There was too much background
behind him to leave it at that—too much baseball, too much
history, too much America. How could a man hit 755 home
runs and have nothing more to offer? How could a person
come out of Alabama as a black teenager in 1952 and not
have a perspective for the rest of us to consider? How could
he play in the Negro League and not have an experience that
speaks to our culture? How could he integrate a Southern
minor league and not have stories to pass along? How could
a fellow go through all that Hank Aaron had gone through
in Milwaukee and Atlanta, in the outfield and the front office,
in obscurity and in fame, and not have memories and points
of view to submit? It wasn't possible.
Other writers told me that Hank Aaron would have little
to say. I didn't believe it, and I didn't care. His life was elo­
quent enough. He personified so many things that have been
so symbolic to the social history of modern America: the
South—he grew up in the deepest part of it, as the damndest
color; the Negro League—he started his professional career
in it when only a handful of moribund teams remained, and
two decades later, when the Negro Leagues were a bygone
of Americana, he was the last remnant of their legacy; the
fifties—he gloried in them, playing on pennant winners and
coming
INTRODUCTION(cid:10) / vii
of age in the fiftiest town in America; the sixties—he was the
most conspicuous athlete in the city that centered the South
and headquartered the civil rights movement; the home run
record—he was the object of a polarizing racial controversy
that brought out the vicious side of white society and told
America more than it wanted to hear about itself.
Hank Aaron was a living metaphor for all of these things,
and he was willing to talk about them, as well. More than
willing, he was determined to talk about them. To him, it
was vital that his experience be brought to light, where it
could at least illuminate the past and at best beacon the fu­
ture. The multifarious forces within him all wanted out. He
had a fundamental desire to make a statement with his life,
an abiding urge to make a difference, and a consequent need
to expose the ignorance, cruelty, and fear that had blackened
his fifty-seven years. He had things to say. He had a book in
him.
And so we met time and again over the course of nearly
two years—in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Florida, Philadelphia,
New York, and Cleveland. I smelled the collard greens sim­
mering on his mother's stove in Mobile and drove the black
neighborhoods with his tireless father, turning home on
Henry Aaron Loop. In Jacksonville, Florida, I looked into
the smart green eyes of his first wife for six straight hours. I
spoke with five Hall of Famers, six managers, three owners,
ten Aarons, nineteen Mobilians, eighteen Negro Leaguers,
and twenty-eight team-mates, among others—more than a
hundred people, in all.
But the book came from Aaron—from his life, times, and
reflections. Aaron's deep Alabama voice accented the details
and anecdotes with urgency, worth, and a gentleman's
candor. We had the same
viii / INTRODUCTION(cid:10)
book in mind, and his recollections were persuasively rein­
forced by the most reliable of the other sources. This was not
a point to be taken for granted, because the popular versions
of Aaron's past were not always consistent with the facts.
The media, for instance, commonly advanced the notion that
Aaron never spoke out about civil rights until his second
marriage and pursuit of Ruth. But Aaron maintained that he
had stepped forward on racial issues throughout his career,
and the old articles bear him out; he was on record in behalf
of black managers and desegregated training camps as far
back as the late 1950s. Similarly, critics had little sympathy
for his wariness of the press, yet the old articles supply
abundant cause for this, referring to him repeatedly in
plantation-hand terms.
Of course, Aaron's memory, like most people's was not
unfailing. There were elusive details that neither he nor the
written record could pin down. As an amateur and semipro
in Mobile, for instance, he played on numerous, almost inter­
changeable teams that received little or no coverage in the
newspapers. It would have been triumphant to find a journ­
alistic verification of the game in which the Indianapolis
Clowns discovered him playing for the Mobile Black Bears
as a seventeen-year-old shortstop, but it doesn't exist, and
the imprecise oral legend will have to suffice in its stead. It
would have been a winning moment, also, to locate a pub­
lished account of the doubleheader in Buffalo, New York,
which moved the Boston Braves to sign Aaron despite the
fact that he batted cross-handed. But none was available, and
I collected five far-ranging oral versions of this afternoon be­
fore a former Braves official sent me a copy of the letter that
the Boston scout filed after the games. Aaron's entire Negro
League season is obscured by the scarcity of