The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (46 page)

M
ILWAUKEE
, W
IS.—
The Braves’ decision to move to Atlanta was accepted with regret by two of their Negro players, outfielders Henry Aaron and Lee Maye. Both said they disliked the idea and would not move their families to the Georgia city. Both have children in integrated schools in the Milwaukee area.

Aaron even planned to take a trip to Atlanta to investigate conditions for Negroes there.

State Sen. Leroy R. Johnson, the only Negro legislator in the South, said he was writing Aaron to assure the Braves’ slugger that he need have no fears about racial problems in Atlanta.

H
ENRY HAD NEVER
considered himself as important a historical figure as Jackie Robinson, and yet by twice integrating the South—first in the Sally League and later as the first black star on the first major-league team in the South (during the apex of the civil rights movement, no less)—his road in many ways was no less lonely, and in other ways far more difficult.

He would receive credit for handling the inequities of his life with dignity, and yet he was rarely afforded the dignity of being recognized as having played a significant role in eradicating important barriers to the movement. Robinson had confronted the first, impenetrable obstacle of being allowed to compete at the major-league level; his was the first success, which made all other successes—including Henry’s—possible, and Henry was never so presumptuous as to believe anything to the contrary. But after Robinson, the integration of other levels of the sport, in regions where breaking the social customs proved far more difficult (with considerably less interest), was not a story that received much coverage.

Rather, the conventional thinking concerning minor-league integration held that sooner or later, black prospects would have to play with their white teammates. Either that or the clubs would be forced to relocate their minor-league teams, moving away from the South, at considerable expense and difficulty. Thus, the breakthrough of playing baseball in the segregated South would largely be seen as an inevitablility, no real breakthrough at all.

Henry had not been recognized for his groundbreaking achievement, and now he was being told to return to the South once more. Playing in Atlanta meant confronting the South all over again, with its contradictions and its conditions. It meant being reduced once more to a person with no rights and no dignity. That had been hard enough when he was a kid, when he knew no better. But in 1966, Henry was thirty-two years old, was earning $70,000 per season, and was on a clear Hall of Fame path. He was famous and accomplished and angered that in the South all he had produced could be taken away by a teenage store clerk or an average housewife, just because they were white and he was not.

“I have lived in the South
¹⁸²
and I don’t want to live there again,” Henry told a reporter in 1964. “This is my home. I’ve lived here since I was a kid 19 years old. We can go anywhere in Milwaukee. I don’t know what would happen in Atlanta.”

In Milwaukee, Henry fought hard for his comfort. During one offseason, he took a job as a spokesman for the Miller Brewing Company. In another, he and Bruton formed a small real estate company, the Aaron-Bruton Investment Co. When the team struggled as Perini and Bartholomay began to distance the Braves from the city, Henry volunteered to sell season-ticket packages to fans (but even the great Henry Aaron had little success once it became clear that Bartholomay had other plans for the franchise).

He had become a part of Milwaukee. By the early 1960s, just as Perini sold out to Bartholomay, Henry’s friendship with Bud Selig had grown stronger. Selig was already something of a name in Milwaukee, thanks to the family car dealerships and the powerful connections he had made at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His college roommate was Herbert Kohl, who would go on to a long career in Wisconsin and national politics. Both Kohl and Selig maintained a strong interest in sports and both would one day own professional sports clubs. One of Selig’s fraternity brothers, Lewis Wolff, built a fortune as a real estate developer. Selig, with his folksy demeanor, would often be easily underestimated. He was not the loudest or the most opinionated person, and yet he possessed a deceptively keen ability to gain the ear and confidence of a majority of people in any given situation. For years, Selig would cultivate a persona as someone who just happened to fall into leadership positions, and it was that persona that provided a certain cover for his own desires and vision. Bud Selig was driven and ambitious, with an understated, but no less fierce, desire to lead.

Selig also knew how to navigate in various arenas. One that held his attention above the rest was baseball, and he had made his first inroads modestly, befriending players by doling out favors. When he was younger, his father sent him to the annual business school in Dearborn, Michigan, sponsored by Ford, where Selig learned the car business. While there, he met a fellow student who happened to be friends with Frank Torre. Soon, Torre and Selig became friendly, and after that first introduction, Bud Selig became the man players went to when they needed cars during the season. When Torre’s younger brother Joe was called up to the big club, it was Bud Selig who sold Joe Torre his first car, a 1961 Thunderbird.

Selig’s relationship with Henry flourished at City Stadium, home of the Green Bay Packers. Selig was a die-hard season-ticket holder, a devoted worshiper of all things Lombardi. Henry, meanwhile, was committed to the Cleveland Browns, and the two men built a friendship around football, around Ray Nitschke and Jim Brown. Selig did not remember who initiated the first contact between the two, but he recalled Henry, predictably in those times, as quiet, somewhat unsure of himself, but with a dark, sarcastic sense of humor.

He would never call Henry Hank, and it was a subtlety that accelerated Bud Selig into Henry’s inner circle.

“I don’t think it was on purpose. It definitely wasn’t calculated, but it just seemed natural to me,” Selig said. “Henry Aaron. That was his name. I don’t think I ever called him ‘Hank.’”

Bud Selig was eating his breakfast when he read Bob Broeg’s piece in
The Sporting News
in 1964, which confirmed what he and other Milwaukeeans had refused to believe: The Braves were leaving. The Milwaukee press was quick to cover the story, albeit slower to analyze the implications. Ollie Kuechle, the sports editor and columnist of the
Journal
, had maintained that the Braves were not leaving. The mayor of Milwaukee may have been a Braves shareholder, but the king of Wisconsin, Lombardi, was one, as well, and both were in the dark. “Yes, Vince was a shareholder. He was on the Braves board,” Selig recalled. “And even he couldn’t save them.”

Selig remembered finishing the story and thinking it was the “worst day of my life.” He then began to canvass Milwaukee businessmen to mount a counterattack. If the Braves were going to be stolen, he would form a committee that would attract another team to Milwaukee, taking the first steps toward becoming the man who was synonymous with baseball in Milwaukee. From watching his team be yanked away, Selig would learn the rules of power and would vow to return big-league baseball to the city. While Doyne had once denounced “piracy,” Selig was naked in his coveting of vulnerable teams. Once the Braves departed, Selig staged exhibitions for the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians, with the hope of attracting them to Milwaukee.

Over thirteen years in Milwaukee, only the Dodgers outdrew the Braves on average, and that franchise played in the megalopolises of New York City and Los Angeles. As far as Bud Selig was concerned, his city had done everything right and had still ended up with a handful of sawdust. Selig was thirty-one when the Braves played their final season in Milwaukee, and he decided he would not stand on the fringes of power again. For the better part of the next half century, Bud Selig would, in his own seemingly unassuming way, become one of the game’s most astute and formidable power brokers. In later years, when baseball made both men extremely wealthy, Selig recalled that Bartholomay would often joke with him, telling him that the wrenching years of the mid-1960s were the best thing that could have happened to Selig. Without his having moved the Braves to Atlanta, Selig remembered Bartholomay telling him, Bud Selig never would have become what he would ultimately be: the most powerful man in baseball.

B
ARBARA
A
ARON DID
not want to believe the Braves were considering Atlanta. When the rumors first surfaced that relocation was a real possibility and that she, Henry, and the children would be moving back to the South, she felt her heart sink with profound disappointment. The house in Mequon was a handsome ranch, with a proud brick facade and a long, rambling roof that featured two cathedral peaks. The sprawling, manicured front lawn sloped sharply downward toward the street. The front of the house looked majestic in winter, a dense sheet of snow enveloping the lawn, leaving an unbroken swath of white, in contrast to the black pavement of the long driveway.

Living in Wisconsin had provided Barbara with a certain level of comfort and dignity, and she did not believe this would be true in Georgia. She was the wife of the famous Henry Aaron, and such ballplayers were always afforded special dispensation, but she also knew the codes of the South were considerably less respectful of Henry’s fame. The more notorious places, the rural areas and cities such as Birmingham, which collectively seemed to revel in their reputations, even sought out prominent blacks with the intention of humiliating them, to remind them that, despite their education or accomplishment, they were still at the core niggers, permanently beneath the lowest white man of any social class.

Atlanta’s historical personality was one of moderation and compromise, but the end result in the early 1960s was generally the same: Whites on top, blacks on the bottom. The family now risked having everything they’d earned in Milwaukee taken away by the denigrating ways of life in the South. Education was a primary concern for Barbara. Hankie, Gaile, Lary, and Dorinda were all enrolled in public school, and the thought of them having to leave an integrated school in Wisconsin to attend a segregated school in Atlanta particularly galled her. As a family, the Aarons had come too far to go back. Despite the fact that the Aarons were the only black family in Mequon (and the reality that, in ostensibly tolerant Milwaukee, only Henry’s outsized fame allowed them to live there), Barbara nevertheless had made friends and believed that she was part of a growing community.

She had been raised in Jacksonville, nearly as close to Atlanta as Henry had been in Mobile. She had heard the predictions about what Atlanta was going to be like, despite the apparent protections that had been promised the players and the team. During Bartholomay’s and McHale’s secret meetings with the Atlanta people, particularly Mayor Allen and the ubiquitous Bob Woodruff, the head of Coca-Cola and the most powerful businessman in the region, the Braves had been promised that seating in the Atlanta stadium would not be segregated. All tickets would be available to all fans. Black fans could sit in whatever seats they could afford, and Allen had promised there would be no nefarious pricing schemes that would promote de facto segregation. Allen told Bartholomay that the rest rooms, concessions, and all public facilities would be integrated.

But what if those were just words, bargaining chips necessary to get an important deal done, to keep the best player on the club from making a fuss? The Braves weren’t going to refuse a multimillion-dollar move to Atlanta just because of the racial concerns the black people or players had. Had Henry’s objections been a consideration, the team wouldn’t have considered the South in the first place. Even if the Braves kept their promises, Barbara thought, she would have to live in the world beyond the ballpark. She’d have to take the kids to school and shop and deal with an environment she regarded with dread. What most whites did not understand, and indeed it was virtually impossible to do so, was the level of humiliation blacks in the South were forced to endure. In later years, when the confrontations of the civil rights movement would be documented in film and other media, the standard humiliations of separate drinking facilities and rest rooms would become so clichéd (and completely uncomprehensible to a new generation of black and white Americans), their mention would lose virtually all power to shock. It was not just the big humiliations that had to be borne, but the constant, daily, nagging small ones, as well. The depth of the racial prejudice, of just what whites truly believed about blacks, however, could not be underestimated. About a year before Bartholomay and Allen first began secretly negotiating the move, the relationship between Atlanta’s black community and Rich’s, the largest department store in the Southeast, had begun to deteriorate. For years, blacks were angered by the treatment they encountered at Rich’s while spending their hard-earned money. “Not only were blacks forbidden to sit
¹⁸³
at the Rich’s lunch counter,” wrote Gary Pomerantz in
Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn
, his groundbreaking book about the white Allens and black Dobbses, the political families who transformed modern Atlanta, “they also could not try on clothes before buying them. The Atlanta department store’s rule of thumb was that white customers would not buy clothes if they knew blacks once had sampled them.” When the Braves move was finalized, it was Rich’s (“Atlanta born … Atlanta owned … Atlanta managed”) which became one of the Braves first advertisers.

Bob Hope, an Atlanta teenager and rabid baseball fan who called the Braves for an internship a year before the team had finalized the move, knew how ingrained the white attitudes regarding black hygiene truly were. “When I was in high school,
¹⁸⁴
our football coach told us that the sweat of a black kid would burn you,” Hope recalled. “They told us black kids wouldn’t just tackle you but in the piles they would bite you and you’d get diseases. That was one of the reasons why we never played against black teams.”