A Summer Up North: Henry Aaron and the Legend of Eau Claire Baseball

Chapter 3: On the Road in the Northern League

W hen Henry Aaron, Joe Torre, and legions of other Eau Claire minor leaguers weren’t playing at Carson Park, they were crisscrossing northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and even parts of Canada—the parts with roads—to play in the Northern League’s other ballparks. The scenery might have been pretty in places, but the routine of packing up equipment, driving hundreds of miles in summer heat while sandwiched into an un-airconditioned vehicle, then hopping out to play baseball in some Midwestern outpost even farther north or west than “Eau Where?” was the most forgettable part of being a minor leaguer. Easily. Or the most romantic, depending on your sense of humor. Torre, used to the bright lights of Brooklyn and New York, remembers warming up for games at some of the rickety, wooden Northern League ballparks and wondering when the groundskeepers would turn on the lights. They were on, teammates would tell him. Teams could take fourteen players on the road and sometimes an umpire , meaning one player was the odd man out, or, considering the cramped conditions, the lucky man out. Behind one of the cars was a two-wheel trailer with all the equipment. The cars were so burdened that the team sent four extra tires to make sure the players would get back. The roads were mostly gravel and shaky and dusty enough to rattle off the hubcaps, make sleeping difficult, and dislodge any intestinal blockage incurred from a succession of roast beef and mashed potato dinners at roadside cafés. 101 c h a p t e r 3 on the road in the northern league In 1952 Aaron and the Bears touched bases in ballparks as far away as Sioux Falls, South Dakota, near the Iowa border, Aberdeen, South Dakota, near the North Dakota border, and Grand Forks, North Dakota. In Grand Forks Aaron was about as far north as one could get in the lower fortyeight states—a long, long way from Mobile in terms of miles but especially of culture. Lefse, bratwurst, waving wheat and corn fields, pine-fringed freshwater lakes, dairy farms, ski-jumping towers on the horizons, Paul Bunyan folklore, and blond, blue-eyed, freckled, sunburned, innocentlooking Scandinavians. It wasn’t anything like the region where he grew up with its soul food, cotton fields, salt water, shipyards, paper mills, and black skin, the urban, segregated Gulf Coast city of Mobile with the shadowy history of the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy lurking behind the white folks he seldom came in contact with. For road trips the 1952 Bears piled into two nine-passenger 1949 Chrysler airport limousines plastered with Bears logos. The cars were hand-me-downs; they had been used the year before with the Braves’ Class A farm team in Hartford, Connecticut, in the Eastern League, so they had plenty of miles on them. Elmer Toth and Julie Bowers knew the cars well because they rode in them in 1951 while playing for Hartford. All the team equipment weaved behind the Chryslers as they headed out across the Mississippi River to the Minnesota prairies or up north to the Great Lakes Twin Ports, Duluth and Superior. Three players could sit in the front, three in the middle, and three in the back. Two jump seats behind the front seat were folded down and offered to the next game’s starting pitcher so he could lie down and get some uncramped rest, according to Chester Morgan, who often drove one of the cars (playermanager Bill Adair drove the other). “They’d go about eighty miles per hour, and that’s what we drove them. It was really scary. I figured if I was going to die I’d die behind the wheel.” One night, first baseman Dick Engquist was stopped by a state patrolman in Minnesota for driving one of the Chryslers about eighty miles per hour. Engquist began to plead his case to the officer, saying he was just a poor baseball player. Unfortunately, Engquist didn’t look like a Class C baseball player. “He had on green slacks, yellow and green alligator shoes, a big straw hat, and was smoking a big, black cigar. He looked like the biggest high roller you’d ever seen. The cop was unfazed,” pitcher Ken Reitmeier recalled. 102 on the road in the northern league The Northern League had eight...