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I t’s a long way from down the bay, as they say on the Gulf Coast in Mobile, Alabama, to the Chippewa River in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. In 1952, the year he turned eighteen, Henry Aaron made a round trip and realized one thing: He was good enough to play pro baseball. Before then, he didn’t know. Metaphorically speaking, 1952 was Henry Aaron’s first home run, a hit all the way across the country, a success that would foreshadow the extent of his fame in the coming years. Because Aaron grew up in Mobile, Mobile and not Eau Claire should probably get most of the credit for sending him to the Major Leagues. Mobile must have had good gumbo, good water, or good blood lines because it also was the hometown of Satchel Paige, Billy Williams, Willie McCovey, Ozzie Smith—all Hall of Famers as well—and a few other pretty good major leaguers: Amos Otis, Tommie Agee, Cleon Jones. But Mobile—a former slave trading post and the last major city in the Confederacy to fall during the Civil War—was segregated and not an easy place for a black ballplayer to get noticed. Brothers Frank and Milt Bolling, who became major leaguers in the 1950s and 1960s, grew up near some of these black future baseball stars. Yet they had no idea who their neighbors were because they lived on the other side of the tracks. Milt, who played for the Boston Braves in the early 1950s, was once asked if he knew Henry Aaron. “Well, it turns out he only lived a few blocks from me. We lived a block and a half this side of the railroad tracks, Hank Aaron lived maybe a block and a half on the other side. Never heard of 3 c h a p t e r 1 North to the Northern league him, and he’s only a year younger than I am,” Bolling said in Larry Moffi’s This Side of Cooperstown. When Aaron began playing baseball with his father, brothers, and friends in a vacant neighborhood lot in Mobile, hitting bottle caps with a broomstick, he dreamed of being Jackie Robinson. Born February 5, 1934, Aaron had just turned thirteen when Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947. On that day, Robinson crossed the railroad tracks for blacks everywhere. The event stirred big ideas in the adolescent Aaron. “When Jackie Robinson got that opportunity, every black person around the country said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a chance now.’ I knew if I played well I had a chance to get out of Mobile,” Aaron said. “Without Jackie Robinson, there wouldn’t have been any Hank Aaron.” By the spring of 1952 Aaron was out of Mobile. In the summer of 1951 he had been playing shortstop on Sundays with a semipro team in Mobile, the Black Bears. The owner of the Black Bears knew the owner of the traveling Indianapolis Clowns, Syd Pollock, who promptly came to Mobile to get a look at young Henry. Pollock liked what he saw and said he would send him a contract the next spring. Aaron turned eighteen in February of 1952 but was still in high school when he apprehensively got on a train with two dollars, two pairs of pants, and two sandwiches and left for spring training with the Clowns in Winston-Salem, North Carolina . He was on his own for the first time, and more than once he thought about getting off the train and going back home. As it turned out, Aaron was catching one of the last trains to the Negro Leagues. The Negro National League folded in 1948 after Robinson and other stars went to the majors, and the Clowns were the only drawing card left in the Negro American League, which was down to six teams and fading fast. The Clowns originated in the 1930s in Miami as the Ethiopian Clowns. Their crowd-pleasing antics, such as playing shadowball and throwing confetti on the fans, eventually were emulated by the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team. Goose Tatum played on the Clowns and the Globetrotters. Jesse Owens played for the Clowns in the 1930s and Satchel Paige in the 1960s. Some Negro League players in the 1940s thought the Clowns gave the league a bad reputation. The Clowns had a juggler, a contortionist, a midget, and an ambidextrous pitcher, Double Duty Green. Their acts 4...

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