The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (15 page)

Blacks were marginalized in a tight quarter of the city, nicknamed “Bronzeville,” which was roughly the rectangle bordered by State Street to the south, North Avenue to the north, and Third and Twelfth streets to the east and west, respectively. The name Bronzeville was most likely a descendant of the black section of Chicago, the destination city for so many southern blacks during the great migration. Bronzeville was managed so tightly by the restrictive housing patterns and lending practices of area banks that a study undertaken by the Milwaukee Commission on Human Rights—titled
The Housing of Negroes in Milwaukee, 1955
—concluded:

The free choice of residence
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in the open housing market which ecologically stratifies most of our population in terms of income, education and occupation is not operative in the case of Negroes. All those restricted within the arbitrary confines of the racial ghetto must find shelter as best they can within its circumscribed bounds. The Negro middle and upper classes, regardless of their education, skills, professional accomplishments—if their skin is dark—must reside in the slum. The fact that they dislike the disorganizing and predatory features as greatly as do their white social status counterparts avails them naught.

Henry and Barbara, who was now pregnant, rented an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street, close to Bill Bruton and Jim Pendleton. Henry was eager to breathe the air of the big leagues—to measure his ability against the top competition in the sport, to absorb the fullness of the dream of being a major-league ballplayer—but navigating his new city outside of the ballpark was a far less attractive challenge. He had always been the boy who wanted to escape, the one most comfortable in his own private space or on the baseball diamond, not easily gregarious by nature. Thus, it wasn’t with great enthusiasm that Henry went about the inevitable but important chore of wading through the idiosyncrasies of his new city, even though he was immediately taken by the nightlife there. Milwaukee was not Chicago, but when it came to hoisting a glass, it was on par with any city. “The first thing I noticed about Milwaukee,”
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Henry would say, “was the number of bars. Milwaukee was definitely a drinking town.”

More than any other player on the Braves, it was Billy Bruton who eased Henry’s transition. “If it weren’t for Bill Bruton,”
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Henry would say, “I don’t know if I would have made it those early years. He was like a big brother and a father to me, all at the same time. He showed me the way.”

Eight years older than Henry, William Haron Bruton was born November 9, 1925, in Panola, Alabama, on the outskirts of Birmingham. Unlike most of his teammates, including Henry, for whom baseball was the only destination, Bruton saw baseball as a vehicle that could provide greater opportunities and acceptance for him off of the field, opportunities not yet existing for blacks. As an adolescent, he moved to Wilmington, Delaware, with the childhood dream of becoming a chemist, but he would later say that he chose baseball because he believed that chemistry was not yet a field in which a person of color could succeed. He had not even begun to think of baseball as a career, because during his youth, the game had still been closed to black players. By the time he had been discovered playing center field for the San Francisco Cubs, a barnstorming club that toured the Midwest, Bruton was twenty-four years old, talented enough to play in the major leagues but too old to be taken seriously as a prospect by a major-league club. After the legendary scout Bill Yancey instructed Bruton to shave four years off of his age to make him more attractive to big-league clubs, the Boston Braves signed Bruton to a minor-league contract to play at Eau Claire. He was a tall and lean left-handed hitter, six feet tall but weighing barely 170 pounds, possessor of blazing speed and sharp defensive instinct. When Bruton was promoted to Denver before joining the Braves, he had been nicknamed “the Ebony Comet” by the local fans.

It was Jackie Robinson who received the attention, but Billy Bruton was one of the many unsung black players who had a special role in the integration of the game. Along with Roy White, he had integrated the Northern League two years before Henry arrived, and, like Henry, he had been welcomed into the home of Susan Hauck. Few players were as committed to challenging the conditions for black players in the game as Bill Bruton. He was as frustrated and impatient for equal opportunity as Robinson, yet he possessed interpersonal skills that made him popular with the overwhelmingly white Milwaukee fans—but not at the price of his dignity—without having to play the caricature of the disarming Negro. He did not raise his voice, or often show flashes of temper, but almost immediately after reaching the big leagues, Billy Bruton had become the de facto ambassador to Braves management for the black players of the team. He would be the first black player on the Braves to live year-round in Milwaukee, and being an older player—he was a twenty-seven-year-old rookie when he made his big-league debut in 1953—he was more mature than the younger players.

Bruton was serious and religious, and he immediately commanded the respect of his peers, even during a humiliating time. His wife, Loretta, did not attend spring-training games, because she refused to sit in segregated seating, apart from the wives of the white players. “There were beaches everywhere in Florida,
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but none where she could go with the other wives,” Bruton once said. “I had to eat in the kitchens of roadside restaurants … or wait for a Negro cab driver to come along and tell me where I could get a meal. All I could ask myself was, ‘How long would I have to suffer such humiliation?’”

Bruton was the black elder of the Braves, and he had immediately taken Henry under his wing. He taught Henry important aspects of the big-league life: how to tip, which cities were particularly difficult for black players, which parts of Milwaukee were friendly and which were not. Duffy Lewis had, in effect, made Bruton his deputy when it came to dealing with the logistics of the separate life black players were required to live. Lewis made Bruton his proxy. It was Bruton who handed out meal money and, most important in spring training, learned the transportation schedules of black cabdrivers and buses, as well as restaurants, barbershops, all of the details black players needed to know, being apart from the rest of the team.

I
NSIDE THE CLUBHOUSE
, the youth of the team served as a major benefit. It meant there would be less sifting through an established, rigid culture. Unlike most clubs that contended for a championship, the 1954 Milwaukee Braves possessed an optimism that stemmed more from talent than experience. The Braves were in gestation, a talented club high on potential but low on actual checks on their big-league résumés. The Rookie Rocket may not have been able to keep the club in Boston, but Perini was correct in his belief that his club was on the verge of becoming a force. Henry was now another addition to the Braves stockpile.

The lone exception was Warren Spahn, who represented the dominant personality of the clubhouse. In 1954, Spahn was thirty-three, eleven years older than Mathews, thirteen years older than Henry. He had been with the organization since before Pearl Harbor, having signed as an amateur free agent with the Boston Bees in 1940. When the Braves were poised to rise to prominence in their new home, Spahn was already the most gifted and prolific left-hander in the game.

He came from Buffalo and was from the outset a star athlete. His father, Edward, pitched in the semipro leagues and city teams in Buffalo and played on and managed traveling teams in Canada. The city teams had no age limits, and Edward Spahn and young Warren played on the same team.

He was, like most superior athletes, always competitive, on and off the field, but perhaps not exactly by choice.

“My grandfather was a shortstop,
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played third base on occasion when the team needed him to,” Warren Spahn’s son, Greg, recalled of his grandfather Edward Spahn. “He was a little, wiry guy. He absolutely loved baseball. He drove my father so much, he always told me he wasn’t going to do to me what his father had done to him. My father was given no other option but to play baseball. Looking back on it, I wish he would have driven me more. It was just an overreaction to what his father had done to him.”

There were qualities in his personality and background that set Warren Spahn apart from his contemporaries. The writers consistently made note of his extensive vocabulary, erudition, and wide interests, taking great effort to paint him as the pitcher as intellectual. His arrival in the big leagues in 1942 as a twenty-one-year-old was nearly his downfall. Casey Stengel, salty and unsentimental, was the Braves manager. Stengel banished Spahn to the minor leagues one day after he refused to throw at Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese during a spring-training game. “He told my father he did not have enough guts to be a major-league pitcher, and that became a big point of contention for my family over the next couple of years,” Greg Spahn said.

Spahn was drafted in 1942 and served three full years with the U.S. Army Combat Engineers. Unlike that of many higher-profile players, his military service was not a country club existence, putting on baseball exhibitions stateside for starry-eyed superiors. He saw combat in Europe, was wounded in Germany, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the monthlong battle along the Rhine, where 19,000 Americans were killed and another 47,000 wounded. He received a battlefield commendation in France. During the European campaign, Spahn suffered a shrapnel wound to the leg. For his wartime service, he would be awarded two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts.

“At the Bridge at Remagen his foot was hit by shrapnel from the bridge being bombed. At the Battle of the Bulge he suffered a laceration across the back of his neck,” Greg Spahn recalled. “He had a six-inch scar across the back of his neck. After he came back from the war, he would always say, ‘Pressure? This isn’t pressure. No one’s going to shoot at me if I don’t pitch well.’”

During the war, Warren met his wife, LoRene, a native Oklahoman, and the family settled in Broken Arrow, near her hometown. When he returned to the major leagues in 1946, Stengel was gone and Spahn, at twenty-five, won his first big-league game. He posted an 8–5 record in 1946 and then began one of the great pitching streaks in baseball history. In 1947, Spahn won twenty-one games and lost ten. The next year, the Braves won the pennant for the first time since 1914, with Spahn immortalized in baseball history by
Boston Post
sports editor Gerald V. Hern.

First we’ll use Spahn
then we’ll use Sain
Then an off day
followed by rain

Back will come Spahn
followed by Sain
And followed
we hope
by two days of rain

The poem survived the years as a two-verse rhyme, “Spahn and Sain and Pray for Rain.” For his part, Spahn went just 15–12 in 1948, producing the second-lowest win total of his career between 1948 and 1963. Johnny Sain, who won twenty-four that year, was the legitimate ace of the staff, but legend never worries about such details.

Like Johnny Logan, the shortstop, Spahn was hesitant about the move to Milwaukee. Months before Perini petitioned the National League to relocate, Spahn opened a restaurant in Boston, Warren Spahn’s Tavern on Commonwealth Avenue, just across from Braves Field.

Spahn was simply different, distant in age and experiences from the younger players. He was a practical joker but could possess a cruel sense of humor, one that could make other players uncomfortable. Over the years, the relationship between Warren Spahn and Henry Aaron would fluctuate. Henry thought Spahn took pleasure in being a merry antagonist, the kind of person who would locate someone’s most sensitive spot and use it as fertile ground for humor. Spahn’s personality was exactly the kind Henry disliked the most—the guy who needled others for fun. “Spahn and I,”
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Henry would say fifty years later, “we had our problems.”

While always respectful of each other’s considerable ability, the two were not always friendly. “Hank didn’t always get Dad, but they definitely had great respect for one another,” Greg Spahn recalled.

If Spahn was the established veteran on the young team, Eddie Mathews was symbolic of its youth and vitality. If Spahn was the old pro, Logan the gritty street fighter, Lew Burdette the wily and guileless old pro, and Henry the prodigy, Eddie Mathews was the instant star, the matinee idol who immediately gave a face to the Braves. From the start, though he played his first season in Boston, Mathews captured the imagination of the Milwaukee baseball fan in a way no other member of the Braves would.