The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (40 page)

Only after Gil Hodges singled to load the bases did Haney finally call for McMahon, but putting a pitcher in a bases-loaded, nobody-out situation in the other team’s stadium is not a blueprint for success. Norm Larker hit a two-run single to make it 5–4, and still nobody out. Another Brooklyn legend, Furillo, tied it at 5–5 with a sacrifice and the game went into extra innings.

In the eleventh, Henry stood on third, with the bases loaded and two out, but Stan Williams stymied Adcock. Bob Rush entered the game in the bottom of the eleventh and did the same, escaping with the bases loaded. With two out and nobody on in the bottom of the twelfth, Hodges walked, and then took second when Joe Pignatano singled off Bob Rush.

That brought up Furillo, thirty-seven years old, leg-heavy, and out of place in Los Angeles, another member of the Brooklyn old guard soon to be phased out by progress. Furillo took a fastball from Rush and drilled it past short, or so it looked. Mantilla dived and stabbed the ball, keeping it in the infield, seemingly saving the season … but then he scrambled to his feet and fired wide to first. The ball screamed past Frank Torre, heading toward the dugout. Hodges, big number 14, skipped home deliriously, holding his head with both hands in disbelief before spreading them wide, anticipating the embrace.

Mantilla could not speak afterward, unashamed that he cried on his stool, unable to compose himself, unable to give interviews. The Braves had led in both games and yet lost each of them and the season.

Fifty years later, Frank Torre could still see the final play of the season, clear and in slow motion. “The Coliseum was a football field.
¹⁴¹
Mantilla was in for Logan. Gil Hodges was a slow runner. Mantilla got the ball and he threw it in front of me, and what I was trying to do was put my body in front to block it. The infield was football sand, and football sand was a beachlike sand. It went into the sand and bounced over my head. It was impossible to block it—and the winning run scored. I’m six-foot-three, and you had to listen to the crap, ‘Gil Hodges woulda blocked that ball.’ … It was pathetic.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, in Los Angeles, Joe Reichler of the Associated Press ran a story saying that Fred Haney would be leaving the club as manager, the victim of another bitter defeat and the change of management. Birdie Tebbetts, the needling former catcher and manager of the Reds, was now in the Braves front office. Haney blew a small gasket when denying the rumors. “Absolutely untrue,” he said. “Anyone can write a story and ascribe it to a ‘trusted source.’”

Two days later, he quietly and solemnly resigned as manager of the Braves, and the Braves did not try to stop him.

A
ND SO
F
RED
H
ANEY
left, and with him the magic and allure of Milwaukee baseball during the 1950s. Haney was merely the symbol of the change, not the catalyst. He was sixty-one years old, and despite having won six of every ten games he managed with the Braves, he would never again manage at the big-league level. Haney had arrived in Milwaukee having never finished higher than sixth in the previous six years he’d managed, but he left with a World Series title, two pennants, and the bittersweet memories of a moment in baseball history that would not last long after he and his wife headed for California.

For all the disappointment about the way the season had ended, Henry saw the future as something to look forward to. He’d played hard, had played to win, and looked at his teammates with respect. Nevertheless, there would be the lasting pain of failure, of coming up so short. That part, Henry could handle. Losing when his teams should have won more, well, that would gnaw at him for fifty years.

In his autobiography
I Had a Hammer
, Henry commented on his disappointment:

Every team has its “ifs” and “buts,”
¹⁴²
but that doesn’t make it any easier. It still bothers me that we were only able to win two pennants and one World Series with the team we had. We should have won at least four pennants in a row. The fact is, we had them and we blew them. If we had done what was there for us to do, we would have been remembered as one of the best teams since World War II—right there with the Big Red Machine and the A’s of the seventies and the Dodgers and the Yankees of the fifties. But we didn’t do it, and in the record book we’re just another team that won a World Series. Damn it, we were better than that.

Though deep in his heart he felt the atmosphere of Milwaukee had changed, he was the most brilliant young star in the game, who, at least statistically, may have competed with more dynamic rivals, while looking up at no one, the great Mantle and Mays included. He had played in pennant races virtually every year since he’d entered the league. He had been disappointed before the first game of the play-off that so few Milwaukee fans had showed up, but he did not place the appropriate significance of the moment until years later.

Henry had fallen into the lethal baseball trap of believing in the endless summer. The pain of losing again to the Dodgers was considerable, but to Henry’s mind, a great team losing was nothing more than the awful price of competition. The year 1960 awaited, the players coming back would be the same, and as a group they had always played at or very near the top.

To Henry, they would simply win it all next year. He had no way of knowing that the day Spahn walked off the mound at Yankee Stadium after game four would be as close to winning the World Series as he would ever come again.

PART THREE
LEGEND

CHAPTER TEN
RESPECT

You ache with the need
¹⁴³
to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all of the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful
.

—Ralph Ellison

I
N
F
EBRUARY
1964, Henry celebrated his thirtieth birthday, and the various rivers of his life, both competing and complementing, reached a critical convergence. Gaile was ten, Hankie six, Lary six, and Dorinda two (she was born on Henry’s birthday, February 5, 1962). Months earlier, he and Barbara had celebrated a decade of marriage. So much of what he had envisioned had coalesced: Months before, he had completed his tenth season in the major leagues, his position not only as a premier player in the game but as quite possibly one of the greatest to have ever played the game cemented. All of his benchmarks, active or retired—Robinson, Musial, DiMaggio, and Mays—were now peers.

For a place that had once been foreign and unsettling, Milwaukee was now home. The family had lived in the suburb of Mequon for five years, Henry’s connection to the city and its people growing only stronger. He at once understood the contradictions that came with his stature: He was often subject to the humiliations and limitations that came with being black, and yet his fame insulated him from some of the very conditions suffered by the average black family. Indeed, Henry was aware that the Aarons were
allowed
to move into Mequon in the first place only because he was
the
Hank Aaron, a fact Father Groppi and his supporters often noted with increasing volume during the turbulent rallies for housing desegregation that came to define 1960s Milwaukee.

There was a reason,
¹⁴⁴
the Groppi followers always said, that the Aarons were the only black family living in Mequon, and the reason was certainly not the city’s heightened level of tolerance. Groppi and Aaron did not have any formal relationship. Henry was not active in the desegregation battles in Milwaukee, but Groppi nevertheless used Henry and his fame as an example of the racial inequities in the city’s housing practices.

If Henry remembered the difference between how he and his fellow black teammates were regarded and the treatment afforded Willie Mays back during his barnstorming tour of the South following his second year in the league, he also now understood that in Milwaukee, being Hank Aaron represented no small advantage, either. In certain situations, the disparity between the famous Henry Aaron and the common black person in Milwaukee was so great that it made him uncomfortable, for Henry’s internal compass had never been turned toward superiority over others—especially other blacks—regardless of the perks gained because of his talent. While he would for fifty years hold a special place in his heart for Milwaukee, he would acknowledge the painful merits of the Groppi argument: It was definitely his fame, he later decided, that had made his time there so special.

This was a position common to famous blacks in the 1950s and 1960s, the movie stars, singers, and athletes whose talent provided opportunities that otherwise did not yet exist for the general black population, and being able to taste, even briefly, a world where color was not the defining aspect of life created a bittersweet worldview. There were some players, such as the St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson, who were cognizant of being treated with more humanity and dispensation by whites simply because of their athletic gifts. Gibson understood the uneasy balance of his position, and the worst part of it all was how immediately transparent the change in disposition of those same whites could be once they discovered he was not Pack Robert Gibson, taxi driver from Omaha, Nebraska, but
Bob Gibson
, the great Cardinals pitcher, who provided so much success and glory to the home team and enjoyment to the paying customers, the majority of whom were white. “It’s nice to get attention and favors,
¹⁴⁵
but I can never forget the fact that if I were an ordinary black person I’d be in the shithouse, like millions of others,” Gibson once told the writer Roger Angell. “I’m happy I’m
not
ordinary, though.”

Similarly, such discomfort did not fail to have an effect on Henry. As he grew more prominent, he resolved that he must do more with his special status than buy a house in a nice neighborhood or receive a better table at the exclusive restaurants that did not admit blacks but made exceptions for him. His abilities, he believed, needed to translate into his having greater significance than those vapid, individual perks. As he rose, Henry believed his responsibility included helping the less fortunate.

For his years in public life, Henry would become known for his consistency on the baseball diamond, far past the point of weary cliché. Yet, to the people closest to him, it was his sense of duty, combined with a certain steely, uncompromising compassion, that struck them the most. One example was his friendship with Donald Davidson, the Braves publicity man, who went back with the franchise to its days in Boston. Davidson happened to be a dwarf, all of four feet tall, and if the news stories always contained a mention of a black player’s race, Davidson could not escape mention of his diminutiveness. There were some members of the Braves who played tricks on him—Spahn and Burdette, naturally—but Henry was very protective of Davidson.

“You always knew he was a serious man,”
¹⁴⁶
said Joe Torre, Frank Torre’s kid brother, who joined the Braves in 1961. “You always knew he had strong commitment to people. And it’s not something that he bragged about. And I think that was one of the most admirable things about Henry. He was quiet. He didn’t advertise it, but you just knew.”

H
UNTING SATISFIED
Henry’s need for adrenaline. It also served as an extension of his desire for open space and solitude, in a sense no different from his days as a boy in Toulminville, when he would escape to an isolated fishing spot on Three Mile Creek, being at a peaceful distance, seeking a retreat from the world. Early in his career, he and Barbara would return to Mobile almost as soon as the season ended, but after Henry had purchased the Mequon house, he would spend at least part of the off-season in Milwaukee, even though Lary and, periodically, Gaile still lived in Mobile with Estella and Herbert. In 1960, an old friend of Henry, Lefty Muehl, who played in the long-since-vanished Illinois-Iowa-Indiana league and was a part-time scout in the Braves organization, invited Henry to Doland, South Dakota, to shoot pheasant, and fall hunting became something of an annual pastime for him.

Soon, a routine formed:
¹⁴⁷
Henry would leave Milwaukee and head west, through Minnesota and into South Dakota, at some points along Route 90 and Route 94, stretches of the nascent Eisenhower Interstate System, the new superhighways that were connecting towns and cities across America. Henry and Lefty would scour little Spink County, the cluster of a half dozen cities nestled in the northeast corner of the state, hunting game. There were Doland (population 267, boyhood home of Hubert H. Humphrey), Frankfort (where Lefty Muehl grew up), Ashton, Conde, Mellette, and especially Redfield (known locally to South Dakotans as the “Pheasant Capital of the World”). Henry and Lefty would snare the legal limit (and maybe then some). Muehl told Henry he would introduce him to a hunting paradise. He was not exaggerating, for the region was famous for its pheasant, attracting hunters, as well as celebrities from the sports world and from Hollywood, the enclave rich who fancied shooting. There was just one problem: When the rich and famous arrived in Spink County, everyone knew who they were. Privacy and discretion were essential, and that was where Audrey Slaughter came in. She and her husband, Rich Wilson, were the proprietors of the Wilson Motel. According to local legend, Audrey ran the tightest switchboard in America. The kids in the neighborhood may have heard the rumors that a big name was in town—the great stunt cyclist Evel Knievel would be a frequent visitor in the 1970s—but the phone at the Wilson Motel leaked no secrets. Once, word swept through Redfield like a dust storm that Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter himself, was in town. “My mother was so mad,”
¹⁴⁸
recalled lifelong Redfield resident Ted Williams, who as a teen heard that his namesake and hero was staying at the Wilson. “She knew the woman who ran the hotel. They were friends and she
still
wouldn’t tell us what room Ted Williams was in.”

It was while hunting in Doland that Henry met State Senator Lawrence E. Kayl, whose daughter attended the school. When the hunting ended, Henry would not return to Milwaukee immediately, but would leave Doland and drive twenty miles to Redfield, continuing along State Road 212 until he reached a cold eleven-building complex that stood ominously above the reddish clay flatlands. Each time when he arrived, the children were waiting for him.

T
HE MISSION STATEMENT
for the Northern Hospital for the In sane, written near the turn of the twentieth century, stated the complex was not designed for the mentally ill, but for people suffering from a “developmental disability.” In 1913, the institution was renamed the State School and Home for the Feeble Minded, and it would be officially known as such for nearly the next four decades. Between 1951 and 1989, the name changed once more, to the Redfield State Hospital and School, and today, the buildings still stand, though in a time when attitudes regarding mental illness are more tolerant. Officially, it is now known as the South Dakota Developmental Center, a kinder, more clinical name, for certain. But for generations of South Dakotans, the old name stuck, and locally and colloquially the hospital would always be known as the “Feeble Minded School.” Ted Williams, the Redfield boy once rebuffed by Audrey Slaughter at the Wilson Motel in his attempts to meet his namesake, would years later become superintendent and resident historian of the school. He would accept the former names of the school as at once embarrassing, painful reminders of the society’s lack of sensitivity toward mental disabilities, but he also understood the terminology reflected the orthodoxy of the day. In that, Redfield was not alone. In 1881, years before the school first opened, Minnesota dedicated the Minnesota Institute for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, adding a wing to that institution in 1887, officially known as the School for Idiots and Imbeciles, the critical difference between the two—according to medical definitions that would in later years be recanted—being that an idiot maintained an IQ under twenty, an imbecile slightly above. In 1890, Indiana opened the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth, and the famed American eugenicist Henry Goddard, generally credited with inventing the term
moron
as a clinical definition, was the director of the Training School for Backward and Feeble-Minded Children, in Vineland, New Jersey.

When Henry arrived in Redfield, he would be surrounded by hordes of eager small children. Some inmates, institutionalized for life, were nearly adults, and some were within five or six years of Henry’s age. Henry would stay for hours, spread out with the residents on one of the two large baseball diamonds on the property, patiently instructing the young ones how to run and throw and swing a baseball bat, encouraging strong throws and vigorous swings, the actual lessons far less valuable than the time spent. “I remember it well.
¹⁴⁹
I was working with one of the youngsters and he was about three feet away from me. He took the ball, wound up, and threw as hard as he could. He hit me right in the chest,” Henry recalled with laughter. “I was happy to go up there and spend time with the children, but it was
dangerous.”
Howard Chinn, superintendent of the school from 1961 to 1973, recalled that Henry was eager to organize a game with the kids, except for one major problem, which scotched the idea: gopher holes. Chinn remembered gophers burrowing into the grass, creating dangerous divots in the field, and Henry had no intention of having to explain to Lou Perini that he was out for the season because he’d snapped one of his brittle ankles by catching his foot in a gopher hole in South Dakota.

The practice of an athlete visiting sick children dated way back, like so much in American sporting culture, to the legend of Babe Ruth, and over the years, in the face of image burnishing, it would be met with great and often deserved cynicism, considered hardly much more than an exercise in manipulation: the fail-safe photo op. Against the current backdrop, such visits are often viewed as the ultimate cliché, athletes paying social penance for enormous salaries that in years to come would engulf and distort the sports culture. And, worse, they are often viewed as a self-serving opportunity for athletes to cleanse their reputations, thereby increasing their own marketability. In today’s world, even a nonpublicized visit can hold great currency in the image-making business, transparent acts of self-aware selflessness. But 1963 was different. With Henry, there were no television crews in tow, no photographer, and no publicist. There were no friendly local columnists trading access for some good publicity (who knew the real Henry Aaron sneaked away on goodwill missions to South Dakota, and snagged a bagful of birds, too?), and there were no well-timed, perfectly managed news leaks designed to get the word out that a big-time ballplayer hadn’t forgotten the little people. On the dusty plains hundreds of miles from his own cultural sphere, there was no advantage for Henry to gain except in whatever he offered of himself to the children of the Redfield school, and whatever emotional currency they could return to him. Henry told virtually no one about his visits. He never even told anyone on his own
team
. In later recollections, his closest teammates—Mantilla, Mathews, Covington—had never heard of the school, and they certainly didn’t know Henry knew anything about South Dakota. Howard Chinn did not remember Henry as a celebrity making an electric appearance that kept the town buzzing for weeks. Nearly fifty years later, living in Enid, Oklahoma, hard of hearing but sharp of mind, he recalled “a lone black fellow who played baseball”
¹⁵⁰
coming by for several years.