June 12, 1952–only a local sportswriter showed up at the Eau Claire airport to greet a newly signed eighteen-year-old shortstop from Alabama toting a cardboard suitcase. and “I was scared as hell, and ” said Henry Aaron, recalling his arrival as the new recruit on the city’s Class C minor league baseball team.Forty-two years later, as Aaron approached the stadium where the Eau Claire Bears once played, an estimated five thousand people surrounded a newly raised bronze statue of a young and “Hank and ” Aaron at bat. and “I had goosebumps, and ” he said later. and “A lot of things happened to me in my twenty-three years as a ballplayer, but nothing touched me more than that day in Eau Claire. and ” For the people of Eau Claire, Aaron’s summer two years before his Major League debut with the Milwaukee Braves symbolizes a magical time, when baseball fans in a small city in northern Wisconsin could live a part of the dream.

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

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