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By late 1964, the papers were full of the unthinkable -- the Braves really did want to move to Atlanta. Milwaukee officials vowed to fight the move. We were worried.
So was Hank. "Aaron Plans to Investigate Problems of Atlanta Negro," said an October headline in the Journal. "I have lived in the south and don't want to live there again," Hank told the Milwaukee sportswriters. "I don't want to go on the road and find out one day that some Ku Klux Klan group has exploded a bomb in the area where my family is living. There have been a lot of bombings down south and nothing has been done to find the people responsible." The year before, four little black girls had been murdered in an explosion in a Birmingham, Alabama, church. And Bull Connor, the Birmingham public safety commissioner, had turned the dogs and fire hoses on black demonstrators. In Georgia, Lester Maddox, an up-and-coming segregationist politician who headed a group called Georgians Unwilling to Surrender (known by its initials, GUTS), was vowing never to abide by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When three young black ministers showed up to try to integrate Maddox's Pickrick restaurant, he threatened them with a pistol. Two years later, Maddox was elected governor. Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed that he was "ashamed to be a Georgian."
In early 1965, when the move was all but inevitable, Hank was invited to Atlanta by more moderate local officials, including the city's white mayor, Ivan Allen, and Georgia's lone black state legislator, Leroy Johnson. Before Hank left, he said that if the new Braves stadium were not completely integrated, he would refuse to play there.
Hank returned saying he could live and play in Atlanta after all. "Actually, Atlanta is not the south," he told a Journal sportswriter. "What I mean is, it isn't like the rest of the south. The only thing bad about it is it happens to be in Georgia. They have made tremendous progress in all phases" in Atlanta, Hank said. "The Negroes there are way ahead of the Negroes here. It's no contest. Sure they've got segregation problems there, but they've got them in Milwaukee, too. Up here they call it 'de facto segregation.' Down there they just call it segregation."
Still, Hank said, he didn't want to go if he could help it. "This is my home," he told the papers.
There was talk of suing the Braves to keep them in Milwaukee. But most people seemed resigned to the departure. Attendance was pathetic, a fact Braves officials were always quick to point out. In 1965 the team owners had the audacity to schedule five exhibition games in Atlanta, and these outdrew Milwaukee's first twenty-eight home games of the season.
A few times that year, the big crowds came. On Bat Day at County Stadium, at the urging of the public address announcer, we children held our wood aloft: 15,000 matchsticks, steady and silent in the late afternoon sun. It may have seemed like a final plea, or threat. Whatever it was, it didn't work. The Braves were leaving.
In one of my last trips out to see the Braves, a young outfielder named Rico Carty hit a pair of homers and a double. After the game I waited with Kath and a bunch of other kids for his autograph behind the Braves dugout. Rico was laughing and joking in Spanish with a teammate I can't remember. I was three kids away when he ducked his head and disappeared.
The Braves' last game in Milwaukee was September 22, 1965. Twelve thousand, five hundred seventy-seven mourners came to pay last respects. They gave Eddie Mathews a three-minute standing ovation when he came to bat in the eighth. The next inning, Hank and teammate Joe Torre got their own long cheers. "This I've never seen before," Hank said after the game. "Words can't describe the way I felt."
The Braves lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in eleven innings. Hank hit the final pitch, a line drive out to center field. A bugler played "Taps" on the Braves' dugout. The next morning the Milwaukee Sentinel ran a picture of Aaron and Mathews: Number 44 and Number 41, side by side, backs to the camera, on the long cement corridor to the Braves' clubhouse. Walking away.
"Great While It Lasted," said an editorial in the Journal. The mayor sought to reassure us that we were still a major league town: "Big league baseball teams do not make big league cities." If we judged ourselves on that basis, the mayor warned, "heaven help us!"
"Let 'em go," my brother Tom said, covering the wound of abandonment with disdain. "They stink now anyway." It was true; those who abandoned us were losers and no-names. Names like Spahn and Burdette and Bruton and Shoendienst had given way to Bolling and Woodward and Gonder and De La Hoz. But of course there was another name, which is why for me the sting wouldn't fade. The man who patrolled right field in my hometown, the great Henry Aaron, was leaving. What was I going to do with my hero 800 miles away?
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