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Me And Hank A Boy And His Hero, Tweny-Five Years Later by Sandy Tolan Free Press, 2000 | Buy the book

When the 1966 season began, Milwaukee, like a wounded lover, tried to move on. My friend T started rooting for the Chicago White Sox, ninety miles down the road. My dad suggested that perhaps I could pull for the Cubs, as he had as a boy, when there was only a minor league team in Milwaukee. The Cubs were okay; they had Ernie Banks and Billy Williams and Ron Santo -- but no Hank. Anyway, I couldn't pull for a Chicago team. I had to find a way to follow the Braves.

In that first season without them, I'd wait for dark, and scour the AM radio dial. Night after night, I'd pull in country preachers, and trucker talk shows, and distant oldies stations playing greaser music...and finally, one spring evening, a faint signal, coming in at 650 AM: "Felipe Alou the batter...Hammer on deck..."

The Hammer on deck! Hammerin' Henry Aaron! The Atlanta Braves, coming through the speakers in Milwaukee! Alone in the living room, I jumped up and down, again and again, pure elation surging through me. Now I could relax; I'd found Hank again.

Season after season, I'd listen through the pop and crackle of distant thunderstorms in Indiana or Tennessee. The station was WSM out of Nashville, 650, the voice of the Grand Ole Opry. When the signal faded, I'd flip over to 750, WSB in Atlanta. Chin on the living room rug, I'd scrawl on homemade scorecards, recording walks, hits, strikeouts and home runs, keeping track of my distant hero and his teammates: Phil Niekro, Ralph Garr, Dusty Baker, Cecil Upshaw, Felix Millan. Sometimes my mom or my sister Mary would come in and shake their heads in amazement. All they could hear was static. But through the buzzing I could make out the voice of Milo Hamilton, the Braves' new play-by-play man: "Here's the pitch to the Hammer....There's a drive, deep into the power alley in left....That thing is...OUTTA HERE!"

Great as it was to follow Hank from afar, these were my baseball-formative years, and I was deprived of a home team. So was the rest of Milwaukee. In the summer of 1967, a young car dealer tried to come to our rescue. Bud Selig of Knippel-Selig Ford arranged for an exhibition game between the Chicago White Sox and the Minnesota Twins to be played at County Stadium.

I went to the game with my mom. Dad couldn't come; lately, he was having trouble walking. We were worried, and so were the doctors. They said that Dad would probably need a special diet and some kind of exercise. Beyond that, they weren't sure what would help.

Mom and I sat in the lower grandstand behind home plate. We yelled a lot. We stomped our feet. The grandstands were packed, the box seats were packed, the upper deck and the bleachers were packed. Selig roped off standing-room-only fans four and five deep along the outfield warning track. When Twins left fielder Bobby Allison went back on a fly ball and spiked a kid, drawing blood on the boy's shin, I was jealous: Allison escorted the boy off the field, to the cheers of 50,000. The kid got to sit in the Twins' dugout and get patched up by the trainer.

It was the biggest crowd ever to see a game at the stadium: 51,114. Five thousand more were turned away at the gate. The Twins won, but nobody cared. We cared about sending a message. "MILWAUKEE:" shouted a big homemade sign in the bleachers. "We Deserve a Major League Team."

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