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. I was scared as hell, 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 Hank Aaron at bat. I had goosebumps, he said later. A lot of things happened to me in my twenty-three years as a...