The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  The difference was that these kids weren’t just learning how to adjust to curveballs far from home, nor were they integrating the game. They were integrating society. Henry would answer for the next half century the question of what those days in Eau Claire were like, being the only black person sitting at the drugstore counter, but the inverse was also true: The overwhelming majority of his white teammates had never engaged in a meaningful conversation with a black person, either.

  And the worst thing of all for an eighteen-year-old ballplayer was the lack of girls. Naturally, there were girls all over the place. Black girls, however … well, that was a different story. The Northern League consisted of teams in Eau Claire, Duluth, Fargo-Moorhead, Grand Forks, Aberdeen, Sioux Falls, and St. Cloud—not exactly the best advertisement to meet eligible black women.

  Herbert junior would often be the one to tell him to forget about the idea of coming back to Mobile, that there was nothing in Mobile for him. He would do himself no good being just another southern black boy without prospects. Herbert had persuaded him, boosted him, revived him. Then came the moment that transformed two lives: June 20, Carson Park, Eau Claire versus the Superior Blues, the White Sox farm club. Henry is playing shortstop. In the top of the eighth, Gordie Roach hits Superior’s Gideon Applegate and then walks the next batter, Chuck Wiles, the Superior’s catcher. The next ball, a chopper to second, would play in slow motion to anyone who was at the park that day.

  Bob McConnell fields the ball and flips to Henry for the first out, and Henry steps on the bag and winds to throw back to first for the double play.

  Wiles is racing for second but has not yet gone into his slide. Henry fires sidearm to first. These were the days before batting helmets. Wiles took the full force of Henry’s throw in the flesh of his right ear. He stood for a moment before crumpling to the ground, unconscious, while Applegate rounded third for the tying run. Wiles was taken off the field on a stretcher and rushed by ambulance to Luther Hospital.

  That might have been the end of the story, one of those fluky baseball accidents. Except that upon arriving at Luther Hospital, Wiles slipped into a coma, in which he remained for three days. His career was over. The doctors consoled the young catcher by telling him had his outer ear not borne the brunt of the impact, Henry’s throw would have killed him.

  Wiles spent two more weeks in the hospital, his inner ear crushed. He lost his equilibrium. Periodically, he would entertain the thought of returning. The next year, Wiles and his family moved to Albemarle, North Carolina, where he signed on with a semipro club, the Cotton Mill Boys, but the experiment ended in a heartbreaking finale, Wiles losing his orientation while on the base paths, to the amusement of fans, who thought he was joking. “One time I got to second base.30 I was determined I was going to get home,” Wiles told Jerry Poling. “I don’t think I even knew where I was. I missed home plate by a lot. The fans thought I was clowning.” Chuck Wiles never played baseball again.

  The Wiles incident rattled Henry, as would the vitriolic response from the Superior fans when Eau Claire next arrived. During moments of despair, he called home and told Stella he was returning to Mobile. Each time Henry called, Stella would hand the phone to his brother Herbert, who took the receiver and told him the same thing each time: “The future is ahead of you, not back here in Mobile.”

  For years, Henry would recall how close he came to quitting the game, fearful that he could kill someone on the baseball diamond. Not an interview regarding his Eau Claire years would pass without a reference to Chuck Wiles. Henry would be betrayed by his lack of world experience, for while Wiles lay in a coma, Henry hit his first home run for the Bears, June 22, against Reuben Stohs. Wiles would never hold a grudge against Henry and he would say he believed Henry was remorseful about the accident. But he also would never forget that Henry did not apologize or console him in person.

  Henry tore apart the Northern League. He played shortstop, wearing the number 6. He batted seventh in the order, consistent with the old-time custom of infielders batting low in the order. It was almost as if the isolation helped him. He had no distractions after the Wiles incident. On the field, he focused on his talent, developing an uncanny ability to compartmentalize, an attribute that would become a trademark. He played eighty-seven games for Eau Claire, hit .336, made the all-star team, and was named Most Valuable Player in the league. He was competing against players his own age, but they were just kids. In the Mobile industrial games and in the Negro Leagues, Henry had played against older competition for years.

  His homesickness subsided, his batting average soared, and Henry began to shed his introverted personality. The moment that best illustrates Henry’s evolution from a shy and uncomfortable young man, hamstrung by his southern upbringing, to a more confident one was his relationship with Susan Hauck, a white teenager who frequented Bears games with her girlfriends and hung out with the players away from the ballpark.

  The girls did not seem to care about how interracial friendships—or romances—were viewed by their friends or the community at large, but their nonchalance put Covington and Henry in a potentially dangerous situation. For example, there was the time Henry, Covington, and a group of Susan’s friends, all female, went to Elk Mound, Eau Claire’s stunning vista point—and designated make-out spot. As Hauck recalled for Jerry Poling, a group of white teens followed the group to the peak of the hill, only to find Susan and her friends—unaware that Henry and Covington were hiding in the bushes, petrified that they might be forced to duke it out with a gang of white boys.

  “It was never a romance.31 It was a friendship. I suppose people thought we were dating. I liked him,” Poling quoted Hauck as saying in A Summer Up North. “I guess you could say I was infatuated with him. Back then, if you would talk with a black person you were awful. I used to think that was wrong. I was never raised that way.”

  While Susan and Henry clearly shared a heightened level of intimacy, their relationship was not something Henry would ever again mention. Over the next fifty years, he would coauthor two books and write an autobiography, and never mention Susan Hauck and his relationship with her family. He ate dinner regularly with them, the guest of her parents, Arnold and Blanche Hauck. The two held hands often at her house. Two years earlier, in 1950, the Haucks had welcomed Billy Bruton into their home as warmly as they did Henry. The relationship between Susan and Henry, however, was more intense.

  “When you think about who Henry Aaron is32 and where he came from, it was all pretty remarkable,” Jerry Poling recalled. “Never mind what may or may not have gone on between them. Here was a guy who came from the worst segregation in the country and here he is holding hands with a white girl. I thought that was pretty amazing.”

  For the 1953 season, Henry was promoted a level, to the Braves Jacksonville club, but for a .336 hitter, it was not a major ascension. The club didn’t want to rush Henry, and thus it classified him at the A-ball level. Jacksonville was part of the notorious South Atlantic League, otherwise known as the “Sally League.” Jackie Robinson had just completed his sixth year in the majors, but the Sally League had not yet been integrated. Henry Aaron and a handful of others would be the first black players in what was widely considered to be the most hostile league for blacks in the minor-league system. Perhaps more than any minor league, the Sally represented the major challenge to integration. The Sporting News marked the moment:

  JACKSONVILLE AND SAVANNAH33

  SHATTER COLOR LINE IN SALLY

  COLUMBUS, GA.—After Savannah broke the color line for the first time since the circuit was organized in 1904… Jacksonville … followed suit by taking on three colored performers….

  The … Tars picked up three from Toledo … Shortstop Felix Mantilla, outfielder Horace Garner and Second Baseman Henry Aaron.

  HENRY WOULD HAVE a more difficult time even than Robinson. Where Robinson would have the benefit of going to his home ballpark in Brooklyn half of the time, the Sally League would play all of its ga
mes in the Deep South. Even the home park, Jacksonville, would not always be a friendly place. Henry knew he might be able to win over the home fans with spirited play, but off the field, he found that Jacksonville was another southern town that was not ready to treat him with any degree of humanity.

  Robinson played under the glare of the national press, which provided a certain degree of protection against the most virulent opposition. In the minor leagues, Henry would be isolated, and press coverage would be minimal. When Henry arrived in Jacksonville, another minor league, the Cotton States League, attempted to ban the Hot Springs franchise from competition for signing two black players—Henry’s old teammate with the Clowns, Jim Turgeson, and his brother Leander.

  His nerves were on edge. “We were in spring training and it was way across Georgia, and it was an old army camp field and they still had the bunk houses and that’s where we stayed,” one teammate remembered. “They had a couple of fields there. And Hank was playing left field one day, and now keep in mind he was young just like I was. All of the sudden he takes off from left field right during the ball game and heads towards the barracks where we were staying and nobody knew what the hell was going on. We talked to Hank later and he said there was a big snake out there in left field.”

  The small towns that comprised the league were notorious—societies with little sophistication that enforced Jim Crow laws ruthlessly. Jim Frey was a teammate of Henry in Jacksonville. Frey would be another one of those baseball men who was an average minor-league player, not quite good enough to reach the majors, but someone who possessed such an eye and enthusiasm for baseball that he would draw a paycheck from the game for his entire working life—as a manager, a general manager, a scout, and in numerous other capacities, as well.

  Jim Frey had been raised in the southern part of Ohio, a northern state that often possessed a southern mentality. He grew up in Bridgetown, west of Cincinnati, which was known during that time as a “sundown town,” which meant no blacks after dark. When Frey was a kid, his father, John, worked with a black handyman who did carpentry and stonework for the family. Frey recalled how his father had had to rush to escort the man out of town before the sun went down. Violating such local customs could be fatal for blacks, but it also posed danger for any sympathetic whites.

  “It was toward the country,34 just a little itty-bitty town. There weren’t many people there. In this particular town, at that time, and this was in the forties and fifties, the blacks had to get out of town, had to get to the next town in, which was Cheviot, Ohio. My dad had to get them to the car line by six o’clock. That was the rule.”

  Jim Frey held Henry in high esteem. He loved his talent, but he also felt acute personal pain because of the abuse Henry endured in Jacksonville during that 1953 season. “It was just terrible what he was subjected to,” Frey said. “And he just took it all and hit. Baseball is a hard-enough game when everyone is rooting for you. You cannot believe what it must have been like to be Henry Aaron in 1953. It was a heartbreaking thing to watch.”

  If Frey was aware of the treatment the black players faced, a certain reciprocity was also taking place. Henry and, to a lesser extent, Felix Mantilla were watching the white players, taking in how they responded to their teammates’ humiliations, who they were as men. If Frey was learning about the American South, Henry was learning about his white teammates and whether they would be friend or foe.

  Frey recalled the segregated grandstands at Luther Williams Field, where the Macon Peaches played. Every park in the Sally League separated its black fans from its white ones. Frey remembered being taken by the different elements of America colliding on the field one day in Jacksonville as he stood in the outfield, surrounded by the black faces in the crowd while simultaneously watching Henry fielding his position at second base as the home crowd, the whites, screamed at Henry to “go back to the cotton fields.”

  This was, both Mantilla and Frey agreed, how the 1953 season progressed, either in Jacksonville or on the road. “Which city was the worst?” Henry said. “You couldn’t say, because they were all bad.” Frey, who became great friends with Horace Garner, remembered being handed gifts by the black fans at the end of the season, thanking him for engaging with them all season. Previous white outfielders, Frey thought, must never have acknowledged the paying black fans, who sat in the corner sections.

  “My exposure to blacks mostly came [from baseball], because in the minor leagues, starting in Evansville, Indiana, in ’51 and then ’52 and then later in Jacksonville in ’53 and ’54, they were some of the first blacks that were allowed to play in professional baseball at that time,” Jim Frey recalled. “We went to a high school, Western Hills High School, which had about two thousand students at that time, and we only had a handful of blacks in the school. I doubt if there was more than one [black] family or two. I don’t think there were more than three or four black students in our school, which was a pretty big school. We had to go into Cincinnati to go to high school. We didn’t have one out in the country. We never had a lot of exposure to the blacks at that time.

  “It was first the Three-I League in the Midwest and the Sally League in the Southeast. I played with, I don’t know, several on each of those teams, and those players were the first or among the first who were allowed to play in the minor leagues at that time. A couple of them were Latins and the others were Americans and blacks, but they weren’t allowed to eat with us. In many areas, they weren’t even allowed to get off the bus at night, and they had to stay in different quarters. It was a different world then. It was tough on ’em. It was really tough on ’em.”

  In Jacksonville, three important events took place in Henry’s life. The first was his friendship with Felix Mantilla. Mantilla was brought to Jacksonville from the Toledo club specifically to room with Henry. Clubs in those days always fielded an even number of black players to keep white players from having to room with a black teammate. Mantilla’s presence soothed Henry, even though Mantilla, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican, did not speak much English. He relied on Henry while adjusting to the Deep South.

  Mantilla recalled his time in the minor leagues as horribly oppressive, where race was consistently the determining factor in virtually every encounter, on or off the ball field. He remembered his difficulties in learning English and understanding the culture.

  “When you’re seventeen or eighteen years old,35 you see things very differently. I was lost. I used to go to the movies to learn, but the movies didn’t have subtitles. I didn’t always pay attention to the segregation laws, and I found out when it was too late.

  “When I joined the team in Evansville, I didn’t know the city was segregated, either,” Mantilla recalled. “One day, the team got tickets to go to the movies, and when I walked in, they said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ They looked at me like I had the plague.

  “There was another theater that didn’t allow blacks, and Henry and I walked in. You had to know all the rules, all of the things you could do and couldn’t do. Believe it or not, Jacksonville was one of the better towns for us. It was Hank who always kept me away from the things that could have gotten me in trouble. Hank and I relied on each other. We tried not to let the other out of our sight.”

  There were humilating moments, Mantilla recalled. “The whites used to yell from the stands and call us ‘alligator bait.’ Jacksonville wasn’t so bad. But places like Columbus and Macon, those places were wicked.”

  There was the time Mantilla and Aaron combined to propel Jacksonville closer to the Sally League pennant. Jacksonville hadn’t finished first in the league since 1912. Mantilla and Henry had both been all-stars. By midseason, the crowds had warmed to their presence. They wore the right uniform. They were helping the club win. Once, after a particularly satisfying victory, a fan caught up to Henry and Felix Mantilla as they left the park. Mantilla remembered the game as being a considerably hard-fought contest and, having won, both he and Henry were smiling, their guards down after nine inn
ings of concentration. The fan approached the two players easily.

  “I just wanted to say,” the man said, “that you niggers played a hell of a game.”

  Mantilla remembered the good white teammates who made his and Henry’s time a bit easier. Pete Whisenant, an outfielder with Jacksonville, often made sure the black players were not isolated. Whisenant, Mantilla remembered, would often go out to dinner with Henry and Mantilla after games, looking for an integrated place where the teammates could hang out together. Often, Mantilla recalled, such a small gesture could put them all at risk.

  And then there was the time Mantilla put everyone at risk. Henry had always told him about southern culture, about how to interact gingerly with whites. At the start of the 1953 season, Sally League umpires warned Aaron, Mantilla, and Garner not to engage with hostile white fans or opponents. They were also warned not to argue calls with umpires, in order not to incite white fans. Montgomery had even held off integrating its club, because it wanted to see how Jacksonville and Savannah—the two integrated teams in the league—were received both at the ticket gate and inside the clubhouse.

  One result of the umpire edict was open season on black players. Pitchers threw at Henry, constantly sending him into the dirt. Mantilla thought when he went to the plate that his ears were being used for target practice.

  Then came the game in July when a career minor-leaguer named John Waselchuk threw at Mantilla’s head one time too many. Waselchuk was a pip-squeak from Peabody, Massachusetts—five eight, 150 pounds—but a hard-throwing one, with the best curveball in the Sally. Waselchuk was a tough kid, a veteran; he’d joined the navy directly after graduating from high school, then sailed the Mediterranean for three years before signing with the Cubs organization in 1949.