Summer Up North: Henry Aaron and the Legend of Eau Claire Baseball. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Summer Up North: Henry Aaron and the Legend of Eau Claire Baseball

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 ballplayer, but nothing touched me more than that day in Eau Claire." 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.

Jerry Poling is the news-wire editor and a columnist for the Eau Claire Leader Telegram. He is the author of Downfield: Untold Stories of the Green Bay Packers.