The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant Read Free Book Online Page B

missed so many days of school—forty by the end—that he was expelled from Central High. He was enrolled at the Josephine Allen Institute, a small private school in Toulminville, on the corner of Sengstak and Walnut streets, run by a local educator, Josephine Blackledge Allen. The school, a long two-story rectangle, did not emphasize sports, but “basic grammar, mathematics and cultural refinement.”
    As the Aaron legend was being spun, an interesting caveat would find its way into each subsequent profile: Henry had promised Stella that if he didn’t make it in baseball, he would go to college. Stella would repeat the tale that Henry was headed to Florida A&M, a black college.
    For his part, Henry would debunk certain portions of the myth, denying that had he chosen not to play baseball, A&M would have been interested in offering him a football scholarship. This was almost certainly not true, as Henry did not play football as a junior or senior in high school. Henry would go so far as to say that he purposely stopped playing football because it would guarantee no school would have an interest in him. In later years, he would laugh at the suggestion that he’d ever had any intention of playing college football or that a college existed that wanted him on its team.
    The truth was that Henry Aaron bet his entire life on baseball. The college promise was, given his high school academic career, empty and illogical, but the words sounded good. They created the fiction that Henry Aaron, who spent more time in a pool hall than in the classroom at a time when a young Negro with little education wound up working in the fields, a factory, or on a chain gang, had a backup plan. What Henry never told anyone was that he was so confident in his ability to hit a baseball that he never thought he needed one.
    “It was never one, two, three with me,” 17 Henry would reflect. “It was never ‘this or that.’ I knew it had to work. I knew I had to do it. It was that or, well, I didn’t think I was going to the cotton fields, but it was going to work somewhere for one-fifty a week. It had to work. There wasn’t anything to fall back on.”

CHAPTER TWO
HENRY
    H ENRY A ARON SET out to be a professional baseball player, having hardly been an amateur one. At Central High, he had dabbled in football, and once, either in 1947 or 1948, he played a regular-season game against Westfield High and its sensational running back, Willie Mays. Central, however, had no baseball team, and Henry would not play football with great enthusiasm, for fear an injury would ruin his baseball prospects. He was expelled from Central, and was uninterested in anything but baseball while at Josephine Allen, which only fielded a softball team anyway. Henry’s résumé consisted of hitting bottle caps with a broom handle.
    As he grew older and more prominent, journalists would seek to know more about his early years, about his upbringing and his family, about how he could have been so sure he possessed the special ability it took to play baseball at the highest level. A lot of kids were the best in their neighborhoods, but it wasn’t exactly a given that Henry was even that . Henry would depend on a few of the old chestnuts that would be repeated for the next half century. The stories were odd and colorful, but none was particularly true or carried the kind of insight that would fill in the important pieces of his personal puzzle. At differing times, he told various tales about the origin of his legendary wrists. He told one writer that despite his wiry frame, his bulging forearms came from a job hauling ice in Mobile; he told another he benefited from mowing lawns; and he told people that for all of his right-handed greatness, he would have been an even better switch-hitter. That was because he batted cross-handed, which for a right-handed hitter was to say with his left hand on top, as a left-handed hitter would.
    In 1959, the writer Roger Kahn would attempt to