A 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.