If you were born in the 1960s, chances are your childhood was a montage of momentous events you couldn’t fully comprehend in real-time.
Maybe you saw a parent crying in front of the television over casualty updates from Vietnam … but didn’t fully grasp why.
Even if you were lucky like me and your mother was the sort of person to keep you home the day after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated but went to school herself to console my teacher, a Black woman, well, you didn’t quite get it.
You knew the first lunar landing was awesome, sure, but the more cosmic forces behind the space race weren’t evident.
So it was that a 13-year-old sticking to sports might have been consumed with the superficial part of Hank Aaron’s chase of Babe Ruth’s immortal record and revel in Aaron hitting No. 715 on April 8, 1974.
In its time, it and of itself, it seemed as enchanting as watching Neil Armstrong descend into that first step on the moon.
It was so mesmerizing, in fact, that I shrugged off whatever reason there might have been for Aaron’s annoyance over the two men running on the field to congratulate him as he circled the bases. And I had no particular memory of Vin Scully’s beautiful portrait of the scene at Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta.
“What a marvelous moment for the country and the world: A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol,” he said that night. “And it is a great moment for all of us.”
But it would be years before Aaron could even exhale about the moment that so captivated so many — including Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick.
Then 11, watching in the family room from Crawfordville, Georgia, Kendrick simultaneously circled “the bases” himself (albeit a couch to a TV to another couch to a recliner) while “literally jumping for joy.”
As a Black man who grew up in the deep South, in a family that had supported King and a town where segregation persisted, Kendrick had some understanding of the greater meaning. He even remembers a sense of validation.
“But you don’t really quite understand the level of hate at that age,” Kendrick said in his office on Friday, hours after Aaron had died at age 86. “As you get older, you do.”
Particularly in the job he holds now for an institution that is a guardian of hallowed history and a beacon for civil rights — which Aaron advanced in numerous ways and will be a fundamental part of his legacy celebrated in services held Tuesday and Wednesday.
Beyond the fact Aaron’s life was so much more than baseball and his game so much more than home runs, his story can’t be fully appreciated in the vacuum of mere numbers.
It’s better understood by the backdrop against which he performed his most famous act. Framing the moment were credible death threats necessitating a 24-hour bodyguard and a family in hiding, among other fearsome circumstances.
“This is 27 years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier (in Major League Baseball), and Henry Aaron is going through the same level of hate and vitriol that welcomed Jackie Robinson. But in a very much polarized South,” Kendrick said. “So it makes the feat even more incredible than we already knew it to be.”
Noting how Aaron may have feared even his ability to make it around the base paths during No. 715, Kendrick added, “He’d already seen Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated. He had already seen John F. Kennedy assassinated. He’d seen Malcolm X assassinated.”
Perhaps as much as it speaks to Aaron’s admirable resolve and focus, the cumulative feat also hints at the grace and character that made him who he was — a man who just months ago received the last award of his much-decorated life when the St. Louis Sports Commission honored him with the Stan Musial Lifetime Achievement Award for Sportsmanship.
Many years after his retirement, when I was working for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and had occasion to interview Aaron, he spoke with calm reassurance about the time.
While he called it sad that he’d had to contend with so much, including a vast amount of hate mail, he also struck a conciliatory tone.
“It wasn’t all of it hate. That was just how people were expressing themselves,” said Aaron, then working in the Braves’ front office. “They weren’t all saying, ‘I hate you.’ They were saying, ‘I hate what you’re doing.’ ”
That was a magnanimous outlook But it also reflected who Aaron was and from where he came. When I asked him about his start in pro baseball with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues in 1952, he turned to the joy of simple pleasures.
After all, he was playing baseball and getting paid $2 a day for meal money: “That was enough to get a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread and have a little left over.”
Even as he made his debut with the Braves in 1954, though, he was carrying a burden familiar to all former Negro Leagues players as integration opened up the game.
“They were all carrying the weight of their people,” Kendrick said as he honored Aaron for the Musial Awards.
To Kendrick, who cherishes that he became friends with his childhood hero who never disappointed, Aaron absorbed and reconciled the weight in indelible ways.
Reminiscent of Buck O’Neil and other bright personas of the Negro Leagues, an institution itself emblematic of resilience, human qualities such as “a very gentle spirit” are what Kendrick will forever treasure as much as anything about Aaron.
You could know that from Aaron not having it in his considerable heart to criticize Barry Bonds as Bonds broke the home-run record amid evidence of steroid use.
You could know it from all he did for others along the way, whether in a civil rights capacity or mentoring or by giving men like former Royals manager Ned Yost his first coaching job. (“Everything that I accomplished started with him!!” Yost said in a text message).
“You can never reduce him to just baseball,” Kendrick said. “He was a civil rights icon, on that same plane with Jackie and Muhammad Ali and others who used their lives to push for the betterment of others.”
Indeed, during that 25-minute interview with him in 2001, Aaron had a brief flash of anger when it came to what he perceived as a lack of appreciation of King and Robinson.
“Once you lose history,” he said, “it has a way of repeating itself.”
Another reason that April 8, 1974, still resounds well beyond what met the eye — and should serve as a reminder in the ongoing struggle for social justice of both how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.
