Beech Tree News Network

Buckets-Broomsticks- and Bottle Caps:
    When baseball great, Hank Aron was a poor kid in Alabama, he wanted to play major league baseball someday.  He aspired to be a great hitter, but how? He owned neither a baseball nor bat. 
    A poor kid has to make do sometimes.  Henry (Hank) scrounged-up a gallon bucket and a broomstick.  Then he went around to places that sold soft drinks and collected pop bottle caps.  When he got his bucket full, he would go out, pitch bottle caps into the air and bat them with his stick… all day—day after day.  Evidently this sharpened his ability to hit a small moving object. 
    Shakespeare is credited with saying, “Repetition is the key to knowledge.” Hank hit many buckets- full of bottle caps… into roadside ditches and vacant lots.
    At fifteen, Hank began to play some local baseball.  He got invited to play with make-up teams when they were short a player.  Word had gotten around how well he could hit a ball.
    Well into Hank’s sixteenth year, a minor league scout for an all colored team—the Milwaukee Clowns--- saw Hank play, and signed him to a contract.  This was after the famous Jackie Robinson broke into the majors with the Brooklyn Dodgers; the first colored player in the major leagues. 
    Hank had hardly any decent clothes; the expanse for his travels, as he said, was “From my house down to the end of my street...”  He had never ridden on a train—all this was a new experience. 
     When he arrived at Clowns headquarters, he was the new kid on the block.  However when the team’s managers and players saw how Hank could hit a baseball, he was no longer the new kid.
    Hank’s stint with the Clowns was short lived.  The—then –Milwaukee Braves signed him to a major league contract.  He finished his career with the Braves, first in Milwaukee, and then in Atlanta Hank lidded Milwaukee.  There people were kind to him and his family.  Not so in Atlanta; certainly the fans and the teammates were.  But when Hank began to get close and finally surpass Babe Ruth’s homerun record, the bigots and the racists, and the other mean, low-down few began to sound-off.  Hank and his family even received some death threats; Henry (Hank) Aron began his major-league career as a Brave, and ended it as a Brave.  He is not only credit to his race—but to the human race.
                            Kindest regards….