From the Tuesday, June 12, 2007 issue of The Cedartown Standard
Republished with Permission

A Braves Fan Recalls Aaron’s Sweetest Swing
By Joe Samuel Starnes

   I was 7 years old and my grandfather, who had not yet
been diagnosed with leukemia and did not know he had only
two years to live, was 71 when Hank Aaron stepped up to
home plate and broke Babe Ruth’s home-run record.
   Granddad would sit in his easy chair with me in his
lap, rubbing my back and watching the Atlanta Braves in
the earliest days of TBS, the easygoing play-by-play
lulling us into a placid relaxation.
   He grew up way out in the country in Polk County in a
place called Hematite, and was never in a hurry.  In the
late summer afternoons, he sat on his back steps, smoking
one cigarette after another, looking over his yard where
he’d squeezed a productive garden of corn, tomatoes, okra
and string beans into a space that wasn’t much more than
50 by 100 feet.  I remember long plumes of smoke gliding
out of his nose and dissipating into the blue sky.  
   My grandfather, like many did during the Depression
in rural Georgia, made the shift from farming to
factories.  He moved his family into town where the
streets were paved and spent 35 years as a fixer on the
second shift for Goodyear Tire & Rubber, answering the
quotidian call of the mill’s work whistle that echoed
throughout the small town.  
   Not quite forty years later, he was retired and I was
his only grandson and we were excited about Aaron’s home-
run march.  I can remember stretching across his lap in
the easy chair, watching the Braves in blue and white
caps with a red lower case a.
   All of the boys in the second grade were talking
about Aaron’s pursuit of the record.  I vividly remember
my friend John Kelley saying every day in the lunchroom
that “He’s gonna get it tonight!”  I had a poster
documenting Aaron’s home runs that my grandfather gave me
that must have come with the newspaper.  It had sections
to write down when and where Aaron hit each home run, and
the name of the pitcher.  I kept it as accurately as I
could.  My home-run log carried over from the 1973 season
to 1974, as Aaron ended the prior one home run short of
tying Ruth.  I remember Aaron hitting three singles on
the last game of 1973.
   He tied Ruth’s record in Cincinnati on opening day of
1974, his first swing of the season.  I don’t recall the
at-bat (it was a day game and I was in school), but I
remember well the record-breaking swing four days later
in the Braves’ home opener.  The ball flew over the left
centerfield fence at old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium
and I rushed to write it down.  If I hadn’t lost the
poster, my pencil scrawl would tell you that Al Dowling
of the Los Angeles Dodgers served up the ball Aaron hit
out on April 8, 1974.  
   I still have the baseball Aaron signed for me in
1978, two years after my granddad died, when Aaron
visited the grand opening of the Magnavox television
store in the old Riverbend Mall in Rome.  My mother took
me.  When we got there, we learned he would sign only
baseballs. You couldn’t get him to sign notebook paper
(being novice autograph seekers, that was our plan), so
Mom ran to a sports store in the mall while I waited in
line.  She returned with a softball, believing that the
larger ball would give him more room for his penmanship.  
I held out for a baseball and sent her back. I’m glad I
insisted.  The home-run king would have been insulted by
a softball.  
   My dad saved the article about Aaron’s visit from the
next day’s edition of the Rome News-Tribune.  In the
newspaper photo, my face is obscured by a baseball
another kid is holding out.  My hand is empty as Aaron
examines my baseball, determining where to sign.  Only
white kids were lined up around him as fathers in Chevy
baseball caps and mothers with thick glasses waited
behind.  Aaron had seemed standoffish, and in the photo
he is not smiling. I learned years later from his
autobiography that he had received many death threats and
racist taunts in the seasons of the record chase.  The
hate mail came daily and his family was threatened.  I
know I never thought about his race or wished that a
white player were chasing the record instead.  
   Years later, in the early nineties, a father of a
friend showed off to a group his Super 8 movies from
Aaron’s 715th home run.  The boastful friend’s father had
been at the game with his home movie camera and jumped
onto the field and ran into the mob of press gathered
around home plate.  He was not shooed away or arrested
(amazing considering that Aaron was allegedly under tight
security because of the death threats). His video had
close-ups of Aaron as he came around the bases.  I can
pick out the intrusive father when I see news footage of
that day.  He was only ten feet from Aaron’s home plate
celebration, acting like he had a right to be there.
   He wasn’t the only trespasser. Two quasi-hippies ran
onto the field and ran around the bases with Aaron like
they belonged there. Unlike Reggie Jackson who once
ferociously elbowed the jaw of a fan who tried to get his
cap, Aaron continued his dignified trot and did his best
to ignore them.
   I wouldn’t trade my vantage point for Aaron’s
historic home run, sitting in my grandfather’s lap while
Hammering Hank rounded the bases. We were happy to be
where we were, not scrapping to move closer, enjoying the
moment in our way and trying to let Aaron enjoy his.  I
think that Aaron, a calm, peaceful man whose lightning-
quick bat thrust him into the spotlight he certainly
never desired, would have wanted it that way.
   Aaron’s was a career of consistency, and he never hit
more than 47 home runs in a single season. He relied on
superb timing and a fast wrist snap, not the injections
of steroids and who knows what other freakish substances
that have caused Barry Bonds’ muscles, head and feet to
grow tremendously as he reached his mid-thirties and saw
his season home-run production more than double from 34
in 1999 to 73 in 2001.  The parody newspaper The Onion
perhaps said it best in a spoof from last year,
“reporters have corroborated the claims of Bonds’ steroid
abuse made by every single person who has watched or even
loosely followed the game of baseball the past five
years.”
   My grandfather, like Aaron, had many of the
characteristics of rural Southern men, most notably being
polite, soft-spoken and taciturn.  As Bonds closes in on
him, Aaron has been notably silent and has said he does
not plan to attend games to see Bonds tie or break his
record.  Aaron is a gentleman in a difficult position
but, as he has always done, is adhering to one of the
time-tested tenets of good manners:  if you don’t have
something good to say about somebody, don’t say anything.

Joe Samuel Starnes is a writer living in Philadelphia.
His novel, Calling, was published in 2005, and he has
recently had work appear in The New York Times and The
Philadelphia Inquirer.