Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-Five Years Later [Hardcover]

Sandy Tolan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2000

When Sandy Tolan was nine years old, his hero left town. In 1965 Henry Aaron and the Milwaukee Braves moved to Atlanta, but unlike the other Milwaukee kids, Sandy continued to follow Aaron's career from afar, straining to hear the games at night through the crackle of distant AM radio stations. Aaron's heroics provided an anchor for Sandy in the turbulent late '60s and early '70s, and the young white fan felt a bond with the black superstar.

In 1973, Sandy began keeping a scrapbook to track his idol's approach to the greatest record in sports -- Babe Ruth's 714 career home runs. But he soon learned that Hank Aaron had become the target of racist hate mail and death threats. Shocked and wishing to help somehow, he wrote Aaron a letter, saying, "Don't listen to them, Mr. Aaron. You're my hero." To his astonishment, he got a letter back. "Dear Sandy," the baseball legend wrote, "Your letter of support and encouragement meant much more to me than I can adequately express in words."

Twenty-five years later, armed with his scrapbook and the old letter, Sandy Tolan went to Atlanta to meet his hero. "Me and Hank" is his account of baseball, heroism, race, and childhood dreams, as he taps the bittersweet recollections of the home run king and those around him. Among the people we meet are:

Aaron's daughter, Gaile, who had to be placed under FBI protection for her own safety.
Dusty Baker, the young teammate who saw Aaron's perseverance and quiet courage as a model to aspire to.
Civil rights leader Andrew Young, who realized what Aaron meant to Atlanta as it struggled to free itself from the mindset of segregation.
Felix Mantilla, who with Aaron broke the colorbarrier in the Deep South's Sally League in 1953.
Bud Selig, the former Milwaukee car dealer and future commissioner of baseball, who brought Aaron home to finish his career.
James McClain, a Vietnam veteran, now homeless, who saw Aaron as the embodiment of all that blacks could now achieve in America.

Weaving these reflections with his own, Sandy Tolan explores the landscape between a hero's aspirations and the reality of his struggle; between a young fan's wishes and their delivery, a generation later, to a middle-aged man; between the starkly different ways that whites and blacks in America experience and remember the same events. "Me and Hank" is a portrait of a true American hero whose example resonates far beyond the playing field.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For decades 714 was the holiest number in baseball. When Hank Aaron began closing in on Babe Ruth's career home run record he also began receiving racist hate mail and death threats: "You are not going to break the record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it. My gun is watching your every black move."

In the midst of all the anger and hate, a white teenager named Sandy Tolan wrote a letter to Hank Aaron. "Don't listen to them, Mr. Aaron. We're in your corner. You're my hero. I believe in you." To his great surprise, several weeks later Tolan received a reply--from Hank Aaron himself. Tolan kept the letter, taping it into a scrapbook he was keeping to follow Aaron's home run record chase.

Twenty-five years later, Tolan, now a journalist, had the opportunity to finally meet Aaron. He recounts the meeting, and his decades-long admiration for the man in Me and Hank. No mere hagiography, Me and Hank lingers on a difficult question: Why was Hank Aaron's home run record less celebrated than Babe Ruth's? Or as Aaron himself put it in 1979, "Isn't it funny? Before I broke his record, it was the greatest of them all. Then I broke his record and suddenly the greatest record in baseball is Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak." Tolan uses Hank Aaron and the Babe's home run record as a prism through which to examine racial tensions in America--both in the 1970s and in the 1990s. Along the way he visits the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown (where Ruth has a room all his own while Aaron has "a wall and a locker"), meets Charlie Danrick, who sells audio tapes of old baseball games (the tape of number 715 "doesn't sell. It just lays there. People don't buy it."), and befriends a homeless black man from Atlanta who was in the stands on April 8, 1974 ("And when I seen him hit the ball ... it felt like he passed the civil rights bill to me.") At times angry but always thoughtful, Me and Hank provides a much-needed window into baseball, race relations, and even American history. --M. Stein

From Publishers Weekly

In 1973 baseball's greatest hitter, Hank Aaron, was nearing his greatest moment: surpassing Babe Ruth's 714 career home runs. As a result, Aaron received death threats and hundreds of pounds of hate mail, his daughter needed 24-hour FBI protection at college and his imminent achievement was all but vilified because many whites didn't want to see a black man best the cherished record of an iconic white man. Sixteen at the time and a lifelong fan of Aaron, the white Tolan was appalled at this racism and wrote his hero a letter of support. Aaron replied with a warmhearted letter, setting up the connection that sparked this enlightening memoir and prompted Tolan, a radio producer, to look up his hero in 1998. Tolan first visits Aaron to talk about breaking Ruth's record, then he interviews dozens of others on the same subject, including members of Aaron's family and his own. The result provides not just a chilling foil to the chivalric home run chase between McGuire and Sosa, but also a portrait of race relations from the 1950s until now. For blacks, Aaron's achievement was as significant as Jackie Robinson's crossing of the color line. But, while whites generally remember the well-publicized hatred that stalked Aaron, they have, according to Tolan, ignored his record (which remains undefeated) and made licensing Ruth's image a $3-million-a-year business. The author's sentimental recollections of childhood grow somewhat repetitious, and each chapter has the same tone of disbelieving outrage as Tolan's NPR piece that inspired the book. Still, the work is a worthy complement to Aaron's I Had a Hammer, and a valuable contribution to the civil rights bookshelf. Author tour; 20-city radio satellite tour. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (June 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684871300
• ISBN-13: 978-0684871301
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,777,219 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sandy Tolan is the author of Me & Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-Five Years Later. He has written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and has produced dozens of radio documentaries for NPR and PRI. His work has won numerous awards. He was a 1993 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and an I. F. Stone Fellow at the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he directs the schoolÂ’s Project on International Reporting.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful and moving, May 7, 2000

By 

Joseph McBride - See all my reviews

This review is from: Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-Five Years Later (Hardcover)

What a wonderful book! This is a fitting tribute to a man who has been shamefully underrated in American life, as well as a probing look at race relations in the past forty-plus years, seen through the prism of baseball and Hank Aaron's breaking of Babe Ruth's record. Like the author, I grew up in Milwaukee, although I am a bit older and so I saw Hank Aaron hit many of his home runs. His dignity and grace are a precious memory of my youth. Also like the author, I wrote Hank Aaron a letter when I learned that racists were hounding him for challenging Ruth, and received an eloquent letter in reply from Mr. Aaron. This book, with its highly personal approach to the subject, is a multifaceted view of a revealing part of American life. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book that could have eased up on the bitterness, August 5, 2000

By 

DAVID S JACKSON (Colleyville, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-Five Years Later (Hardcover)

Don't get me wrong -- this was a great read and a provocative book about my favorite ballplayer of all-time. But I thought Tolan was at his best describing the people who experienced Hank Aaron's home run chase firsthand (including himself) and at his worst when his personal memories shifted from fact to opinion.

The tale of his encounter with a homeless Atlanta man who attended the game where Aaron hit No. 715 is beautifully told and moving. His personal friendship with a Babe Ruth admirer ignores racism in his hometown and praises Aaron for his accomplishment illustrates how we need inner strength and conviction not to simply march in tune with those around us. Tolan's interviews with Aaron, his daughter Gaile and former teammates reveal the depth with which Aaron had to endure racism as a ballplayer, and his historical portrait of the racial tension in his hometown of Milwaukee is thorough and fascinating.

But the more Tolan discovers about how unappreciated Aaron truly is, the more preachy -- and less effective -- he becomes. He hits a low point when he grills three advertising executives on their lack of knowledge of Aaron's hardships as they prepare to pay homage to Aaron in a MasterCard commercial. Are they to be blamed for that? All of these people clearly respect Aaron, and they all interviewed Aaron in preparation for the commercial. If he'd really wanted them to know what he endured, he probably would have told them. He also takes some unnecessary shots at the Hall of Fame because they have chosen to pay tribute to Babe Ruth with an entire room, while Aaron gets only a wall. Sure, Aaron deserves a room to himself, so do Jackie Robinson, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, and many of baseball's other African-American pioneers. They don't. Deal with it.

One need not be a walking encyclopedia of Aaron's life, as Tolan is, to appreciate his accomplishments achieved under extreme duress. Let those who appreciate Aaron for who he is -- a great ballplayer and a great man -- simply be. The irony is, I'm with Tolan on his central argument, that Aaron is one of the greatest and most underappreciated Americans in history. I'll even go far as to say you can't prove Ruth is better than Aaron, because Ruth played an all-white game and didn't necessary play against the best. But Ruth made the game popular. If not for Babe Ruth and what he did to make baseball America's pastime, Aaron's chase wouldn't have inspired the rancor that it did. People wouldn't have cared.

Sandy, let's enjoy being Hank Aaron fans by not wasting our time beating up those who don't appreciate him to the extreme degree we do.

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, September 4, 2011

By 

Lit Wit (Houston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-Five Years Later (Paperback)

Me and Hank left me wondering what the author's actual purpose in writing the book was. I am a baseball fan and also had an idol at an early age. His name was Granny Hamner and I visited in the hospital after an injury. It was a disillusioning experience. I made him an album hand crafted from pictures cut out from greeting cards that told about his life. Mr. Hamner pretty much blew me off which was a tough reality for a thirteen year old girl. So I get the fascination with Mr. Aaron as well as the history encompassed in his very difficult public life. Those elements make the book worthwhile. However, the author goes off track in many sections and muddles up the main focus. In particular, including Phil Niekro's story of his father and his knuckleball triumphs detracts from the tribute to Hank Aaron. The only related element to Niekro's interview was that Niekro maintains he had absolutely no knowledge of the racial tensions around the homerun countdown. Sure.

I felt the author experienced something similar to me and Hamner when he visited Aaron. Tolan certainly had more invested in the experience than the hall of famer.