3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderfully well-written addition to baseball history, January 7, 2003
This review is from: A Summer Up North: Henry Aaron and the Legend of Eau Claire Baseball (Paperback)
This book is incredibly well written and offers the reader insight into an early part of Hank Aaron's life, but the book is so much more than that. It also vividly describes minor league baseball and its impact on one community. It delves into race relations in one Wisconsin city in the 1950s and today. It offers story after story, engagingly told, of how baseball affected lives of individuals and how individuals had an impact on the world of baseball, often through simply accepting someone like Aaron into their homes in an era where racial tension led too many to stare rather than welcome him. Poling's book is one of the most well-written sports histories I've read; I read the book in a day as I couldn't put it down. Granted, partly I was interested in it because I went to college in Eau Claire and lived in Duluth, Minnesota, for a couple of years (another city in the Northern League he discusses). However, I really believe that even those with no ties to Wisconsin but rather a love of baseball or an admiration for Aaron as a person and a baseball player will enjoy this book.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
when no one was looking, June 12, 2010
This review is from: A Summer Up North: Henry Aaron and the Legend of Eau Claire Baseball (Paperback)
The most important things happen when nobody is looking. It has ever been so.
Jerry Poling's winsome and poignant tale of an 18-year-old, skinny-as-a-rail African American boy from Mobile, Alabama making his break into professional baseball in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1952 rescues some of those things from the obscurity that otherwise enshrouds.
My father was a relief pitcher for the Superior (Wisconsin) Blues that year. He too was breaking into professional ball with a wicked curve that by some accounts had the future Hank Aaron stymied. Raymond 'Cool as a Cucumber' Baer is not mentioned in Poling's eminently readable volume. Yet the fact that Dad was on the field during some of the games that Poling narrates provides corroborates boyhood memories of tales spun. The impact on this son, reader, and reviewer is almost eery.
Eau Claire, like most of the decent cities that dot the heartland of this nation, was in 1952 capable of racial pettiness. Few whites in the industrial core of Wisconsin had met a black man. Aaron, more boy than man, walked uninvited into their lives and struggled to decide whether it was worth all that. But boy could the kid from Mobile hit a baseball.
Truth be told, Poling--a gifted, almost lyrical writer--tells more than one tale here. There is Aaron breaking a color barrier that Jackie Robinson had, for all his formidable courage, barely begun to erase. There is the pennant race in central and northern Wisconsin, won in the end by my father's Blues in spite of the hard-hitting shortstop who now bolstered the Eau Claire lineup.
There is, as well, Poling's journey with his son in more recent times to discover what remains of professional baseball in the upper Midwest. There is the tracing of the trajectory of the man who would become 'Hammerin' Hank', enigma abounding along the way.
But most of all there is the gentle probing under the rocks and topsoil that was and remains Midwestern America. Fittingly, Poling ends his chronicle by touching upon Aaron's belated phone call to Susan Hauck. She was the fortunate daughter of an Eau Claire family possessed of an untimely recognition that we humans are all the same, regardless of race. Aaron had held hands with young Susan, a man's black hand encasing the soft whiteness of a young woman's, on the front porch of the Hauck home. The best of America appears in the lines with which Poling narrates the Hauck family's embrace of Henry Aaron as a man just like them.
In reading this fine piece of sportswriting, I come across the names of two Cuban teammates of my Dad about whom I heard stories as a kid: José Bustamante and Alfredo Ibáñez. I will find them one day, or their families if they are already gone, in Cuba, a country I visit frequently. I will present them with photos and newspaper clippings from the summer of '52. My pursuit, not unlike Jerry Poling's, is one of recovery, of rescue, of honoring a past that--while no one is watching--disappears from all recall.
There is gold in them thar' hills. Poling sifts for it with the confidence of a grizzled miner. Henry would go on to baseball immortality, leaving teammates and competitors like 'Fireman Ray' to remember Aaron's brief, blazing ascent to glory while they accommodated themselves to more ordinary altitudes.
It would all be forgotten were it not for the Jerry Polings of this world, a place in which journalism still matters because men showing up night after night to play ball for half the salary of a factory worker, Iowa field trips, extra innings in Carson Park, and a Home Run King's earliest innings once mattered.
'Still do. 'Still must.
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