Southern Bookman

Henry Aaron's rise to baseball stardom detailed in Atlanta History Center exhibit

Growing up in segregated Mobile, Ala., Henry Aaron learned to hit by swinging at bottle caps with a broomstick.

He practiced the game at Carver Park, two blocks away from his home in the city's Toulminville neighborhood. Now it's called Henry Aaron Park.

Aaron's rapid rise from Mobile's Down the Bay section to Major League superstardom bursts with glory at the Atlanta History Center's exhibit "More Than Brave: The Life of Henry Aaron."

The exhibit, honoring the 50th anniversary of Aaron's breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record, displays artifacts from the Aaron family, the history center, the Atlanta Braves, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Emory University, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and personal collections from across the United States. It continues through September 2025, following the return of the Major League All-Star Game to Atlanta.

Aaron signed at age 18 with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues, in their last years of existence following Jackie Robinson's integration of the Major Leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers. A wistful photo shows the young Aaron at the Mobile Train Station, beginning his journey to international fame.

After a few months with the Clowns, Aaron signed with the Boston Braves. The exhibit traces Aaron's brief minor league career with the Eau Claire, Wis., Bears and Jacksonville Braves. In segregated Jacksonville, Aaron endured racial threats similar to the abuse suffered by Robinson.

After the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee, Aaron quickly rose to the majors, almost immediately showing himself one of the game's best players. A video presentation looks back at Aaron's stellar play for the Milwaukee Braves, who beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series. Slugger Eddie Matthews joined with Aaron to give the Braves baseball's most powerful hitting duo.

The exhibit gives in-depth details of the Braves' rapid demise in Milwaukee and their move to Atlanta, orchestrated by Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. Included are letters from Allen, and Atlanta's black leaders who sought to reassure Aaron about the city's racial tolerance. After a flurry of lawsuits, the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966.

Aaron's hitting his 715th career home run to break Ruth's record on April 8, 1974, climaxes the exhibit. A video narrated by sportscaster Bob Costas shows Aaron breaking the record at no longer existing Atlanta Fulton County Stadium.

Three Hall of Fame announcers called the historic smash over the left centerfield wall: Curt Gowdy for NBC's national TV audience, Vin Scully for the visiting Los Angeles Dodgers' network and Braves play-by-play man Milo Hamilton. Each of their calls echoes through the years in the video.

As the exhibit examines, Aaron's pursuit of Ruth's record, one of baseball's most hallowed landmarks, triggered an outpouring of hate mail and death threats. Aaron was assigned an armed police bodyguard as he neared the record.

After hitting the home run off the Dodgers' Al Downing, Aaron simply told the crowd, "Thank God it's over."

The video shows Aaron's dash  home, shaking hands with Dodgers infielders, the two college students who came down to the field, risking being shot by Aaron's bodyguard, and Aaron's teammates greeting him at home plate. His mother was there too, hugging him as if she would never let go.

Estella Aaron had told her son to hurry and get under the bed when the Ku Klux Klan rode by on horseback past their home one day. She'd watched her little boy walk to Carver Park with his bottle caps and broomstick.

Now, she and her son stood in the chilly Atlanta spring night, hearing fireworks and a cavalcade of cheers.

Aaron's sweet swing learned in the Alabama heat had made him baseball's home run king.

 

 

Farewell, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, who wrote and sang R&B classic "Ain't Got No Home"

Clarence "Frogman" Henry's 1956 hit "Ain't Got No Home" is one of the essential classics of New Orleans rhythm and blues.

Recorded at Casimo Matassa's famed recording studio, the song glimmers with joy. The song is a tour de force, combining Henry's virtuoso vocal performance with the horn section's New Orleans rhythm that seductively turns again and again above a driving drumbeat.

Henry's deceptively simple lyrics trace classic themes of loneliness and searching for home.

The singer portrays a "lonely boy," a girl and a frog who comically lament not having a home or family, shifting from his normal voice to an exaggerated girl's falsetto and the frog's guttural growl. Henry's echoing "ooooooo" chorus delivers one of the most exciting sequences in American popular music.

One of the last members of New Orleans' influential era of rhythm and blues in the 1950s and early '60s, Henry died Sunday at age 87 from complications of back surgery. He had been scheduled to perform at the 2024 Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Henry also recorded the top 10 hits "I Don't Know Why But I Do" and "You Always Hurt the One You Love," both in 1961. He also opened for the Beatles at several stops in their 1964 U.S. tour, including an appearance at his hometown City Park Stadium, now Tad Gormley Stadium.

The British invasion led by the Beatles ended the dominance of R&B on the hit record charts. Henry remained popular performing with his band at New Orleans clubs.

"Ain't Got No Home" found a second life in movie soundtracks, including Martin Scorsese's "Casino" and Barry Levinson's "Diner."

Henry's performance gives the song the universal appeal of a folk tale or fable. The music invites listeners to laugh and dance.

 

North Buckhead has been a special place for 37 years

May will mark 37 years since we moved to North Buckhead, the place I've lived the longest in my life.

When we first came to North Buckhead, the neighborhood was vehemently fighting the Ga. 400 extension. Rep. John Lewis and Mayor Andrew Young engineered the road's construction, against the opposition of GOP Sen, Paul Coverdell.

The road, with MARTA rail beside it, left tall concrete pillars hulking above Mountain Way, a once bucolic walk. Yet the road has not been the disaster that neighbors feared it would be. It's convenient and gives impressive views of the Buckhead skyline, most of which has risen since we've lived here.

Our children attended public schools. Sarah Smith Elementary had begun receiving strong community support, but we were considered outliers for sending our daughters and son to Sutton Middle School and North Atlanta High. Now, Sutton and North Atlanta gather strong attendance from the neighborhood.

Over the years, we've built strong relationships with local businesses. We can walk to Chastain Park Shopping Center for haircuts, groceries and restaurant meals. We've close to the attractions of Sandy Springs, not a separate city 40 years ago.

Longtime neighbors greet me warmly on my afternoon walks. Through the years, we watched our children grow into adults.

The neighborhood draws young families, and houses now sell for more than $1 million. North Buckhead's close to Chastain Park. The Blue Heron Nature Center offers wooded trails and art exhibits.

Deer frequently visit our yard, and we've seen foxes, turtles, possums, raccoons, and squirrels. The trees and flowers rate among Atlanta's most glorious.

Walking's a favorite pastime in the neighborhood, and swimming pools and backyard basketball courts are plentiful. The dogs are generally friendly, and the cries of children at play fill the air.

Not all has been idyllic: We've twice been burglarized. Traditional ranch homes have been torn down for the rise of McMansions, though I find some of them attractive. A favorite service station with full mechanical service has left, replaced by a car wash and convenience store. Yet the community has been amazingly stable.

All in all, North Buckhead feels like home.

Farewell, Mary Ann Zielonko, partner of "Kitty" Genovese, subject of provocative New York Times article

The murder of 28-year-old Catherine Susan "Kitty" Genovese on March 13, 1964, stood for many years as a shocking case of urban apathy and unwillingness to help others in distress.

A New York Times story two weeks after Genovese's slaying near her apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens, reported that 38 of her neighbors witnessed the crime, but none of them called police or sought to help her after hearing her screams.

Gay Talese in his monumental Times history "The Kingdom and the Power" cites reporter Martin Gansberg's article as a sterling example of the newspaper's increased attention to New York City under editor Abe Rosenthal.

Genovese, a bartender, was stalked, raped and repeatedly stabbed by Winston Moseley in two separate attacks after she got off work. Moseley served a life sentence for the crime.

Mary Ann Zielonko, Genovese's domestic partner and also a bartender, was asleep in their apartment when her lover was killed. When their relationship was discovered, she was questioned by police as a possible suspect.

Zielonko, 85, died last week at her home in Vermont from aspiration pneumonia, according to an obituary by New York Times writer Clyde Haberman.

A number of articles and academic studies examined the Genovese slaying and the witnesses' indifference, called "the Genovese Syndrome" in standard psychology textbooks.

However, additional reporting found serious flaws in the original  Times story. A 2016 Times article concluded that Gansberg's article "grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived."

In the middle of the night, far fewer people heard the attacks than initially reported. Several did try to call police. Others believed the attacks a lovers' quarrel. A neighbor left her apartment and cradled Genovese as she lay dying in an alley behind her apartment building. She died en route to a hospital.

Zielonko in an interview with the Rutland, Vt., Herald cited by The Times said that after the slaying, she lived by a philosophy of always helping others.

 

 

Henry Aaron's record-breaking home run 50 years ago signaled Atlanta's emergence

On April 8, 1974, Henry Aaron hit his 715th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth's famous record and placing Atlanta on the national stage as a major city.

Famed Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, calling Aaron's smash against Dodgers pitcher Al Downing, said, "A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world."

Atlanta's majestic display of racial unity cast a brief glow over deeper divisions: The city of Atlanta lost more than 100,000 residents in the following decades from "white flight" spurred by the 1973 election of Maynard Jackson, the city's first black mayor.

A population boom in recent years has returned Atlanta to its 1974 population of 495,000, reducing the city's longtime black majority. The metro area's population has leaped to more than 6 million from 1.3 million 50 years ago.

Before breaking Ruth's record, which had stood since 1935, Aaron received an avalanche of racially poisoned hate mail. Despite death threats, he continued his stellar play.

Like fellow Mobile, Ala. native Willie Mays, Aaron rose from the harshly segregated South to take his place among the first generation of black stars who invigorated baseball following Jackie Robinson's integration of the Major Leagues. Early in his career, Aaron and other black players were forced to stay in different hotels than their white teammates, especially in the South. 

Following his Hall of Fame baseball career, Aaron gained success as an entrepreneur, Braves executive and supporter of human rights, education and black political equality. His death in January 2021 drew deep national mourning.

The brief flight of Aaron's record-breaking home run over the left centerfield wall was one of those historic moments that define a city and a nation.

 

Memories of a Presbyterian boyhood

When my father picked us up after Sunday school at First Presbyterian, he sometimes drove us to the levee, where he enjoyed watching the Mississippi.

We always encountered an old black man who wore a white robe and cotton-cloth cap. The preacher carried a cross of two crooked tree branches tied with a white cloth. He said he performed baptisms in the river, although I never saw him carry out one.

My father would give the black preacher a dollar and send him away. For a few moments, my father, saying nothing, looked at the dark brown Mississippi flowing toward the gulf. Tugboats pushed bigger cargo ships up the river, its banks in my memory lined with trees in flower. After a few moments, Daddy would turn and say “let’s go,” and we’d head home, where Mama cooked Sunday dinner.

My mother’s father and mother came to visit us every Sunday afternoon, my grandfather still wearing a tie and starched white shirt and my grandmother the nice dress she’d worn to church. They were Presbyterians, as was my mother. My father had been raised Catholic, but had to leave the church because of his marriage outside the faith.

My sisters and I were raised Presbyterian, going to Sunday school from early childhood. After “confirmation,” a significant childhood occasion, we studied the “shorter Catechism,” which detailed John Wesley’s Predestination doctrine. Some would be saved, others condemned.

After Sunday school, we sometimes went to church with our mother, especially on communion Sundays, when ushers passed out round silver trays with specially cut holes that held the small glasses of grape juice. The holes ringed the outer circumfrence of the trays, tiny suns in a symbolic cosmos.

The sanctuary’s dark wooden walls and abstract stained glass windows contrasted with the flowery dresses of the women and girls. The husbands, their hair combed back with hair tonic, wore business suits, their shoes buffed to a brilliant shine. A full choir in red robes with gray sashes sang the soaring Protestant hymns, the congregation joining in.

Before and after church, people congregated on the plaza at the foot of the concrete steps that rose to the sanctuary’s heavy wooden doors. The couples chatted with each other, their children running back and forth, the girls in black patent leather shoes with straps and the boys in nice pants and shirts, hair slicked back like their fathers’,

Daddy was never comfortable with the forced bonhomie of Protestant Christian Fellowship. He didn’t care for the sermons of our minister, Dr. Melton, especially when they appeared lifted from Reader’s Digest.

Over the years, my mentally unstable father attended church a few times, usually seated with me in the gallery, where we whispered about football. He came to church on the Sunday after John F. Kennedy’s assasination, his eyes red with sadness although we had gone to Tiger Stadium for the LSU-Tulane game the day before.

Vacation Bible School gave me my favorite church memories. On hot and humid weekday mornings, my mother would drive us to the church on North Boulevard in downtown Baton Rouge and drop us off. We’d hurry to a clasroom behind the sanctuary, where mothers younger than ours taught us the stories and heroes of the Old and New Testaments, especially the teachings of Jesus, pictured as pink-cheeked and golden haired in a cheap poster hanging on the wall. The women wore shorts, their tan and shapely legs stirring passions I didn’t understand.

Sunday school continued through high school. Classes moved from the sanctuary basement to the “rec center,” equipped with classrooms and a basketball court where Sunday night “youth fellowship” commenced. My Uncle Mac, my mother’s older brother, taught a class on the Reformation, which although tilted toward the Protestant side gave a good foundation in early modern European history.

A youth minister named George Klett stirred my religious faith in my impressionable early teen years.

Mr. Klett was a young man with dark, slicked back hair, who wore thick black glasses. The old minister, Dr. Melton, rarely allowed Mr. Klett to give a Sunday seromon, and he was a dull speaker with a monotonous Southern drawl. His duty was to develop our youth program, a mission he carried out diligently.

One Easter, he organized a love feast to commemorate Christ’s Last Supper. We gathered in a room in the rec center. Perhaps each person brought a dish, or the church staff prepared the meal. In subdued light, we teens and Mr. Klett recalled Jesus’ final meal with his disciples.

To prepare for the banquet. Mr. Klett led an Easter contemplation group, which met on Wednesday nights for several weeks. After one session on Peter’s denial of Jesus and the savior’s passion, I and a young woman with long brown hair and sky-blue eyes engaged in an intense conversation on the rec center steps, a streetlight illuminating the sidewalk. Despite our sharing of deep feelings, the relationship advanced no further.

In a year or two, Mr. Klett left for another church, or perhaps he suffered a crisis of faith, or was embroiled in a scandal. I’d pretty much lost my religious belief by then and instead of going to Sunday school walked down to the newsstand at the end of North Boulevard to look at issues of the Sporting News and the Village Voice.

The burden of those years was church youth retreats. Boys and girls gathered for entire weekends for the church's campaign to keep us from drugs, sex and rock and roll. The speakers aspired to hipness, to speak in our teenage language. I spent those sessions in a fog of confusion. 

Once I roomed with a boy from church whose mother was eternally pregnant, leading to overheard snatches of gossip whenever she appeared in her maternity dress. The family
bore eight children. This family member, a boy of 16 or so, assaulted me for hours with filthy stories. A chaste lad, I felt my neck, ears and face burn as he kept the filth coming. That was in Gulfport, Miss., where later I played a high school football game, one of the few in which I satisfied the coaches.

In one daylong restreat, we rode a bus, or different cars, to a church in Clinton, La., a small city north of Baton Rouge that hadn’t developed much from its ante-bellum plantation days. We met in a small library with a vending machine that dispensed free soft drinks. The preacher who spoke to us chain-smoked cigarettes. A nervous man, he wore a black shirt and white collar in the day’s heat and somnolence.

After the talks, we saw Kirk Douglas play Vincent Van Gogh in “Lust for Life.” I wasn’t sure and remain unenlightened about what Vincent’s cutting off his ear had to do with the Christian message. On the way home, the ladies gossiped about the preacher, finding his smoking unseemly for a man of the cloth.

Although I attemded LSU, its campus just a few miles from First Presbyterian, I stopped
going to church. After my father devoted Sunday mornings to fishing, and bought a camp
on the Atchafalaya Swamp, my mother felt compelled to join him, leaving the church she’d loved since childhood.

As I was swept away by the cults of rock and roll and radical politics, religion’s roots proved shallow after all of those years of indoctrination.

Now that I am an old man, my memories of First Presbyterian show how deeply they were
implanted. In quiet moments, I hear Mr. Klett’s voice intoning “well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Poetry blossoms as National Poetry Month arrives

Poetry's popularity has risen, as other arts decline.

Once poetry's readership had fallen so low that the American Academy of Poets in 1996 declared April National Poetry Month to promote the genre.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led many grieving readers to seek solace in poetry.

While the Internet has devastated newspapers, magazines and publishing, it's spurred the poetry revival. Poets publish their work online without needing to go through literary journals or book publishers. Readers have easier access to poets' work. 

Poetry books are now regularly reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review and elsewhere. Print publications like the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Atlantic and Harper's publish more poetry.

Several poets have written best-sellers, receiving the attention once given to novelists and non-fiction writers. New poets keep appearing who write exciting, inspiring work. 

While the theater, classical music, jazz and novels lose followers, poetry thrives.

 

Farewell John Barth, innovative postmodern novelist

John Barth was one of the novelists who excited my literary friends in my college days.

Barth, a longtime professor at Johns Hopkins University and the author of 20 books, died April 2, according to Johns Hopkins. The cause and the place of death were undisclosed.

Along with Larry McMurtry, J.P. Donleavy,  Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, Raymond Carver, Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and the late Richard Farina, Barth stirred heated discussions in dorm rooms and campus bars. 

Barth's books like "The Sot Weed Factor," "Giles Goat Boy,"  and "Lost in the Funhouse" bestowed a sense of avant garde sophistication to us aspiring hipsters. Their difficult, metafictional techniques opened new vistas.

Looking back, I marvel that novels generated the same enthusiasm as new albums by the Beatles, the Stones, the Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills and Nash and other rock heroes.

Pynchon, Barth, Donleavy, Farina and Brautigan expanded our worldview as the Vietnam War and the rising counterculture divided the country.

Barth was one of my early literary heroes, extending the novel's boundaries. His challenging work revealed how to understand it, presenting an exhilarating literary adventure.

Happy birthday, Emmylou Harris

Birthday greetings to EmmyLou Harris, who turns 77 Tuesday.

With her classic, limitless voice, Harris is one of the artists of her generation who renewed American musical traditions.

She sang harmony on Graham Parsons' landmark album "Grievous Angel," which took country and western and folk to new frontiers while retaining an authentic, old-time sound. Her voice, soaring above Parsons' lead vocals, recalled church choirs and country roadhouses.

After Parsons' death, she embarked on a stellar solo career, interpreting classic country, folk and gospel music, and writing haunting songs like "Boulder to Birmingham."

I've been blessed by her albums, and seeing her perform three times, twice at Atlanta's Symphony Hall.

In her performances, she warmly interacts with her audience, greeting them like old friends.

A great singer and interpreter of traditional songs, a masterful songwriter and an admired humanitarian, Emmylou is an American treasure. 

 

 

Revisting Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"

April arrives with another visit to Geoffrey Chaucer's Tabard Inn.

In the General Prologue of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales,", the pilgrims are gathered for their journey from London to Canterbury, to seek healing at the shrine of the murdered martyr St. Thomas Becket.

Written 600 years ago, the epic poem's opening hymn to April and introduction of characters possess an enduring immediacy. I imagine myself among the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Squire and the others.

Viewing Chaucer's small tomb at Westminster Abbey, I thought about how alive the poem is.

In 1400, London was a small city, with a high mortality rate. Disease, famine, fire and violence were constant threats.

The poem, written in the city's Middle English dialect of the time, established English as a literary language, much as Dante's "Divine Comedy" did for Italian.

Chaucer and his characters glow with the love of life, the beauty of nature.

They speak to us, through the years.