Hank Aaron

Henry Louis Aaron was born on the fifth of February 1934 at Mobile, Alabama, the third of eight children of Herbert Aaron Sr. — a worker at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company — and Estella Pritchett Aaron, a homemaker. He completed Central High School at Mobile through the tenth grade and the Josephine Allen Institute through the eleventh grade. He played baseball with the local sandlot squads of Mobile's Black recreation circuit through his teens, principally as a shortstop, and at sixteen signed with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League for the 1952 season.

He played eighty-eight games for the Clowns of 1952 — batting .366 with five home runs — before the Boston Braves purchased his contract for ten thousand dollars in May 1952. He spent 1952 and 1953 in the Class C and Class A minor leagues. He was the principal Class A player of his cohort at Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and at Jacksonville, Florida, and was promoted to the major-league Milwaukee Braves for the 1954 season.

He played twenty-three major-league seasons across 1954 to 1976 — twenty-one with the Braves franchise at Milwaukee and Atlanta, the final two with the Milwaukee Brewers. He was selected to the National League All-Star Team in twenty-one of his twenty-three seasons. He won the 1957 National League Most Valuable Player Award when the Braves won the 1957 World Series. He had at his retirement seven-hundred-and-fifty-five career home runs, two-thousand-two-hundred-and-ninety-seven career runs batted in (still the major-league record), six-thousand-eight-hundred-and-fifty-six total bases (still the major-league record), and three-thousand-seven-hundred-and-seventy-one career hits.

His decisive symbolic moment was the night of the eighth of April 1974 at the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, when he hit his seven-hundred-and-fifteenth career home run off the Los Angeles Dodgers' Al Downing — surpassing Babe Ruth's seven-hundred-and-fourteen-home-run record that had stood since 1935. He had received across the previous three years an estimated nine hundred and thirty thousand letters, of which an estimated fraction were death threats. The Atlanta Braves had assigned him a personal bodyguard for the home stretch of the 1973 and 1974 seasons.

He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982 with 97.8 percent of the vote — the second-highest first-ballot percentage in Hall of Fame history at that date. He served from 1976 as a senior executive of the Atlanta Braves organisation, rising to senior vice-president in 1989.

He died at his Atlanta home on the twenty-second of January 2021, at eighty-six.

He is honored here as the home-run record-holder of the twentieth century.