The day a leery Aaron got some Minnesota Nice

July 15, 2007 01:26 am

— Retired Mankato teacher Darrill Miller thinks the world of Hank Aaron, yet he’s fine with the fact that baseball’s all-time home run king is about to be surpassed.
Aaron’s 755 homers are testimony enough to his greatness, Miller says, and whatever Barry Bonds achieves won’t diminish that.
Miller’s personal link to Aaron came on a February day in North Mankato in 1981.
Aaron, then vice president in charge of player development for the Atlanta Braves, was in town to speak at Mankato State and conduct a baseball clinic at the university.
Miller, a former minor league ballplayer who was teaching at North Mankato Junior High, got in touch with Aaron and asked if he’d come to speak to the students.
Aaron was reluctant.
“He didn’t know if he wanted to speak to a group of kids,” Miller says. “He said, ‘I’m a minority, and they might boo me.’”
Even though this was 1981, not 1951, Miller believes Aaron’s concerns were genuine.
It was understandable that Aaron may have been racially gun-shy, considering it was only a few years earlier that he’d had to deal with vicious racism and even death threats in his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record.
But Miller promised Aaron he
wouldn’t be harassed, and Aaron agreed to come.
Aaron spoke to the students in the school gym, trading on familiar themes: Stay off drugs, listen to your teachers, love your parents.
“He was very surprised when he came into that gym and the place was full,” Miller says. “And afterward, if he told me once, he told me 10 times. He said, ‘Darrill, this is really a nice group of people you have here.’”
Miller’s own baseball career was a light year more humble than Aaron’s.
The Balaton native left Minnesota to go into the service, then played in the St. Louis Cardinals organization. It was in Florida in 1950, Class D ball, then the lowest rung in the minors.
Miller lasted half a season before souring on the prevailing player lifestyles.
“Nothing but drunks. That’s all there were. I hated it, to tell you the truth, so I quit it. Just let it go.”
He went back home, played semi-pro town team baseball for $10 a game, and enjoyed it infinitely more than his stint in Florida.
If that rowdy Class D league had been filled with Hank Aarons instead, maybe things might have been different.
“He was one of the nicest human beings I’ve met in my life,” Miller says. “I can’t say enough about him.”
As for the passing of the home run torch, Miller just shrugs it off with sports’ hoariest bromide. Something about records owing their very existence to their eventual demise.

Brian Ojanpa is a Free Press staff writer. Call him at 344-6316 or e-mail bojanpa@mankatofreepress.com.

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