Baseball In Eau Claire

Eau Claire has been a hotbed for amateur and professional baseball since the end of the Civil War. Wisconsin's Chippewa Valley has had the honor of donning dozens of nationally known baseball stars in its uniforms (most notably Hank Aaron) as well as hosting thousands of other players who were stars in their own right. With this collection of images, author Jason Christopherson takes the reader on a journey in time through the eyes of a baseball fan. Many of the images are from the collections of the players themselves and are therefore available to the public for the first time in this book. Mixed in with the images are stories-and not just the kind you would find in the newspaper. Unless, of course, your local paper runs stories such as the one on a future major leaguer who, not knowing any better, ate gravy-laden pork chops with his bare hands on his first road trip!

June 12, 1952—only a local sportswriter showed up at the Eau Claire airport to greet a newly signed eighteen-year-old shortstop from Alabama toting a cardboard suitcase. "I was scared as hell," said Henry Aaron, recalling his arrival as the new recruit on the city’s Class C minor league baseball team. Forty-two years later, as Aaron approached the stadium where the Eau Claire Bears once played, an estimated five thousand people surrounded a newly raised bronze statue of a young "Hank" Aaron at bat. "I had goosebumps," he said later. "A lot of things happened to me in my twenty-three years as a ballplayer, but nothing touched me more than that day in Eau Claire." For the people of Eau Claire, Aaron’s summer two years before his Major League debut with the Milwaukee Braves symbolizes a magical time, when baseball fans in a small city in northern Wisconsin could live a part of the dream.

"Ask any resident of Eau Claire, Wisconsin about the history of baseball in their town and the response almost always revolves around Henry Aaron and the magical 1952 season. But 'Clearwater's' baseball roots go far deeper than that. Between 1886 and 1912, 41 major leaguers also donned Eau Claire colors at one time in their careers." --Back cover.

In 1855, Wisconsin's Chippewa County set the wheels in motion to divide itself into three parts. The southernmost section became Eau Claire County. With good forest, good farmland, and the confluence of two scenic rivers, it quickly established its own identity. Eau Claire County followed a classic American path. The county harvested its native natural resources (timber in this case) and started a strong agricultural tradition. In later decades, as its sesquicentennial approached, the county had developed a diversified economy, anchored by health care, retail, higher education, and high-tech manufacturing. But it is the interesting and ever-changing mix of people who built the county, and who have sustained it for 150 years. In 1890, seven of every ten people living in Wisconsin's Chippewa Valley, with Eau Claire County at its heart, were born outside the U.S. or had foreign-born parents. The area still welcomes new arrivals. Through scores of historic photographs, this book captures the hardworking, fun-loving people who have given the county its distinctive place in the American heartland.

This City of Hills was big enough to have everything, even a professional baseball team, and small enough so we could participate in everything. A collection of short stories about growing up in the 1940's.

Burleigh Grimes--forever to be remembered as the ill-tempered spitballer with the perpetual five o'clock shadow. For nearly two decades, he brought his surly disposition to the pitcher's mound. His life-or-death mentality resulted in a reputation as one of the game's great competitors and a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Along the way he suited up for eight different ball clubs and played alongside a record 36 Hall of Famers. Grimes spent more than half a century in professional baseball as a player, manager, coach and scout. This biography covers all aspects of his life, from his childhood in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, to his twilight years in that same town. In between are World Series highs and lows, brawls, five marriages, a near-death experience and 270 major league victories.