Baseball great was no stranger to Port

While arguably the greatest baseball player in history was best known for clobbering home runs, Port Washington got to know Hank Aaron on a different level.

Years after Aaron retired as the all-time home run leader, he hit one more in the business world with roast beef.

Aaron chose Port as the first location of 15 Arby’s restaurants he was contracted to open in the state.

He drove across Wisconsin for hours scouting different spots when the home run king stopped for a soft drink at Burger King in Port — Rick’s Lighthouse Mobil today — across the street from North Port Shopping Center.

“I looked across the street and said, ‘That’s the spot.’ It has gone well since,” Aaron told Ozaukee Press in a phone interview from his home in Atlanta in the summer of 1988.

The Port Arby’s is still in operation today.

Aaron, who died Friday, Jan. 22, at 86, wasn’t known as Hammerin’ Hank to one Port resident. Former Milwaukee Braves teammate John DeMerit called him by his given name.

“It’s interesting that everyone calls him Hank. We knew him as Henry in those days,” he said.

DeMerit called Aaron Henry at the 50th reunion of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves World Series title and got an odd look. Aaron told him people don’t call him that anymore.

DeMerit, raised in Port, got to spend some alone time with the future legend in 1961. He had recently married and talked about his commute to the office — County Stadium. Aaron offered to give him a ride from his house in a Mequon subdivision.

DeMerit’s wife Gladys drove him to Aaron’s house and would return later for games. Aaron and DeMerit drove over to 43rd Street and then down Sherman Boulevard to County Stadium.

DeMerit joined the Milwaukee Braves in 1957 and met Aaron, who had been there since 1954, when he was 20.

“He was quite young, obviously. He was not a leader yet,” DeMerit said.

Those roles were reserved for stars such as Warren Spahn and Eddie Mathews.

“He was on the quiet side. It wasn’t that he didn’t know things. He was just probably in the shadow of the older guys,” DeMerit said of Aaron.

In the 1988 interview with the Press, Aaron said people stuck with him despite making silly mistakes as a young adult.

“Wisconsin and the Milwaukee area will always be a home to me because of the way I was treated when I joined the Milwaukee Braves,” he said.

Aaron faced some cruel social obstacles. Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, a decade before Aaron was promoted to the Major Leagues, and racism was rampant, especially in the South.

The Braves’ spring training was held in Bradenton, Fla. White players stayed in a hotel. Black players did not. DeMerit said he remembers the bus ride back from training.

“All of a sudden you’re on gravel roads, dirt roads. They would stop the bus and the Black players were housed by some of the Black people in the neighborhood there,” he said.

“That is something that staggered me. What an insulting thing to have happen.”

In 1958, DeMerit remembers Aaron, Mathews and a few other players taking the same flight to spring training. They all took a cab from the airport to Bradenton and Mathews suggested stopping for a beer along the way.

The group got into a tavern and asked where Aaron was.

“He wouldn’t get out of the car,” DeMerit said. “Mathews looked at the bartender and said ‘Do you serve Black people here?’”

The answer was no.

“We all took off,” DeMerit said. “It was impressive to see Eddie Mathews say ‘Hey, we aren’t staying here, either.’”

Aaron wasn’t that outspoken yet.

“If he had some kind of agenda in regards to race, which he obviously should have, it wasn’t obvious to us,” DeMerit said.

His work ethic was more noticeable.

“He earned everything he got. I never saw him take a day off for anything that was inexplicable. He just played,” DeMerit said. “He was unassuming, steady, solid and determined.”

DeMerit had no idea Aaron would become a legend, but he and everyone around the budding star knew he was good.

“Nobody that I know of thought of him as a home run hitter. He could hit home runs, but by God he hit everything else too,” he said.

“And when he hit it, you knew it was hit. My God, it was a bullet.”

Aaron’s hitting records — he has the most career RBI with 2,297 and total bases with 6,856 — tend to overshadow another part of his game, DeMerit said.

“He was a pretty good outfielder. People don’t realize that,” he said.

Aaron’s 755 home runs were tops until Barry Bonds hit No. 756 in 2007. But questions about steroids still dog Bonds and keep him out of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

To DeMerit, Henry Aaron is still the home run king.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said.