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A few years ago, I wrote a story about Henry Aaron’s brief but formative stint with the Indianapolis Clowns. In his autobiography, Aaron said he couldn’t recall ever playing a game in Indianapolis. The Clowns were mostly a barnstorming team, playing only a few games in Indy each season. They first played throughout the South, then East before heading to Indianapolis for the first time in June of 1952.
This was the same time Aaron’s contract was sold to the Major League Boston Braves . He was sent to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he played with Boston’s minor league team, the Bears, for the remainder of 1952. He might have played one double-header against the Chicago American Giants in Indy on June 10, before moving to Eau Claire. The Indianapolis Recorder, the weekly Black community newspaper, noted Aaron’s signing by the Braves and that this would be the only chance to catch the rising star in Indianapolis. No mention can be found if Aaron played, but the Recorder briefly mentioned in its next issue that the Clowns lost both games.(Aaron was allowed to rejoin the Clowns after Eau Claire’s season ended, and he led the Clowns, which had won the first half of the season when he was with the team, to the Negro League World Series championship against the Birmingham Black Barons which had won the second half of the season. That best-of-13 series was played totally in locations in the South and ended in New Orleans.)
The Clowns also held its 1952 spring training in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which Aaron also wrote about. There’s a famous photo from April 1952 of Aaron at the Mobile, Alabama, train station with a duffle bag — when he had $1.50 in his pocket and the ham sandwiches his mother made, which the article noted. But he was apparently heading to spring training in North Carolina, not to Indianapolis.