It was a thrill to be on field, take photos at 1975 MLB All-Star Game in Milwaukee

In this protracted -- and increasingly dispiriting -- period of trying to stay at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, I'm energized by the various, non-shooting photography projects I keep running into and tackling. (The previous four blog posts here will review what I've come up with so far .... or at least recently, anyway.)

I launched into the most recent two days ago. In a Facebook group called Old Milwaukee ("old" Milwaukee referring to its history, not the Old Milwaukee beer brand), I learned from a post there there that folks running a relatively new Facebook page called The History of Milwaukee County Stadium are collecting memories and pictures via the Internet from people interested in seeing their stories preserved in a book they want to publish from the amalgam of nostalgia.

I have lots of memories of County Stadium; I grew up in suburban Milwaukee, so the Braves were my team through childhood and quite a few years later. I still recall the excitement, anticipation ... then absolute awe .. that I felt, at age 8 or 9, as I climbed the ramp from the concourse to the lower grandstands and finally laid eyes -- for the first time -- on that beautiful green ball diamond I heretofore had only imagined. It was my first in-person Braves game, and I'm pretty sure the opponent were the Pittsburgh Pirates.

I made many more trips there to see Braves games. But the stadium was also home to the Green Bay Packers in the National Football League (this was back when the Pack played three of its seven home games in Milwaukee; the four others were played in Green Bay), and I saw three or four Packers games at County Stadium (and I saw about five or six in Green Bay, too). County Stadium also was part-time home to the Chicago White Sox in a brief period between when the Braves left Milwaukee for Atlanta in 1965 and when the Brewers arrived in town in 1970. I saw maybe three of those White Sox games. And I would see some Brewers games there in the few years I would still reside in Wisconsin after that. One of the Brewers game was opening day of that first season, when a group of guys in my high school drove there together to see it and sat in the bleachers, the only time I ever watched a game of any kinds in bleacher seats there.

In 1975, the last year I lived full-time in Wisconsin, Major League Baseball named the Brewers the host team for the annual Major League Baseball All-Star Game. That summer, I was working as an editor for the Columbus (Wis.) Journal-Republican weekly newspaper, which was owned by Citizen Publishing in Beaver Dam. Citizen Publishing also owned the Beaver Dam Daily Citizen, and a college acquaintance of mine, Warren Kraft, worked there. Citizen Publishing honchos arranged for Warren and me to get media passes to that All-Star Game, which gave us access to players on the field during extensive pregame activity such as fielding and batting practices -- and interviews of the players where time permitted.

That 1975 season was Henry Aaron's first back in Milwaukee; he had played with the Braves, in Milwaukee and then Atlanta, from 1954-74 and became one of my favorite players. He would retire after the following season (1976). In 1974, before coming back to Milwaukee, Aaron tied and then passed Babe Ruth to take first place on baseball's all-time home-run list, hitting his record-setting 715th in an early-season game in Atlanta (his last season with the Braves) against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Aaron was named to the '75 American League All-Star team, so I got to see him close up that evening. National and local media consumed all his "free" time before the game, so I really didn't get a chance to talk to him one on one, much as I would have like to.

But there were no such mobs around first baseman George Scott, the other Brewers player named to the AL All-Star team. So I pulled Scott aside and interviewed him. Warren grabbed a couple pictures of us as we chatted. That's George and I during the interview in the photo leading off the post, and another frame appears immediately below, followed by a closeup of Scott that Warren also took.

I took every other photo in this post, using the 35mm camera (which I think was a Nikkormat with a modest-focal-length lens), gear the Citizen Publishing Co. issued the Columbus paper to use for news and sports coverage. If you're wondering why the images are black-and-white; that's what newspapers used almost exclusively back then, and well into the late 1980s.

It is All-Star Game tradition for the two teams -- National and American league -- post for full-team photos before the game. The national and Milwaukee media had commandeered all the key front-and-center spots for these pictures, so I stood off the side to photograph the American (above) and National (below) teams. In the American League team photo above, Hank Aaron is in the first standing row, third player from the left. He is turned to gab with Oakland's Reggie Jackson. George Scott, the other Brewers player on the squad, is front row, far right. That season's Brewers manager Del Crandall, who served as a coach in the game, is in the row of men seated in chairs, seventh from the right. There's a guy in a Brewers uniform two to the left of Scott, but I don't know who that is. 

Pregame shots of Hank Aaron (right) talking to Cardinals great Stan Musial (above) and chatting with Musial and longtime Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh (below). Musial served as the honorary captain of the National League squad for the 1975 All-Star Game (Mickey Mantle was his counterpart for the AL). I don't know for sure whether Musial's selection for that honor was coincidental, or if it had something to do with the fact that the only other MLB All-Star Game played in County Stadium (in July 1955) was won by the National League when Musial broke a 5-5 tie by leading off the bottom of the 12th inning with a walk-off home run to right field, a game still considered one of the most exciting and dramatic in All-Star Game history. Aside from Musial's homer, the NL overcame a 5-0 deficit in the late innings -- a rally to which Braves players Hank Aaron and Johnny Logan contributed a key walk and single, respectively. 

Sadly, I was on the wrong side of the American League All-Star team for the shot of the team picture if I wanted to get Hank Aaron prominently in my image. But I redeemed myself later with the photo above, when smaller groups of players posed together. I think a lot of the players -- knowing Aaron was the newly crowned home-run king and that he was close to ending his career -- wanted a keepsake photo record of themselves with Aaron. In this photo, Aaron is standing at left and flanked to his left by Mike Hargrove of the Texas Rangers and Rod Carew of the Minnesota Twins. On a knee in front of them is Boston Red Sox outfielder Fred Lynn (left) and Oakland A's outfielder Claudell Washington.

Above is the County Stadium scoreboard at the start of the bottom of the 9th inning, which Minnesota's Rod Carew would lead off. The American League would not score that inning, so the game ended just as the scoreboard shows here -- the National League winning, 6-3.  

Above and below are photos I ordinarily would not include in a post because of their inferior image quality. The one of George Scott above was shot through the wire of the batting cage, impairing its sharpness. The one below of Aaron running out of the dugout during player introductions before the game was taken from my seat in the press box -- quite a ways above field level. I did not have a long focal-length lens for the shot, and it was getting dark (compromising my ability to freeze action with a decent shutter speed; a flash would not have helped at that distance). But I took the photo nevertheless because I had a sense of its possible historical value years later. And it's because of that historical value that I'm including it in the post here.