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. 

Going back in time ... to 1994 trip to MLB Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

My trip to Cooperstown, N.Y., in late October 1994 was memorable on a couple of levels, one expected and another unexpected.

The expected was seeing the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, something that at the time had been at the top of my list of places I wanted to visit (this was before the term “bucket list” became popular to describe that kind of thing).

The unexpected was the spectacular autumn colors in the Allegheny Mountains that I would see on the drive across western New York en route to Cooperstown. Sadly, I did not pull over to photograph any of those scenes. Today, I’d have done so in a heartbeat.

I saved all my picture-taking on the trip for Cooperstown, and specifically, for Doubleday Field and the MLB Hall of Fame.

Some of those shots — all taken with the Kodak Star 335 (see previous post) — are sprinkled throughout this post. I’m not claiming any are spectacular; their purpose for inclusion in a post is merely historical. In fact, several of the shots of Doubleday Field were marred by discoloration after the film was inadvertently exposed to light (probably in either the loading or unloading from the camera) before processing, so ... I cropped around those glitches and healed where I could.

Leading off the post is a shot of the main entrance to Doubleday Field, which is just a few blocks from the HOF and is where for years MLB has held its annual Hall of Fame game between two teams from the big leagues on the weekend of the HOF induction ceremonies in August.

Below is the main entrance to the HOF, which I took after leaving the museum for the day. It was late afternoon, and there was considerable noise, so I processed this image in my Noiseware software.

The statues of legends Babe Ruth and Ted Williams (above) greet visitors just inside the main entrance. I don’t remember now exactly where the photo below of the Hall’s very first induction class of 1936 was displayed, but I’m sure it has a prominent place. 
  

The HOF has a whole open area devoted to the Hall of Fame member plaques. The photo above is a perspective shot, the first below is a section of four, a composition I made to include one of my boyhood heroes, Hank Aaron (upper left). The second photo below was my other boyhood hero, Eddie Mathews. Both Aaron and Mathews got their start with the Braves’ franchise, which had several outstanding teams — including National League pennant winners in 1957 and '58, and World Series champs in '57 — in Milwaukee when I was growing up. 

The shot above and the first two below are from an exhibit dedicated to the National League Braves’ period in Milwaukee, which lasted from 1953 (when the team moved to Milwaukee from Boston) to 1965, when the franchise moved to Atlanta. 

Above: An exhibit dedicated to Hank Aaron, who at the time I visited the Hall was baseball’s all-time home run king. In my humble opinion, he still is. 

Above: An exhibit dedicated to the Milwaukee Brewers, which started as the new Seattle Pilots franchise in 1969, and after just one year, moved to Milwaukee, where the Brewers have been ever since. The club along with Houston Astros are the only teams that have spent time in both the American and National leagues. 

Ty Cobb (above), the all-time hits leader until Pete Rose erased his record on Sept. 11, 1985. As controversial of a player that Cobb was, I’d always had a soft spot for him since I learned that he once said of Eddie Mathews early in Mathews’ career: ‘I’ve known three or four perfect swings in my time. This lad has one of them.”

A co-worker at The Indianapolis Star was a fan of the National League Giants, and I'm sure I took the pictures devoted to the 1951 pennant-winning New York Giants above and the exhibit below for Candlestick Park, where the Giants first played after moving to San Francisco in 1958, for his benefit. 

I didn’t take the photo of the Ebbets Field exhibit above for anyone in particular. I’ve always had a fascination about that ballpark ... maybe because of how it was magnified in Roger Kahn’s “The Boys of Summer” book. Ebbets Field was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers until they moved to Los Angeles in 1958, and the Brooklyn stadium was torn down not long afterward.  

I’m one of those baseball fans who always detested and rooted against the New York Yankees, but I’m big enough to acknowledge that the Yanks had some fabulous teams through the years and amassed an incredible string of American League pennants and World Series championships. The franchise exhibit is above; one devoted to the team’s great home-run hitting and run-producing tandem of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth is below. 

The shots above and below are the three photos I took inside Doubleday Field that are presentable for the blog. I had to do some touch-up on the one above and applied a radical crop on the right side of the first one below (you can kind of see the fringe of discoloring on the right side. I liked this first one below so much because it showed the autumn leaves sprinkled on the outfield grass. And the trees in the background of the one above give you an idea it was late October: There is still a hint of color in the leaves.