Ninety years ago today Henry Louis Aaron was born in Mobile, Ala. He was Hank Aaron on his baseball cards, and he also was known as the Hammer. You cannot convince me that there ever was a more appropriate nickname in sports.

I never met the Hammer in person, but I did grow up with him. I was in second grade and watching a baseball game on television at my grandmother’s house the first time I saw the name Henry Aaron. It was not a home run that drew my attention and fueled my admiration for the Hammer; it was a stolen base and an extra base taken on a catcher’s errant throw that impressed me. As the Hammer stood at third base quietly dusting off his pants, the television emblazoned the name “Henry Aaron” across the bottom of the screen. That was my introduction to baseball, and I was hooked for life. And Henry Aaron was my favorite player from that moment on.

The Hammer played in the days before the super stations and ESPN, so I followed him over the radio on WSM-AM 650, the Air Castle of the South. I watched him on television whenever I could, but since he played in Atlanta, that was not very often. I saw him play in person for the first time in 1967, right after I completed the third grade; Aaron was 33 years old, and I was not yet nine. He went 0-4 with two strikeouts as the Braves lost to the Cardinals 5-0.

In mid-July after I survived fourth grade, the Hammer became just the eighth player to hit 500 career home runs.

I watched on television as the Hammer, at 35, hit home runs in Games One and Two of the first National League Championship Series in 1969. I listened to him hit another homer in Game Three of that series on a transistor radio while I sat in Mrs. Donna Forrest’s sixth grade classroom at West Cheatham Elementary School.

The summer after I completed seventh grade, the Hammer hit his first home run in an All-Star game. Four days later, the Atkins clan traveled back to Atlanta and saw the Hammer hit a home run live and in person against the Dodgers. The summer after my eighth-grade year, they played the All-Star Game in Atlanta, and I watched on TV as the Hammer hit another home run, this time in front of the home folks.

On my dad’s birthday during summer break after my freshman year of high school, the Hammer became just the second player in baseball history to hit 700 home runs.

I was barely a sophomore in high school when the Hammer hit his 40^th home run of the 1973 season, leaving him one homer short of the Babe.  It was at the end of my sophomore year in 1974 when the Hammer tied the Big Bambino with his first swing of the season on Opening Day in Cincinnati. I watched from our living room in Cheap Hill, Tenn. when the Hammer, still strong at 40, hit home run number 715 back home in Atlanta.

Early in my junior year in high school, the Hammer hit a homer in his final at-bat as a Brave. He returned to Milwaukee for his final two seasons and hit the last home run of his marvelous career the summer after I graduated from high school.

I followed the Hammer for only 11 seasons of his career. But those were the last 11 years of my childhood. And that’s why I say I grew up with him.