When I was growing up in Chicago, my father took me to a lot of baseball games. Some were just your typical father-son outings, others were special. We might have been on our way to Wrigley Field or Comiskey Park, but in my dad’s eyes we were off to see greatness in action: Willie Mays or Frank Robinson or Bob Gibson or any of the many black baseball superstars of the ‘60s.

On the bus or the el train to the ballpark, he would brief me about what to watch for. And for the most part, he was right about the greatness aspect. These iconic black baseball players of the era seemed cut from a different cloth than their peers. Mays had an enthusiasm that infected everyone, even people in the stands. Gibson’s stern stare could intimidate someone in the cheap seats hundreds of feet away. Robinson had an intensity that seemed to make the scoreboard vibrate.

One day in 1968, we charged off to Wrigley Field to see Hank Aaron. (The Cubs and the rest of the Atlanta Braves were secondary concerns.) My dad was particularly excited. In a game that featured four future Hall of Famers, Aaron was clearly the best player on the field; he had three of Atlanta’s seven hits, but my Cubs won 5-2.

As good as Aaron was, he wasn’t larger than life like some of the other players of the era. By this time, I was 8 years old and hip to the Johnson family tradition of contrarianism, so on the way home, I piped up with my assessment that Aaron wasn’t equal to the other players we’d made trips to see. My father let out a sigh of disappointment and went silent. As we got off the bus, he said “you know, he’ll probably be the all-time home run king.”

It didn’t take long—six years—for history to prove my father right; 35 years ago, April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron homered over the left-center field fence in Atlanta Fulton County stadium and broke the most hallowed record in all of sports—Babe Ruth’s career home run mark of 714. Home runs seem cheap today; they routinely fly out of new ballparks built to dimensions designed to bolster offense. They are hit by batters who seem artificially bulked up by steroids and human growth hormones. And the dingers are served up by pitchers who are now trying to hit a strike zone that is a fraction of its former size.

When I began going to baseball games in the 1960s, home runs were hard to come by, and Ruth’s number seemed almost unreal. His mark of 714 was a full 25 percent better than the next closest hitter’s—Jimmie Foxx’s 534. For decades, the idea of breaking Ruth’s record seemed as credible as the idea that a black person could be elected president of the United States.