Imagine holding a game-used baseball bat once swung by Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, or Babe Ruth (“The Great Bambino”). That’s exactly what my wife, daughter and I got to do during a recent travel trailer road trip.
Hundreds of thousands (more likely millions) of people collect baseball memorabilia. To them, Cooperstown, New York, is Ground Zero, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. That’s not where I took my family. Instead, we visited a lesserknown, secondary Ground Zero - the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory in Louisville, Kentucky, where visitors are allowed to hold bats once used by a few of baseball’s greatest stars.
In 1856, a small woodworking shop, J. F. Hillerich Job Turning, was started by J. Fred Hillerich in Louisville. By 1864, the company had twenty employees handcrafting stair railings, porch columns and swinging butter churns. The name was changed to J. F. Hillerich & Son in 1880, when J. Fred hired his teenaged son as an apprentice. One day in 1884, seventeen-year-old John A. “Bud” Hillerich (the son
