April 1953 (View large image)

0utside you could hear the dogs squabbling among themselves and occasionally the whimper of a puppy scratching on the screen door. So close by that it seemed you could reach out and touch them with your hand, the chat piles, mountains of waste after the lead and zinc have been extracted from the ore, rose against the dull grey sky and the cold, insistent rain falling on the coarse earth added the final depressing touch to the scene.

This was Commerce, Oklahoma, whose 2,400 people would have gone on living in their drab anonymity, were it not for the miracle of Mickey Mantle, who jumped from the mines to the front pages of the nation as the new pride of the Yankees.

Only recently his friends and neighbors honored Mantle with a banquet and a parade along the seven‑block length of Commerce’s main street, past the pool hall, the Black Cat Cafe, the town hall (which is only a store front) and Ott Chandler’s drug store. There were bands from Miami, Picher, Quapaw, Fairland, Chelsea, Grove and Commerce. Mayor Peck declared a school holiday. Uniformed police from Joplin, Baxter Springs, Galena and Miami, as well as units of the highway patrol from Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, added to the color and gaiety. The governor’s representative made Mickey an honorary colonel and commodore. Even traveling at a snail’s pace it doesn’t take long for a caravan of cars and high school bands to traverse seven country blocks. Finally, the last of the paraders had come to the end of the town, where the main street meets the highway and the kids hang out at Lloyd’s Drive‑in. The parade was over. Reluctant to end a day such as this that had come once in the history of Commerce, they went back to their homes—or back to the mines. They walked or rode through streets where once houses had stood, but now there were just gaping holes in the ground. Much of Commerce is built over the mines and more than one home has been swallowed up by the earth. The people simply pack what belongings they can salvage and move to another house, so much like the last one, and go back to digging again in the mines.

This had happened to his wife’s family, Mickey said as we sat and talked in the living room of the clapboard home that houses the Mantles. He said it matter‑of‑factly, not attempting to impress me. “You know,” he said “there’s a mine right under the chair you’re sitting in. Three hundred feet down there men are working in the ground. This house is built right over a mine just like all the others around here.”

To a city‑dweller this should have come as something of a surprise, but nothing that Mantle could say and nothing he can do would surprise me because this is the most surprising and exciting young ballplayer in the new generation of baseball. He has a personality that is dull and colorless, yet he has a talent that knows no horizon and a story that reads like fiction. His is the fable that somehow has become fact.

Within a single season he stilled the cry of those who mourned the passing of the great Joe DiMaggio. He filled it so adequately in center field, a position he had never played before, that if DiMaggio was not forgotten, his retirement no longer was a major la­ment. The Yankees won their fourth straight pennant with Mantle out there, hitting .311 to pace the club, and defeated the Dodgers in the World Series with Mickey collecting ten hits, including two home runs.

It was an excellent performance, but one that had been equaled or bettered before in Series competition. Yet after the seventh game Jackie Robinson of the Dodgers was moved to remark, “Mantle beat us. That kid was the difference between the two clubs. If he’s not yet 21 years old, what will he be like in three or four years? For a kid like him, nothing is impossible.”

There have been few more exciting rookies than Mantle was in 1951. Yet Mickey could have become one of the greatest busts simply because he had had so much ballyhoo. Until the end of last season there were many who viewed Mantle with misgivings, be­cause he was a kid who was asked to walk before he could crawl and run before he could walk in baseball. There was question of his maturity for a role so large as the one in which he was being cast and it is entirely possible that what veered Robinson so firmly in his praise of Mantle was not what Mickey did over the entire Series, but his reactions on just one play

It happened in the third game of the Series, a game the Dodgers were to win to take a two‑games‑to‑one edge, but it is entirely possible that the Series was decided right there in the Yankees’ favor as Mantle met and passed his most severe test. In the eighth inning, Robinson slashed a single to center. As Robinson made a sharp swerve around first base, Mickey fielded the ball on one hop and then was faced with a choice that every National League outfielder has had to make. He could throw to second, forcing Robinson to retreat to first base, or hold his throw until Jackie had committed himself irrevocably when it would be Mantle’s arm against Jackie’s speed, daring and know‑how on the bases. When it is you against Robinson, it is no simple decision to make.

Mantle elected to hold his throw. Whether it was a deliberate or in­stinctive decision, none can say, but Mantle watched Robinson and Jackie, watching the fielder, came as much as 25 feet toward second. He slowed down, pretending to go back and Mickey, meanwhile, came in several steps with the ball before cocking his arm as if to throw to first base.

With that motion Jackie went into high gear for second, yet Mantle still held his throw. Suddenly, it seemed Jackie sensed he could not make the base. The Dodger stopped, stumbled, got to his feet again and then scrambled back to first.

It was a war of nerves on the bases, Robinson drawing on his years of ex­perience and Mantle drawing from some inexplicable well of wisdom that seems to be his despite his youth, and it was a war Robinson lost.

Among the 66,698 spectators at the Yankee Stadium that day were some who sensed the importance of the play as it related to the Series, but at least one among them, Branch Rickey, interpreted Mantle’s reaction to Robinson’s maneuvering in a much broader sense. Rickey brought Robinson to the majors and many times saw how Robinson’s running could kill the con­fidence of one man and, through him, his team. As the play unfolded Rickey turned to his companion and said: “Maturity is something that cannot be measured in years. That young man’s arms and legs and eyes and wind are young, but his head is old. To me it is the final proof of the boy. Mantle has the chance to make us forget every ballplayer we ever saw.”

It is not generally known that Rickey did not wait for this final proof to bestow what must be accepted as The Mahatma’s most sincere accolade. Two years earlier, with Mickey on the Binghamton roster and only a half season at Independence (Class D) and a season at Joplin (Class C) behind the kid, Rickey had seen him play in a California exhibition against his own Pirates. Batting left‑handed Mantle hit a ball over the right‑field wall. Batting right‑handed, Mickey smashed a drive over the left‑field wall. On the bases, he was a blurred streak going to first. His throw from the outfield, although resembling more the trajectory of an infielder, which Mantle had been to that point, had cannon power.

Rickey reached into an inside pocket and tore loose a check from its folder. Theatrically he signed his name to it and then handed the blank to Day Topping, co‑owner of the Yankee: who sat beside him. “Fill in the figure you want for that boy and it’s a deal,” Branch said.

Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra: Heart of the Yankees (View large image)

It has been rumored that Topping’s reply was, “Ralph Kiner and $500,000,” but actually all Topping did was grin at Branch s corroboration that the Yankees had dug a rare gem from their farm system. Rickey sighed wistfully at his disappointment that his offer had not been accepted and his relief that it was rejected. Such is the way Mantle affects veteran baseball men who see him.

Shortly thereafter, Ted McGrew, who scouted for Rickey with the Cards and Dodgers, dug up talent for the Braves and currently is beating the bushes for the Red Sox, spoke at a Hot Stove League dinner in San Diego. McGrew recommended Pee Wee Reese and Pete Reiser to Brooklyn and Alvin Dark to the Braves. His estimate of a player’s talent is among the most au­thoritative in baseball.

“Here is a player,” said McGrew, “who, in my opinion, is greater than Joe DiMaggio ever was. Mantle is faster, a better hitter and has a better arm than DiMaggio. With two strikes on Mantle, the infield naturally is playing back and Mickey is so fast you just don’t make a play on him when he bunts unless he sends one right back to the mound.”

Mantle, a kid who turned 21 last October 20, is a breathtaking young­ster. There can be no argument on that score, but McGrew will find many who watched DiMaggio’s impeccable and imperishable performances through the years who will dispute this hasty enshrinement of Mantle. After all, Mickey has played only 238 games in the majors and 504 games in all professional baseball classifications.

Had McGrew said that Mantle has it within him to become the new Di­Maggio in performance as well as publicity, his statement would have sounded more reasonable, but even in its exaggeration it puts Mantle into the perspective in which he is viewed by many baseball people. Here is a human comet that has shot across the baseball horizon with a swiftness that has made observers lose their breath. Many before him leaped from high school, the sandlots and college ball directly into the majors, but none made it as big as quickly. To mention a few, Rogers Hornsby, Mike Gonzalez and Sid Hudson took the five‑league stride from Class C to the big‑time and only Hornsby’s rapid development after his first inconsequential season with the Cardinals bore the fruit of real stardom.

The circumstances, however, were vastly different and favored The Ra­jah. All Mantle had going for him was his infinite talent. Every other feature was against him.

Mickey came into the majors with all the noise and fireworks of a man being shot out of a cannon. Older and far more experienced men than he curdled under the burden of the con­centrated ballyhoo barrage that at­tended his first spring training with the Yankees when he came in, green as a pea, with ambitions to achieve the level of Beaumont.

The first time I saw him reporters older than his father were elbowing for position around him in the dugout as they asked him questions he did not understand and could not answer even if he did. Photographers, mean­while, were shooting him from every angle. It was a time when business agents fought for the right to his exclusive signature on endorsement contracts and four national magazines were preparing personality stories on a youngster who had not lived long enough to develop an adult’s person­ality.

A short time before, DiMaggio had disclosed that this was to be his last active season. If Mantle’s own astounding contributions in Arizona and California exhibitions that spring were not enough to turn all the headlines his way, his implied designation as DiMag’s heir‑apparent provided the final stimulus. Mickey’s name began to be spelled out on the typewriters of the nation’s press before he learned how to flip down his sun glasses while going after a fly ball.

In retrospect this now seems almost comical, but the first time in Phoenix that Mickey went after a fly ball in an exhibition was the first time he ever wore sun glasses. Fumbling to drop them down from the peak of his cap, the kid took his eye off the flight of the ball and it hit him in the temple.

He had been a shortstop before that point at Independence and Joplin, but a few days after DiMag’s announcement reporters with the Yankees ob­served that Mantle had been turned over to wily Tommy Henrich, then a coach, for outfield instruction. Hen­rich labored long and faithfully with the kid and as the publicity furor mounted about Mantle it disturbed Tommy. Tommy estimated the effect all the ballyhoo could have on his charge because he recognized Mickey as the product of the hysteria attached to his promotion and the victim of it. “This isn’t good for the kid,” Henrich said. “They ought to leave him alone. He’s going to be fooled up here, fooled a lot, by pitchers who know a lot more about this business than he does and nobody knows whether the kid’s got it in him after all his buildup to accept the strikeouts and errors that have to come.”

As if these extravagant demands on his time and his talent were not enough, the publicity barrage that had his name on the lips of all interested in the sports world resulted in another trend which must have stewed within Mickey like a bubbling cauldron. In December, 1956, the selective service of Ottawa County, Oklahoma, had classified Mickey 4F in the draft be­cause of chronic osteomyelitis in his left ankle. As a high school freshman football player Mantle had been kicked in a practice scrimmage and the infection of the bone had never completely healed.

To those with sons in the service, it seemed strange that one so strong and swift, by all appearances the perfect physical specimen of youth, could be deferred from serving his country. A poison pen letter campaign to the

draft board in Mickey’s home town, to Selective Service Headquarters in Washington, to newspapers, to the Secretary of Defense and even to the President built up in volume and in­tensity. Washington finally had to yield. On April 11, 1951, Mickey was re‑examined at Tulsa, but again he was deferred because of his ankle injury. This was to happen again, on August 20, 1951, when the poison pen­men once more forced Selective Service to call him in. A fourth time, November 3, 1952, Mickey underwent another examination and this time he was deferred again because of the knee injury he sustained in the 1951 World Series.

So here was this youngster of limit­less promise beset by stresses and strains that pulled him every which way. There were the limitations of his own inexperience and unfamiliarity with the outfield, the reverential awe with which he regarded DiMaggio, be­side whom he would play and whom he realized he was being groomed to succeed. There was the boomerang of publicity and Mickey’s pain and pleas­ure and wonder of it all. These were forces manager Casey Stengel recog­nized as dangerous and knew, some­how, he must control, yet even Casey found himself contributing to the aura of hysteria that surrounded Mantle.

Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris: Summer of '61 (View large image)

While most of the correspondents who traveled regularly with the Yankees did not know about Mantle until the spring of ’51, a few did be­cause the Yankees had had the kid at their pre‑spring training rookie camp in Arizona in 1950. That was the year the Yankees had such regulars as Yogi Berra in Phoenix acting as instructors and Happy Chandler, then baseball’s commissioner, judged this an attempt to circumvent the starting date for spring training. He ordered the rookie camp shut down. But before he did, Stengel had seen enough of Mantle to want to see more of him.

When Mantle appeared among the prospects at the regular training camp the following spring, Casey could not contain himself. “I know how John McGraw felt when he first clamped eyes on Mel Ott” said the Yankee manager, who had played for the Giants under McGraw. Ott had come to Old Muggsy as a 16‑year‑old kid out of Gretna Green, Louisiana, but once the old pilot saw this infant cock his right leg and smash at the pitches with the power of a veteran, he would not let him out of his sight. From that day, when Mc­Graw converted Ott from a catcher to an outfielder, until the day he played his last game, Mel was a Giant.

It is the way Casey wanted it for him­self and Mantle when he said: “Can you imagine what the Old Man would say if he knew I was coming up with two all rolled up into one. He’d swear he was seeing double. This kid is abso­lutely tremendous. How do you pitch to him? Right‑handed? Left‑handed? Just when they think they got it solved the kid smacks one farther than anyone else ever hit it, left‑ or right‑handed. They say he can’t hit right‑handed as well as left‑handed. How do they know? I think he’s better right than left. The kid, himself, says it makes no differ­ence.”

As time went on Casey became more and more enthusiastic, and his enthusi­asm forced him into a tug‑of‑war with George Weiss, general manager of the Yankees. A sound baseball man who built and nursed the Yankee farm sys­tem, Weiss wanted Mantle assigned to the minors for seasoning. Stengel, however, fought Mickey’s battle for the majors and long before Mantle finished his first spring of exhibitions, in which he hit a fantastic .403, Casey made it clear to Weiss that he wanted this youngster beside him to guide and train as McGraw had trained Ott.

Vanity moves many a man and Casey, coming into New York after being classed as a managerial clown for so many years, was aware that the age of the stars who had won two world cham­pionships for him would handicap the Yankees in the 1951 race. Stengel stood for a rapid changeover, rather than the slow, mellowing process which had been part of the Yankee farm pattern.

For a man like Stengel, who has all the money he will ever need and be­came the manager of an experienced ball club not of his own making, Mantle represented the opportunity to leave a masterpiece of his own creation when he retired. He could not be faulted for his egotism and ambition because in Mickey there would be a little bit of Casey in the Yankee Stadium for years to come.

Despite all this Stengel never once lost sight of the inexperience of his boy. The day Mantle arrived in New York. following the first of his re‑examina­tions by his draft board, the Yankees were at Ebbets Field to play the Dodgers. Mickey had slept little in the 72 hours preceding his arrival in Brooklyn, but after the buildup Mantle had undergone on the road back to New York, Casey felt it would be only fair to leave it to the youngster to decide whether or not he wanted to play that afternoon. Mantle said yes.

Reporters in the dugout watched Casey beckon the boy out to right field. As they walked toward the mall Casey talked quietly to him. In the distance Stengel could be seen tracing the contours of the Ebbets Field right-­field fence for Mickey with his expres­sive gestures. Then Stengel walked back to the bench, leaving Mantle out in right field to shag balls being hit to him by Henrich.

“Boy never saw concrete before,” said Casey, meaning that Mickey had never before played in a park with a concrete wall at his back from which line drives can take unpredictable caroms. “I wanted to show him this wall because he never seen one like it before,” Casey explained. “I showed him how it starts straight up—down here—like any other wall and then there is this break here and it slants. I tell him how to play the ball glancing off the wall. I say to him: ‘I played this wall for six years.’ He looks at me like I’m kidding him or something and he says: ‘You did’

“I guess,” said Casey, “the boy thinks I was born at the age of 60 and right away became a major‑league manager.”

“Maybe,” a listener said, “the kid thinks there was no in‑between stops for you because there’ve been so few for him.”

“Anybody,” said Stengel, with obvious attention to the reporters, “asks this kid if he’s nervous ought to get

punch right in the nose.”

Four days later the American League season opened and Mickey was in ringt field, where Ruth and Henrich and Selkirk had been, and Stengel, watching Mantle jogging slowly out to his posiition, said, “Last year he’s a shortstop at Joplin. Today he’s in right field in the Stadium. More people here watching the kid in one game than watched him the whole last season. I’m praying for him.”

Obviously, so were Mickey’s teammates. In his third time at bat Mantle singled for a run and when he later scored from second base, churning up the paths with that determined stride and muscular pull of his arms, the entire Yankee bench came to its feet to welcome him. As Red Smith wrote “He was in the lodge.”

But was he? A Hollywood script writer could have not conceived so poignant a beginning to a story of Mickey Mantle if it had been written for the movies. Nobody would believe it possible, of course, for so young a

player to spring, full grown, so to speak to the center of baseball’s stage. Yet what a perfect subject Mantle’s amazing story would provide for a movie!

It began, really, before Mickey was born in the town of Spavinaw, little more than a fly‑speck on a map of Oklahoma.

“It it’s a boy,” Elvin C. Mantle, who was known as Mutt, told his wife Lovely “I’m going to name him after Mickey Cochrane and I’m going to make him into a professional ball player.”

That was what Mutt wanted to be and what Mutt’s father hoped his son would be. It is difficult to say for certain how early the father and grandfather began to school the son, but Ben Epstein, Mantle’s biographer, disclosed that at the age of six months, three and a half years before Mickey was to hold a bat in his pudgy hands, Mutt ordered a baseball cap made to fit the kid. Two and a half years later Mutt demanded that his wife, who had sewn the cap out of cotton cloth, tailor a complete uniform for their offspring. This time the father yielded the pants of his own uniform to outfit his son.

When the family moved to Commerce, where they had a large back yard at Quincy Street, Mickey was not only swinging at hard pitching, but swinging right‑handed against his father’s left‑handed pitching and left-handed against Grampa Charles’ right-handed pegs. For a year they threw tennis balls at the child, but when he was six they introduced Mickey to regular baseballs. For four years they, groomed him and, at ten, Mickey made, his first appearance with the Douth (Oklahoma) team in the Pee Wee League.

If for no other reason, the league was aptly named for Mickey. “He sure was pee wee,” Mickey’s mother recalls. “He was a catcher then and when squatted down behind the bat wearing that protector that was too big for him you couldn’t see his feet and about all you could see of him except for his arms were those two little eyes sticking out of the protector like a scared turtle looking out of its shell.”

Everybody called him Little Mickey then, but nobody laughed at the kid’s zealousness or the eager application of his family, who seemed to have wrapped all their effort and spare time into mak­ing a player out of their boy. He is five feet, 11 inches and 200 pounds now; a handsome oak of a man with arms and legs and size 17 neck of a plunging fullback, which once he was, but he was only a wisp of a lad when he became recognized as an athletic prodigy in the region where Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri come together.

“Soaking wet,” said Mickey’s mother, “he didn’t weigh more than 80‑90 pounds when he already was playing with boys almost as big as he is now.”

Nevertheless, damp as he was behind the ears, Mickey began the steady up­ward march that only one with feet on solid ground could achieve with such distinction. Every team thereafter that Mickey played with became a winning one and his streak of never having per­formed for a team that did not win a championship is still unbroken. There could be other reasons, but one to reckon with until a better one comes along is that Mickey played with Inde­pendence and it won the KOM title. He played for Joplin and it took the Western Association crown. He’s been with the Yankees two seasons and in both of them they continued as pen­nant and Series winners.

The next step in Mickey’s march was the Commerce‑Picher Gabby Street team in which Mantle was a second baseman and shortstop. Mickey was only 11 and the age group of the league was 12‑14, but few would argue his right to appear with this group. By this time Mickey was some sort of juvenile legend, a kid who could switch hit. The years of practice already were bearing the fruit, but around the Mantle house­hold the practice hours didn’t grow shorter. If anything, they were grow­ing longer and in the summertime when the mines let out at 4 p.m., it was not an uncommon occurrence for supper to be held off until 9 because Mutt and Grandpa Charles would have been ap­palled at the waste of daylight hours. Perfecting Mickey’s swing obviously was more important than eating.

Robert F. Kennedy and Mickey Mantle: The Naturals, 1965 (View large image)

Mickey, however, was rebelling at being forced to hit left‑handed against righties. A natural right‑hander, he preferred his own way and in the rare times when he played without his father looking on, Mantle batted only right-­handed. One day, though, he was not warned of his dad’s arrival at a game and went to bat the way he liked rather than the way his parental tutor pre­ferred. He never did it again.

A touch of fatherly discipline was not the determining factor, though. In this juvenile way Mantle began to appre­ciate the percentage edge he held over the other kids, especially the pitchers, as a switch‑hitter. Two seasons in the Gabby Street League and Mickey was ready for faster amateur company. He made the Junior Cardinal League, which was affiliated with the American Legion, and there he came under the loving and experienced eye of the man who was to have a more lasting in­fluence on his life than any other ex­cept his father. That man was Barney Barnett.

Barnett is gone now, but his devotion to amateur baseball as one of the people behind the Ban Johnson League is legend in the Midwest and Southwest.

Barney’s passion was baseball and if there was anything about which he cared more it was the kids who played the game. At 62, Barney was a manager himself—of the Baxter Springs (Kan­sas) Whiz Kids. Baxter Springs is 15 miles from Mickey’s home town of Com­merce and it was only natural that Barnett should have been smitten by Mantle. Oddly, the play on which Mickey’s future turned was one in which he hit into a triple play against Barney’s team.

With the bases loaded and Mickey batting left‑handed, Barnett pulled in his right‑fielder. The hunch paid off, because Mickey lined to him. The ball was hit so hard and streaked on such a trolley wire to the fielder that the base­runners, moving with the pitch, were easy outs. The Whiz Kids had the side retired, but Barnett was more impressed with the line drive perfection of the batter who was responsible. Barnett sought out Mantle’s father and told him he wanted Mickey for his team. “I know you got the big leagues figured for him,” Barney said, “and I think you’re figuring right.”

With the Whiz Kids, Mantle played exclusively as a shortstop, but by this time he was already becoming famed as a Commerce High School athlete who was to win letters in baseball, basket­ball and football.

Conceivably he might have been de­toured from his destiny with the Yankees were it not for the football accident that overtook him in his fresh­man year and left him a victim of osteomyelitis. Possibly Mickey might have gone to college on a football schol­arship instead of into professional base­ball if he had not been kicked in the ankle during a practice scrimmage.

Football and basketball were the major sports at Commerce under coaches Frank Nogel and Allen Wool­ard and only Mickey’s meteoric success has stimulated baseball into that cate­gory under coach John Lingo, who coached Mickey.

“I wouldn’t say Mickey was any bet­ter a baseball player than a football player,” Lingo said. “Actually, Mickey only had one full year of football, in his senior year, because of the injury to his ankle, but even with that one season I know he could have gotten a football scholarship had we tried to talk it into him. We used him as a halfback in the T and fullback in the single wing and he scored ten touchdowns in seven games. He would have made a great T quarterback; he had such great hand movement.

“I know Mickey had some hopes of playing college football,” the high school coach said. “Most of the boys around here do, but his father discouraged the ambition, especially after that accident, and I went along with his dad’s wishes. Mutt was a man with common sense. He knew what he wanted for his boy and it was obvious Mickey had the stuff, but I certainly would have liked to have been responsible for seeing him develop as a football star.

“He made All‑District in his senior year and every game he surprised me by showing more talent. I didn’t know he could kick or throw, but we came out here to play Miami and he just kicked that ball away. I had Bill Mosley, who was another great athlete and a great friend of Mickey’s. Matter of fact, Bill and his wife and Mickey and his wife went on their honeymoon to­gether to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Any­way, I used both as passers in that game. I thought Mosley threw a better pass because Mickey seemed to throw too hard a pass to handle, but the boys always told me Mickey’s seemed hard, but wasn’t even though he threw it like a bullet.

“Despite all that,” Lingo said, “I was glad nobody sought out Mickey for col­lege football. I know he would have wrestled with his preferences and I also know his dad would have been heart­broken if a chance came along for pro­fessional baseball and Mickey wasn’t in a position to take it. Heck, Mickey could have made it just as big in bas­ketball. We used him as a guard. He had a good one‑hand outside shot. I never did see anybody ever get the ball away from him.”

As it happened, when the call came for Mickey to get his chance to play before Tom Greenwade, the Yankee scout who signed him, Lingo drove with Mickey to this game they all re­membered so well, advised the scared youngster what to have for his meal before his tryout and sat there praying for him to make it, while the narrow-eyed Yankee bushbeater from Willard, Missouri, sat beside him in the rickety stands.

These days you can run across a hun­dred men who’ll swear they were the first to see Mantle and the first to tip Greenwade on him and some of them will even be telling the truth. A scout who beats the trails of the deepest bush and sandlot gets his tips in many ways. Greenwade, however, gives credit to two men—Barney Barnett and a fire­man named Kenny Jacobson, who also worked as an emergency umpire in the Ban Johnson League.

True to his promise to Mutt, Barnett asked Greenwade to take a look at Mickey early in the 1948 season. In August, Greenwade caught the Whiz Kids at Alba, Missouri. Little Mickey, as he was still called then, pitched a few innings and played shortstop and, as Tom recalls, “he was kind of a bitty thing and not too much to see.” Tom, in fact, was more impressed with the Whiz Kids’ third‑baseman, a youngster named Billy Johnson.

Neither Barnett nor Mickey heard from Greenwade for almost a year after and, in the meantime, Mickey came to the Joplin ball park for a tryout one day at the invitation of Johnny Sturm, former Yankee first‑baseman then managing the Miners. Sturm was im­pressed and mentioned Mickey’s name, but Greenwade showed no immediate signs of recognition.

One thing was clear. Sturm thought enough of the boy to warrant another look and since Johnson played on the same team with Mantle, Greenwade considered a trip to Parsons, Kansas, worthwhile with the Whiz Kids sched­uled there. But in his mind it was John­son who rated more attention as a pros­pect.

“I can honestly say I wasn’t too high on Mickey then,” Greenwade admits.

Another look, however, changed his mind. Johnson had moved to Georgia, Greenwade learned, where he subsequently was to be signed by the Ath­letics before going into the Air Force. The Mantle kid Tom saw was chunkier, weighing perhaps 20 pounds more, and ran like a deer. Still in Commerce High, Mickey couldn’t be approached under baseball’s high school rule, but Greenwade laid out enough lines and asked enough questions to let Mickey know his interest wasn’t purely aca­demic. He figured he could hold still the few weeks remaining to graduation.

Mickey was to receive his diploma on Friday, but one day earlier, Lingo was in his high school office when he re­ceived a visit from Runt Marr, who scouted the KOM territory for the Cardinals. Mickey’s area, in fact, was heavily dominated by Cardinal fans, St. Louis being the closest big‑league city to Oklahoma. The only big‑league games Mantle ever saw before viewing the Yankees featured the Cards when his dad took him on three trips to St. Louis.

“I’d like for you to take me oven to the Mantle house and introduce me to the folks,” Marr said to Lingo.

“I didn’t figure he had too much chance to get Mickey,” Lingo recalls, “but I couldn’t see any harm in taking Runt over. I didn’t know whether he knew that the Yankees had become in­terested, but I did know that Greenwade had already begun inquiring if Mickey could get to play Friday night at Coffeyville, Kansas. That sort of complicated things. Friday was gradu­ation and Mickey had planned to skip the Whiz Kids game in Coffeyville to get his diploma.

“We all knew how much Mickey’s father wanted the boy to get his chance, so I talked to Albert Stewart, our superintendent of schools, and he saw it our way,” Lingo said. “Came Friday and he handed Mickey his diploma in advance and told him he was graduated and we were on our way.

“But now with Marr coming over I didn’t know what I could do but take him to see the Mantles. When we got there, Mickey was at home but Mutt wasn’t. Runt couldn’t say much and couldn’t make any offers and it was apparent that Mickey was indifferent to the Cardinals. Runt left without meeting Mickey’s dad.”

The next day Greenwade appeared at Lingo’s office. As he did the previous day, Lingo took the Yankee scout over to the Mantles and introduced every­body all around. It was the first. con­versation Mantle had had directly with Greenwade. The scout, the high school coach, Mantle and his dad piled into Greenwade’s car and drove to Coffey­ville, where Mickey and Lingo stayed, while the other two continued on to Independence. “We’ll be back in time for the start of the game,” Greenwade said.

Mickey appreciated that his dad and Greenwade weren’t driving to Indepen­dence just for a ride. He sensed that Greenwade already was sufficiently in­terested to begin talking terms and this excited him to the point of nervousness. Ordinarily phlegmatic, then as now, he realized his father’s plans for him were falling due and the ambition within him was almost more than he could bear.

He went for a pre‑game bite with Lingo. Mickey kept picking up the menu and putting it down as Lingo watched him, aware of the tumult going on inside the boy.

“What shall I eat?” Mickey finally asked.

“What have you always been eating before a game? This one’s no different than the others,” Lingo said.

“I guess so,” Mantle said, and ordered his usual—a hamburger, french fries and a large glass of milk.

At game‑time his father and the scout still were not in the stands. “I kept looking up to where Coach was sitting,” Mickey said. “I figured where he was sitting, Dad and Tom would sit, too, and then I began to worry that something had happened and they weren’t going to show up.”

Lingo picked up the narrative. “They finally arrived in the second inning and by then I think Mickey had booted a couple at shortstop, but there was nothing wrong with his bat. In that game, I seem to recall and Mickey’s mother agrees with me, he got three for four, a triple, double and single.”

In the fourth inning Lingo couldn’t contain himself any longer. “What do you think?” he asked Greenwade.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” Tom an­swered in his slow Missouri way, but when the game was over he still acted as though he wasn’t yet convinced.

“The Whiz Kids are playing again Sunday at Baxter Springs,” Mutt said.

“I’ve got to go over to Tulsa Sunday,” Greenwade replied, “but I’ll try to get back for the game.”

It’s just as well Greenwade did. That Sunday he got the biggest, most pleas­ant surprise of his life and possibly only then did he begin to appreciate fully the potentiality of his new dis­covery. In the time which has past Greenwade has tried to put into words just what he felt when the full force of Mantle’s ability struck him. An ex­cellent story‑teller, his tongue ties up when he speaks of it. The best he can do is repeat a story told him by Paul Krichell, who discovered Gehrig.

“Every scout keeps thinking of the moment he will set eyes on the ball­player he always dreams about. Krichell once told me that when he saw Gehrig he said to himself, ‘I’ll never have another minute in my life like this one.’ I guess that’s how it was with Mantle. I tried to keep my mouth shut after I’d signed him but I’ve got pride and I popped off to a few of the boys. Once Hank DeBerry, who died last year, and I were in Caracas, Venezuela. I kept telling him I found a kid who couldn’t miss and he kept looking at me and whistling the tune of ‘It seems to me I’ve heard those words before.’

“That Sunday in Baxter Springs it hit me. Then I was sure,” Greenwade said.

That afternoon the Whiz Kids faced a left‑handed pitcher, Carl Pevehouse. The first time Mickey came to bat, he batted right‑handed. Greenwade turned to Mickey’s father. “He do that all the time?” he asked.

“Been doing it since he was high’s my knee,” Mutt said. “I made him do it. He hits as well one way as another.”

As the game ended, a rainstorm chased the crowd from the stands. Greenwade, Mutt and Mrs. Mantle took shelter in Tom’s car. Soon they were joined by Mickey himself.

“I think you’ll be all right, boy,” Greenwade said to Mickey.

Then to his dad: “I can sign him to a Class D contract for $140 a month.”

“He can make more’n that in the mines at 87-1/2 cents an hour and playing once a week at Spavinaw for $15 a game,” Mutt said.

“Let’s see then,” Tom said, adding figures on the back of an envelope. He passed the envelope to Mutt. The total came to just below $1,500, or roughly a $1,100 bonus and $140 per month as salary for the remainder of the season. Had the salary and bonus totaled $1,500 Mickey would have had to be classified a bonus player.

“We’ll put him with Independence after a week or so at Branson, Missouri to train him a mite.”

“And next year?” Mutt asked.

“If he can handle Class D we’ll try him at Joplin next year,” Greenwade said.

Joplin is 35 miles from Commerce. The plan pleased Mutt, but he asked his son how he felt.

“If you think it’s all right then it’s all right with me,” Mickey answered.

Sitting there in the car in the rain Mickey and his dad, who was to live only long enough to see his son play in the 1951 Series against the Giants, signed the contract, which must class Mantle as one of the outstanding bargains in the history of baseball. Some anonymous clairvoyant in the Yankee organization must have appreciated the impact even then, because the can­celed check of the first payment made to Mantle is framed in the office of the Independence team.

When he had safely tucked the con­tract into his pocket, Greenwade said to Mutt: “I’ll tell you this. You know more baseball than the father of any boy I even signed.”

When Mickey began to make it with the Yankees, even Casey Stengel saw fit to repeat the same thought. “Maybe,” he said, “I ought to sign the kid’s old man as a coach.”

This is what Mickey likes to remem­ber as he visits the grave of his father in the G.A.R. cemetery midway between Commerce and Miami. “He was a real good guy,” the new pride of the Yankees said. “I only hope I can be as good as he wanted me to be.”

August 1960 (View large image)

We had been sitting there in the living room of the Mantle house and of all the things Mantle said he seemed to say this most sincerely, yet there is no false modesty in this new national idol just turned 21. He is a man now, head of a family.

When Mutt died of cancer in a Den­ver hospital last May, Mickey was left as the sole support of his mother, the twins, his 14‑year‑old sister, Barbara, and his 11‑year‑old brother, Larry. Mickey’s wife Merlyn, is pregnant. She is expecting in March and by that time Mickey may have a new home of his own. Last November he bought a piece of land in Commerce and con­tracted to have a ranch home built on it.

In the meantime, Mickey has been dividing his time between the home in which Merlyn’s folks live in Pickier, the little town in which she met her husband when she was a high school drum majorette and he the rival team’s grid star, and his mother’s house. On December 23, 1951, Mickey and Merlyn were married and two days later, at Christmas, Mickey was able to present the paid up mortgage on their home to his folks.

There are a few neighbors who have a roof over their heads that is com­pletely their own, but there are none in the little mining town like Mickey Mantle, who already has one of the community’s parks named after him.

Two years ago Mantle was working as an electrician’s helper in the mines at $1.40 an hour and if any mirror is needed to see how he has grown it was provided this winter when Mickey was hired to appear for a week at the Sportsman’s Show in Boston and an­other at New York for $7,000 as a re­placement for Ted Williams.

Williams was strictly a fisherman. Mickey’s a confirmed quail, partridge, rabbit, mallard and squirrel shooter. The difference between fish and game, however, is not so important as the appreciation that Mantle has already become so big a draw in so short a time. It amuses Mickey to feel that somebody is ready to pay him more money than he once thought existed for handling a rifle, which he does so much of the time for fun. During Okla­homa’s hunting season a day doesn’t pass when Mickey and his kid brothers are not out beating the brush at 5 a.m. with rifles in their hands.

He tries to live as he has always lived, yet Mickey appreciates that what once was has been largely altered by the rush of success that came to him so quickly. To a certain extent life is like it always was for Mickey. He is still a boy who wears a tie only when there is no other way out. At home he prefers a woolen sport shirt and blue jeans or a pair of old khaki pants jammed into hunting boots. At the dinner table he is still one who eats adequately, fried chicken, strawberry shortcake and a large‑sized glass of milk being his favorites.

The big league, where he was in­troduced to charcoal broiled steaks, hasn’t changed him basically. He still doesn’t like the charcoal taste. A west­ern movie is still the only one he really enjoys. His reading preference still is the adventure story. He is polite in con­versation, but no more expansive than he once was before meeting up with reporters who think nothing of flying clear across the country for a few min­utes chat with him. If anything, he is still amazed that a paper or magazine considers it worth­while to send a writer from New York to Commerce for a personal interview.

When I called him to say I was flying down from New York, Mickey replied, “What can you learn down here you don’t already know? I think you’re wasting a lot of time and money.”

Upon my arrival I called him again. This time he was at Youngman’s Con­struction Co., in Baxter Springs, where he was employed during the past win­ter. He has an office, a desk and desk plate bearing his name, but few specific duties.

“I guess you could sort of call it pub­lic relations,” Mickey said when I asked him what he does.

I was stopping at the Miami Hotel where Jack Killilay, the desk clerk who was an old‑time Red Sox pitcher, was telling me stories about Mantle and how his success had affected this little town. Mickey said he would pick me up to drive out to his house for supper.

He came into the lobby, looking like a college student in a rumpled rain­coat, saying hello to people and grinning bashfully from the right side of his mouth.

“I’m glad to see you,” he said, “but I still can’t understand why you’d come all this way just to see me.”

I told him I had been in town for several hours looking around and talk­ing to Joe Peyton, a member of his draft board, Jess Heck, a local news­paperman, and Lingo, his former coach.

“They can’t tell you much about me,” he said. “There just isn’t much to tell.”

“You must be a big man in the town now,” I said. We were in Mickey’s Mercury driving along Highway 66 toward Commerce at a fair rate of speed when he wiped the windshield with the palm of his hand and peered through it.

May 1962 (View large image)

“Is that a patrol car ahead?” he asked, slowing his car and pulling into the right lane.

“What difference would it make to you?” I asked.

“I don’t want to be picked up for speeding,” he said. “The cop would tag me as quick as he’d tag anybody else. I’m the same as everybody else around here.”

Such was my introduction to Mantle in the town he has made famous. To me, at least, his impact upon his neigh­bors and they upon him is important in understanding fully the after effects of what he has undergone since becom­ing a Yankee. Part of it has been thoroughly pleasurable, of course, like the money rolling in, the opportunities given to him to sit on the bench at Oklahoma, Oklahoma A & M and Tulsa football games last fall. But part of it has been bewildering to this young man who has not yet matured sufficiently to handle all that fame brings with it.

His party phone line, Commerce 312, ring two, at 317 River Street, rings al­most incessantly. There are appearances he never had to make before and in­vitations to join organizations in which he has little or no interest. There was the “day,” parade and banquet his neighbors threw for him and while it filled him with pride, it also embar­rassed him.

“I felt silly about the whole thing,” Mickey confessed. “If I had had to make a speech I wouldn’t even have gone to it. There I was sitting with Merlyn in the back of that big open Cadillac rid­ing up the street and all those people hollering it up for me and I didn’t even know what to say or do. What’s so special about me?”

If he had not already become con­vinced there was something special about him, Mickey surely learned it recently when a business agent with whom he had signed an “outside in­come” contract on April 24, 1951, brought suit for $750,000. Mickey, the Yankees and another agent, Murray Kaufman, each were asked to pay $250,­000, Mantle for allegedly breaching the contract and the Yankees and Kaufman for persuading him to do so. Aside from the merits of the suit, it seems to set into proper perspective Mantle’s meteoric rise and points up that the pressures which have harassed him in the two short, unbelievable years are still continuing.

On the one hand, baseball people, such as McGrew, already accept him as potentially the equal of DiMaggio, if he is not that already; on the other hand, Mickey is beset by his own doubts born of his youth, inexperience and leg injuries which can curtail or end his career as quickly as it started.

He is a boy who has been timed go­ing from home plate to first base after batting left‑handed in 3.1 seconds and in 3.5 seconds after batting right‑handed. His closest competitor running against the clock from the left side of the plate is the Senators’ Gil Coan, who was timed in 3.4. Mantle has speed to burn but in the back of his mind there is the fear that either his left ankle, which has the osteomyelitis, or his right knee, whose injured ligaments resulted in his latest draft deferment, may cut him down at any time.

Here is a boy who hit 23 homers, 12 right‑handed and 11 left‑handed, but by his own admission there are too many pitches which still fool him. He has been under constant bunting in­struction by Stengel, who feels Mickey can add 30 hits to a season’s total if he masters the drag, yet Mickey still con­fesses uncertainty when he is called upon to bunt.

April 1969 (View large image)

The Yankees figured to open with Mantle in center field last year and go all the way with him, but before Stengel concluded that Mickey could do the job, he tried Jackie Jensen, Gene Woodling and Irv Noren, obtained from Washington in a trade that proved to be an unwise one. Only then did they fall back on the kid and whatever was expected of him he did, but as you sit and talk to Mantle he stresses his own inadequacies rather than the compe­tency with which he filled the position.

“I don’t hit right yet, I don’t know how to field right and I don’t even know how to use my speed to steal bases,” he said.

The house on River Street was quiet­er now. The rain had stopped and even the dogs had bedded down. The puppy was curled in a dry corner of the porch. Roy and Ray had gone off to basketball practice at the high school and the only sound aside from the conversation was the creaking of the rocking chair Merlyn sat in. Mickey’s mother was quietly sewing on the sofa. Mickey buffed the Browning Automatic “Sweet Sixteen” he had brought out to show me. Lingo sat across from Mickey and I had just been going through “Bengal Tales,” Mickey’s 1949 graduation class book. The legend under his picture read:

“Mickey Mantle

“They’re great pals,

“He and his baseball jacket.”

Mrs. Mantle had unearthed the class book and opened it with great care to her son’s page. Only a few minutes before with dinner over and the dishes done, Barbara had left the house with some of her girl friends to meet their dates. All the girls were dressed, as though in uniform, in blue jackets bearing a big blue‑and‑white “C” of Commerce High. It was this which prompted Mrs. Mantle to get the book, for Mickey had said, “I don’t know how they get those jackets away from the boys. I wouldn’t give mine up to a girl for a minute when I was in school.”

Merlyn laughed aloud. “Didn’t I know it,” she said. “I wanted that jacket so badly, but you wouldn’t let me have it.”

“I guess baseball and the jacket were just too important to Mickey,” Mantle’s mother said.

“You know it was, Ma,” Mickey an­swered. “It always was and it always will be.”

Then Mickey turned to me. “I know what people think about me as a play­er,” he said, “and I know how fast I’ve come, but I also know that there’s an awful lot I still don’t know about this game. There’s so much that some­times I get to worrying so much it scares me.

“When they started to turn me into an outfielder I didn’t like the idea so much. I thought I was pretty good at shortstop. I made 55 errors at Joplin and I still thought I was good, just be­cause I hit a few.

“Everybody’s saying how I can do this good and that good. Oh, I do a few things all right and I’m not complain­ing,” he said, laughing. “But there’s a lot I still got to learn and maybe I’ll never learn it.

“Once last year Parnell (Mel Parnell of the Red Sox) gave me so many in­side pitches I came out of the game with my fists black and blue because I didn’t know how to handle them. Once last year I like to died when I got hit in the head with a fly ball,” he said.

I started to protest that he must have meant the incident in spring training of 1950.

“No,” Mickey said vigorously. “I mean last year. It was a looper hit out between me and Jensen when I was playing right-field. He came over for it and I did, too. He let me take it and it hit my glove, bounced off and hit me right here.” Mickey brought his hand to his left temple. “I was so ashamed,” he said, “I wanted to die right there.”

Then Mickey detailed some of the things he still has to learn. It was a remarkable self‑diagnosis of the shortcomings of a player, who is said to have no shortcomings.

“I’m weak on the fast ball, high in­side,” he said. “Curves on the outside give me trouble. I’m getting to bunt better, but I still have a tendency to bunt up at the ball and pop it up. In the field, line drives straight at me still are trouble. I can’t tell if I ought to go back or go in. I can’t tell if a ball’s hit real hard or if it’s going to drop in front of me.

“I struck out 111 times last season,” he said. “That’s a new record for the Yankees. I don’t want those kind of records and nobody else but me is go­ing to be able to cut down those strike­outs. I still got to learn not to swing at bad balls. I certainly swung at too many last year.”

Mrs. Mantle had dropped her sewing in her lap and had begun to listen to her son intently as he talked. She is a tall, rawboned woman of 39, who somehow has managed to take the celebrity of her son in such stride that she can be a sort of social and business secretary for Mickey, keep her home immaculate­ly clean, cook a dinner for seven with scarcely any advance notice and still remain unperturbed. Sports conversa­tions in her home naturally are not novel. Roy and Ray talk about nothing else. Larry is imbued with the hero worship of his three brothers and there is some question whether he considers Mickey, who plays so far away, more important than the twins, whom he sees perform the year round in basket­ball, football and baseball. Barbara is at the age when the Block “C” she has snared from her particular high school hero is of the greatest significance. Touchdowns, baskets and home runs are terms Mrs. Mantle fully understands and has for some time.

She interrupted Mickey in the middle of his monologue. “I got to tell you something,” she said. “Even when you were a little bitty thing you were never satisfied. You were playing in the Pee Wee League . . . you got a single and you wanted a double. You pitched in high school . . . you struck out 15 and you wanted to strike out 16. Now it’s the same.”

“Ma,” Mickey said, “now I got to ask you something. That was the way Pa wanted it, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, son,” Mrs. Mantle said, looking down at her sewing again. “That’s the way Pa wanted it.”

“Then that’s the way I want it,” Mickey said, “and I won’t be satisfied until that’s the way it is.”

© SPORT Media Publishing

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