Copyright © 1995 David Falkner.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-684-81424-2
Chapter One
Chapter 1
Mickey Mantle Boulevard in Commerce, Oklahoma, is a nondescript road leading into and out of town, an arrow through the heart of the legend that floats above the town and above the memory of Mickey Mantle's life. As your eyes follow it to the distant horizon, the road seems to disappear into the heat of a summer's day, past weed-choked fields packed with black holes. The sky is empty, and the holes, along with piles of spent ore, called chat, are the physical remains of the Eagle-Picher Mine Company that once dominated the area.
The holes were once tunnels that crisscrossed parts of three states, running for miles all the way up to Joplin, Missouri, past Dust Bowl towns like Picher, Cardin, Miami, and Spavinaw, where Mickey Mantle was born to a mining family on October 20, 1931.
The lead and zinc mines were hellholes full of danger, illness, and death. The miners were not unionized in the late '20s and early '30s. The wages were low, but in the years of the Great Depression they were gratefully accepted. Thirty dollars a week was good pay. The horrors of the jobs that the men performed below ground were echoed in the cares and anxieties of those who waited above for the day's--or night's--shift to end. Sirens announcing an accident of some kind were a regular feature of life in the area; miners were often injured or lost their lives in explosions, cave-ins, and tunnel accidents.
Bill Mosely was Mantle's closest childhood friend. When Mosely was five, he lost his father in a mining accident. "My dad was a powderer, a dynamite man," said Mosely, "and after everyone left he set off the charge, but he didn't get out in time." Mosely, like Mantle, lived for a good portion of his early life in Commerce, and he remembered the sound of those sirens. "Whenever they went off, people heard them in all the little towns, and they would come together, and go over to the hospital to wait for the ambulances to come in."
Mickey's father, Mutt Mantle, was a shoveler in a mine called Blue Goose Number One. Mickey's cousin, Ron Mantle, who still lives in the area, recalled that "Mutt worked in the Blue Goose mine, and my dad worked at the West Side mine. It's hard to imagine what they had to do every day. When I was younger, I went down in the mines once. It was horrible. It was like crawling down a hole. It was damp and dark and dirty, and that's the way you came out of the ground every day. We used to go out and get my father whenever mom had the car. The miners would come out of there so filthy you'd barely recognize them. It was just dark, dark, dark. You talk to the people who are still left, the very few of them that are alive, they'll tell you the same thing. Most of 'em have some ailments now, since they were either hit by falling rock or they've got lung damage or whatever. My dad, like my Uncle Mutt, got to be a ground boss, and I remember on at least three occasions he had to go out during the night because they had an accident in the mines and they would call all the miners in and they would go down and rescue people. Once they had a fire they had to go fight down there. They lived with death every day."
The history of the Mantle clan, like that of so many who were born and labored hard on this land, is found more in the memory of its members than in public records. "Our family bloodlines run mainly to English beginnings," said Mickey, "with a sprinkling of Dutch and German. We go back five generations in America."
Mantle's mother and father were both raised in the Oklahoma-Missouri-Arkansas corner, in and around the town of Spavinaw. Mantle's grandfather Charlie lost his wife when the couple was still young, but not before they had had four children, three boys and a girl. The grandfather, a left-handed pitcher, supported his family by working at a variety of jobs, but he was principally a butcher. Other family members helped out caring for the children; the youngest, Emmett, was raised by an aunt and uncle.
According to those who knew him, Charlie Mantle was a sweet man. "I never ever heard him raise his voice," said Floy Norton, one of his daughters-in-law. "Mr. Mantle was just a very kind person, very there at all times for Mickey and just plain nice to everyone." Charlie Mantle fed others as well as his own kin out of his butcher shop, but he wasn't a miner--the one sure source of steady employment--so making ends meet was always tough. The Mantle family moved from Spavinaw to Commerce when Mickey was a child, and the grandfather went along, too. "He lived with Mickey's family in Commerce," said Max Mantle, a younger cousin of Mickey's who was around the family all the time. "He wasn't working when they moved to Commerce; he worked in a grocery store, he worked as a butcher, but not after the family moved." Like so many in the Mantle family, Grandpa Charlie died young--though not before he played a part in Mickey's early baseball education.
Mantle's father, Elvin (no one knows the origin of the nickname Mutt, except that he seemed stuck with it almost from infancy), was, in the words of cousin Ron Mantle, "an old hardrock miner who loved his kids. That's basically what he lived for, to raise his kids." But raising his kids meant, for him, a life in the mines rather than following in his father's footsteps. Mutt tried his hand at other work before he went underground, but in the end it was mining that allowed him to take care of his family.
Mantle's mother's maiden name was Richardson. She may have been part Cherokee; Mickey was less sure of her family's origins other than that she, like his father, grew up in Spavinaw. As a teenager, Lovell Richardson ran away, married, and had two children before divorcing and returning to her parents, home until Mutt Mantle, whom she had surely known over the years, began courting her.
In a tiny hamlet like Spavinaw, Oklahoma, where everyone knew everyone, a runaway teen bride who had divorced and returned with two children in tow must have been quite a topic of conversation. Yet the taint of scandal made no difference to Mutt Mantle, and that was no small thing. Back in the twenties and early thirties, during the Depression years when Mickey was born and raised, the teaching of the Lord in rural Oklahoma was tailored to the hard lives of the parishioners. The values and codes of behavior were narrow and well defined. Every Sunday the churches in the tiny hamlets resounded with hymns and sermons that taught that this life is full of sorrow and deceit, but that Judgment Day is real and not far off.
Mutt's family was remarkable in that they were neither churchgoers nor, in any discernible way, religious. They raised their children on their own terms. But raising a family at all in that place and time meant inevitably turning to the mines. Mutt worked all the different, wretched jobs there were. He was a mule skinner, which meant he handled the mules used to pull the huge cans of ore that had been gouged from the veins of subterranean rock; he was a "screen-ape," a rock-busting, sledgehammer-swinging man; he was a shoveler, a hooker, and a ground boss. While serving as a ground boss, he often had to go below when someone got sick or there was an accident, or when a shift of busters and shovelers needed more men. He rode the great hooks down into the holes, and he came up riding the cans of ore to the surface. Pat Summerall, a longtime friend of Mantle's, said that on one occasion Mantle surprised him by telling him that Mutt "never died of cancer; it was emphysema." The miners, of course, breathed death every day of their working lives.
Even when the miners tried to forget what was underground, they could not, so they lived hard and they played hard, too. Their recreations were few but intense. They drank, they fought, and they brushed themselves off and went to Saturday night barn dances, where one of them would show off his special skills with fiddle or accordion. And they played baseball.
The miners--Blue Goose, West Side, and the other Eagle-Picher shafts--all had teams. They played on Sunday afternoons and sometimes on Wednesday evenings, before crowds of two and three hundred with a keg of beer waiting for the winning team. Mutt Mantle and his brother Eugene (Ron's father) played for Blue Goose Number One. Mutt was a pitcher, Eugene (or Tunney, as he was nicknamed) was a catcher, forming an all-Mantle battery--and a good one by all accounts. Mickey believed that if his father had ever gotten the breaks he had, he would surely have made the majors. Many contemporaries said Mutt could run; years later, when Mickey was on his way to a professional career, Mutt raced against his son and could stay with him stride for stride over a good stretch of ground. Other observers, less partial than Mickey, remembered Mutt as a good but not great player.
"We used to go out and watch the mining teams," said Nick Ferguson, a close childhood friend of Mickey's. "They had good teams and some real good ballplayers. Sherm Lollar played for one of them teams. Barney Barnett, who later started the league in which Mickey played, had one of those teams, it was Blue Goose I think. . . . Mutt played for the Blue Goose team, so Barney coached the father and then the son. Mutt was a switch hitter, too. Good player, but I don't think he was special. I remember one day watching Mutt play, there was a guy pitching who was ambidextrous, a guy named Montgomery, and they kept switching back and forth. Mutt would get up to bat one way, Montgomery would take off his glove and try to throw the other way. They came up with a rule that you could only jump around one time, so that took care of that. But I sure remember Mutt as a player; he was pretty good and he played real hard."
Mutt Mantle played baseball hard enough to bring it home with him; it was his passion, his answer to the mines, something to dream about. And he had a partner, a mate who genuinely shared his passion for baseball and then some. Mickey's mother was a homemaker, but one who did her housework while listening to broadcasts of St. Louis Cardinal games. The Cards were the team in those parts, the closest major-league team in the area (excluding the hapless St. Louis Browns, whom no one followed).
For those who did not live through the Depression, it is difficult to imagine the grip those hard times had on the people who did. The fears it provoked in that corner of Oklahoma and elsewhere in the Dust Bowl were especially intense. Young people openly wondered what there was to look forward to. "In Oklahoma back then when kids were growing up," Tunney Mantle's widow, Floy Norton, said, "we always had people come to the door in those days to try to get a little donation or somethin' to eat. The kids would see that and would laugh and say, `When I grow up I'm gonna be a bum.' They thought that was funny. But it wasn't funny, because times was so bad in those days. And if you haven't lived when you don't make enough money to eat and feed your family, you don't know what I'm really talking about."
"See, where we come from," said Mrs. Norton's son, Max Mantle, "we were just poor, that's all, the whole area. You went down into the ground three hundred foot a day, and there just wasn't much else. You just try to get by the best you can, that's all. You knew you wasn't ever going to make much money, you just did what you had to do the best you could."
The discomfort Mickey Mantle showed in the face of fame reflects this deeper sense that pervaded the area like alkali dust: that survival itself was the real goal, and a worthy one. Where he came from, your future was the mines--if you were lucky--or sticking your hand out, if you weren't. If you wanted or needed more, you were a hopeless dreamer.
Mutt Mantle was such a dreamer. By all accounts he was a quiet man, without airs or pretensions--a good neighbor, a good provider, and a survivor. But in ways that might be more recognizable today in the basketball dreams of urban youths, Mutt Mantle dreamed about the open spaces of country baseball, about the roads that led out of Spavinaw and Picher and Commerce, north and east to St. Louis and other big-league venues. However accomplished he was, he imagined himself at one point in his life with a major-league uniform on his body. In those miners, games, whether anyone knew it or not, he was playing for half a dream, the other half always missing, always out of reach. It is not known whether Mutt Mantle, in his baseball-crazy childhood, ever picked himself up and consciously sought the attention of major-league scouts for himself, as he would later, on his son's behalf. Regardless, the birth of his eldest son provided the missing half of his fading dream. He named him Mickey--not Michael or Elvin Junior, but Mickey, after the great Detroit Tigers catcher Mickey Cochrane, though no one has ever explained why Mutt, a stone St. Louis Cardinal fan, a pitcher, a hard rock miner, picked out a Detroit Tiger from Bridgewater, Massachusetts, as his favorite player. The mystery has long been part of the myth.
Neither mysterious nor mythical was the baseball education that followed. Mutt Mantle, not unlike other fathers, was determined to teach his son how to play. Unlike other fathers who played catch with their sons, though, he was working with a son so gifted and so different that their games of catch literally became a passport to another world.