The Last Boy (12 page)

Tuesday, May 6, was a rainy day in New York. Showers would dampen the gate at the game against the Cleveland Indians that evening. The Yankees had been expecting a big early-season crowd. From the apartment window, Mantle watched the cars on the Grand Concourse splatter the pigeons in residence on the island dividing the Concourse. The field would be wet too.

He was getting dressed to go to the ballpark when the phone rang. It was Casey Stengel. Lovell Mantle, who had grown up in a world where baseball was played in afternoon sun, had called the Stadium assuming that that’s where she would find her boy.

Stengel’s message was succinct: Mutt Mantle had died at 10:30
A.M
. He was just forty years old.

Mantle pummeled the wall with rage and resisted Merlyn’s attempts to console him. He broke free from her embrace, saying he would make arrangements to fly home in the morning. There was no need for her to come. He remembered slamming the door in her face as he left for the ballpark. She remembered being ordered from the room, banished to the hall, as she had been the previous summer during Mutt’s do-or-die lecture in Kansas City. Shut in or shut out: either way, it hurt. This was patrimony, not matrimony.

He played that night because his father would have wanted him to, he wrote in
The Mick
, a narrative of unyielding filial devotion. The box score from May 6, 1952, tells a different story: the Yankees lost 1–0. Noren played center field and grounded out with bases loaded in the third inning. Mantle remained in the dugout in uniform. He had not been able to get in touch with his mother.

Baseball wives are used to being left behind: to make a home, to raise the children, to kill time while trying not to think about how their husbands are filling their empty hours. But when Mantle left for his father’s funeral alone, Merlyn was devastated. What would people think back home? Hopefully, they would consider the cost of travel prohibitive. “I never did know why I wasn’t invited to the funeral unless he just wanted it to be with his family,” she told me fifty years later. It was a harsh way to learn her place in her husband’s life.

Mantle found his father laid out in an open casket in the front parlor of the home he had purchased with his 1951 World Series check. “Had him in a shirt and tie,” said Larry. “Probably weighed only eighty pounds,” said Barbara.

Larry was ten years old. The boy cowered in the parlor corner, hoping no one else would arrive to pay their respects and make him talk about it all over again. But come they did. “Every time somebody new would come, it would seem like they would come and get me and take me over to the casket and tell me how sorry they was,” Larry said. “I would no more get over cryin’ and get away from there and about that time, here come somebody else. The next thing I’d know, they’d drag me up there to that casket. It seemed to me like it just happened for two days, just continually.”

The funeral was held at the First Christian Church in Commerce at 2
P.M
. on Friday, May 9. Though Lovell’s father had been a Methodist deacon, the Mantles weren’t churchgoing folk, which made them unusual in a community where every day’s labor was a leap of faith. “When we pulled up to get out to go in, it just seemed to me like everybody in the world was there,” Larry said. “Most people I remember seeing gathered at one place in my life.”

Mutt was buried in the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery along Route 66 between Miami and Commerce. When it was time to leave him in the ground for good, Mickey refused to go with the rest of the family. He stayed behind, berating himself for never having told his father he loved him.

The family plot, with its hard stone markers, became the locus of the legend of damned Mantle men claimed before their time by non-Hodg-kin’s lymphoma. “It just seemed that all my relatives were dying around me,” he wrote in
The Mick
. “First my uncle Tunney, the tough one, then my uncle Emmett. Within a few years—before I was thirteen—they had died of the same disease.”

This belief became so central to his being that he conflated ages, gravesites, and perhaps even cause of death. In fact, Grandpa Charlie lived until age sixty and is buried some fifty miles away in Adair, Oklahoma. There is no hard evidence of the kind of cancer that took his life. Tunney, the first Mantle man to die too young, is buried near Mutt in the G.A.R. Cemetery. His son, Max, who lived at Mickey’s house while his father lay dying at home, said Tunney died of stomach cancer. “I didn’t hear about Hodgkin’s until Mutt died.”

Like Tunney, Emmett Mantle, the youngest of Charlie’s sons, also died at age thirty-four, but not until 1954. He is buried in Tulsa, Oklahoma. By then, the convergence of familial and cultural fatalism and Mantle’s own brush with a life-threatening disease had merged into a personal narrative that imposed structure on fear and attempted to keep it at bay.

Mutt’s dread diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was first made at Lenox Hill Hospital in October 1951. A year earlier, Mantle told a teammate that Mutt had miner’s lung; he told Pat Summerall the same thing thirty years later. Paul Thomas assumed as much and was surprised at the cause of death penned on the death certificate still on file in the garage of his funeral home fifty years later: “carcinoma of the bowel with generalized metastasis.”

Whatever the cause or causes of Mutt’s death, it was the defining moment of his son’s life. Mutt had decided how he would make his living, what position he would play, and what side of the plate he would bat from and when. Mutt decided when he would receive his high school diploma, whom he would marry, and when he would marry her. They weren’t bad choices, but they weren’t his own. “There was never any talk about what
I’d be in life,” Mantle once said. “Dad and I knew I was going to be a ballplayer.”

Someone else would always decide—father, coach, manager, the American League schedule maker. As his friend Joe Warren said, “When you don’t raise your children to make their own decisions, then they grow up and they don’t know
how
to make decisions.”

Just barely out of his teens, he accepted Mutt’s responsibilities (much as Mutt had accepted responsibility for Lovell’s two young children) and took on the obligation to live for him. “When he was alive, I was Dad’s life,” he would say. “Now, making good for Dad is my life.”

Without Mutt, there was no one with the moral authority to insist, no one to say no to Mickey Mantle. He would never grant anyone that authority again. And, his brother Larry said, “No one challenged him.”

Without Mutt, he was adrift, save for the organizational imperatives imposed by the baseball season. Free to make his own decisions, he made bad ones. “He wasn’t under anybody’s finger anymore,” Merlyn told me. “He could do what he wanted.”

A day after the funeral he headed back to New York and to the life and the wife his father had bequeathed him. “He was different,” she told me. “For one thing, he was going to have to take care of a wife, mother, and four kids. He was worried. He was making peanuts. The Yankees told him if he was still there in June or July they would raise him to $10,000.”

Two weeks later, Mantle took sole possession of center field—47,000 square feet of prime Bronx real estate. Built atop landfill displaced by the construction of the Grand Concourse, on the site of a former silent movie studio, it was home to a legion of ghosts, Yankee greats and great Yankee fans who importuned the right people to have their ashes scattered by the monuments in center field. “You got to feel the glow of the ghost,” former tenant Mickey Rivers said. “Not just the living ones but the dead ones, too.”

Mantle was possessed by his father’s ghost. Sometimes they had imaginary conversations in the outfield—one-sided as those talks might be.
That home run, the one that went 500 feet? It should have gone 502.
Mutt’s ghost would remain the animating force in his son’s life for the next forty years.

A last family photograph, taken on December 15, 1951, captured the Mantle men at the dining room table playing canasta. Mickey is the center of familial and photographic attention. Sleeves rolled up, collar undone, he reaches forward, putting his cards on the table. His crisply pressed dress shirt strains against the seams. Mutt sits to his left, his chest sunk inside a flaccid undershirt, his proud thinning hair, brushed away from his brow, the way he liked it, accentuating the hollows of his cheeks and the caverns of his eyes.

The twins fill out the foursome. Butch stands at Mutt’s shoulder. No one at the table is making eye contact. Lovell presides over her brood, Donna Reed style, gazing over Mickey’s shoulder at his cards. Her right hand rests on his back as he plays the hand he has been dealt.

Standing in the capacious outfield at Washington, D.C.’s, Griffith Stadium during batting practice, Irv Noren glanced at the Mr. Boh sign atop the football scoreboard in left field and told Mantle: “Geez, you might be able to hit one out of here today.”

Noren knew all about the stadium’s prevailing winds, when the ballpark held the heat and when the breeze blew through the open grandstands. He knew where the ball carried and where it had never gone before. He had played two years for the Senators before being traded to New York in May 1952 as insurance against Mantle’s infirm right knee.

Noren knew that Babe Ruth had hit a ball into the graceful crown of an oak tree on the other side of the center field wall; that Larry Doby had hit a ball over the thirty-one-foot wall in right field, prompting an irate call to the Senators’ front office: “Someone from your stadium just threw
a ball onto our house and woke up my children, and now I can’t get them back to sleep.”

He also knew that no one in major league history had ever hit a ball over the thirty-two rows of poured-concrete bleachers erected in left field just in time for the 1924 World Series, the only one the Nats ever won. Noren thought that Mantle might be the man to do it and this might be the day. “I played there two years. I knew the ballpark pretty good. The wind was blowing out a little—not a gale. And I always thought he had more power right-handed.”

April 1953 was as kind to Mantle as the previous spring was cruel. Then he was expecting his father’s death; now he was awaiting the birth of his first child. His draft status—and his place as DiMaggio’s heir—had been resolved. He arrived at spring training as a World Series star who had batted .345 against the Dodgers, driving in the winning runs in game 7, and had outwitted Jackie Robinson on the base paths. “That young man’s arms and legs and eyes and wind are young, but his head is old,” Branch Rickey had said. “Mantle has a chance to make us forget every ballplayer we ever saw.”

On April 9, in an exhibition game in Pittsburgh, he hit a ball onto the roof of Forbes Field, a 450-foot effort that duplicated Babe Ruth’s last major league home run. The Babe would have been impressed: the night before, Mantle, Martin, and Ford had managed to miss the train from Cincinnati while cavorting across the river in Covington, Kentucky. They had paid a taxi driver $500 to drive them to Pittsburgh, arriving just in time for batting practice.

Three days later, at an exhibition game in Brooklyn, Mantle was chatting with the home-plate umpire at Ebbets Field when the public address announcer greeted him with news from the stork in Joplin, Missouri: “Mickey doesn’t know it yet, but he has just become the father of an eight-pound, twelve-ounce baby boy.”

They named him Mickey, Jr., although his full name was Mickey Elven, after Mutt, not Mickey Charles. Later, Merlyn would regret saddling her oldest son with his father’s name. But in the spring of 1953 Mantle was not yet fully who he would become, and neither he nor Merlyn could envision how much of a burden that “Junior” would become. Five days later the proud papa, who did not meet his son until June, was shagging
flies in the Griffith Stadium outfield with Irv Noren and Johnny Sain. “It was a gray, overcast day with a wind blowing directly out to center field,” said Bob Wolff, the Senators’ broadcaster, who got paid to notice such things. “And the flags were unfurled in that direction.”

Chuck Stobbs, a lefty newly acquired from the Chicago White Sox, was the Senators’ starting pitcher, a last-minute decision by manager Bucky Harris, who had noted the Yankees’ opening day loss to another left-hander but had forgotten Mantle’s game-winning grand slam off Stobbs the year before. “Stobbs is pitching,” Noren told Mantle. “And you can hit him pretty good.”

The weather had played havoc with the first week of the season, forcing cancellation of the Senators’ home opener set for Monday afternoon, April 13. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, away playing golf in Georgia, did not intend to make the traditional first heave.
Washington Times-Herald
reporter Jacqueline Bouvier was dispatched to the stadium to query the Nats about the presidential snub. They expressed more interest in her. “She’s going with some senator,” a companion informed them. The president returned to D.C. in time for Thursday’s rescheduled festivities. By Friday afternoon, Ike, Jackie, and the capacity opening-day crowd had disappeared. Paid attendance was 4,206, an embarrassment camouflaged by a throng of 3,000 boys in the upper deck along the third base line who had gotten in free. It was Patrol Boy Day, an annual event in the nation’s capital.

With the Yankees leading 2–1 in the top of the fifth inning, Stobbs committed pitching’s cardinal sin: he walked Yogi Berra with two outs and the bases empty, bringing Mantle to the plate. Later, in his coaching life, Stobbs always admonished young pitchers,
no two-out walks.

Stobbs was a three-letter man at Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia, where baseball was his third-best sport. He was just eighteen, the youngest player in the major leagues, when he made his debut with the Red Sox in 1947. Now he was in his seventh season, playing for his third team and making his first start for the Senators. He was only twenty-three, but he had gotten old early. He didn’t throw very hard, and that spring he hadn’t thrown very much. Shoulder stiffness had limited his innings during spring training.

Mantle wasn’t feeling up to par either—he had pulled a muscle in his
left leg the day before, one of those early-season injuries that would plague him throughout his career. Charley horse was the official diagnosis. He stepped to the plate, as he often did, with a borrowed bat, a 34-ounce, 34½-inch Louisville Slugger belonging to teammate Loren Babe, who hit a total of two home runs in his major league career.

As Mantle settled into the batter’s box, he was greeted by the friendly visage of Mr. Boh 460 feet away, in deep left field. Mr. Boh was the one-eyed, mustachioed mascot of the home brew, National Bohemian, which could not be sold in the stadium by municipal ordinance.

Left field in Griffith Stadium was as vast as center field in Yankee Stadium—405 feet down the line. Though the fence would eventually be brought in to accommodate a beer garden and the visitors’ bullpen, it would always be a pitcher’s ballpark, allowing 41.7 homers per season compared to the major league average of 81.5. That forgiving acreage was the reason Bucky Harris thought a control pitcher like Stobbs would flourish in Washington.

Griffith Stadium’s construction was minimalist: exposed steel girders, concrete, and brick. The ungainly structure was the architectural equivalent of a mismatched suit. Its charms, such as they were, were sensory and supplied by the surrounding neighborhood—the smell of bread rising at the Wonder Bread factory on Seventh Street, where the stadium vendors purchased hot dog rolls (bringing them back warm between games of a rare sold-out doubleheader), and the joyful sound of African-American spirituals from Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux’s church greeting dispirited fans after another desultory loss. There was a small rectangle of land gouged out of center field because the owners of the abutting homes refused to sell when the ballpark was built in 1911. That tall, stubborn oak stood sentinel behind the center field wall.

Mantle took Stobbs’s first pitch for a ball. In the Yankee dugout, benchwarmer Jim Brideweser turned to coach Jim Turner and said, “You know, I bet this kid could hit that big scoreboard.”

“Naw,” said Turner. “Nobody could do that.”

The second pitch was either a fastball or a slider, Stobbs told reporters later, he couldn’t remember which. Either way it was right over the plate. As Stobbs went into his windup, a gust of wind blew through the open facade behind home plate. “Straight out to left field,” recalled Bill Abernathy,
a patrol boy who had opted to sit with his father in the vacated presidential box.

Sam Diaz, an observer at the Weather Bureau, would later report: “Between 3 and 4 p.m. there were gusts up to 41 miles per hour in the direction of the bleachers at Griffith Stadium…the lightest at 20 mph.”

Bill Renna, a spare Yankee outfielder, watched attentively. “They threw him a changeup, I think. He moved forward but kept his bat back and took a short step and held back because it was a changeup. Then it released: body, arms, bat came around, really synchronized. Everything went in a smooth swing. Everybody in the dugout got up and moved forward onto the steps. We just kept walking forward in unison watching the flight of the ball.”

The ball left his bat traveling at an estimated speed of 110 miles per hour. Clark Griffith, the namesake and grandson of the Senators’ owner, was sitting in the family box behind the third base dugout, having cut class at Sidwell Friends School for an afternoon of baseball. “It went up and got caught in the jet stream,” he said. “It took on a life of its own.”

The thwack of contact resounded through the empty stands. The sound would stay in the memory of Roy Clark, the musical son of a Washington square dance bandleader, sitting with his father along the first base line. “It just echoed in that ballpark,” Clark said. “Even before it was halfway to its destination, you knew that it was gone. Looked like it was in the air for five minutes.”

The ball kissed Mr. Boh’s cheek, clipping his handlebar mustache above the word “beer” as it headed out of the ballpark toward Fifth Street, NW. The visiting bullpen down the left field line offered an unimpeded view. “You’re waiting for it to come down, to go into the crowd,” backup catcher Ralph Houk said. “The next thing it’s over the crowd and out of the stadium. There’s a moment of silence. Everybody is looking that way—even all the infielders on the opposing team and the left fielder. He’s looking for it, and he can’t believe it went out.”

Mantle rounded the bases with his customary modesty, head down as he touched each bag. Contrary to later reports, he did not giggle while rounding first base, not within earshot of first baseman Mickey Vernon, anyway. The ball was hit so high that Mantle was at second base by the time it came down, testified second baseman Wayne Terwilliger. On the
mound, Chuck Stobbs hung his head and dropped his glove, Abernathy recalled. He may have been the only person in the ballpark paying attention to the pitcher. “His glove fell off his hand,” Abernathy said. “He just looked down at the mound.”

It was Mantle’s first home run of the season, the first of twenty-nine he would hit at Griffith Stadium. Returning to the dugout, he smiled in a way that acknowledged his debt to the wind. “Yes, he knew it,” Gil Mc-Dougald recalled. “He didn’t get all of it. I mean, Billy Martin, for God sake, hit one on the label and it went for a home run.”

Years later, after Roy Clark had become a renowned country singer and Mantle’s good friend, he told him he had been at Griffith Stadium that day. “He looked like a kid on Christmas morning—just a big grin,” Clark said. “And then he immediately said, ‘That wasn’t the hardest ball I ever hit.’”

Upstairs in the press box, Arthur E. Patterson, the Yankees’ director of public relations, regarded the ball’s disappearing act from the vantage point of opportunism. Marketing The Mick was his job. Patterson was an old sportswriter who had spent twenty years at the
New York Herald Tribune
before making the seamless transition from hack to flack, first for the Yankees and then for the Dodgers. He knew a good story when he saw one—even if he couldn’t actually see what happened. The left field bleachers cut off the view from the press box.

“That one’s got to be measured!” Patterson declared. Or so legend says. He dashed from the stadium on a gust of inspiration. “To his dismay the baseball already landed when he arrived, so he picked out the spot where it might have come down,” Red Smith wrote years later. “To this day, the measurement is regarded as exact.”

Actually, measuring the thing was the suggestion of New York
Daily News
beat writer Joe Trimble, and he meant it as a joke. But Patterson immediately saw entrepreneurial potential. Some innings later, he returned with a baseball and a story he would tell in a variety of iterations until his death in 1992. He had arrived on Fifth Street, a residential block lined with row houses and billowing oaks, to find “a surprised and delighted Negro lad” (
The Sporting News
) named Donald Dunaway running down the street with a bruised baseball, its cowhide scraped like a child’s knee. They quickly entered into a mutually beneficial arrangement—the boy, who lived around the corner at 343 Elm Street, NW, would show him
where the ball had landed in exchange for whatever money Patterson happened to have in his pocket. The sum was variously reported as 75 cents, a dollar, $5, or even $10.

The deal struck, Patterson testified, Dunaway led him to the backyard of 434 Oakdale Place, a modest two-story attached brick row house on the south side of a one-block street that dead-ended at Fifth Street and the back of the left field wall.

Hustling back to the press box—afternoon deadlines were looming—Patterson breathlessly reported that the ball had traveled 565 feet, making it the longest home run ever measured. None of the intrepid residents of the press box ventured out of the stadium to interview the mystery boy or to make an independent attempt to verify Patterson’s claim. He never said he had employed a tape measure; nor did the word appear in any of the morning papers. The not-so-sweaty literati knew better, as Bob Addie wrote in the
Washington Times-Herald
three days later, in a column taking his readers “behind the scenes to show you how these records are determined.”

“ ‘Here’s the dope,’ panted Red. ‘The fence is 55 feet high to the beer sign. I walked 66 feet from the 391 mark to the back where Mantle’s ball cleared the bleacher limit. That would be 457 feet. Now I paced off 36 strides, which means three feet a stride or 108 feet to where the ball eventually landed in the backyard on Oakdale St. It’s a small backyard so the ball didn’t have a chance to bounce much. So add them all up it’s 565 feet.’”

The announcement was piped into Bob Wolff’s broadcast booth and he dutifully and enthusiastically reported it. “He was the Yankee PR man, so you accepted what he said.” The next morning, Mickey Mantle and Donald Dunaway were front-page news in every sports section in America. “The magnificent moppet of the Yankees today hit the longest home run in the history of baseball,” Trimble declared, even after subtracting three feet from the total.