The Last Boy (7 page)

Embedded in the outfield sod that sloped downhill at perhaps a 10-degree angle from the right field fence was a six-inch round depression. “Actually it was a sewer drain, maybe four by four inches,” said former batboy Frank Prudenti. “There was, like, a piece of metal in the center. You could pull it up, and you could push it down. Like a cork on a bottle.”

The cover was made of thin plywood with a rubber coating, Prudenti says, maybe three-fourths of an inch thick. “It was wedged in there, belowground. You had to hit it with your heel, wedge it down real tight. If it wasn’t, somebody could definitely trip on it.”

Generations of Yankee outfielders and their opponents were well acquainted with this ancient piece of Stadium infrastructure. “Been in it, been on it, been around it, and fell on it,” said Bobby Murcer, another of Greenwade’s Oklahoma finds.

Bauer used it as his anchor. Berra was taught to play off it. “Never stand on the drain,” Tommy Henrich told him.

Gil McDougald, the second baseman, had retreated into right field, following the flight of the ball. “You could see the whole thing coming in your mind. I knew that it looked like trouble. Mickey, you gotta understand, was playin’ pretty deep because he had to come down that hill, or incline, I guess you’d call it, out there. So it wasn’t what you’d call a short fly ball. It was like a humpback job. It was Mickey’s ball, but DiMag, being the icon he was, and Mick being a rookie, he gave way instead of really taking charge.”

From the visiting dugout Al Dark also tracked the flight of the ball. “All of sudden, Mickey throws on the brakes and his legs went out from under him and he slipped as you would slip on an ice thing. Then he couldn’t get up and it didn’t look like he wanted to get up.”

Mantle was motionless. Yankee Stadium was still.

A sequence of news photographs documented the progression of the disaster in right center field.

Click.

There’s DiMaggio camped under the ball, his glove open at his side, looking up into the sun. There’s Mantle splayed on the grass in front of the 407-foot sign. The shadows of the championship banners ringing the Stadium point toward his fallen form. His right leg is folded beneath him, the injured knee bent backward at an ugly angle. His left leg extends upward toward the sky. To his left, there is a faint indentation in the grass.

Click.

Now DiMaggio cradles the ball, his glove pressed against his stomach, and turns toward Mantle. He lowers his uninjured leg like a drawbridge, shifting his full weight onto his side. He buries his head in his arms on the turf. Behind him, the polite grandstand crowd, some in fedoras, some in coats and ties, begins to rise, Windsor-knotted necks craning to see.

Click.

DiMaggio kneels beside him, whispering words of reassurance, a consoling hand resting on his shoulder.
They’re coming with the stretcher, kid.
Mantle said it was their first conversation of the year.

Click.

Now his teammates come running from the bullpen, their spikes churning up an urgent trail in the warning track dirt. The backup catchers, Charlie Silvera and Ralph Houk, are first to reach him. “The only time Houk and I got our picture in the paper,” Silvera said.

Mantle lies curled in an almost fetal position. “He was going full speed,” Houk said. “He was about to get the ball.”

“Joe more or less ran him off it,” Silvera said.

They told him not to move, as if he could. “He was kinda moaning,” relief pitcher Bob Kuzava said. “The trainers, they wanted him to stay still because they didn’t know what happened. They tried to immobilize him so he isn’t gonna injure himself anymore.”

Click.

It looked like he’d been shot. He wasn’t sure he hadn’t been. “I was running so fast, my knee just went right out the front of my leg,” he told me, trying and failing to reproduce the sound of rupturing flesh and broken promise.

It was so sudden, so painful, so shocking that he soiled himself. “Shit my pants,” he told me, and dared me to write it.

“Must be like giving birth,” he told his friend Mike Klepfer years later.

Newsweek
reported, some spectators thought he’d had a heart attack. “He lay like he’s dead,” Jerry Coleman said. “Seemed like he was there twenty minutes before they finally got around to getting him out of there.”

Five Yankees carried him off on a stretcher, three on one side, two on the other, like pallbearers. Mutt was waiting in the dugout.

A pool photographer was allowed in the trainer’s room, an exception to the “off-limits” norm. Still in uniform, his sanitary socks dirty with exertion, a towel demurely draped across his waist, he props himself up on his elbow, looking in blank disbelief at what used to be his right leg; surely it no longer felt like his own.

Sidney Gaynor, the team physician, stands impassively at his side, checking the ice pack fixed to his leg. Gaynor initially diagnosed the injury as a torn muscle on the inside of his knee. A day later, he called it a torn ligament. Over time, it would be variously described (by Mantle and a legion of reporters) as torn cartilage, torn ligaments, torn tendons, and a combination of all of the above.

Later, in the locker room, Mutt squatted by his son’s side as he struggled to put on his argyle socks and his wing-tip shoes, glancing up at an inquiring photographer from beneath an errant forelock. Mantle never looked that young again.

The Yankees sent him back to his father’s hotel, his leg splinted and tightly wrapped. “Come all the way up here, and you bung your knee,” chided one of Mutt’s Okie pals.

“Thought you fainted,” Mutt said. Mantle wasn’t sure he hadn’t.

“Naah,” he replied with youthful bravado. “I felt like fainting my first game in the Yankee Stadium.”

“Yanks’ Joy over Triumph Is Tempered by Loss of Mantle for Remaining Games,” the
New York Times
declared the next morning. It was the first time he appeared on the front page of the paper of record.

On October 5, 1951, a game was won and a fate was sealed. The drain in right center field became a baseball landmark. On opening day of the 1952 season, Mantle would make a pilgrimage to the spot “where he had come to grief,” as Arthur Daley put it in the
Times.
“I couldn’t find it,” he told the columnist, grinning and shuddering at a memory. Daley wrote, “He still could not fully comprehend or remember.”

More than fate was at play. When Howard Berk, the Yankees’ vice president for administration from 1967 to 1973, reviewed plans for the Stadium’s renovation in the early 1970s, architects told him that a groundskeeper had forgotten to put the rubber cover on the right field drain. “Not the first time a groundskeeper forgot to put something on the field that endangered a player,” Berk said.

DiMaggio chose Willie Mays Night at Shea Stadium in 1973 to offer his account: “I said, ‘Go ahead, Mickey. You take it.’ I called out to him as we converged…Luckily, I was close enough to make the catch.”

Mantle never blamed DiMaggio publicly. “He had his own opinion, but he never said it,” Merlyn told me. “He ruined his career.”

The morning after, his knee was so swollen he couldn’t walk. Mutt took him to Lenox Hill Hospital for X-rays. “I couldn’t put any weight on my leg,” Mantle told me. “So I put my arm around his shoulder. Now, this guy’s as big as me, maybe a little bigger. When I jumped out, I put all my weight on him and he just crumpled over on the sidewalk. His whole back was eaten up. I didn’t know it. But my mom told me later he hadn’t slept in a bed because he couldn’t lie down for, like, six months. And no one had ever told me about it. They never did call me.

“So when he crumpled over, we went to the hospital and we watched the rest of the Series together. That’s when they told me when I got home I’d better take him and have him looked at because he’s sicker than I think he is.”

“Hodgkin’s disease,” was the diagnosis.

Mutt’s illness was not disclosed. His distress was said to be profound. The
Times
reported: “Mantle’s father became so upset when his son slipped that he too required hospitalization.”

They watched the last four games of the Series on a small black-and-white TV with rabbit ears. Mutt seized the opportunity to point out things Mickey might have done better. Pain became a teachable moment. The Yankees won their eighteenth world championship. Mutt was sent home to die.

Mantle’s knee was slow to heal. The front office decided to send him to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for a second opinion. The verdict came on October 22: no surgery needed. Go home and rest.

In less than twenty-four hours, all the supporting structures of his life imploded. His father had only months to live; his potential was irrevocably circumscribed; his knee and his heart were never the same. A wire service reporter filed a prescient deadline dispatch: “His mind is already shackled with the thought that the knee might pop out whenever subjected to strain.”

That October afternoon was the last time Mantle set foot on a baseball field without pain. He would play the next seventeen years struggling to be as good as he could be, knowing he would never be as good as he might have become.

That the earth would give way beneath his feet was a grim irony for Mickey Mantle. Growing up in Commerce, Oklahoma, in the dead center of the Tri-State Mining District, fatalism was an inheritance. It percolated up from the tainted, unstable earth. That forgotten corner where Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas meet was hardly the Oklahoma of Rodgers and Hammerstein. A century of mining lead and zinc from the ancient bedrock had left the ground as hollowed out as the faces of the men who worked it.

The lead went into munitions used to fight the Hun in World Wars I and II, into lead-based paints and pigments, into sinkers for fishing rods and weights for balancing tires. It was also crucial to the manufacture of lead-acid storage batteries. Zinc was needed to galvanize steel, to cure rubber, and to line sinks and washstands. It was an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

Two blocks west of the front door of Mantle’s boyhood home was a hulking, ashen heap of mineral detritus disgorged from the abandoned Turkey Fat Mine, where the first shaft was sunk in Commerce. Three blocks from the house he purchased for his parents with his first World Series check was a crater twenty to thirty feet deep, an insidious reminder of how easily life could give way. That house at 317 South River Street, with the family’s first telephone, was where he went to recuperate when doctors at Johns Hopkins told him he could go home. By the time he arrived, Mutt had gone back to work as the ground boss at the Blue Goose Mine.

Even before Mutt got sick, before Mantle ripped up his right knee trying not to run into Joe “Fuckin’” DiMaggio, he had reason to doubt his own longevity. Everything about the world that produced him undermined confidence in long life. When a reporter came to call, Mantle told him that three hundred feet below his chair, men like Mutt were trying to claw out a living from exhausted mines. It was only a slight exaggeration.

Mining had created a tenth circle of Hell, turning a verdant swath of the Great Plains into alien terrain, flat except for the mammoth piles of mineral waste known as chat. Locals call this range of bleached man-made dunes the “Chatanagey” Mountains. Cruel Billy Martin called Merlyn “Chat Pile Annie.”

The highest of them, at the Eagle-Picher Central Mill, a mile and a half northeast of the Mantles’ home, was a twenty-story behemoth built from over 13 million tons of chat. Long after the ore played out, the metastatic landscape remained disfigured by 5,000 acres of tailing piles and sludge ponds so toxically opaque that no shadows were cast upon them; 1,200 open or collapsing mine shafts lurked beneath the overgrown, contaminated grass; 40,000 drill holes and hundreds of water wells reached deep into the Roubidoux Aquifer.

The worst desecration was centered in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, where 2,500 acres were left undermined, 50 of them punctured by cave-ins. Also left behind when the ore played out were 300 miles of tunnels that wound their way through parts of three states and underground caverns, one as big as the Houston Astrodome. Some folks swear you can walk the twenty-eight miles from Commerce, Oklahoma, to Joplin, Missouri, without ever seeing the sky.

Only 6 percent of what miners like Mutt hauled out of the ground was
ore-grade—thus the aptly named Discard Mine on the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Waste laced with cadmium, magnesium, copper, and gallium was strewn over 41 square miles.

When the Mantles arrived in the area in 1935, a time of unprecedented and violent labor unrest in the Tri-State region, these towering buttes were a source of pride for a workforce known for its fierce independence and anti-union ways. Adults regarded them as protectors against the tornados that spiraled across the land. Children rode their bikes up the dusty slopes in summer and slid down them on rusting car hoods in winter. In the shadow of these bleak mounds, they roasted wieners, ate cake, and sang “Happy Birthday.”

Boys learned to play baseball on dried-out sludge ponds of chemical residue, alkali flats as smooth as the most manicured major league infield but not as forgiving. There was one a block from Mantle’s home and the ball would roll forever, which is why, he confessed later, he preferred to play the infield. “They was full of lead and zinc—it’s a wonder we all didn’t end up with lead poisoning in our blood,” his boyhood friend LeRoy Bennett said. “There was no grass that growed on ’em because it was so heavily slanted one way or the other on the chemical chart.”

Everyone but Mantle learned to swim in the quarries created by cave-ins, leaving them with rat-red eyes; his mother would haul him home in a fury when she caught him so much as wading. He could barely manage the dog paddle. Cave-ins were routine yet shocking. One night driving home from work, Merlyn’s uncle felt the pavement give way beneath his wheels. “Went over and it crashed in,” Merlyn told me.

Route 66, the Mother Road connecting Chicago and Santa Monica, California—and Mickey and Merlyn’s hometowns—was not immune. “I never will forget, one time, the highway splittin’ wide open,” Bennett said. “Miners were always gettin’ killed and that kind of thing, but it was kind of expected. Eventually it was gonna happen and you couldn’t do anything about it anyway, so most people just accepted it.”

Everyone knew the air the miners breathed wasn’t good, that the work was lethal, the earth’s crust precarious, but Paul Thomas, the undertaker who buried Mickey’s father and Merlyn’s mother, never thought he would have to bury the entire place. No one could have imagined that one day the government would pay citizens to leave their toxic homes. Hanging from
the beams in Thomas’s Picher garage above three shiny hearses were rusty relics of the miners he interred: helmets with carbide lamps, lanterns, and kettles. The walls were covered by wide-angle portraits of proud mining crews, including Mutt Mantle’s at the Hum-bah-wah-tah Mine. Posed in front of the doghouse where they changed their clothes, lunch pails at their feet, the roof trimmers, hookers, bumpers, and rope riders peer at the camera through masks of exhaustion and soot. An Eagle-Picher sign declares:
WE USE SAFETY HERE
. The photo is dated June 8, 1941.

In the language of the mines, men worked
on top
or
in
the ground, never above or below. In 1935, when Mutt went to work for Eagle-Picher, a common underground worker earned $2.80 a day, according to
Union Busting in the Tri-State
, a definitive history of the industry written by George Suggs, Jr. In an eight-hour shift, miners filled as many as forty-five to sixty 1,250-pound cans, all by hand, lifting up to 75,000 pounds every day.

They rode to work in the buckets they loaded, falling into the darkness at the force of gravity. Everything needed below went down the same five-by-seven-foot shaft, including the air they breathed—there was no other ventilation. The mules that pulled the cans to the shaft lived out their lives in the ground inhaling the smell of mother earth in a climate-controlled 65-degree tomb. The working conditions for man and beast were appalling. Miners carved the rock face, inhaling the dust generated by their labor. A roof trimmer standing atop an 80-foot ladder chipped ore from the ceiling while four rope riders steadied the precarious perch. Their backbreaking labor required teamwork and bred a mordant camaraderie not unlike that of baseball teams. It’s no accident that so many of them, including Mutt and his brother Eugene—known as Tunney—spent their off days playing baseball in the sunshine and arguing over pitch selection.

The mine whistle summoned Mutt and his crew at 7
A.M
. and sent them home at 4
P.M
., fifteen minutes after the dynamite charges were lit in preparation for the next day’s dig. The ground shook; wives and children went about their business and hoped for the best. “Sirens were a dreaded, scary thing, because that did mean there had been some kind of a cave-in and somebody was hurt,” said Ben Craig, a banker in Kansas City who played sandlot ball with Mantle. “It was just, always, hold your breath.”

“It would be rare to have two in one day, but you didn’t go very many days at a time without hearing one,” Craig said. “It was not unlike the tornado warning sirens we have out in this part of the country. I don’t think it was as loud as these are now, though. Nobody wanted to spend that much money.”

Mantle’s best friend, Bill Mosely, lost his father one day when he set the charges and didn’t get out in time.

Between 1924 and 1931, there were 24,464 reported accidents in the Picher field, according to statistics in documents kept by the Tri-State Zinc and Lead Ore Producers Association, to which only half the mine operators belonged. During that same period, 173 miners were killed, many as a result of falling rock. Archives from the Tri-State Mineral Museum in Joplin document the grim ordinariness of death in terse, numbing language: “Machine man. Killed by a falling slab.” “A shoveler. Killed instantly by a falling rock.” “Bumper. Killed by a fall of rock.” “A miner. One of 4 miners killed by falling slab.”

Some slabs were larger than a city block.

Little wonder Mutt didn’t want this for his son. Mosely says a school field trip to the bottom of the earth was as close as they ever got to going in the ground. In the summer, when he wasn’t playing baseball, Mantle worked for Eagle-Picher, hacking away combustible blue stem grass that grew up around the poles that carried electrical wires to the mines. “They’d take him ten miles out of town and have him dig ten-foot circles, one foot deep, around every telephone pole,” Merlyn told me. “He had to dig his way back in.”

In the winter of 1950–1951 Mantle worked as a roustabout earning $33 a week. “I know every job Mickey had with Eagle-Picher,” said Frank Wood, a metallurgical engineer, whose father owned a store that supplied equipment to miners, and who himself worked on the subsidence report to the governor of Oklahoma. “He worked with the Eagle-Picher pump crew, maintaining all the pumps that were above ground, pumping the water out of the mines. Now, this is a rascally bunch of hard-drinkin’, hell-raisin’ fellas that did this work, but they were very diligent and did very professional work. Mostly what Mick did for ’em was a gofer. They’d send Mick over to get bearings and repair parts for the pumps, and he’d set there at the engineer’s desk and practice his signature
on the Yellow Transit notepads. I got three notepads of Mickey Mantle signatures.”

“The bull gang, they called it,” his cousin Max Mantle said. “They’d go from one mine to another working on the equipment. They had to go down in. As far as being a miner, he wasn’t.”

The best days of the Tri-State Mining District were ten years gone when Mutt moved his family to the region. The land’s lucre was first discovered in 1848, the year Mantle’s great-grandfather, an English coal miner, immigrated to America. The Twenties were the glory days. Between 1908 and 1930, the ore that came out of the mines was worth more than $300 million. The human cost of extracting the wealth was clear as early as 1915, when doctors noted pulmonary disease in almost two out of three miners. Laws passed in 1923 by the Oklahoma Department of Mines required operators to wet the muck piles prior to shoveling the ore into buckets. But miners paid by the bucket were reluctant to waste precious time wetting down the ore, and the laws were loosely enforced. They choked on the air they breathed, and when they tried to cough up the fragments of chiseled rock caught in their lungs, they choked on their own blood.

Silicosis was more feared and far more common than the random but inevitable collapse of rock. A clinic opened in Picher in 1927, but it was for the benefit of the mine operators, who were anxious to cull the sick from the workforce. Doctors provided advice but no treatment. Annual X-ray examinations were compulsory. Miners were required to carry a wallet-sized health card certifying that they were free of disease. Those whose X-rays came back positive were fired the same day and could never be hired by another mine. An attorney for Eagle-Picher explained the company’s methodology for ridding the area of silicosis and the rampant tuberculosis that ensued: “When they get sick and can’t work, we throw them on the dump heap.”

That explains why Mutt never went to the doctor.

Between 1927 and 1932, almost 30,000 miners were examined; more
than 5,000 of them had both silicosis and tuberculosis, which spread throughout the mining towns as quickly as they were built. Picher was the corporate, civic, and cultural center of the area, a town of 10,000 people that grew to have 5 movie theaters, 43 grocery stories, 28 boardinghouses, 2 hospitals, and no place to park. “About every other business was a bar,” Paul Thomas said.

In the beginning, the mining camps were little more than shanty-towns with flimsy houses built one on top of another. Later, mining companies built “shacks” for their workers like the one the Mantles lived in on Quincy Street. “Everybody had a little wood frame house with a porch on the front,” said J. Mark Osborn, a physician from Miami, Oklahoma, who played a central role in bringing the government’s attention to health problems in the blighted region. “One day you’d walk along and see a guy, and he’d be coughing up blood into a spittoon. In a couple of weeks he’d be gone and you’d go three or four houses down and there’d be another guy coughing up blood and dying in a couple of weeks.”

His grandfather was one of those men.

Whatever fears and prejudices Mantle took with him when he left Commerce were the residue of growing up in an insular, homogeneous world fraught with unifying peril. The indigenous population was Native American; the eviscerated land was a Quapaw reservation until 1897. Blacks were not welcome after dark. “It was an informal thing, and the police departments and the county sheriffs and ‘the country club set’ set the rules,” said Bennett, who left town for the Naval Academy and graduate school at MIT. “As far as I can recollect, there was not one black in Commerce, not one. I didn’t know what Jews were.”

One night years later while visiting Mantle in New York, they went to hear Les Paul and Mary Ford perform in New Jersey. On the way back in the car, Bennett recalled, Mantle saw “a black person, and Mickey purposely rolled down the window and yelled to this guy, ‘Hey, you black bastard, go home and take a bath.’”