The Last Boy (8 page)

Parochialism and prejudice were offset by public schools that were the hub of the community and teachers who saw the best in their students. Among them were Ed Keheley, a nuclear engineer who returned to Picher after retiring as site manager of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Kim Pace, a learning specialist who became principal
of the elementary school she had attended as a girl. Keheley came home to raise cattle but found the pastureland toxic, and his hometown despoiled—mired in controversy about the impact of long-term exposure to lead on Picher’s children. It wasn’t so much a question of the level of lead in the blood as the length of exposure that caused the problem—damage suffered before the age of six is irreversible. “These kids were known to the schools,” said Keheley, who has conducted historical research on the Picher Mining Field for the United States Department of Justice and private organizations for more than a decade. “They passed them from class to class, gave them diplomas. It was certainly better than ten percent.”

Pace says her students needed seventy-five repetitions to master reading skills that average students retained after fourteen to twenty-five repetitions. What should have taken two or three weeks to learn took six to eight weeks for her children. Once they fell behind, they stayed behind.

No one wanted to believe it, least of all the parents of the children ridiculed as “chat rats” and “lead heads.” Suspicion redoubled when, in May 2006, workers involved in a University of Oklahoma study confessed to having submitted fraudulent blood samples. But everyone knew somebody who struggled to learn to read. Merlyn Mantle told me she was among them. Two of her sons were later diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability in which letters and symbols are reversed. “I think it came from my side of the family,” Merlyn told me. “My aunt had a child with problems. It was all on my side.”

She never saw signs of learning disabilities in her husband, but Mantle’s friend Pat Summerall did. He too has a son who is dyslexic. He says he and Mantle talked about their shared experience on several occasions. “He couldn’t pronounce the word, but he knew what he was saying,” Summerall said. “He thought he had that disease. He’d see different things in road signs. He’d see it going one way when it was going the other.”

At the end of Mantle’s life, doctors tested his blood as well as that of his sons for elevated levels of lead. “Some scientist out of Tulsa was saying ‘What’s wrong with his liver was the lead,’” Danny Mantle told me. “They made all of us kids, me and David and Mick, do all this blood work. It wasn’t in our blood. They did find it in Dad’s.”

“You haven’t got a problem that God cannot solve.”

That optimistic promise greets worshipers at the entrance to Jerry VonMoss’s Exciting Southeast Baptist Church, just off Mickey Mantle Boulevard—old Route 66—in downtown Commerce.

His father was a supervisor at the Blue Goose Mine. His parents and Mickey’s parents were friends. On the desk in his office he keeps a reminder of a dead way of life: a ten-pound ingot of lead ore his father made into an ashtray. Zinc was far more abundant than lead in the Tri-State area, by a ratio of six to one. Miners called it Jack. Until Mickey Mantle came along, it was the only name in town.

On the shelf behind his desk, VonMoss keeps a Bible, a photocopy of a
Sporting News
questionnaire filled out by Mantle when his nickname was still “Muscles,” and his father’s map of the mining district. Mine operators named their stakes after their children, their wives, their lovers, lives and luck lost and found: Cactus, Emma Gordon, Lead Boy, Nancy Jane, Dew Drop, Prairie Chicken, Bull Frog, Skeleton, Lawyers (because it was full of snakes), Darling, and No Dinero.

After the ore played out, after B. F. Goodrich closed its Miami plant in 1987, there wasn’t much commerce left in Commerce or the rest of the Tri-State region. Picher became a ghost town. Rusted industrial skeletons stood sentinel on city street corners behind government-mandated chain-link fence—derricks, pinions, and those massive 1,250-pound cans. Colored banners adorning public buildings warned
STAY OFF THE CHAT
! and offered the only respite from the bleak palette.

After nearly three decades as the most toxic waste site on the EPA’s Superfund list and, Keheley says, after the infusion of more than $240 million of taxpayers’ money, government officials accepted the findings of the 2006 subsidence report his committee prepared for Oklahoma senator James Inhofe. The money had been spent on a well-intentioned but misbegotten attempt to rid yards of the mineral residue that arrived on every breeze; to plug open mine shafts; and to rid Tar Creek of the acidic water that reached the surface and municipal water supplies a
decade after the last mine closed in 1970. But it was all to no avail, Keheley’s committee found, because Picher’s underpinnings were as unstable as Mantle’s.

Merlyn’s hometown was declared unsalvageable. The government began offering buyouts to residents who never wanted to leave and often couldn’t afford to do so, a protracted process that generated enmity and litigation.

Finally, on May 10, 2008, Ed’s wife said, “The Lord looked down and said, ‘Enough.’”

An EF4 tornado roared across the Kenoyer chat pile, killing seven of Picher’s citizens and destroying 114 homes, including one belonging to Merlyn’s late mother, one to her sister, and one built by Picher high school students for Sue Sigle, an elementary school teacher who grew up across the street from Merlyn. The only thing Sigle cared about was the unlocked safe holding her late husband’s collection of Mantle memorabilia, including a ball he had autographed for her son. He had planned to open a baseball card shop when he retired.

She was in Branson, Missouri, when the tornado struck. When she got home, all that remained of the two-story brick home was the fireplace. Highway patrolmen escorted her through the rubble, past the camera crews stationed on the front lawn. There, among the ruins, she found the open safe, with the precious family heirloom. Neighbors had retrieved it for her. She felt blessed.

After decades of despoliation, Mickey Mantle’s memory was the only resource left to mine. Everyone became a prospector. And that ore was pretty much played out, too. Memorabilia hunters had excavated every attic for anything he might have touched, used, or signed. Jerry VonMoss provided a guided tour of Mantle-area landmarks, with his wife, Corrine, and friend Jim McCorkell in the backseat. She pointed out an empty pasture west of town where Bonnie and Clyde spent the night before robbing the bank, killing the constable, and abducting the chief of police. The scandalous thing was…Bonnie wasn’t wearing underwear.

Across the way lay a field where the charred remains of a house once occupied by the Mantles had once been hidden by high grass. “This guy stomps around and finds some boards that were on the house,” VonMoss said. “He takes those boards and sells ’em to an old boy in Florida, who
takes the boards and cuts them up into little pieces and sells them. Now, who made the most money?”

VonMoss eyed McCorkell in the rearview mirror. “Jim’s the guy who sold ’em. The deacon of the Southeast Baptist Church selling boards off of Mantle’s house!”

McCorkell sold each ten-inch board for $200 to a Florida merchant, who cut them down further and resold them at a generous markup—marketing them as relics of the house at 319 South Quincy Street, where Mantle had taken his first swings as a switch-hitter.

Two local entrepreneurs purchased the house, hoping to develop it into a tourist attraction. They were optimistic about their prospects. After all, Branson, Missouri, the entertainment mecca, was only two and a half hours away and, said Miami mayor Brent Brassfield, “nine to fifteen thousand cars pass by Miami on the Interstate every day.” His brother owns half interest in the house.

They were surprised by the modern amenities and hung a plaque by the bathroom door:
MICKEY MANTLE IN-DOOR PLUMBING
. They planned to straighten the humpbacked shed the Mantles used as a backstop. But when Mantle visited, he told them, “It leaned when I was a kid.” So they braced it to lean forever. A sign advertising
RESTORATION IN PROGRESS
,
MICKEY MANTLE COMMERCE COMET BOYHOOD HOME
was stolen off the front porch.

For a time, hopes rested with plans for a Mickey Mantle Museum. Board members of the Mickey Mantle Memorial Trust, many of them childhood friends and classmates, envisioned a 33,000-square-foot educational facility that would celebrate the history of the region and its contributions to America—Mick and Jack. But the plan died for lack of funds, support, and potential visitors. The Mantle family informed the trust that they preferred to see a statue of The Mick erected at Mickey Mantle Field, according to Brian Waybright, chairman of the trust and director of the annual Mickey Mantle Wooden Bat tournament. A nine-foot, nine-hundred-pound bronze likeness—stationed behind center field—was unveiled at 6:07
P.M
. on June 12, 2010.

Nonetheless, townsfolk like Ivan Shouse, Mantle’s high school classmate, were disappointed and perplexed by the fate of the museum and of the town he left behind. “Why
did
Mick move out, anyway?” he asked.

The Mantles of Brierley Hill, a soot-draped coal-mining town in England’s West Midlands, fled the “Black Country” fifty years before the ore played out. Elihu Burritt, the American consul to Birmingham, described the landscape, pitted by collieries and ironworks, in 1862 as “black by day and red by night.”

Fourteen years earlier, Mutt Mantle’s great-grandfather George brought his family to America, seeking light and air and a new way of life. They arrived in New Orleans after a months-long trial at sea. When the wind died and the
Sailor Prince
was becalmed, the women set about washing clothes on deck, only to see the wash barrels swept overboard when the breeze returned. It was a harbinger of the life of privation that lay ahead.

A riverboat ferried them up the Mississippi to St. Louis, where George and his sons found initial employment in nearby coal mines, according to a family history shared by Max Mantle. Three years later, they headed west for Missouri’s Osage country to try to eke out a living aboveground as farmers and grocers. But within two generations, Mantle men would be working in the ground again.

Elven “Mutt” Mantle was eight years old when his mother, Mae, died of pneumonia a month after giving birth to her fifth child, Emmett. His
father, Charles, never remarried, and struggled to raise the children alone. An aunt and uncle reared the new baby as their own thirty miles away in Pryor, Oklahoma. Mutt was eighteen when he met and soon after married Lovell Thelma Richardson Davis, a divorcée—a rarity in that time and in that place—who was eight years his senior. Family lore has it that when Mutt arrived to call on Lovell’s younger sister, she stepped forward and declared she would have him for herself. “Mutt married himself a mother,” relatives said.

That was true enough; Lovell already had a daughter and a son from her marriage to Bill Davis. Still a teenager, Mutt took on the responsibilities of a much older man.

It was a union of opposites. “Daddy was a very passive individual,” his youngest son, Larry Mantle, said. “My mom was a hellcat. He did whatever she said.”

The first of their five children, Mickey Charles, was born on October 20, 1931, in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, in the depths of the Great Depression. Mutt picked the name before he knew the child was a boy in honor of his hero, Hall of Fame catcher Mickey Cochrane, and his father, Charlie, a semi-pro southpaw pitcher. He ordered Mickey’s first baseball cap six months before he was born. He placed a baseball in the newborn’s crib and seemed surprised when he showed equal interest in his bottle.

Before the boy could walk, Mutt and Charlie propped him up in a corner and rolled balls across the floor to him. Lovell fashioned his first sliding pads from Mutt’s old wool uniforms and had a cobbler fix spikes to an old pair of shoes to fabricate his first pair of cleats.

When Mutt lost his job grading roads in Spavinaw, he took up tenant farming, tending 80 parched acres for four futile years until drought chased him from the Dust Bowl for good. He quit the land for the promise of employment in the mining towns forty-five miles to the northeast. Within a decade, he had ten mouths to feed: his father; Lovell’s children, Ted and Anna Bea Davis; Mickey, his twin brothers, Ray and Roy, Larry, the baby, known as Butch, and the only girl, Barbara, who was called Bob. She never knew why.

Mutt moved his family first to the small mining town of Cardin, then to the Quincy Street house in Commerce, where they slept four to a bed for ten years. The modest one-story structure, measuring twenty-five by thirty
feet, had four rooms, including the kitchen, which had a wood-burning stove, and tin can lids pressed into knotholes in the plain pine floors. “I cannot believe that many of us lived in that little bitty house,” Barbara DeLise said.

In 1944, much to Lovell’s consternation, Mutt traded it for an old farmhouse with a calf on the outskirts of town. He wanted better air for his ailing father and to live off the ground, not in it. “She was so mad,” DeLise said. “The house was a two-story, and it was a wreck. The cracks in the floor were so bad. And when the wind blew, the linoleum would be standing this high off the floor. So we didn’t stay there too long. It had no bathroom. Had to take a bath in the washtub. We didn’t have nothin’. You just went outside and went to the bathroom. That was pretty bad.”

Grandpa Charlie died soon after, just as his oldest grandson was entering eighth grade. He was laid out in the front parlor, such as it was. “Say goodbye to Grandpa,” Mutt said, escorting the oldest boys to the open coffin.

“From there we moved to Dr. Wormington’s place,” DeLise said. “He lived in town, and Dad took care of his farm. We weren’t growing anything that I know of. Dad just took care of the animals. We had cows and chickens and four or five horses. We had one rooster. This is probably why Mickey got so fast. We had a rooster that was meaner than any dog you ever, ever saw. Every time you stepped outta that house, that dang rooster was right there. And, man, it would jump on you. He would take a ball bat and run to that bathroom, just trying to beat that rooster.”

There was yet another move, to Whitebird, before the family settled back in Commerce. There was always enough to eat—especially biscuits and beans. Enough, Larry recalled, to feed Mutt and Lovell’s friends Jay and Eunice Hemphill, who often showed up just in time for dinner and left as soon as it was done.

Pauline Klineline, a cousin on Lovell’s side of the family, said her mother always laughed when she saw childhood pictures of Mickey in a clean white shirt because he never owned one. Lovell took in ironing to supplement the family income. “They could just barely eke out a living,” said LeRoy Bennett, Mantle’s first childhood friend.

Though Lovell’s father was a church deacon and Mutt’s English forefathers were known as “dissenters” because of their fidelity to the Primitive
Methodist Church, religion was not stressed in the Mantle household. Nor was education—Mantle later said he never saw his father read anything but the sports page.

In the Mantle canon, Mutt is portrayed as a tough man in a tough world who was tough on his oldest son. Kind? “That’s an interesting question,” Bennett said. “Yeah, I’d say so. But he probably didn’t realize that himself. He was just an ordinary, hard-rock miner.”

Mutt was a surrogate father to two of Mickey’s pals, Nick Ferguson and Bill Mosely, and to his nephew Max. “He’d just grin at you,” Mosely said. “You could tell when you were doin’ somethin’ wrong and everything, but he was pretty quiet. Everybody wanted to please Mutt, seems like. He’s the type of guy, he didn’t have to really tell you a lot what to do, but you just felt that you wanted to do what he wanted.”

In the family he was known for his prowess in cards and dominoes and his caution behind the wheel. “Mutt had a team of horses and a wagon,” Max Mantle recalled. “He drove the horse and wagon down to Afton, traded it for a car. Ray said, ‘We made just about as good time gettin’ down there with the horse and wagon as we did in the car on the way back.’”

When Mickey got old enough to drive, Mutt’s speed limit was strictly enforced. “Mick’d kick it up to forty-five or fifty miles per hour,” said Jimmy Richardson, Mantle’s first cousin on his mother’s side. “Mutt, he’d be squirmin’ around, and he’d say, ‘Slow down, son! You’re airplanin’ it!’”

Mutt’s two youngest children remember a gentle man, worn out and worn down by the mines, who came home every day, lay down on the divan in the parlor, and had them brush his hair. He was very particular about his dark, reddish black hair, which he wore combed straight back from his brow. “He’d say, ‘Okay, Bob, get your brush and your comb,’” DeLise said. “And I’d set down on the divan and comb his hair for hours and he’d take a little nap. I’d get a nickel for every hour.”

Larry didn’t get paid.

Like her husband, Lovell came into a world fraught with uncertainty and peril. A tornado demolished the family home when she was an infant, injuring an aunt who also had a newborn, Pauline Klineline’s mother. “Mickey’s grandmother took my mother and Mickey’s mother and nursed ’em both,” she said.

Lovell grew to be “a fair-sized woman,” Max Mantle said, who was
also stout of opinion. She was patient with Mickey’s crew on winter afternoons, when they ran wild in small quarters. But she had no tolerance for anyone who messed with her boys. Mutt refused to sit with her at Mickey’s ball games. Her bellowed motherly support would have made her deacon father wince.

Nor did she shy away from occasional fisticuffs. At one Friday-night barn dance, Commerce men took umbrage at the attention lavished on their women by some out-of-town dandies. “Daddy stepped up, said, ‘Ain’t no women for you to pick up. Ya’ll need to leave,’” Larry said. “Sure enough, Daddy and this guy start out in a fight. Then here comes Lovell, getting in the road.”

Mutt tried to move Lovell out of the way. But, Larry sighed, “he couldn’t keep Mom out of it.”

When one of the twins got banged up on the final play of a football game, the enraged Lovell lit out for vengeance. “She grabbed ahold of my hand, and off we went across this football field,” Larry said. “ ‘Who’s the Afton coach?’ Guy says, ‘I am.’ She hit him,
wham
, hit him over the bench.”

Ted, Lovell’s son from her first marriage, spent much of his childhood at his grandmother’s house, his widow, Faye Davis, recalled. He suffered from osteomyelitis, the bone disease his half brother Mickey would contract. Ted told his wife that his mother had little patience with his infirmity. “When he was seven or eight years old he used to cry because it hurt,” Davis said. “But Lovell told him, ‘Shut up, people have to go to work in the morning.’”

Expressions of tenderness were few. Merlyn figured that was the reason her husband didn’t know how to show his feelings. “Mick’s family was cold,” she told me. “His mom was cold. I never heard her call her children ‘honey.’”

“She used to whip him, too, something he didn’t like to admit,” David Mantle wrote in the family memoir,
A Hero All His Life
.

Young as they were, Larry and Barbara don’t remember much about their parents’ marriage except, he says, that she ran everything. Were they affectionate? “No, not that much,” Barbara said. “I don’t remember them ever bein’ smoochie smoochie.”

Larry Mantle’s warmth was the exception to a familial reserve handed
down through generations of Mantle men. When he tried to hug his nephew Mickey, Jr., at a family gathering, “he almost jumped straight back.” Leaving a holiday party with Mickey, Sr., one year, Larry paused to embrace their mother. “We get outside, and Mick said, ‘I wish I could do that.’

“And I said, ‘What?’

“He said, ‘Kiss Mom on the cheek like that and hug her.’

“I said, ‘Just walk up and do it.’

“I really felt sorry for him that he couldn’t. Because, my goodness, that must be terrible.”

Mutt and Lovell’s oldest son was as quiet as his father and as pugnacious as his mother. An “ornery little varmint,” Cousin Max called him.

Everyone else called him Little Mickey. He didn’t weigh but ninety pounds when he was a freshman in high school, qualifying him to play on the Midget basketball team. What there was of him was all boy. He set fire to the trash and raced the flames to the outhouse, trying to douse them with a bucket that had a hole in the bottom. He was five then. He tied himself to the hind quarters of a calf, pretending he was a rodeo rider. “That old calf bolted out the side door of the barn,” DeLise said. “We thought it killed him.”

He was the big brother who organized the games, made the rules, and played the pranks. “Usually it was fun for him at other people’s expense, like mine and Barbara’s,” Larry said. “We had this old barn with a big wasp nest. He’d do a deal where he’d go in and tear down the wasp’s nest. No one could run ’til it started falling.”

At Whitebird, he turned the porch into a fort with dynamite crates from the mines. “We used to build rubber guns from tires that had inner tubes,” Larry said. “I was on his side a lot. Cannon fodder.”

But he was scared of heights, particularly the roller coaster the twins rode to death in St. Louis, and as a little boy scared of bugs. Mike Meier’s grandma babysat for the Mantles. “Granddad used to laugh,” Meier said. “He was scared to death of everything. Granddad said, ‘I never dreamed
he would grow up to be what he was because he was such a sissy.’”

He loved country music—especially Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Every time they came through Commerce, they saw the same red-haired, freckle-faced boy waiting by Route 66. One day, Mantle wrote, they stopped to introduce themselves. Their young admirer asked to tag along to their performance in Joplin. Wills told Mantle, “You get your parents’ permission.” Next time, the Playboys took him along.

He hid his own musical ambitions and his guitar in the culvert in the front yard, his artistic impulse trumped by competitive zeal. He used the money set aside for guitar lessons to play pool instead. “He didn’t worry a lot about world news or wars or things,” said Bennett. “He was sort of loose as a goose. He just wanted to play baseball. He was pretty simple, really—his main worry was hittin’ a big curve ball.”

In the Commerce High School yearbook—he was sports editor—the caption under his senior picture read: “They’re great pals, he and his baseball jacket.” He was also listed as Most Popular on the Who’s Who page, assistant editor of
Tiger Chat
, the school newspaper, a member of the Engineers Club, and a cast member in the senior play,
Starring the Stars
.

His siblings remember him as an enthusiastic babysitter and compelling storyteller who drove the young ’uns under the bed with tales of the Headless Horseman lurking outside the window. “And Mickey sat in the living room just dying laughin’,” Barbara said.

Max Mantle recalls a different ending to the tale: “He was under the bed. He was the furthest one under the bed.”

But Cousin Mickey would never spend the night at Max’s house; he was always heading home at bedtime. He wet his bed until he left home for his first year in minor league baseball. It had to be embarrassing in a house where everyone lived and slept in such proximity. Perhaps that’s why Lovell was so diligent about starching and ironing his boxer shorts every morning.