Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  It wasn’t true, then, as Mickey was to say years later, that he had “no other enjoyment than baseball.”9 Or, as Willie said, “The game [baseball] was everything to me.”10 It was probably true that both boys had no other enjoyment than sports. Most of their waking hours, when they weren’t in school, were spent playing baseball, football, or basketball, or daydreaming about them. “All the time my algebra teacher was saying ‘X equals how much?’ ” Willie told a writer shortly after arriving in New York, “I was thinking about the next ball game.”11 At about the same time, Mickey was thinking much the same way. “At Commerce High, I’d sit in class listening to the teacher, but half the time I would gaze out the window and see myself scoring sensational touchdowns.” He was not, he admitted, a very good student, but “I passed my classes. I took easy subjects—home economics, shop, gym, and so forth—and staggered through the rest.” He recalled with fondness an English teacher named Mrs. Jacoby who had him memorize Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”‖ “I didn’t get it quite right in class. But after school she let me catch a glimpse of the page over her shoulder while I recited to the empty classroom.”12

  Teachers had no such ambitions for Willie or his classmates. Instead, Fairfield Industrial trained Willie for a job as a launderer. “I never became a cleaner or a presser,” he said, looking back on his high school years. “Don’t laugh. That was a big job for most young boys back then, back in the late 1940s, in that part of the South. Let’s face it, there just weren’t that many other opportunities for a young black kid living in the Deep South almost twenty years before the coming of the Civil Rights movement.”13

  When he was grown, Willie could remember having only one actual job, washing dishes in a Birmingham café, “Folks treated me grade-A,” he said, “but I quit after one week.” As Willie phrased it, “Working wasn’t for me.” Mickey had numerous odd jobs, including some hard, nasty work in a cemetery, and, of course, a steady round of chores both at Quincy Street and later on the farm and in Whitebird, the most tedious of which was shucking corn. (There was no Uncle Otis around to wash dishes and chop wood for Mickey.) But for the most part, “All I did: play, play, play”—mostly baseball.14

  At one time or another, both boys played just about every position. Mutt made Mickey play catcher, a position he hated and that seems, in retrospect, a curious choice, considering not only how frequently catchers are injured but also that it was such an obvious waste of Mickey’s incredible speed. Nonetheless, it showed him baseball as it looked from behind the plate—the only position on the diamond where one can see every player without turning one’s head. (So sure did Mickey become of his ability to perform a catcher’s tasks that he once challenged Yogi Berra to let him call the pitches from center-field when Whitey Ford was on the mound. The strain was too great, though, and he gave up pitch-calling after just one inning.)

  According to his friends, Mickey, while playing second base for the championship-winning Gabby Street League team from Douthat, could not only bat but throw left-handed, at least to toss a ball around. Nick Ferguson thought, “He coulda thrown left-handed for real if he had to.” Mantle had by far the strongest arm on nearly all the teams he played on, and many who saw him in his teenage years thought he could have made it as a pitcher. In addition to a humming fastball that he could throw with excellent control, Mickey developed a specialty pitch, a knuckleball. No one knows who taught it to him or how he mastered it, but it was a skill he maintained over his entire professional career.

  Years later, while with the Independence Kansas Class-D team in the Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri (KOM) League, Mickey broke a teammate’s nose throwing a knuckleball. On the team bus headed for a game, Mantle was demonstrating the proper grip; when they arrived at the ballpark, Lou Skizas, a third baseman, crouched down in the catcher’s position and said, “OK, let’s see it, kid.” According to Mickey, “I uncorked the knuckleball, struck him right in the nose, and sent him tumbling. He was out cold for two or three minutes.” Skizas was rushed to the infirmary, “He had a broken nose and missed three days of baseball. Matter of fact, he still has a permanent lump on his nose.”15 (In 1956, Mantle’s kunckleball claimed a second victim when, while having a catch with teammate Norm Siebern, he unleashed a floater that smashed into Siebern’s nose, costing him two days of practice.)a

  Willie, like Mickey, had terrific hands and seemed to have promise as a shortstop. According to one account, though, he gave it up when he threw so hard to first base he almost broke the fielder’s hand. (Though this story sounds apocryphal, it may well be true. Piper Davis once told me that black kids in the 1930s and 1940s often played with gloves “where there was so little padding that you often had to stuff a rag or something in it just to keep your hand from getting broke.”) When he was a young teenager, Willie’s throwing arm was already legendary in the Fairfield area, and like Mickey it looked as if he could have made it as a pitcher. He liked pitching for the same reason he liked playing quarterback in football: he got to be the center of attention and could showcase his skills. He apparently gave up pitching for a couple of reasons. The first was dizzy spells. One summer day when he was fourteen, he pitched a complete game against an industrial team and hit a walk-off home run for the victory. As he slid across home plate—there were no fences on the field—he almost fainted. Cat carried him into the shade and gave him a drink of water, and the spell passed, but the dizziness would come back again and again over the years. No medical reason has ever been offered for why such a magnificent physical specimen as Willie Mays suffered from recurring dizzy spells; perhaps, said some who had watched him over the years, it was simply a side product of the exuberance with which he played the game.

  The fainting spells implanted in Willie’s mind the idea that pitching might be too taxing for him, but a stronger reason for his decision to focus on the outfield was voiced by his father. Cat reminded him, “If you pitch, you can’t play every day.”16 It isn’t recorded, but Mutt no doubt said something similar to Mickey.

  One thing that Willie always had more of than Mickey was luck—relative, of course, to what a black youth born in Alabama during the Depression and growing up without a mother or father at home could expect. Football was good to Willie, either that or he got out of it before it could turn bad. He was never seriously injured while playing the game, if one discounts falling out a tree while watching a football game and breaking a leg (or perhaps an arm).

  Technically, Mickey Mantle wasn’t injured playing football, either. He was injured during practice. In his freshman year, Mickey got a simple kick in the shin. Some biographers have said it occurred during a game, but Mickey, recounting the incident to Herb Gluck, said it happened during practice: “One day we were practicing, and I was carrying the ball when a tackler kicked me on the left shin. Bill Moseley and the coach helped me off the field. The coach said it looked like a sprain. That night my mother soaked the ankle in a bucket of hot water.” By the next morning, his temperature had climbed to 104 and his ankle had swollen horribly.

  The vast majority of ankle injuries on a football field are shrugged off and the player can be back in the lineup in a couple of days. But Mickey never had that kind of luck. His father drove him to nearby Pitcher General Hospital, where the family doctor diagnosed the injury as superficial. Because of the fever, though, the doctor determined that the ankle should be lanced. No one seemed to understand how bad the infection was. For the next two weeks, Mickey endured a regimen of peroxide, sulfur, liniments, and compresses, but nothing reduced the swelling. Mutt and Lovell shook their heads and wondered what fate had befallen their son. Every morning Lovell, after packing the rest of the kids off to school, walked nearly a mile to catch the northeast Oklahoma bus from Whitebird to visit Mickey at the hospital; when Mutt got off work at the mines, he drove his wreck of a 1935 LaSalle to the hospital to relieve his wife, who returned home to fix dinner.

  To his parents’ horror, Mickey was diagnosed with osteomyelitis; the doctors said that
amputating the leg was a strong possibility if not a likelihood. Lovell was adamant: under no circumstances would they take Mickey’s leg. Immediately after hearing the diagnosis, Lovell went to a lawyer in nearby Miami and got Mickey transferred to the Crippled Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City. The move was essential, but it involved the swallowing of a great deal of pride: the Crippled Children’s Hospital was a charity hospital for patients too poor to go elsewhere. The family made the grim three-and-a-half hour drive from Pitcher to Oklahoma City, Mutt all the time at the wheel, chain smoking and brooding, despairing that his beloved son would ever walk again, let alone fulfill his promise in baseball.

  But finally, Mickey did have some luck after all. The year 1946 was when penicillin was making its way into hospitals in the bigger cities, and Mickey was given an injection every three hours for several days. His ankle showed immediate improvement, and after a few days, the mood in Mickey’s hospital room lighted considerably. Early in October, father and son were euphoric over the combination of Mickey’s recovery and the St. Louis Cardinals’ victory in the World Series. Mutt and Mickey let out a collective yelp in the eighth inning of the final game when Enos “Country” Slaughter made his daring dash from first to home to score the winning run against the Red Sox. Slaughter, Musial, and the Cardinals were the world champions. It seemed like an omen. Three days later, his arms around half-brother Theodore, Mickey walked out of the hospital. By the next spring, he was practicing with the football team.

  One change that his friends noticed immediately was how much bigger Mickey looked in the few months after his hospital stay. He’d weighed around 130 pounds when he went in and lost, or so friends and family thought, about 15 pounds, but he had gained all that weight back and then some. By the spring of 1947 he looked both bigger and stronger. “I don’t know what they were giving him,” Nick Ferguson recalled for David Falkner. Ferguson advanced the amazing thought that “He [Mickey, that is] thought maybe it was steroids, but I have no idea what it was. But he claimed that’s what pumped him up to 160 pounds.”17 Where such advanced steroids would have come from at an Oklahoma City hospital in 1946 isn’t known.

  Ferguson kept some photographs of the Commerce football team while they were in high school. Though he missed the 1946 season, Mantle was included at his coach’s insistence. In the 1947 team photo, Nick estimates Mickey looks to weigh about 165 pounds, all of the added weight pure muscle. No friend, teammate, or relative remembers him lifting a single weight.

  Boys will be boys. When he was thirteen, Willie and his pals were on their way to a ball game, riding in the back of a truck owned by Stephenson’s Dry Cleaners. The driver was a member of their group, Herman Boykin, who, since he was only fourteen, had no business behind the wheel. The boys were riding with the back doors open and decided to have some fun by making faces at the driver of a truck behind them. After a couple of minutes, the man lost his temper, sped up, cut in front of them, and stopped short, nearly driving them off the road. Herman quickly figured out what had happened, and when they arrived at the field, raised his truck’s dumper, rudely depositing Willie and the other players on the ground.

  Around the same time, Mickey got into serious trouble—or at least as serious as trouble got for school boys in Commerce, Oklahoma, in 1944—by embarrassing Patty McCall and her girlfriends. Miss McCall had invited Mickey, Bill Moseley, and a couple more of Mickey’s friends to her house for some Cokes and 7-Ups while listening to the radio. Mickey, Bill, and the others developed a bad case of fumble-itis; unaccountably, they kept dropping things on the floor so Patty and the others girls would have to bend over and pick them up. The boys would then take the opportunity to look up their skirts. Patty told her folks, and her parents told the principal, who thought that the boys were not too old for a good paddling. Mickey knew he got off easy: Lovell never found out.

  As early as their high school years, it was obvious that their hometowns were incapable of holding Mickey and Willie. Back then, Mantle noted in his 1987 memoir, “There wasn’t very much of anything going on for teenagers in Commerce. The main drag was only a few blocks, one end to the other; the City Hall, the volunteer fire department, the Black Cat Café, a bank, a movie house, one motel, a handful of stores …”b The Black Cat Café was just about the only place in Commerce that could pass for a “hot spot.” One local historian called it “One of the few all-night eateries between Kansas City and Tulsa.”18 Called by one Oklahoma newspaper “a conspicuous place on U.S. 66,” it was a gathering point for celebrities who happened to be passing through, including folk humorist Will Rogers, cowboy film star Buck Jones, and musicians such as Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Given that Mutt often went to the Black Cat, it’s likely that it was the place where father and son had their first beer together—either there or at one of the other bars popular with Mutt and other miners, including JJ Café, Killa Bar (a pun on “killed a bear,” as the original pioneers often had to do), the A-D Bar, and Finch’s.

  Legally, Oklahoma was dry, though bars were allowed to sell “near beer” with an alcoholic content of 3.2 percent (“real” beer was anywhere from 4 to 6 percent). Of course, the Black Cat and all the other Commerce taverns served the genuine stuff as well. Nick Fer guson recalled, “Everyone knew when a raid was coming. The police would notify ’em so the real booze would get put away, get put all under the bar … as soon as the sheriffs or the deputies or whoever would leave, well, they’d bring out the booze again. It was all payoffs back then, you know, everything got taken care of.”19

  Mickey was good-looking and, because of his athletic prowess, extremely popular. Painfully bashful and without much money, though, he had little social life. In a large room above the bank, there were Saturday-night “Teentown” dances, but they were tame affairs, especially for a boy as awkward at dancing as Mickey. One night in his senior year, his friends persuaded a pretty girl named Claudine Sanders to ask him for a dance. Mickey gave a nervous yes, but he was mortified: his face was “red as a beet, and she kept rubbing her body against mine” while his pals looked on and laughed. “Goddamn!” he thought to himself, “If I ever get away from here, I’ll never dance again!”20

  Given Willie’s distaste for alcoholic beverages, he and Cat may not ever have shared a beer, but by the time Willie had reached his late teens, he and his father did frequent some of the same establishments, most of them located along Fourth Avenue North in downtown Birmingham. Fifty-seven years after moving away forever, Willie still had fond memories of the area: “Man,” he remembered in an interview with journalist Paul Hemphill, “you could find whatever you were looking for. It was the place where me and my friends headed whenever we had money. During the day, the Fourth Avenue area was a swirl of activity.” Willie Patterson, a fine third baseman for the Black Barons in the 1940s, recalled, “You had the Carver Theatre, and the Frolic, the Famous and the Champion. On that corner, they sold records. Anything you want, you can get on Fourth Avenue. Watches, anything you want …”21

  Ballplayers, many of them from the several industrial-league teams but especially the Black Barons, were treated like kings in the Fourth Avenue district. Players from out of town stayed at the Rush Hotel on North Eighteenth Street, just a good baseball heave from the center of the bustling black business district. The hotel was owned by Joe Rush, who also owned the Black Barons.

  It was an area few whites knew firsthand. A Birmingham News article from 1936 described it: “The Frolic Theatre’s bright lights twinkle, and the Harlem Cafe beckons—where dark-skinned and dapper city boys and lanky cotton hands from the ‘Black Belt’ gape … a paradise of barbecue stands and pool rooms, of soft drink parlors and barbershops … the Mecca for cooks and chauffeurs on Thursday night, a heaven for miners and mill workers on Saturday night.…

  “Many white men have seen Eighteenth Street. Only a few know it. No white man understands it.”22

  The hottest spot in black Birmingham was Bob’s Savoy—or “Little Savoy” Café—at 41
1 North Seventeenth, owned by a New York native, Bob Williams, and named for the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Williams had come to Birmingham during the early years of the Depression and used his New York contacts to keep a steady stream of black celebrities frequenting his club whenever they went on tour in the Deep South. The musicians included Duke Ellington and Count Basie; sports celebrities such as Jackie Robinson and champion fighters Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson were also known to stop by.c

  Like the Black Cat in Commerce, the Little Savoy was known for being open 24 hours a day (though some recall that on Sundays it didn’t open until after church services let out). The upstairs was for eating: “Chicken–Steaks–Dinners–Short Orders–Drinks–Smokes” read the ads that appeared in the Birmingham Times and other black papers. Downstairs was for drinking and shooting pool, and though Bob’s bartenders were careful not to sell beer to teenagers, schoolboys (especially those like Willie, who had fathers well known as ballplayers) were often tolerated on summer afternoons when school was out and allowed to drink Cokes, Dr Pepper, and Royal Crown Cola while they shot pool.

  In a few short years Willie would be in New York and would see the original Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.

  For every father who raises his son to be an athlete, there’s a moment at which he realizes, often with a shock, that his son has surpassed him. Mutt Mantle’s realization came sooner than Cat Mays’s did.