My Favorite Summer 1956, by Mickey Mantle, and I Had a Hammer, by Henry Aaron
Scully, Matthew
Iisa part of the charm of Mickey Mantle autobiographies—there are now at least four of them—that the Mick can never quite figure how an ordinary guy like himself ever inspired such deep, unshakable...
...Or again, Aaron is angry at not being hired as a manager after retirement...
...18.95 I HAD A HAMMER: THE HANK AARON STORY Henry Aaron with Lonnie Wheeler/HarperCollins 333 pp...
...I also felt a stream of tears running down my face...
...We'd try to hide from one another, taking cover behind a trunk or in a locker and try to ambush each other . . . Though you would not want him to expand much further on the topic, there's a wonderful innocence in this passage...
...Yogi a funny guy given to malapropisms like calling Mick's ability to hit both ways "amphibious...
...I didn't feel a wild sense of joy...
...Gripes aside, though, one likes to think the real character of Henry Aaron is revealed in the book's better passages, as when he recalls the evening he hit number 715: When I was alone and the door was shut, I got down on my knees and closed my eyes and thanked God for pulling me through...
...You can work in the mines with me...
...he asked...
...So too in Mantle's account of walking through Central Park and over the Harlem River to get to the Stadium back in '56, or taking the subway all by himself, unaccosted...
...I'm taking you home," he said, and I could see there was a tear in his eye...
...The question is, we're reminded several times, "where baseball fits in the greater scheme...
...He slammed it on the bed and started throwing my clothes in it...
...What are you doing...
...of simply, "There goes Henry Aaron...
...Being Mickey Mantle somehow places him outside the whole experience, so that, to this day, a generation after his retirement, he can only express boyish amazement at it all...
...But mostly the book reads like this: Billy and I kept water pistols in our locker, and some nights Billy would fill his pistol and begin squirting water at me...
...It was okay to be black as long as you were Willie Mays," Aaron writes...
...Then I would get my pistol and fill it with water and I'd start shooting at him...
...Mick says he resented owner George Weiss's fear that Martin was "a bad influence" and "not the Yankee type," because, after all, Billy was such a great guy and fine competitor and, in those early years at least, the team did so well...
...T he touching thing about Hank 1 Aaron, by contrast, is that he avoided all of Mantle's mistakes, broke just about all the records, and yet, he tells us, got nowhere near the same adulation and ended up feeling somehow unfulfilled...
...At that moment, I knew what the past 25 years of my life had been all about...
...Fans are like that, and, save for a Jimmy Piersall, one is expected to ride it out and silence the idiots next time at bat, as indeed Hank usually did...
...and then dying, a young man, just after Mantle's first World Series...
...Another time, Aaron and Willie Mays were driving along when some unfriendly-looking police officers stopped them —smiling only when they recognized Willie...
...Readers of the more confessional Mick will recall that his good buddy Billy led him into adventures that were alarming, especially to Mrs...
...I just signed the contract and sent it right back...
...He got to the hotel and knocked on the door...
...Although in fact this attitude doesn't really rub one the wrong MY FAVORITE SUMMER 1956 Mickey Mantle and Phil Pepe/Doubleday/246 pp...
...To me that was all the money in the world...
...What a horrible sound...
...I thought I raised a man...
...I couldn't wait to go to spring training to get ready for the 1956 season...
...However fond Mickey may have been of his friend, one suspects Mutt would have led the bum away by the scruff of the neck...
...Uncheapened by hack writing, the Mantle story is a drama of paternal sacrifice: Mutt Mantle slaving in the coal mine day after day so Mickey would never have to go there...
...On racial matters, he says, "I make it my business not to be content," which "rubs some people the wrong way...
...coming home each evening to pitch to Mickey until dusk, insisting he learn to be a switch hitter...
...Wherever baseball might be in the "greater scheme," there is no doubt that one of the game's finest gentlemen had to put up with unbelievable abuse...
...The awful tendency is to exaggerate Mantle's Oklahoma idiom, so that the book reads more like something from his composition class at Commerce High School than the mature recounting of a great career...
...If there is any enduring "social releTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 47...
...About Martin, though, there's something ominous in Mantle's recollection that "occasionally, Whitey and I would sneak out with Billy...
...We sat up that night and we talked quite a bit and the next morning he went back to Oklahoma and I stayed...
...But the Babe himself—who also absorbed his share of uncharitable commentary from the bleachers—went to the next world in 1948 still resentful because the Boston Braves had laughed off his repeated offer to become manager in the thirties...
...Such images help explain why the name Mantle will always have an aura that, say, the name Jose Canseco will not: a happy, uncomplicated kid traipsing through the park, suiting up, and, at the appropriate moment, depositing one high in the seats and then trotting modestly around the bases—with none of today's high-fives, curtain calls, and post-game whining...
...I opened the door and he just walked in and the first thing he did was grab my suitcase, one of those old cardboard jobs...
...Roger Maris a "great guy" and reluctant hero...
...Of all people to tell The Mickey Mantle Story, he at times seems the least competent...
...That last sentence, obviously Mantle's unaided voice, has a Hemingway-like quality: spare, simple, but powerful when you think of Mutt driving back home to obscurity, and the boy, after toughing out another stint in the minors, succeeding Ruth, Gehrig, and Di-Maggio...
...Billy Martin a carouser, but like Whitey "a great guy" with whom Mick "liked to party a lot...
...But it also attests to the influence, not entirely helpful, of friends who entered his life as he approached real fame in 1974, and of a ghost-author, Lonnie Wheeler, who writes well but insists that the man's achievements be measured by their political significance—a measure bound to end in disappointment...
...My dad probably didn't make that much in all the years he worked in the mines...
...It attests to Jackson's own unique gifts that he could turn baseball's all-time highest achiever into a political dependent...
...The rest of the book is pretty standard baseball fare, interesting only if youdidn't know already that Whitey Ford was a cut-up...
...There are some good stories about '56 —his favorite year because that's when he edged out Ted Williams for the Triple Crown and when the Yanks beat Brooklyn in a subway Series...
...Aaron, Mr...
...In part, this is because he is plainly a man of greater depth than Whitey and Billy and Yogi, for all their amiability...
...I didn't feel like celebrating...
...The best to be said in Pepe's defense is that he's not such a hack as whoever assisted in the 1984 Mick, which ended with the sentence "Until I see y'all around again, I'll just say so long for now," followed by Mantle's signature...
...Iisa part of the charm of Mickey Mantle autobiographies—there are now at least four of them—that the Mick can never quite figure how an ordinary guy like himself ever inspired such deep, unshakable devotion...
...But Mantle repeats here that he regrets having had to retire at 37 "because I didn't take care of myself...
...Following Jackie Robinson by just a few years, Hank was favored with the same warm epithets from the stands...
...Jesse, we discover, had also befriended Ernie Banks just as "Mr...
...Despite the inevitable trite conclusion to which this approach leads (the struggle for social justice means "more than a bunch of home runs...
...grateful spirit, not in the truculent spir- a better example of character and manHe gripes, for instance, that people it of his friend the King-hanger-on- hood, is it at all certain that Mr...
...Without arguing that you can't be a Yankee great and a reckless rounder too—the Babe, at least, challenged that proposition—it's hard to believe the Mick's career, to say nothing of his marriage, would not have prospered more without Martin's social tutelage...
...But I probably felt closer to God at that moment than at any other in my life...
...Hard to say, though a reliable indicator in I Had a Hammer is the arrival in his life of Jesse Jackson...
...Nor son would beat out Mr...
...After a big salary hike, Aaron discovered, "the Atlanta fans weren't shy about letting me know what they thought of a $200,000 nigger striking out with men on base...
...I didn't even try to get the Yankees to give me more...
...Where you at...
...Cub" was nearing the 500-home-run mark, as he apparently befriends just about every black man who is due some media attention...
...At exactly what point do Aaron's arguably fair grievances with professional baseball—disproportionately few blacks in management, almost no black managers—become the familiar diffuse, unanswerable indictments of society...
...But Maris experienced the same thing with his 61 that Aaron did with his 755...
...Nor has the Mick been well served in this one by veteran New York Post sports columnist Phil Pepe...
...Cub, who broke Babe Ruth's record," instead indeed, if we had some way of determin- or, for that matter, Mr...
...Mick recalls: After the 1955 season the Yankees sent me a contract for $32,000...
...I felt a deep sense of gratitude and a wonderful surge of liberation all at the same time...
...Doubtless the jeers were given a distinctly Southern flavor, but fans always hurl abuse at the big-money player who whiffs at the critical moment...
...And then there are memories like those Aaron has of a Washington, D.C., diner, where they were willing to serve a black man, so long as they didn't have to keep the dishes afterward: "I can still envision myself sitting with the [Indianapolis] Clowns in a restaurant behind Griffith Stadium and hearing them break all the plates after we were finished eating...
...Here, in one of the better moments in My Favorite Summer 1956, Mantle recalls the time when, after going 0-for-22 in his rookie season, he called Mutt to say he'd had enough: I said, "Dad, I want you to come and get me, I can't play...
...This would go on for hours...
...I asked...
...Even as he recounts how Jackson secured him endorsements from companies accused of discrimination, Aaron seems never to suspect that his new friend might have motives unrelated to the cause of civil rights...
...I can only hope, and keep hammering"), the book is a moving personal testimony...
...naming him after the Tiger catcher Mickey Cochrane, and Matthew Scully is assistant literary editor of National Review...
...At one point, the future baseball legend was literally chased out of a Southern town for presuming to walk down the main street...
...placing a little mitt in the boy's crib...
...or Casey Stengel, hard to follow sometimes, but a great old guy and like a father to the Mick...
...Jacksee him and say, "There goes the man turned-professional-media-hound...
...21.95 Matthew Scully 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 way, such is the man's integrity and sin- vance" to Aaron's achievements, it lies ing who has brought more good into the cerity, the racism theme does undergo a in this example of a persevering and lives of black Americans, or provided bit too much hammerin...
...It is understandable, then, that in the small slights that even famous men encounter Aaron can still hear the crashing of plates...
Vol. 24 • November 1991 • No. 11
