Merlyn Mantle, 77 (New York Times Obituary)

Photo: http://j.bdbphotos.com/pictures/X/7/X7H3J1.jpg

FROM: The New York Times ~
By Tyler Kepner

Merlyn Mantle, the widow of the Hall of Fame Yankees
outfielder Mickey Mantle, died Monday at a hospice
facility in Plano, Tex. She was 77. A family spokesman,
Marty Appel, said the cause was Alzheimer's disease.

Born Merlyn Louise Johnson in Cardin, Okla., she
married Mickey Mantle on Dec. 23, 1951, after his rookie
season. They met in 1949, when Mickey was a star at
Commerce High School in northeast Oklahoma and
Merlyn was a cheerleader at rival Picher High School.

They were married 43 years, until Mantle's death in 1995.
They had four sons. She is survived by two sons, David,
53, and Danny, 49; four grandchildren; a daughter-in-law;
and a sister, Pat LaFalier of Miami.

After a private funeral, Merlyn Mantle will be buried next
to her husband and her sons Mickey Jr. and Billy at
Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas.
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Photo:
http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2008/07/09/amd_mantle.jpg
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A Family Album
Mickey Mantle's Relatives Can't Flee Tainted Dreams

FROM: The New York Times (2002) ~
By Richard Sandomir New York Times

DALLAS -

"Can I touch your face?
Can I hold your hand?
Can I give you a hug, again and again?
Can I say I love you?
You're also my friend.
My father."
- from David Mantle to his father

If Merlyn Mantle is haunted by the suffering in her life,
she does not easily show it. The widow of Mickey
Mantle is 5 feet 2 and vivacious, wearing a white top
and white pants as she sits in her 15th-floor condominium.
Her eyes are lively, her manner straightforward.

Merlyn Mantle, nearing 70, speaks openly about her
drinking, Mickey's alcoholism and his philandering.
And while she has no doubt shed many tears, she is not
now.

She chuckled as she took a nearly 50-year-old photograph
from a box of family pictures. "Look at the two dorks on
their honeymoon," she said.

The tiny black-and-white image showed Mickey and
Merlyn in Hot Springs, Ark. Merlyn is smiling demurely,
looking prim in her schoolmarmish eyeglasses and two-piece
suit. To her left, Mickey is grinning, in a white shirt and jeans
with the cuffs rolled up halfway to his shins.

This was her man, her high school sweetheart who grew
up in a house in Oklahoma where, Merlyn said, he "bathed
every morning in a tub in the kitchen; he was so clean."

It is a sweet and simple sentiment, but time has not been
kind to that memory. In recent years, the Mantles have
endured alcoholism and cancer as if a genetic monster had
singled them out to be a double cluster of immense sadness.

Mickey and three of his sons, David, Danny and Mickey Jr.,
were all treated for alcoholism at the Betty Ford Center.
Merlyn found salvation in Alcoholics Anonymous and
Alanon, "where all my friends are now," she said.

Mickey and Merlyn's other son, Billy, died of a heart attack
in 1994 at age 36, two weeks after his father's alcoholism
treatment ended. Billy had suffered half his life with
Hodgkin's disease.

In 1995, Mickey, 63, died of cancer, two months after he
had a liver transplant.

In December 2000, Mickey Jr., 47, died of non-Hodgkin's
lymphoma.

Now Danny, 41, the youngest son, having had precancerous
polyps removed from his colon, faces the possibility of
prostate cancer.

"Why my children?" Merlyn said. "I'm not wishing cancer on
anyone's children. But why mine?"
She said this without rancor or bitterness.

"I don't know how she does it," said Pat Summerall, the
longtime sportscaster, who helped persuade Mickey to
enter the Betty Ford recovery program. "I get the sense from
Merlyn that she feels there's a hex."

Murphy Martin, a family friend, added: "When they reached
the point of all these chronic problems, they consumed her
so much, she could not focus on anything but how she
could best help. Every problem made her stronger."

For 18 seasons as a Yankee, Mickey Mantle symbolized
athletic brilliance - the triumph of a boy tutored by his
father and grandfather to bat left-handed and right-handed
who became the greatest switch-hitter ever. He seemed to
represent the fulfillment of every boyhood dream. His
injuries, and the pain he played through, only enhanced his
heroic stature. His teammates adored him, and so did his
fans. Only after his career ended did the world learn of his
reckless behavior, drinking and womanizing. His drinking
escalated in retirement as he struggled with what to do with
himself. The memorabilia craze that began in the late 1980's
enriched him. Then, through his rehabilitation and his fight
with cancer, he earned new appreciation as a flawed hero
finally taking control of his life.

Merlyn and the surviving sons, David and Danny, are the
heirs to the frankness that Mickey Mantle adopted in his
final years as his alcoholism and decline in health were
played out in public. Even as he dealt with the ravages of
cancer and being a lifelong alcoholic, he admitted his
failings as a husband and father, and lamented wasting so
much of his health and time on drinking. "It took me a long
time to admit Mick was an alcoholic," Merlyn said.

Today, Merlyn Mantle's condominium is decorated in
Southwestern tones that provide a muted backdrop for
a Mantle shrine. He is still young in framed photos, Life
magazine covers and a LeRoy Neiman portrait. His
left-handed swing is still powerful in an 18-inch-high bronze
statue that rests on a coffee table. The real treasures are in
a glass display case: three most valuable player trophies;
signed baseballs; the silver bat for his 1956 Triple Crown;
the balls he hit for - among others - his 512th and 535th
home runs; and his record-breaking 16th World Series
homer.

The Family Business

Mantle left behind about 110 signed balls and 24 signed
bats, not quite a Joe DiMaggio-like trove. He also
bequeathed four signed gloves to his sons. Danny
presented them delicately, as if handling rare items from
King Tut's tomb. He showed an outfielder's glove from
the 1950's; Mickey had customized it to reduce the gap in
the webbing. There are no game-worn uniforms; many
were stolen and Mickey gave away others.

Merlyn bronzed one of Mantle's gloves and a pair of his
spikes because, she said, "he would've given them away
without regard to their future value."

"If he was drunk," David said, "he'd say, 'You like it,
you take it.' "

Anything with Mantle's signature has value. One day,
David recalled, he and his father visited his grandmother
at a nursing home in Jay, Okla. Mickey wrote a note to his
mother that read: "Love, your son, Mick." Soon afterward,
David said, the note was gone.

"It'll probably end up on eBay," David said.

Danny and David make their living through the licensing
of their father's name. They had bounced around in other
jobs - David said he made $12,000 a year at age 30,
working in a McDonald's - but settled into the family
business, and the Mickey Mantle Foundation to raise organ
donation awareness, a mission that has subsided after
distributing eight million organ donor cards.

If there is a joy, it has been in that work. "It's what Dad
wanted us to do," Danny said. "If we've done any good,
that makes us feel good."

They also raise money for the Mantle Family Fund of the
American Cancer Society. The family is proud of that
association, Danny said, "because everybody's dying of
cancer."

"We need some vaccine," he added, "because most of the
time, in our cases, once you find the cancer, it's too late."

Four M Enterprises, the Mantle estate's licensing business,
provides David and Danny with a steady living. Four M
has deals with Upper Deck and I.B.M., and others for
figurines and a Christmas ornament. It licenses the Mantle
name to the renowned restaurant on Central Park South
and to a new steakhouse in Oklahoma City. A New York
City school for children with disabilities, P811M in
Manhattan, is awaiting approval from the board of education
to be renamed for Mantle.

In 1998, the estate received $4.9 million from an arbitration
panel, which ruled that Upper Deck had breached Mantle's
contract. Two years ago, the estate signed a new deal with
Upper Deck to produce cards. Roy True, the family's
former lawyer, said that even before the Upper Deck
arbitration award, "we had amassed substantially more millions
before that."

Danny said his father "left Mom pretty well off, with no debts."

But one need not probe long to discover that this is not the
work the sons dreamed of being in.

David, whose blond hair, face-crinkling smile, Southwestern
twang and slump-shouldered build are jarring reminders of
the Mick, is pointed in assessing himself.

"Here I am, 45, and I have no direction," David said.
"I'd like to leave a legacy to my daughter. I don't know
why I feel confused. I don't know if I'm scared. Am I too
old?" He added, "Drinking 25 years was such a damned
waste."

Danny would like to return to real estate development, despite
some past financial reversals. "People think licensing my
father's name isn't a real job, but it is," he said. "It takes a lot
of time fighting the counterfeiters. But I'm seriously thinking
of trying to find something different."

More importantly, the sons want to be good fathers. David
and Marla Mantle have one child, Marilyn, who is 7. Danny
and Kay Mantle have a son, Will, 5, and a daughter, Chloe, 3.

"My boys are good fathers," Merlyn said. "Maybe it's
because they didn't have that companionship when they were
boys."

Legacy of Pain

Each man reacted similarly to a scene in the recent HBO
film "61*," about the home run race between Mantle and
Roger Maris, when Mantle, played by Thomas Jane,
makes a late-night call to Merlyn to ask about his sons.

"I remember those calls," Danny said. "He must have been
very lonely."

David says he spends as much time as he can with his
daughter. "I want to hug and kiss her as much as I can,"
he said. "Maybe I'm too protective. I still carry her
around. Maybe I smother her. But I remember going to
sleep when I was a kid and saying, 'Dear God, let Dad get
home safe.' "

He added, "Alcoholics do not deserve children."

Danny and David Mantle are bonded like twins; they
complete each other's sentences, and each has experienced
nearly everything the other has. They joke about their
onetime drinking sprees and cocaine toots. They recall how
the memorabilia shop they briefly owned was really more
a family tavern they would close up when their father would
persuade them to party with him.

"We didn't take that too serious," Danny said. "I look
back and it wasn't funny at all, but we were in the middle of
the disease and didn't care. It was sad, but Dad would say,
'Close down, we're leaving,' and we couldn't say no."

One of the rare hot sellers at their store was a photograph
taken at a baseball fantasy camp in 1989. In Yankee
pinstripes, Mickey and his four sons posed with Whitey
Ford and his two sons, Tommy and Eddie.

David sat on a stool in his mother's kitchen and gestured
to that image.

"Half those guys are dead now," he said.

In addition to Mickey, Billy and Mickey Jr., Tommy Ford
is also dead.

Danny, in green shorts and a green-and-white shirt, moves
slowly as he makes his way around his mother's apartment.
In the passenger's seat of David's car, he partially reclined
the seat to alleviate the pain from his prostate problems.
A prostate-specific antigen blood test registered a 45 (0-4 is
considered healthy), but medication has brought it down to
a 38. A high P.S.A. is not necessarily a sign of cancer.

"We're treating it as prostitis," Danny said. "But if that
doesn't work, they'll have to do a biopsy."

It is almost nine months since Mickey Jr. died. Merlyn is
raising his daughter, 12-year-old Mallory, until a custody
case with Mickey Jr.'s ex-wife is settled.

Mickey Jr.'s suffering remains with his survivors. They still
feel aggrieved that doctors at R.H. Dedman Memorial
Hospital only sporadically eased his pain with morphine,
despite a tumor on his liver so large that it blocked his heart.

"They had him on Tylenol," said David, spitting out the
words.

Danny added: "If you have a guy who's terminally ill, why
worry that he might be addicted to morphine? They had
Dad on morphine."

Finally, Mickey Jr. was put on a morphine pump, as his
father was.

"Nobody in our family," Merlyn said, "dies without pain."

Or without some guilt. David, who is healthy, lives with
the guilt he feels about what happened at his father's
bedside at Baylor University Medical Center.

"I was the one who told them to take him off life support,"
he said. "I felt like I killed Dad, and maybe I OD'd him on
morphine."

David can look across the room at his brother and
wonder what will happen to him. He knows something
dangerous percolates in the Mantle genes. "The guy at the
funeral home said, 'We're used to seeing families come
back, but not three times in six years,' " David said.

His reaction to Danny's condition is tinged with mordant
humor.

"After Mickey Jr. died, I said, 'Do I have one or two years
left?' " he said. "I keep thinking that Mom had a heart attack,
so watch, I won't get cancer, I'll get a heart attack."

Yet another death among the Mantle kin occurred last month
when Roy Mantle, Mickey's 65-year-old brother, died of
Hodgkin's disease in Las Vegas.

"Roy suffered terribly," Merlyn said.

Summerall, who played minor league ball against Roy;
Roy's twin, Ray; and Mickey, said: "I'd be haunted.
Wouldn't you?"

Two other siblings, Larry Mantle and Barbara Delise, are
in their 60's. Delise said she had not been touched by
cancer. "It's just everybody on the male side," she said.
"It's difficult. My grandpa, my dad, Mickey, Billy, little
Mickey."

The Mantle men were largely silent about the fear of cancer
killing them at a young age, Delise said. "The men never
talked about it," she said. "Except for Mickey."

Lasting Bonds

At Sparkman Hillcrest Cemetery in Dallas, Mickey Mantle
and two of his sons are buried in a crypt inside a huge
concrete mausoleum that faces the Garden of Peace. On
a recent 98-degree day, the wing the Mantles are buried in,
which was built in 1983, had no visitors. An air-conditioner
hummed.

Two signed baseballs and a few notes rested at the foot of
the ground-level crypt. A man from Euless, Tex., wrote:
"To Mickey - I have had two heroes in my life, my Dad and
Mickey Mantle.

Now you are both gone."

Three bodies are buried, but four names are inscribed on
the marble crypt:

William (Billy) Mantle, 1957-1994
Mickey Charles Mantle, 1931-1995. A Great Teammate.
Merlyn Louise Mantle, 1932-
Mickey Mantle Jr., 1953-2000

The presence of Merlyn's name is testament to the durability
of their love, despite an often dysfunctional relationship and
Merlyn's separation from Mickey in his final six years.

Asked why she never divorced him, she said: "I adored
Mick. I thought I couldn't live without him.

In many ways, he was very good to me, very generous.
I never wanted a divorce and he never asked for one."

Her sons doubt that she will ever date again.

"I think she found her one love in Dad," Danny said.
"He was enough."
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Photo:
http://www.mickeymantle.com/images/book005.jpg

Thanks for posting this Bill.