Two Places, One Story: Mickey Mantle’s House and the Toxic Town Nearby

The Atlas Obscura map led me to two places in the same corner of northeast Oklahoma on the same afternoon. I didn't plan it as a journey from joy to grief. But that's what it became.

The first stop was Commerce, Oklahoma, population around 2,400, a town so modest you could drive through it in under two minutes and think nothing of it. I pulled up to 319 South Quincy Street with my eleven-year-old son, and we got out of the car into the bright afternoon and stood there in front of a small white house, taking it all in. This is where Mickey Mantle grew up. The Commerce Comet. One of the greatest baseball players who ever lived.

I told my son the story the way it deserves to be told: like a fairy tale. Mickey's father, Mutt, was so certain of his son's destiny that he named him after a Hall of Fame catcher before he was even born. When Mickey was a boy, Mutt would come home from work every afternoon at four o'clock, and the baseball lessons would begin. Mutt pitched right-handed. Mickey's grandfather pitched left-handed. They engineered a switch-hitter on purpose, right there in that yard. Below the windows was a single. Above them, a double. The roof, a triple. Clear the house entirely and you had a home run. Mickey once said he was "the only kid in town that didn't get in trouble for breaking a window."

My son and I walked around the yard. We peered into the old tin shed that served as Mickey's backstop. We stood where Mickey stood, and I tried to explain what it meant, that from this unremarkable house on this unremarkable street, in a small town most people have never heard of, something extraordinary grew. That greatness doesn't wait for the right zip code or the right circumstances. That you can come from anywhere, from very little, and still become something magnificent. A Yankees center fielder even. He nodded. We skipped around the yard a little, goofing off in the way that eleven-year-olds do when something connects with them but they don't quite have the words for it yet.

We got back in the car. I told him our next stop was just up the road. I knew it wouldn't be a happy place. Atlas Obscura’s entry about the town of Picher had made that clear.

We drove north on the small Highway 69, past flat green fields and bare trees, and then the landscape began to change. Gray mountains appeared, massive, looming, wrong. These were the chat piles: seventy million tons of toxic mining waste, the crushed and poisoned remnants of a century of lead and zinc extraction. As we rolled slowly into Picher, I was livestreaming on Instagram. Almost immediately, a viewer from Oklahoma appeared in the comments, urgent, almost scolding: Why are you going there? There are so many nicer places to visit. I kept driving deeper into the toxic town.

The houses came into view. Deserted. Every one of them. "KEEP OUT" spray-painted across doors and windows, faded but legible. Yards still faintly shaped by the people who had tended them, a walkway here, a porch railing there, the ghost of a garden. This didn't feel like some picturesque old mining ghost town from the 1880s, the kind you visit out west with a gift shop nearby. Picher had been a living community until very recently. In 1983, the EPA designated it part of the Tar Creek Superfund Site, one of the most toxic places in America, it turned out, surpassing even the Love Canal. By the mid-1990s, studies found that 34% of the children in Picher had dangerous levels of lead in their blood, a contamination that could cause lifelong neurological damage. An Army Corps of Engineers study in 2006 found that 86% of the town's buildings were badly undermined by mine shafts and at risk of sudden collapse. Then, in May 2008, an EF4 tornado tore through what remained, killing six people and destroying 150 homes. The government stopped offering to help people rebuild and started offering to pay them to leave. By June 2009, the last residents had accepted buyouts. On September 1, 2009, Picher was officially dissolved as a municipality. Sixteen years ago.

That's what I kept thinking. Sixteen years ago, people lived here. Children played in these yards. A high school class graduated — eleven seniors, the last class in Picher-Cardin High School's history — and then the doors closed forever.

"Can we go faster?" my son asked. "Can we leave?"

We stayed in the car. I didn't roll down the windows, having read on Atlas Obscura that the wind could carry harzardous material. I told my son what I tell myself about travel: that it's not just about the beautiful places and the perfect photos. It's about seeing many angles on the world, including what's hard and strange and broken. And that we owed it to the people who lived here not to look away.

He nodded again. Less convinced this time.

Picher stayed with us for days afterward. We kept talking about "that toxic town." And, honestly, I couldn't decide what to share about it with Atlas Obscura's community. Should I even write about it?

Then, I sat down to write about Mickey's house in Commerce. I was writing the story about the balls thrown over the house with his father, and I looked up more about Mutt. Wow. Mutt died in 1952, at forty years old, when Mickey was twenty. The cause was Hodgkin's disease. Mutt's father Charlie, the same man who had pitched left-handed to Mickey in that yard every afternoon, had also worked in the mines of northeast Oklahoma and also died of Hodgkin's disease before he was fifty. Mickey spent his whole life assuming it was family fate — that the Mantle men simply didn't make it past forty. He didn't know, until much later, that inhaling lead and zinc dust in the mines can lead to Hodgkin's disease. Mutt had worked specifically at the Eagle-Picher Company, the mining operation whose waste became the toxic mountains I had driven through that same afternoon, a few miles up the same road.

And here is what stopped me cold when I worked out the timeline. The Eagle-Picher mines didn't close until 1967, fifteen years after Mutt was already dead. The EPA didn't declare the area a Superfund site until 1983, thirty-one years after Mutt died. And the last residents weren't cleared out until 2009, fifty-seven years after Mutt's death. The mine that in all likelihood killed him, just kept going. More workers. More families. More dust. And the town built on top of all that poison wasn't fully evacuated until more than half a century after Mutt Mantle was buried. When all that happened, people weren’t talking about Mutt Mantle or the connection the mine had to the famous Yankee’s baseball star.

Today, most people who make the pilgrimage to Mickey Mantle's boyhood home in Commerce never drive the few minutes north to Picher. Why would they? Mickey's house draws baseball fans and history lovers who want to stand where a legend stood. They skip around the yard, peer into the old tin shed, feel the warmth of the American dream — and then they get back in the car and drive away, the story intact, the fairy tale complete. But the full story isn't in Commerce. It's also in the journey to Picher. Until you've sat in that toxic town and felt the eerie silence of those deserted streets, you haven't really understood what it meant for Mutt Mantle to come home from work every afternoon at four o'clock.

"That's so sad," my son said, when I told him that Mickey’s father worked there.

"Are you okay that I took you to Picher?" I asked him.

He thought about it for a moment. Then he nodded, slowly, solemnly, a little wiser.

Wonder, I've come to believe, isn't only the beautiful and the marvelous. Sometimes it's the terrible thing you finally understand. Sometimes it's the two places on the map that turn out to be, quietly, the same story.