CHAPTER 8
MICKEY MANTLE AND JIMMY LING
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In 1964 when I was in the 7th Grade at the John J. Pershing School my Mom and I lived at my Uncle Jake’s house in Dallas, Texas.
That J.C. had a wife and several high school age kids. Mom had her own room. I think I shared a room with one of my cousins just about my age. You can get an idea of what kind of house it was, a mansion is probably correct.
There were two interesting neighbors.
Mickey Mantle lived on the next street.
The great All-American All-American, a switch hitter, New York Yankees Number 7 until he retired. I think when he retired the Yankees also retired his uniform number 7.
Mickey was a great favorite of the American People. Clean cut, Middle American, friendly.
He did not have the kinds of problematical things going on that seem to get many ballplayers today in the papers.
People thought of him as a role model for their children.
In the Billy Crystal film City Slickers the character played by the movie’s star is asked to describe the best day of his life. He answers by telling of the day he went to his first New York Yankees baseball game with his father.
At the end he says, “Mickey hit one out. It was my best day. And I still have the Program.”
Mickey Mantle had that kind of a pervasive presence in the consciousness of America for many years during the last half of the twentieth Century.
Children who later become 40-year-old adults remember him, talk about him with nostalgia and well, still just call him Mickey.
When we moved to Dallas the last person in the world I would have ever thought I would see there was Mickey Mantle. After all, he was a New York Yankee. I would’ve figured he lived in New York.
He lived, actually, around the corner from Uncle Jake’s house.
There was a house between Jake’s and the street corner. On the next street there was a house between Mickey’s and the corner so Mickey’s house was around the corner and one house down on the next street.
J. C.’s house had two pools out back. There was a high hedge beyond the pools demarcating the rear edge of the back yard. There was a little more land to the place though, Texas style.
To the side of the back of the house there was a Guest House with a kind of side yard behind it. What only the family knew was that there was a big bit of land behind the high hedge. It was called The Back Forty.
When my cousin opened his Christmas card that year a set of keys fell out with a note that said “We hope these keys unlock many hours of happiness for you. Love Mom and Dad”
He ran straight away out to The Back Forty.
The Go Kart they had given him was soon wearing out a “racetrack” around The Back Forty. One day as we were go karting I saw a Middle American looking guy and his family across the side fence.
I said, “Oh, look that guy is barbecuing.” My cousins said “That’s Mickey Mantle” and went back to what they were doing.
It took me a while to get it. I thought they were just telling me the name of their neighbor. It did not register that it was the name of the baseball player. After a while, though, my cousins shouted at him and he came over to the fence and we all laughed and talked together.
It was Mickey Mantle! Without the charisma of the Game. He seemed quite medium in build and height, not tall and lean like Uncle Jake. He was not exciting in real life; he was just a nice neighborly guy.
My cousin nudged me “ Ask him for his autograph.” But I didn’t. He was with his family. I had an American respect for a working man’s time off. I left him alone. Still, we shook hands over the fence.
Jimmy Ling and his family were the other neighbors who are of some historical interest in the history of our country at that time.
The tone of this chapter must change here, from sunny All-American baseball to something darker, with an almost sinister edge.
If I were to put a “Big Rule In The Sky” about this it would be a phrase heard in our nation more now than when I was a child.
It’s all about money.
Jimmy Ling was attending John J. Pershing School with me. We walked home together in a group of five or six kids. This led to another not wealthy Chevy Chase boy meets Texan Rich.
We had been walking about five minutes. We had to walk around a wall around what looked like a golf course at the Country Clubs in Chevy Chase. As a big pillared gate in to the Country Club driveway started to get close one boy, Jimmy Ling, started saying to us “see you tomorrow in class.” It turned out that place was his family’s home!
Remember, this was 1964.
At the end of 1963, JFK, who had given the orders to start reducing U. S. troop levels in Vietnam, had been assassinated.
Within weeks LBJ had reversed JFKs withdrawal orders.
LBJ, you will recall from the fact that although they are launched from Cape Canaveral, U. S. Spacecraft are controlled from a big NASA Headquarters in Houston, as in “Houston, we’ve got a problem.” The simple deduction, my dear Watson, is that LBJ knew how to shower federal dollars down on Texas.
Why? You remember. I told you already.
Because it’s all about money.
One of the biggest wads of federal dollars of all time was about to land in Jimmy Ling’s daddy’s golf course front yard.
It had to do with a helicopter, what became the symbol of America’s part in the Vietnam War.
Thousands of helicopters.
Mostly made by Jimmy Ling’s daddy.
Well, actually, his daddy’s company merged with some aircraft companies, to form Ling-Temco-Vought.
Vought came from the great Chance-Vought aircraft company.
I do not know the origin of the Temco part of the conglomerated corporation.
LTV.
It might be difficult to name a company on The Big Board that did as well as LTV during the years of the Vietnam War.
Today, during the war in Iraq perhaps only those with a top end stake in the company formerly headed up by Vice President Cheney before he became Vice President but after he had been Sec Def do nearly as well.
It's the funniest thing, I can never remember the name of that company. It's in that TOT stage, right on the tip of my tongue but I always get it mixed up with the Canterbury Tales. As I have a lot of common ground with Norwegians I have tried to form a mnemonic, a memory device to help me remember, using some concepts from the Norwegians. That is because they seem to care about the same things as the Vice-President: Big Oil (theirs), their Cod and Halibut. Somehow when I try to say it it becomes Canterbury Halibut Tails. Like last night on television they showed the film Grumpy Old Men. Jack Lemmon had put a dead fish in the back of Walter Mathau's car. Jack Lemmon never wanted Walter Mathau to find it and throw it out because it would stop stinking everything up. It always seems simple to me about why the war in Iraq never winds down. It is like it says in The Bible: where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. They don't want it to wind down and stop because they keep making Canterbury Halibut Tails of money as long as they just keep the war going. Like the dead fish Jack Lemmon put in the back of Walter Mathau's car, it just keeps on stinking everything up. Sometimes I wonder: is that it guys? Is it that coarse, that simple? Is it just All About Money?
There was a little report by a television journalist presently out of favor with the government named Bill Moyers titled Why Are These Men So Happy?
The picture showed Vice President Cheney huddling with another suit or two. If I have this right, he made $149 million cashing in stock options from that company he used to head up.
That company by the way played a big role in the contracts to reconstruct things the war in Iraq had damaged.
A cynic might say NOT BAD! Comes out to about $47,000 per pound of Prime Cut, that is American dead, and about a dollar pound for Iraqi dead.
$149 million can buy a guy quite a bit these days.
He’ll never go hungry.
Jimmy Ling and Mickey Mantle.
Mickey Mantle is the All American All American World Champion Number 7. America as America sees the world seeing America.
Jimmy Ling, living behind walls, financially benefiting from the U. S. Government’s bloodlusts expressing themselves through the Military Industrial Complex. America as the world may be seeing the world seeing America.
Author's Note:
Although this chapter may seem to mention the Vice-President and his former employing corporation as War Profiteering, which is in fact what they do, I expressly state no direct ad hominem attack on him. This chapter utilizes his case, rather, as an example to show that the system has gone so far out of bounds virtually every high official must "play ball" within it in the regular course of their employment and that means the influence of Big Money is part of the equation. It is that system I seek to break the back of, not to attack any one person. So the Vice-President made money. So what? That's the system. Better him and his American former corporate employer, its employees, subcontractors and shareholders make money than the corrupt foreign and United Nations operators that were feeding off Iraq in much worse ways previously. Yes, it is such a long established saying it is likely unavoidably a true fact that To The Victors Go The Spoils. So we all heard the President call out an answer to a reporter once something like " NO. No, we do not want France to participate in the contracts in Iraq." Yet like the Gospel examples where a person sought a tangible reward for doing some good deed, then Jesus said yes, take what you have taken, enjoy it for you will have no more. It is true I seek to instate a more moral system, for the purpose of raising the world's respect for America and her own respect for herself, yet I am essentially pragmatic and businesslike about it. In this instance I am not intending to be preachy. This is hardheadedness. Go ahead. Make money, take money. Canterbury Halibut Fish Tails Full of Money, stinking everything up all over the place. That is what you care about. What do I care what you think or do? Yes, you are part of the problem, but you are yesterday's news. Go ahead. What I do care about, what I am enraged about is you all by this system in which you all acquiesced for all these years, have brought America so low in the estimation of the world that our own best operatives write books called SLEEPING WITH THE DEVIL HOW WASHNGTON SOLD OUR SOUL FOR SAUDI CRUDE and that author writes that what you did made America a whore for the Arabs. America. A whore. Hello? Wake up! Where do you point to to show The Founding Fathers ever intended or would tolerate that? I want a stop to situations that are so horrendous people can write books saying all of you who consitute "the system" and "the establishment" have made America a whore.
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This web site has been paid for by the Principal Committee To Elect John W. Stevenson President of The United States of America in the 2008 Election.
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