Spaulding wrote:
Mickey Charles Mantle 
This is probably the greatest post on this Message Board in weeks.
I am relatively certain that if I were married to Spaulding, she probably would have let me name our son “Mickey.” Unlike some people, who shall remain nameless, who were so busy growing up playing with dolls and riding horses that they never understood the greatness that was represented by a strapping young lad out of Spavinaw, Oklahoma named
Mickey Charles Mantle. Please do not get me wrong. I love my wife very much, but she did not grow up in the New York Metropolitan area hearing tales of this man’s legendary greatness.
Mickey Charles Mantle was everybody’s All American hero, except Communists. The great Senator McCarthy should have asked just one question of the sniveling, sweating, disgusting fellow travelers who appeared before him: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a person who does not idolize
Mickey Charles Mantle?” This would have saved a lot of time and money. Barack Obama probably doesn’t like
Mickey Charles Mantle, though it is likely that very few people born in Kenya do, since baseball is not very popular there.
Everybody that I knew in the old days wanted to be like
Mickey Charles Mantle, except the lunatic Red Sox fans who had spread like kudzu into our little corner of The Constitution State (or as we sometimes called it: The Living, Breathing, Subject to Foreign Law Interpretation Document State). Oh, to put on a glorious New York Yankees uniform and take the field in The Bronx! Even if I went 0 for 5, I would sign 50,000 autographs, and take all the kids who idolized me out for ice cream. Their parents would have to come as well, of course. As a great star, I could not afford to have any, shall we say, misunderstandings. What if one of the kids was from The Commonwealth, and his mentally ill father put him up to trying to frame me by making up a false story and expoliting my great generosity? No thank you, Sir! I bet
Mickey Charles Mantle did this a lot, but refused to let anyone write about it, because he was so humble. The writers, of course, were very different back in those days, and would respect the wishes of such a great star. If only there were scratch off lottery tickets where, if you won, you could be
Mickey Charles Mantle for just one glorious day! I would wait in line just to buy one thousand (1,000) tickets at a time. Wouldn’t it be funny if there was a man behind me in line waiting to buy a soda, who would subsequently grumble to his friends about me?!? Talk about an O. Henry short story! Laugh out loud!