Offered is a circa 1940’s Mickey Mantle “Type I” childhood photograph. The 2½ x 3½-inch black and white photo depicts a young mantle in an “Eisenhower”-type jacket and open collared shirt, standing with his arms akimbo in front of a house with a striped awning. His hair is slicked down with a part at the left, and he is looking into the camera with a wry smile. As noted by writer Michael Shenker in the April 10, 2016 New York Times, “In the middle of town, the Commerce water tower is painted with pinstripes and a No. 7. A statue of Mantle, the “Commerce Comet,” greets visitors on Mickey Mantle Boulevard at the edge of town, just behind the center-field wall at the high school field named for him. All who come here to reconnect with their childhood hero look for Mantle’s home, the square, four-room white house with a big yard and rusted, corrugated metal shed where, the story goes, Mantle’s father and grandfather would pitch to the boy as he hit from the left side, and the right, for hours every afternoon until the sun went down. The shed’s roof is partly peeled away, but the legend is intact: This is the spot where baseball’s greatest switch-hitter grew up.” Mantle was born Oct. 20, 1931, in Spavinaw, Okla. He was named for Mickey Cochrane, the great hitting catcher of the Philadelphia Athletics and the Detroit Tigers. His father, Mutt Mantle, was a lead and zinc miner who had played semiprofessional baseball, and his grandfather Charles Mantle had played baseball on a mining company team. The two men drilled the boy in the fundamentals of baseball from an early age, and it was at their insistence that he learned to be a switch hitter. By the time young Mickey was a teenager, he was playing baseball 12 to 14 hours a day, day after day. At high school in Commerce, where the family had moved when he was 4, Mantle played on the football, basketball and baseball teams. He graduated from Commerce High School in June 1949 and signed a contract with the New York Yankees the day after graduation.

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