Mantle’s patron Harold Youngman, the prosperous owner of a Missouri road-building company. He handled Mickey’s investments and indulged his taste for hunting, fishing, and basketball. He procured cushy off-season jobs for Mantle and Billy Martin. Their responsibilities consisted mostly of flying around the countryside in his twin-engine Beechcraft, chatting up town commissioners who awarded the contracts for new construction.

The winter of 1957 would be Mantle’s last in Commerce. Mickey Charles and his hometown had grown apart. “Off-ish to the community,” is how local Frank Wood described him. Half the folks in town wanted no part of him and the other half thought he didn’t give back enough.
Harold Youngman did everything he could to entice him to stay. He gave him a house in Joplin, Missouri, and a 25 percent ownership stake in a new Holiday Inn he was building there—Mickey Mantle’s Holiday Inn, the only Holiday Inn in the U.S. of A. named after an actual person, Mantle bragged. The bar was called the Dugout.

Later, Youngman outfitted a heated fishing cabin built over a pond on his ranch for Mantle and his pals. It had a hole in the floor and an electrified winch that raised the lid so they could fish in winter without getting cold, wet, or dirty. The foreman, Charles Brinkley, stocked the refrigerator and the pond.

Youngman pleaded with Mantle not to quit his roots. He talked up the benefits of being a big fish in that small pond. But Mantle was gaited to the rhythm of big city life. Moving to Dallas made it easier to fly off to all those banquets, photo shoots, and beauty contests he was asked to judge. Merlyn went shopping for Texas real estate. Mantle leased a bowling alley, where he would put his brothers to work and show everyone he could manage affairs on his own.

After the Yankees avenged themselves against the Braves in the 1958 World Series, Mantle went to Dallas to see the new $59,500 home Merlyn had selected, the one important decision in their marriage he allowed her to make. The “Mantle manor,” The Sporting News called it. Furnished in the French Provincial style, it was located in the neighborhood where George W. Bush would settle after he left the White House.

The move distanced Mantle from Youngman’s well-intentioned but paternalistic control and deprived him of much-needed advice. In cutting ties with the place where he made most sense to himself, he became a celebrity nomad, a citizen of everywhere and nowhere. Mantle later said leaving Commerce was the biggest mistake of his life. “Guided differently, he could have done better for himself as a human being,” Jerry Coleman said. “He would have liked himself more.”