The Last Boy (13 page)

“Other things happened,” Louis Effrat reported in the
New York Times
, “but no one appeared to be interested.”

The
Washington Post
,
Washington Star
, and New York
Daily News
published panoramic photos of the stadium with an arrow tracing the ball’s breathtaking trajectory. Ten feet longer than the Washington Monument is high! “The neighbors thought it was a flying saucer,”
The Sporting News
reported.

When the Yankees were rained out the next day in Philadelphia, New York’s prolific scribes had plenty of time and column inches to expand upon the feat. The beatification continued unabated all spring. In June,
Time
magazine stationed him on the cover. A corner banner proclaiming “Coronation, Four Pages in Color” actually referred to Britain’s new queen, but Yankee fans interpreted it otherwise.

Over the next two months he hit baseballs out of three more ballparks: April 28, right-handed, Busch Stadium, St. Louis; June 11, left-handed, Briggs Stadium, Detroit; July 6, right-handed, Connie Mack Stadium, Philadelphia.

The Spalding Company felt compelled to deny excessive liveliness in its baseballs.
The Guinness Book of Records
was rewritten. Mantle agreed to write his first autobiography. He also signed deals with Wheaties, Camels, Gem razors, Beech-Nut gum, Louisville Slugger; and endorsed a whole wardrobe of Mickey Mantle–sanctioned clothing, Esquire socks, Van Heusen shirts, Haggar slacks.

There was one downside to the publicity. Several Washington sports columnists including Addie received irate telephone calls from aggrieved parents whose sons had been drafted by Uncle Sam: “If that boy can hit that long a drive, why isn’t he in the Army?”

The Hall of Fame called to request the bat and ball. Patterson promised to send them after a suitable viewing at Yankee Stadium. A display case was constructed and placed in the Stadium lobby. Sometime between Friday night, May 29, and Sunday, May 31, the day before the sacred relics were due to make their pilgrimage to Cooperstown, the ball was stolen. “Apparently the bat was wired too securely to the back of the case and couldn’t be wrenched loose,” the Associated Press reported. “The Yankees quickly absolved Chuck Stobbs.”

Mel Allen took to the airwaves to appeal to the conscience of the thief. The ball was returned. Stobbs was demoted to the bullpen, having lost five of his first seven starts. He would be remembered for one pitch in a fifteen-year major league career. His initial good humor—“He really hit the heck out of it, didn’t he?”—eroded when he returned to the park one day to find a large, white painted ball on the spot where Mantle had knocked the smile off Mr. Boh’s face.

It was all anyone ever wanted to talk to Stobbs about—except perhaps
a wild pitch that landed seventeen rows up into the grandstand, also a major league record. Every April 17, his friend Bob Kleinknect, who worked the concession stand behind home plate, and missed the home run, sent an anniversary card. Sometimes he signed Mantle’s name, sometimes he added a note,
Thank you for what you did for me.

Long before his death from throat cancer in July 2008, Stobbs stopped talking about the home run that defined his career as much as it did Mantle’s. It was no different from the “other big ones,” Mantle said later, “except that Red Patterson attached a number to it.” In so doing, he elevated Mantle to a new level of hype: “Young Man on Olympus,”
Time
called him.

Ordinary language could not contain him. A new term was coined: the Tape Measure Home Run! The first reference to the putative tape measure may well have been in Shirley Povich’s annual Christmas column in the
Post
cataloguing Santa’s largesse. Among 1953’s better gifts, Povich listed “that tape measure.”

Three years later, between games of a July 6 doubleheader, the Northern Virginia Surveyors Association presented Mantle with a 600-foot, gold-plated tape measure, which now resides behind glass in Mickey Mantle’s Steak House in Oklahoma City: “Presented to Mickey Mantle for hitting 585 ft. home run at Washington, May 1956,” an engraved plaque attests, mangling the truth even further.

By then, Patterson had decamped for the Dodgers. He had done his job.

Rarely has so much ridden on one ball. The modern era’s obsession with clout, the language of home-run power (going deep, dial 8 for long distance), the nightly recapitulation of each day’s blasts in smoothly edited highlight packages accompanied by percussive thwacks and cracks and booms can all be traced to April 17, 1953.

Left in the ball’s wake were three unsolved mysteries: where did it go, how did it get there, and what became of Donald Dunaway?

In 1953, Griffith Stadium was a white man’s palace—albeit a homely one—standing on the edge of a black neighborhood called LeDroit Park.
The ballpark occupied the former site of a Civil War hospital dedicated to the care of freedmen and sat just to the south of Howard University, the predominantly black college chartered by the federal government at the war’s end. In 1873, a Howard professor and trustee named Amzi Barber purchased 40 acres of college-owned land and built a “whites-only” gated community conceived as a pastoral village located on one of the city’s main commuter trolley lines.

The Gothic cottages, stately row houses, Italian villas, and Victorian mansions shared a common green. The neighborhood was protected by restrictive covenants and by a fence, brick and iron on the southern border, wood on the northern boundary adjacent to Howard Town. The barrier was an indignity and inconvenience for residents, who had to walk a mile out of their way to get to public transportation. Twenty years of “fence wars” eventually resulted in the destruction of the wall, the exodus of the white population, and the rise of LeDroit Park as the nexus of African-American culture in the nation’s capital. It was the logical place to look for Donald Dunaway, the only eyewitness to the denouement of the Tape Measure Home Run. If he was alive. If he ever existed.

There were no Donald Dunaways listed in the Washington, D.C., phone book for 2006–2010; in the 1954 D.C. directory there were no Dunaways at the 343 Elm Street address he gave to the newspapers at the time. None of the seventy-two Don, Donald, or Donnie Dunaways or Dunnaways of his approximate age listed on www.whitepages.com had ever heard of him. There was no Donald Dunaway (one
n
or two) in D.C. public school attendance records for Lucretia Mott Elementary School, the “colored” school attended by most LeDroit Park children (Gage-Eckington, an elementary school at the end of his block, was still a year and a world away from Supreme Court–imposed desegregation). Nor was he enrolled at nearby Garnett Patterson Junior High School.

The Hall of Fame and the Yankees’ front office had no updates in their files. Letters and newspaper clippings left in every mailbox on Elm Street and Oakdale Place elicited no reply. Many of the phone numbers for Elm Street addresses were disconnected.

I hired a private eye. She found no trace of Donald Dunaway in Social Security death records or U.S. military service records. She suggested a deed search for 343 Elm Street. There was no Dunaway on the deed.
Neither the current owner nor the owner before her had ever heard of the family.

The men gathered under the food tent at the annual LeDroit Park reunion had trouble placing the name.
Dunaway? Dunaway. Yes, there was a Dunaway. No, there wasn’t. I thought Albert Taylor caught that ball
. Bobby Lane, the unofficial neighborhood historian, put an end to the discussion: “There ain’t no tape measure, and there ain’t no Dunaway.”

Brad Garrett, renowned former FBI special agent, was engaged. Garrett spent five years tracking—and finding—Mir Aimal Kansi, the perpetrator of the 1993 CIA murders, and obtained confessions from the D.C. Sniper and the first World Trade Center bomber. But Donald Dunaway eluded him. After consulting secure databases and racking his brain, he said: “This guy is harder to find than Kansi.”

He recommended shoe leather.

LeDroit Park was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, but in the summer of 2007 its renaissance had not yet reached Dunaway’s old block. Some houses had “for rent” signs spray-painted on plywood doors. A hand-lettered sign in the second-floor window of 343 Elm Street advertised its availability. Some neighbors were never at home; others spoke no English. A man at the end of the street who gave his name as Clarence said, yes, he knew Donald. They had gone to school together, parked cars together, broken windows out of the stadium together. “He passed away, but I don’t remember what year.”

Then a gracious woman named Sandra Epps appeared on Oakdale Place, offering to make introductions to longtime residents. After two years of shoe leather, mailbox stuffing, and unanswered phone calls, doors opened. Miss Rosa Burroughs invited me into her parlor, directly across the street from the Dunaways’ former home.

Yes, Miss Rosa said, she knew the family. He was slight and had a light complexion. Yes, Donald was alive. She had seen him at the bus stop at Fourteenth and P Street just the year before. But she did not know how to get in touch with him. Perhaps her friend Miss Sarah would. She would ask next time she saw Miss Sarah at bingo.

Six months later, Miss Sarah, who had been feeling poorly, returned to bingo. Oh, yes, she remembered Donald and his sister Maxine, the wife of Elder Walter McCollough, the pastor at Bishop C. M. “Daddy” Grace’s
United House of Prayer. The church provided a home phone number.

One night, Maxine McCullough returned my call. “Yes, he caught the ball,” she said. “But why don’t you ask my brother?”

“You couldn’t have been looking very hard,” Donald Dunaway said when he answered the telephone in his apartment less than two miles from where he had found the ball.

Approaching his seventieth birthday, he was not in the best of health. A small man, perhaps five feet, five inches tall, he had been laid low by diabetes and “the arthritis.” A pair of metal spectacles magnified his rheumy eyes, and his fingernails were long and curled. A gray-speckled beard and a watch cap pulled low on his brow failed to obscure his good-humored smile. But he did seem a bit stung to hear that the boys from the old neighborhood did not recollect his name. “But they remembered Duckie, didn’t they?”

Duckie was his street name, bequeathed by an uncle who thought he waddled like a duck as a toddler. Although he had been apartment- and wheelchair-bound for most of a year, he gamely agreed to take a trip back in time to his old stomping grounds. Walking with a cane, he shuffled to a waiting car. I drove. He provided the directions. “There,” he said when we reached the intersection of Fifth and Oakdale. “Right
there
.”

His account of April 17, 1953, was different from the codified version of events. Sometimes he even contradicted himself. But he was adamant and consistent about the big things. He did not see the ball land on the fly in the backyard of 434 Oakdale Place. And he never showed anyone where he had found it.

He was fourteen years old—not ten, as Red Patterson had reported—a sixth-grader at Bundy Elementary, a school for hard cases such as himself. “I was mischievous,” he said with a mischievous smile. He was a member of the LeDroit Park gang and proudly wore the red and black colors. “Like the Bloods and Crips now,” he said. Only without knives and guns. “They knew back then how to fight. We always used these two hands right here.”

School was not a priority. He had already repeated two grades when
he was transferred from Mott to a school twenty minutes away. “Because I was bad. Bad enough to go to Bundy School. It was for slow learners.”

On Friday afternoon, April 17, he said, “I hooked. I snuck out of school at recess and kept going.”

He walked down New Jersey Avenue to the ballpark, which was less than two blocks from the rented two-story row house he shared with his mother, grandmother, sister, and half brother. The stadium lights, installed in 1942, cast a beneficent glow over the neighborhood and the Dunaways’ front porch. Duckie was a Senators fan and would swing on the porch listening to the game on the radio. Like a lot of neighborhood kids, he had an entrepreneurial interest in Griffith Stadium. Sometimes he sold scorecards, sometimes he ran errands; mostly he hung out in the parking lot behind home plate and waited for foul balls. If he got lucky and the security guards didn’t chase him away, he might catch as many as three on a good day and sell them to departing fans for $1. “It was what you call my hustle,” he said.

Usually he sneaked into the ballpark—it wasn’t hard. There was a lumberyard across the way on Seventh Street and plenty of boards lying around to help scale the back wall opposite the Freedmen’s Hospital Morgue. But on April 17, 1953, he was a paying customer. “Had me some money,” he said, savings from selling the
Afro-American
and the
Pittsburgh Courier
inside the stadium.

He bought himself a 75-cent ticket for the left field bleachers and took a seat on the concrete benches a row or two above the left field fence. “Down low, close enough to touch the ballplayers.”

He marked his seat for me on a photograph that appeared in the
Post
the next morning. He had a fine view. He saw the ball head in his direction, saw it hit off the beer sign perched above the bleachers, watched as it headed out of the yard on a trajectory that might have carried it into his own backyard two blocks away save for the intervening row houses and the laws of physics. “I could see when it hit,” he said. “I turned my head around and saw the flight.”

He stayed in his seat long enough to watch Mantle cross the plate. Then: “Out of some perverse instinct, I said, ‘Let me go see if I can find it.’ I lucked up and found it.”

He started down Oakdale Place, a narrow block of low-slung attached
brick row houses developed right after Griffith Stadium was built. He walked down one side of the street and up the other, searching every garden and under every parked car, more than once. Dan Daniel reported in
The Sporting News
that “a Negro woman hanging out one of the windows” had directed Dunaway and Patterson to the site. Not true, Dunaway said. He was alone.