Kay Self was once the only student in her grade in a one-room country school. Then a move into Elbing, population about 200, brought a new adventure at age 11. Her teacher, who lived just across the softball diamond from the school, had a TV set and invited the seventh and eighth grade kids to watch the World Series.
The game they watched on October 8, 1956, was historic. Yankees hurler Don Larsen, once a minor leaguer with the Wichita Indians, pitched the only perfect game in World Series history. But it wasn’t Larsen’s pitching that etched itself in Kay’s memory. It was Mickey Mantle.
Mantle by then had replaced Joe DiMaggio as New York’s center fielder. “I remember being scrunched together as we sat and angled for position on the teacher’s living room floor,” Self said. “I was in the zone.”
From that point on, she said, “I began cutting out everything that had Mickey’s name on it from our daily newspaper’s sports section.” Other teen girls had bedroom wall posters of Ricky Nelson and Elvis. “I had the Yankees.”
Her baseball fascination even paid academic dividends. “I learned to do math percentages by figuring batting averages.”
In the eighth grade, she contacted Mickey’s fan club in Commerce, Okla. — his hometown — and became a member. She collecte d Topps bubble gum cards with pictures of Yankees players and memorized their personal stats, their home towns and their wives’ names.
The Kansas City Athletics were right up the road, but she didn’t care. “I liked winners.” She sported an 18-karat gold baseball charm on her bracelet from the gift shop in Mickey Mantle’s Holiday Inn in Joplin. She bought a Mickey Mantle bobblehead circa 1963 from Marshall Fields in Chicago.
Then, 30 years after fist seeing Mickey play on TV, the unbelievable happend.
Kay Self met Mickey Mantle during a 1986 authograph show in Wichita.
At dinner with her husband and a couple from their church — Linda and Joe Cowan — Self’s love of baseball came out. A few weeks later, Joe Cowan invited her to a baseball card show in Wichita to meet Bob Feller, the former Cleveland pitching great. Over the next few months, Self attended shows featuring Don Larsen and Whitey Ford, Mickey’s former roommate and close friend. Ford was so friendly that Kay whipped out her collection of Mickey memorabilia. “My goodness, has Mickey seen this?” he asked.
Then Cowan called again: Would she like to meet Mickey? She hesitated. What if he didn’t like her? What if she fainted? She decided to risk it.
On Nov. 30, 1986, she sat down at a table set up in the Holiday Inn on East Kellogg, right next to Mickey’s left elbow.
“He turned to look at me, smiled and asked, ‘Who are you?’” she said.
She replied, “I’m the biggest fan you ever had.”
As he signed balls, bats and other memorabilia for fans, Self learned her hero was warm, kind and funny. Mickey signed the photos she’d once hung on her bedroom wall. Her cousins from Newton, making it to the front of the line, couldn’t believe she was there and neither could she. She felt 11 years old again.
Self worked at St. Joseph hospital for much of her career. Like Mantle, she became a center fielder, on a championship military wives softball team at Barksdale Air Force Base.
Mickey, who began his professional career in Independence, Kan., was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974 and died in 1995 at 63.
Bob Rives is the author of “Baseball in Wichita” (2002, Arcadia Publishing) Contact him at bprives@gmail.com.
