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Mantle and Maris Both Homered at Our 1961 Family Reunion
Each summer when I was growing up, my father’s extended family held a reunion picnic in July at a state park about an hour from our home. Since my dad had seven brothers and three sisters, you can imagine the collection of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, usually well over 50 of us. And we held that reunion for well over 50 years until many of the aunts and uncles became too frail to attend and many of the cousins moved out of the area. And while I fondly remember those annual gatherings in a general sense, the one reunion that I remember most specifically was the 1961 edition when the M and M Boys — Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris — were chasing after the ghost of The Great Bambino, Babe Ruth.
During the spring of that year, I had just turned ten and had just earned a spot on one of our local Little League teams. I spent all my days that summer playing pick-up games with the neighborhood kids at a nearby field or playing wiffle ball in the back yard with the kids on our street. Periodically, we would collect old soda bottles and cash them in at two cents apiece, so we could buy baseball cards and pray that our nickel packs might include one of our all-time favorites: The Mick.
By the time that season began, the great number seven had already won five World Championships (1951, 1952, 1953, 1956, and 1958), but the…
