Driving Around the Hometown of Mickey Mantle - Commerce, Oklahoma in 4k Video

Filmed on Tuesday, March 12 2024, I drive around Commerce, OK to see what's going on. I stop by the boyhood home of Mickey Mantle to read the plaque.

What became Commerce was land that was part of the Quapaw Indian Agency, allocated in the late 1830s. The Quapaw were removed to the area in the 1830s by the federal government.

Immigrants arrived and formed a mining camp named Hattonville after Amos Hatton. In 1906, Hatton developed the Emma Gordon zinc and lead mine, whose resources had attracted workers. Starting in 1908, the Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri Inter-Urban Railway built a line between Miami and Commerce to serve the mining industry. In a series of steps the line was later acquired by the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway. In 1913, the residents called the local post office North Miami, though by June 1914 the post office took the present-day city's name that came from the Commerce Mining and Royalty Company, which had bought the mining camp.

In the 1920 census, Commerce had a population of 2,555. The population has remained roughly the same ever since.

Commerce was the site of two notable events in the mid-1930s. In April 1934, Bonnie and Clyde and their associate Henry Methvin killed Commerce Constable William C. Campbell and kidnapped police chief Percy Boyd. By May, Bonnie and Clyde would both be dead.

In 1935, in an event that would later become notable in retrospect, Mickey Mantle's father would move his family to Commerce, to work as a miner. Mantle would later be nicknamed "The Commerce Comet."

At the age of 5 or 6, Mickey's father started teaching him how to hit, they used the tin barn as their backstop. Mutt, his father, would pitch righty and Mickey's grandfather would pitch lefty while teaching him the fine art of switch-hitting. Every day when his father returned home from the mines, he and Mickey would start batting practice that lasted until dark. A ball hit below the windows was a single, above the windows a double, on the roof a triple, and over the house was a home run. Mickey once said, "I was the only kid in town that didn't get in trouble for breaking a window."

#driving #drivingtour #oklahoma