Word: joplin
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...keeps you on edge. His arm is so strong he doesn't have to think out there. All he'll have to do is throw the ball in." Optimistic Manager Stengel was talking about Rookie Outfielder Mickey Mantle, 19, the beaming, spring-legged kid just up from Joplin, Mo. (Class C). And by all accounts, Stengel knew what he was talking about...
When William E. Cook was five years old, his mother died; his father, a ne'er-do-well Joplin, Mo. smelter worker, abandoned the boy and his seven brothers & sisters in a deserted mine cave. After the authorities discovered them there, most of them found foster parents, but only "the county" would take William, a small, ugly child with a deformed right eyelid. William bit like a caged wildcat at the institutional hand that...
...boarding home, he threw tantrums and complained that he wanted a bicycle like other kids. At twelve, he quit school; when he was hauled before a judge he sullenly asked to be sent to the reformatory. A married sister got him out; he responded by robbing a Joplin taxi driver...
...looked up his father, who lives on a pension in a Joplin shack, and announced that he was "going to live by the gun." Then he made his way to the hot little desert town of Blythe, Calif., got a job as a dishwasher. On the night before Christmas, Cook disappeared. He bobbed up in El Paso and bought a .32-caliber automatic pistol. After that he started out to fulfill his promise...
Like a lot of other ragtimers, Texas-born Scott Joplin served his time rocking a piano in that cradle of jazz, the sporting house. But unlike flamboyant, razor-handy Jelly Roll Morton, Joplin was, as one old friend recalls, the kind of man who "never hurt anybody. A kitten could knock him down. He wasn't much socially, but most everyone had a lot of respect for Scott because he never threw himself away...