Is That Mickey?

Published April 15, 2008 - Joplin Globe

Between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. today, Joplin residents may think they’ve seen the ghost of famed baseball player Mickey Mantle.

Don Brown, a 63-year-old Mantle impersonator from upstate New York, tells people to relax.

“People take pictures of me on the interstate with their cell phones, and there was a lady who rear-ended someone else with her car because she was looking at me,” Brown said. “I had a lady come up to me just shaking. She said she thought she had seen a ghost.”

Brown said he uses his uncanny likeness to the Hall of Famer to raise awareness for his true passion: organ donation. He was at Integris Baptist Regional Health Center in Miami, Okla., on Tuesday to promote April as Organ Donation Awareness Month. He will make a brief stop in Joplin today at the Elks Lodge, 1802 W. 26th St.

Brown got involved in organ donation about the same time he realized his likeness to Mantle.

“For years I was a salesman for Reader’s Digest, and one time in the mid-1980s I stopped into this bar outside of Cooperstown, N.Y.,” Brown said. “I was dressed like a salesman, in a suit, and had a ring on my hand that looked very much like Mantle’s 1956 World Series ring. These two guys at the end of the bar kept looking at me, and finally one them said, ‘I know who you are. You’re Mickey Mantle. Welcome.’”

Around that same time, Brown’s brother, Ed, needed a kidney transplant. Brown insisted on donating one his own kidneys, but his brother died before the surgery. After that, Brown got involved in Mantle’s organ donation foundation.

Now, Brown travels around the United States in a 2004 Thunderbird with a custom pinstripe paint job and a Yankee logo on the hood, and Mantle’s No. 7 painted on the back. He attends National Baseball Hall of Fame and Mantle events, and visits organ donors and recipients in hospitals.

“I’m not licensed by the MLB (Major League Baseball), and I don’t sign any autographs as Mickey,” he said. “I’m not Mickey Mantle. I just raise awareness, and that’s what looking like Mickey does. It just brings a greater awareness.”

Brown was in Miami about the same time last year. He said he enjoys his visits to Northeast Oklahoma because that’s where Mantle grew up. Mantle attended Commerce High School and was known as the Commerce Comet. He played minor league baseball in Joplin.

“Everybody here has a story about him,” Brown said. “People come up to me and tell me their mom knew him or their uncle went to school with him. It’s awful hard to turn down an invitation to come back to a place like this when the hospitality is so great. Commerce is just a beautiful little town.”

No. 7

Mickey Mantle died Aug. 13, 1995, at age 63, according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He played for the New York Yankees from 1951 to 1968 and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1974.