Tracing a Baseball Legend Through Preston Hollow
It’s shady and hard to see, but that was Mr. Mantle’s house 16 years ago.
In my mind, Mickey Mantle has always been a Yankee and thus must be a New Yorker and unconnected with our humble city. I’m a very, very casual baseball fan (as in if someone gives me free tickets, I’ll go to a game), not exactly a scholar about Mantle’s career or personal life. And I was young enough to not recall a thing about Mantle’s 1995 death at Baylor Medical Center and burial at Sparkman-Hillcrest, which everyone else I talk to (at least everyone over 30) seems to recall like it was yesterday. So it came as a surprise when some neighbors unhappy with the gargantuan wall going up behind the Freebirds House mentioned that Mantle had grown up across Douglas Avenue on Watson Circle.
My dad, who knows these sorts of things, told me that, no, Mantle grew up in Oklahoma and his family wasn’t exactly making Preston Hollow money at the time. But a quick search of online county deed records brought up four pages worth of Mantle-related real estate transactions, the key one being the 1994 sale of a home at 5730 Watson Circle. I couldn’t find records prior to the late-’60s or so online, so I can’t say when exactly he bought the house, but other sources, like this auctioneer that sold the home’s 1994 real estate contract (signed by Mantle five times!!!) for $7,050, put it in the late 1950s. The original purchaser still owns the house but was not home when I rang the doorbell. (My first question: How awesome is it to live in Mickey Mantle’s house?!).
Another almost-Preston Hollow real estate transaction occurred in 1980, when Mantle purchased a home at 3524 Durango Drive. I don’t know if he ever lived there. He sold the house after just two years. A picture:
Mantle owned this house for 2 years.
And a quick search on DCAD reveals that Mantle’s widow lives lived in a condominium in Far North Dallas.
