Sunday Rerun: The Other Mickey

In 1957, you could buy a copy of the Saturday Evening POST magazine for 15 cents. The cover painting for the March 2 issue of that year was a salute to baseball and the eternal hope of young rookies hoping the impress the brass and make it to the big leagues.

Norman Rockwell painted that cover, depicting Red Sox veterans Ted Williams,  Jackie Jensen, Frank Sullivan, Sammy White, and Billy Goodman all looking over a hayseed who just rolled in on a head of cabbage, toting his bat and glove, his cardboard suitcase fastened with an old leather belt.

According to legend, the rookie on the POST cover was Maurice Joseph "Mickey" McDermott, Jr.  Most fans either never knew of him or can't remember him at all from his big league career (1949 - 1961)...but you know a couple of his friends, and his story alone is interesting.

In the first place, he was signed by the Red Sox at age 15, even though clubs were not supposed to sign people below the age of 18. His father worked out a deal: Dad received $5,000 and two truckloads of Ballantine Beer, and Mickey Jr received a bus ticket for Scranton, Pennsylvania, to begin his pro career with the minor league Sox.

His major league days were not stellar. Sure, he hung around the majors for twelve seasons, compiling a won-loss record of 69-69 and a batting average of .252 - not bad for a pitcher as a hitter.  He would be the first to admit that his habits of boozing it up and running around bars and bistros at all hours limited his performance, and when his playing days ground to an end, he did what ballplayers tend to do. He found work as a pitching coach and scout and batting practice pitcher, and then as a player agent.

All in all, not noteworthy, and I wouldn't even be writing about Mickey except for some interesting facts. First, the POST cover, and by the way, the original Norman Rockwell painting sold at auction in 2014 for over 20 million American semolians.

Speaking of millions of dollars, Mickey and his wife Betty came into 7 of them. In 1991, tired of his lifelong dissolution, a string of DWI convictions and a 60-day prison sentence for piling up his car while driving blotto, Mickey went down the right path and gave up the hooch.

And THEN he and his wife hit the Arizona Lottery for $7,000,000.

And to me, those are not even the most fascinating aspects of Mickey McDermott.

THIS guy!

Do you remember the movie "The Breakfast Club"?  And how about "Arthur"? The good one, with Dudley Moore?  The first "Die Hard"?  Then you'll remember the actor named Paul Gleason, who played Ass't Principal Richard Vernon, a snarky executive who gets shut down by the John Gielgud, and Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson, respectively, in those great movies.

And of course the great beat writer Jack Kerouac.

Why do I mention all these people? Because they were like best friends for a time when Jack was down and out, Mickey was getting up from being down and out, and Paul was giving up his minor league baseball career and getting up into the acting business (with help from Ozzie Nelson!)

I would have paid a pretty penny to hear a conversation held among those three interesting men.