The Legend of Mickey Tussler by Frank Nappi

Most of their struggles involve social interaction, he said. Nappi added that sports could be a natural avenue for autistic people to succeed, given that they often have immense capacities for focus and repetition, which essentially constitutes practice.

He recalled the stories of one student he knew who could spin a ball on his finger for hours - “better than the Globetrotters,” he said. Nappi said his experiences at OHS, particularly with the Best Buddies program - a club pairing high schoolers with special-needs peers - had helped him develop his Mickey Tussler books. The feedback Nappi received from the autism community about his novels was overwhelmingly positive, with many saying that it was rare to find stories about autistic people who succeed rather than just survive the challenges of their condition. “They said they didn’t want it to be this woe-is-me type thing.” “They wanted it to be upbeat,” he said of the song’s producers. “There’s no pretention at all, they just are who they are.” “Autistic people are amazingly pure of heart,” he said. Petrone explained that he had a number of classic baseball songs in mind when he wrote “Buckle Up and Dig In,” including Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Centerfield.”īeyond baseball, Nappi said that his story embodies a wholesomeness that country music often espouses. “The kid starts off on a farm somewhere, with meager beginnings… A little bit of baseball in there helps, too,” he said. Nappi said he thinks the story works well as a country song. The song is catchy, and this reporter has struggled to get it out of his head since first hearing it. MP Music House provided the Herald with a pre-release copy of the song, and the track’s emotional country vocals tell the Mickey Tussler story with guitar flourishes that evoke well-known country-rock acts like the Eagles and Neil Young. Petrone said he was drawn to the success of Nappi’s books. When he learned about the Mickey Tussler series, he told Nappi he wanted to turn it into a single. They stopped to talk to their neighbor Tom Petrone, a co-president at MP Music House, a songwriting and music publishing business.

The track, called “Buckle Up and Dig In,” came about after Frank and his wife, Julia, also an OHS teacher, ran through their Massapequa neighborhood one day. 15, MP Music House will release a country music tune based on Nappi’s series.

“I told them, ‘Eh, I’m not sure,’” he said, “but then there was the second one.” After that, there was a third and, before long, a TV movie. After Frank Nappi, an Oceanside High School literature teacher for 29 years, wrote “The Legend of Mickey Tussler,” a novel set in the late 1940s, about an autistic farm boy with a strong pitching arm who makes it to the major leagues, people asked Nappi about a sequel.

The Legend of Mickey Tussler by Frank Nappi