A Boy’s Brush with the Bat Man
On August 19, 1957, a marvelous, some would
say, momentous thing happened that had an exhilarating effect on San Francisco. Horace Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants
announced that the Giants would be moving to the Bay Area for the 1958 season. The
Major League Baseball Commission had approved two western cities to field teams,
the first expansion west of St. Louis. That San Francisco hadn’t had a ball club
the likes of the Yankees or Red Sox had been a big source of disappointment for
my MA-born dad. My brother Don (10) and I
(7) celebrated with our pop upon hearing the announcement and we intently
awaited our team’s arrival, as did all the Bay Area.
The
New York Giants would relocate to San Francisco and the Brooklyn Dodgers would
settle in Los Angeles; both to start play in spring 1958. Los Angeles was a rival to the City by the
Bay in oh-so-many ways. And this
decision, my dad told us, might give us yet another reason to hate them. LA was
resident turf to the NFL’s Rams. Our ‘49ers
had started life in a lower-ranked NFC category (we had no idea why) and would
not to be foisted to NFL status until 1949.
Dad was suspicious that a similar inequality was looming within this deal.
The
Giants’ departure from Manhattan was abrupt; so much so that the new field promised
them, Candlestick Park, wasn’t even close to being finished. It would be two full years before the park
would broadcast its first National Anthem.
In
the interim, the Giants were given a tired minor league diamond, Seals Stadium,
clucked by media pundits as the major league’s puniest venue and hardly worthy of
the stature of the 1954 World Champion Giants that were on their way there. But the
Giants tolerated the relocation drill in good spirits: in truth, Seals was a
step up from the shabby Polo Grounds they’d surrendered in New York City.
My
dad was unfazed about the venue. He’d
been a jock in his youth into early adulthood, until he was wounded in Belgium
in 1944. Having the Giants in San
Francisco was a source of pride for him – and for a city big-league starved. It wouldn’t have mattered to him if they
played in a sand lot.
I
learned that pop possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the game and too, was
instantaneously judgmental about the quality of play. If any player made a preventable mistake,
he’d call him a ‘hamburger,’ which Don and I knew was his antithesis of a
crowd-pleasing ‘hot dog.’
Superstar
game announcers Lon Simmons and Russ Hodges also left the Big Apple behind,
bringing their dulcet tones to San Francisco, prompting us to retune our radios
seasonally to KSFO, the Voice of the Giants.
The
superstar of the team was Willie Howard Mays, a playing magician whose scheme
was simple, and as history showed, quite doable: “They
throw the ball, I hit it. They hit the ball, I catch it,” he stated
modestly. Mays touched down in San
Francisco in November 1957,
accompanied by an amazing cadre of teammates.
He
and his first wife Margherite bought the house at 175 Miraloma Drive. Don and I were not too distant neighbors,
close enough that we rode our bikes there on occasion, hoping to sneak a peek at
the ‘Say Hey Kid.’ But, we were never so
lucky.
Instead,
we headed to Seals. Nearly every summer
weekend when the Giants were in town, Don and I took a bus there to see Mays
and his crew wow us, as they did the whole city. It was an exciting and frenzied time in San
Francisco.
We
drank in every minute of play perched on the paint-peeling benches that made up
the cheap bleachers in right field. We’d
wolf down a dime hot dog and nickel soda from the snack shop mid-7th,
and after the game, we’d gather up as many rented stadium cushions as we could
carry, each one redeemable for a precious few pennies, earning more than enough
to pay for our meal. We’d then hustle
to the locker-room street exit to feast our eyes on our departing warriors.
Like
every other kid, we had a pen in hand and a program, scooped up from the empty
seats, poised, pleading with players to give up their signature. Snagging May’s
autograph was the prize among prizes.
We’d wait patiently for him to exit the park’s locker room. My brother greeted the superstar with deserved
respect, “Hello, Mr. Mays. We hate to
bother you, sir…”
I
was too young, too afraid and much forewarned by my brother not to say a word. Often, Mays emerged from the doorway with a
teammate – a double treat! I remember
several times when his tag-along was Orlando Cepeda or Felipe Alou and later,
Willie McCovey.
And,
man, was Mays a sharp dresser. Plus, he
had a brand new ‘58 Thunderbird pink coupe (now Susan G. Komen rose) with a
white roof and black and white leather interior.
Talk
about a bad ride!
His
chariot sat at the curb waiting. He would
climb in after signing countless autographs, and off he’d go.
Our
entire family followed his superlative hitting, fielding and throwing accomplishments
on-field and, equally important to my mom, his off-field deeds. We heard that #24 was shy, often shunning
public attention. But shyness didn’t
stop him from paying respects to the aged residents at Laguna Honda Hospital or
bringing smiles at the children’s ward in San Francisco General – it simply reserved
him from talking about it. People
whispered about this gentle man’s outreach to help others – a man who often reached
out to throw a rocket one-bouncer from deep center field dead-on to home plate.
Eventually,
when Candlestick Park opened, my father purchased two season weekend tickets above
first base. He’d take Don or me with him
and sometimes, when he had to work, drop us off and pick us up after the game.
The
shiny new park had a player-protected area, so I never got the thrill of seeing
Mays emerge from the locker room again. In
1972, my sports’ idol left the Giants’ club to return to New York and join the
Mets’.
Years
later, in 1984, a friend produced an event at the Sheraton Washington DC
Hotel. A two-tier head table for
sixty-four was set in the hotel’s grand ballroom. Vice President George H.W. Bush would be up
there, along with other luminaries including Charlton Heston, Mickey Mantle,
Pat Boone, Johnny Unitas, Cicely Tyson Davis with husband Miles Davis, Joe
Montana, Donna Mills, Phyllis Diller and to my delight, Willie Mays.
My
friend had invited me to be part of the festivities that also included the Vice
President’s reception. Every event
producer knows that one must have at least one
designated seat-filler in the eventuality an invited guest doesn’t show up. I was the sole
seat filler for that occasion, and had to tough it out at the head table situated
between the Unitas’ and Davis’.
I
joined the receiving line, because that is what I was expected to do, in the
hotel’s tank-tough reception hall to greet GHWB and Mrs. Bush. Imagine my surprise when I saw Mays and his
wife standing next on line directly in front of me!
Here
was my chance to finally speak to him after all these years. I would tell him, at least, of our San
Francisco ‘connection.’ I uttered,
“Excuse me, Mr. Mays?” He turned,
appearing disinterested in speaking with anyone but his wife Mae Louise. “Yes. What is it?” he asked, separating those
four words into two crisp sentences. His
eyes narrowed; his tone carrying more than a flicker of annoyance.
Always
aspiring to be the better part of valor, I sputtered, “It’s really nothing,
sir. Never mind, I'm sorry.”
“No,
what is it, son?” he asked softly, perhaps sensing that his sharpness caught me
off-guard.
“Well, sir, it’s just that you used to give me
rides home after the games at Seals Stadium,” I said anxiously.
“No,
I didn’t,” he said flatly, deflating my enthusiasm with a three-word sledgehammer.
How
can that be, I thought? In my head, I could still hear my brother say to him,
“Hello, Mr. Mays. We hate to bother you,
sir, but my brother I only live a few blocks from you and we wondered if we
could get a lift home?” I remembered him
smiling at us and saying, “Hop in.”
I
recalled watching my brother pull open the sturdy driver’s side door, folding
the front seat forward and crawling into the back. I did the same on the passenger side. We loafed in the back seat waiting for our
T-bird ride to start. Mays climbed in
and with not even a Bob’s your uncle, we set off.
The
kids at the ball park were green with envy – their mouths agape, pens and
programs dangling like low-hanging fruit.
My brother’s expression was a picture of smugness. He knew the feat he’d accomplished, by uttering
a simple request to the man our parents revered for both his skill and
generosity.
As
we moved through neighborhoods, I watched the City race by from the luxury of
our carriage. I urgently wanted to see
my friends; more precisely, I wanted them to see me, with Willie Mays,
together, in the same car. I have no idea
what I would’ve done if we did chance upon someone I knew. I couldn’t lower the window and shout out
‘Hey, look at me,”– my brother would’ve killed me.
Over
the 1958 and ’59 seasons, my brother begged several lifts home. Each one was granted and each time, Orlando Cepeda,
Felipe Alou or Willie McCovey rode shotgun on the twenty-five minute ride.
I
remembered Don and me tuning in to their conversations, my brother speaking only
instructively to provide directions. Mays
took us right to our door, surprising the hell out of our mom, who on that
first occasion was out tending to ‘her’ tidy front lawn as we approached. After my brother introduced Mays and Cepeda
to her, she thanked them for bringing us home, followed by promised
recriminations for her boys being a bother.
Mays, thankfully, would hear nothing of it. Both men smiled and shook her hand, said
goodbye, and continued on. My father was
beside himself when we told him.
So,
I was baffled by Mays’ denial of what I retained so
clearly. I guessed that if he didn’t wish
to acknowledge the gesture, I’d just apologize and shuffle to the
end of the queue and hope he wouldn’t report me as a stalker.
Before
I could bluster out a mea culpa, his face lit up with that amazing smile and
said, “I gave you and your brother
rides home from Seals
Stadium.”
Mae
Louise beamed as she looked to me. “He’s
been telling the story of the precocious kids who asked him for rides for over
twenty years! He’s always wondered
what’s happened to you two. It’s great
to finally meet you,” she exclaimed laughing, grasping my hand and shaking it
as she would an old friend’s.
With
that, one of baseball’s All-Century team members gripped my hand and asked me
to fill him in on what my brother and I had been up to. Because we were rapidly approaching the Vice
President, I gave him the Cliff’s Notes version and reluctantly shook hands
goodbye to then greet the Vice-POTUS and 2nd Lady (a good feeling,
but not as emotionally charged), and hustled off to find a phone to call my
mom, dad and brother.
©
2015 by Thomas G. Tait
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| 'Say Hey' Willie Howard Mays |
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| Thomas G. Tait |
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| Donald G. Tait and Howard S. Tait |
Thomas
Tait was born and raised in San Francisco.
He is a C-level tourism executive having served as the executive director of the Nevada
Commission on Tourism, Vice President of Las Vegas Resort, President of the
Nevada Tourism Alliance, and a tourism development consultant for
Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He is the chairman of the Outside Las Vegas
Foundation and resides in Henderson, Nevada with his wife Katherine.
