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-7^th, 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 2^nd 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

 

'Say Hey' Willie Howard Mays

Thomas G. Tait

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.