by Allen Barra
When Mutt could scrape together the cash, there were outings to a ballpark. On one, the family had the sensational luck to see a minor league game between Joplin and Springfield that featured a much-heralded young left-handed slugger from Pennsylvania who hit from a low, crouching stance. “See that guy?” Mutt, a superb judge of talent, asked his son. “He’s going to be a major league star.” The twenty-one-year-old in question, soon to be called up to the St. Louis Cardinals for a legendary twenty-two-season career, was Stan Musial. On another trip, Mickey and his brothers got to spend an entire weekend in St. Louis watching the Cardinals on Saturday night and then again in a Sunday doubleheader. “To me,” Mickey said in reflection, “this was like a journey to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.”10 When having breakfast at the Fairgrounds Hotel, where many of the players from both teams stayed, they would often recognize the Cardinals and some of their opponents in street clothes. If Mickey had any inclination to ask for a player’s autograph, Mutt quickly squashed it; ballplayers were people too, he told his son, and they had a right to privacy like anyone else. Mutt’s attitude made a big impression on his son and might explain why, in later years, he was often standoffish to fans he thought were too aggressive.
Nick Ferguson, one of Mickey’s pals, told writer David Falkner, “We all had a happy childhood, I think. Nobody had any great expectations. We didn’t have much, but we’d play all day long … either baseball, football or basketball.”11 But Nick didn’t have the pressure on him to excel that Mick had. Merlyn, who was to bear the brunt of Mickey’s reckless immaturity, was always sympathetic to the forces that shaped her husband’s psyche: “The early pressure on Mickey to play ball and his self-imposed desire to play it better than anyone caused real emotional problems for him. A lot of the conflicts in him later had their roots in those years. Mick wet his bed until he was 16 years old … it is important, I think, in understanding what he went through, and how much he wanted to please his dad. This is what the pressure that wanting that approval did to him.”12 The bed-wetting didn’t stop until Mickey played his first season in Class-D ball at Independence, Missouri, in 1949.§
The Tom Sawyer–like life Mickey led at the farm didn’t last for long. When he was fourteen, a devastating rainstorm caused the Neosho River to flood the Mantle farm. The crops were lost, which meant the farm was also lost. There was only one way for Mutt to feed his family: return to the mines.
The family was forced to downscale their already hardscrabble existence. They moved into a dilapidated house closer to town in a village called Whitebird, where Lovell had to boil water on a wood-burning stove for bathing; more than forty years later Mickey still remembered that they bathed in a number 3 zinc tub.13 There weren’t enough rooms for all the kids; Mickey shared a bedroom with his parents and his younger sister, Barbara. The winters were miserable. “Bleak, gray, the fields covered with frost,” Mickey told Herb Gluck, adding details that could have come from a Depression-era novel. “Some nights those winds whistled through little cracks in the wall so fierce they’d lift the linoleum right off the floor. You had to be careful or you’d step on the rising billows and crack the linoleum.”14 Amazingly, despite the hardships, Mickey could not recall a single time that Mutt and Lovell had a serious argument.
Lovell whipped her sons and daughter into line and saw that they behaved like good Christians, but with practically no talk of religion in the house, the closest thing to Sunday worship was the passion the boys showed at picnics for getting a baseball game going. Nearly half a century later, Mickey would remember what those Sundays were like. “You’d see the dust coming up on the road and dozens of old cars honking by. What a sight! They formed a circle around the field. Picnic baskets, egg crates, and whatnot would be dragged out of the back seats, pints of whiskey in back pockets, too; everybody laughing and hollering, then settling down to watch us play, so attentive, so respectful, you’d think they were actually paying their way into a World Series.”15
Sundays and baseball were something Mickey and Willie had in common. On most Sundays, company baseball teams were playing, and often the players’ sons, if they were old enough, were allowed to play with their fathers. On every other Sunday, the Black Barons played in beautiful Rickwood Field. Even during the Depression years, it was a time for dressing up in one’s best outfits, the women in their most fetching hats, and going to the ballpark. During the 1940s, a well-known black preacher, the appropriately named Rev. John W. Goodgame of the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, spoke for blacks all over the city and probably for whites as well when, after services every baseball Sunday, he told his congregation, “Well, I’m going to the ball game.”
For both Mickey and Willie, the springs and summers of their youth were opportunities for pickup games. No other sport was seriously considered. Everyone showed up on the fields to play baseball. But there was one significant difference between Mays’s experience and Mantle’s. Mickey never saw a black person at his games. He did not play against a black until his late appearances in the minor leagues. When Willie and his friends showed up on sandlots, there were often white kids hanging around waiting for someone with a ball or bat. “And it didn’t matter to me whether I played with white kids or black. I never understood why an issue was made of who I played with.… I never recall trouble.… We played football against the white kids, and we thought nothing of it. Neither the blacks nor the whites. It was the grownups who got upset. If they saw black kids playing on the same team with white kids, they’d call the cops, and the cops would make us stop. I never got into a fight that was started because of racism; to me, it was the adults who caused the problems.”16
Bob Veale, who was four years younger than Willie and who would star, after a stint in the Negro Leagues, for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had similar recollections. “We didn’t know as kids we were breaking segregation laws. We just thought we were playing baseball. I had white friends, kids I played ball with all the time. We weren’t thinking about integrating anything. We were just playing baseball.”17
It can be said with some accuracy that Willie Mays grew up without a sense of the racial tensions that from the 1950s through the mid-1960s would reach critical mass in the Birmingham area. Westfield and Fairfield were different from other Birmingham suburbs. Fairfield, for instance, had white neighborhoods as well as black, and though they were strictly segregated, the citizens lived near one another in relative harmony, probably because most of the adult men worked alongside one another at the steel mills. Piper Davis would remember getting along well with several of his white fellow workers, if only because during their breaks they could talk about baseball. Blacks were allowed in Rickwood Field to see the white Barons play, though they were confined to an area in the right-field bleachers screened off with chicken wire called the “Negro bleachers.” This was common for most minor league ballparks in the South. What was not common was that at Rickwood, on the Sundays when the Black Barons played, white fans would often crowd into the same area to watch the best players in the Negro Leagues. Baseball was the closest thing Birmingham had to a common denominator between blacks and whites. During coffee and Coca-Cola breaks, workers of both races could gab about the soaring shots that Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio hit over the fences or how Satchel Paige befuddled hitters with his notorious “hesitation” pitch.
Mutt and Mickey had to drive hundreds of miles in stifling heat to see Hall of Fame ballplayers at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis; Cat and Willie merely had to take a thirty-minute ride on a crosstown bus to do the same.‖
As in the Mantle home, there was little if any religious orthodoxy in the Mays house. Ernestine and Sarah took care of Willie and kept him in school. Sarah was probably the closest thing Willie had in his formative years to a full-time mother. There was only one thing missing: like Lovell Mantle, she was not an affectionate person. She made sure Willie was well cared for and took a personal interest in his schoolwork and athletics, but with a busy household to run, she gave him l
ittle personal attention. Amateur psychologists would later conjecture that Mays’s choice in women was an attempt at finding a mother figure.
As Willie grew into his teens, his skill at sports and his ebullient charm made him a favorite with the girls at Fairfield Industrial. Friends recall only one real attachment, to a pretty girl named Minnie Hansberry, but when Willie left Fairfield for professional baseball he never mentioned her again.
In at least one important respect, Sarah, Ernestine, and Willie’s mother, Annie, succeeded admirably: they kept their boy out of trouble. There are virtually no accounts of juvenile gangs in the Westfield of the 1930s. The men were steelworkers—tough, independent, and self-reliant—and did not allow delinquency to gain a foothold in their neighborhoods. Cat wasn’t always there, but he made his presence felt. Like Mutt Mantle, Cat Mays smoked heavily, enjoyed cards, and occasionally drank to excess. But he saw that Willie did not indulge in any of these activities.
One day, driving down a Westfield street heading toward home, Cat spotted Willie and a pal taking a puff on a cigarette and sipping from something in a paper bag. Calmly, he stopped the car, told Willie to get in, and took him home. He told his son that if he wanted to smoke he could, and handed him a cigarette. Willie took a long drag and started coughing. Cat made him finish the cigarette—or in another account, a White Owl cigar. He then made his son drink a glass of bourbon. Willie got so sick that he didn’t recover until the next day. Except for taking a sip of champagne in the New York Giants’ locker room after winning the 1954 World Series, there are no eyewitness accounts of Willie Mays ever drinking liquor. Willie’s only known vice—one his father not only regarded as harmless but taught him—was pool, a game that, as several Giants teammates would one day discover to their chagrin, he mastered.
The women did their part to keep the children on the straight and narrow: they were fed well and made to go to school and behave respectfully toward their elders, even if, in Willie’s case, his aunts were only a few years older than he was.a But except for the occasional funeral or on Easter, there was no churchgoing.
After Annie Satterwhite married Frank McMorris, a plumber, she would have ten more children with him. They settled in a small community named Powderly, just a few miles from her son. She made an effort to see Willie as often as possible and exerted a surprisingly strong influence on him. Later Willie would remember Annie as “a good lady” who would slip a quarter into his hand whenever she saw him and who often invited him over to the McMorris home to play with his half brothers and sisters. At the same time Lovell was attending Mickey’s high school baseball and football games in Commerce, Annie was cheering Willie on from the stands of Fairfield Industrial. “My mom had a mouth,” Mays told his most recent biographer, James Hirsch, “and she didn’t back up.” She shared at least one other characteristic with Lovell Mantle—according to one of Willie’s half brothers, “Not one of the kids talked back to her.”18
Despite the economic hardships in both the Mantle and Mays households, it would be wrong to say that they weren’t happy homes. At any rate, both men insisted, time and again, that their childhoods were happy. There was usually some change left over for the comic books both boys loved to read. Mickey would ride his bike to the Commerce News to check out the latest adventures of Superman, Batman, and, starting in 1941, America’s favorite teenager, Archie Andrews, of Riverdale, USA. Willie loved the superheroes too, though his favorite comics were Westerns bought at Doc Pomran’s Drugstore.
Neither boy went hungry. Willie, who usually had more money to spend than his friends, related that at school, “when we had our lunch period … we’d head for the grocery store. I’d buy lunch meat, a couple of big loaves of bread, tomatoes, mayonnaise, and some cake, and pretty soon 10 or 12 of us would be sitting down to lunch in an empty lot.”19 Willie bought all this, or so he recalled, with the $10 that Sarah or Steen would sometimes leave on his dresser. Ten dollars sounds like an awful lot of money for the time and place, but a child’s memory can easily remember one dollar as ten.
On Saturdays, Mickey and his pals found a great hangout at the Black Cat Café, where the 25-cent special might include cheeseburgers, chili, and soft drinks. When both boys were a little older, one of their favorite pastimes was pool. Willie, Charley, and their friends liked to play at Big Tony’s in Fairfield; Mickey, Nick Ferguson, and their pals played in the backroom of the Black Cat. Both Mays and Mantle had the same problem: the proprietors wouldn’t let them play until 4:00 P.M. to make sure they weren’t cutting school and invariably began to shoo them out around 5:30 when the men—sometimes including Cat and Mutt—got off work from the mills and mines.
The high school years, as Willie once put it, “were also the days of the pool hall. I always thought pool playing had a bad rap. In the movies, you’d always see wise guys and gangsters shooting pool between drags of a cigarette as they discussed some heist.” At Big Tony’s, it wasn’t like that. In fact, Tony was given to lecturing the boys about the importance of getting an education. And after the rap, “he very often let us play for free over one of the old, torn tables in the back of the room.”20 Mantle, wrote one biographer, “was something of a pool shark; his game was eight-ball, and his friends said he earned more than enough for pocket money.”21
The women of both the Mantle and Mays homes loved music, and the music they loved was the music Mickey and Willie grew up on. The Mantles listened almost exclusively to country music. John G. Hall, an Oklahoma historian and friend of the Mantle family, has identified the radio stations most widely listened to by folks in the Mantles’ corner of the state: KGLC in Miami, Oklahoma; KVOO in Tulsa; KOAM in Pittsburg, Kansas; KGGF in Coffeyville, Kansas; and KFSB in Joplin, Missouri. “The nation’s big 50,000-watt clear channel stations,” wrote Hall, “didn’t bombard the paint off the garage doors until after sundown. Entertainers in the mid-part of the 20th century used their radio shows to reach a wide audience. Then they would parlay that ‘fame’ by playing at dances throughout the towns and villages of the Midwest. Most of the dance bands went out on Saturdays to play an evening benefit at some municipal building or high school.”22
Jimmie Rodgers, known as “The Blue Yodeler” and “The Singing Brakeman,” had died of tuberculosis in 1933, but his records were still enormously popular all over the South and played on every radio station throughout the decade. Perhaps the most popular artists of the day were Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, who started out in Fort Worth and built up a huge following in the late 1930s in the Midwest and the Southwest. They were an unorthodox country band that started out as a fiddle group and, as they evolved, added brass instruments and even drums. Wills, a big fan of black blues and jazz, incorporated numerous licks and riffs from black music into the band’s repertoire. The Playboys’ style and instruments angered the country music purists in Nashville, but that meant nothing to the thousands of miners in Oklahoma who were happy to tune in to any clear channel stations, particularly Tulsa’s KVOO, to hear such standards as “Faded Love” and “San Antonio Rose.” These were the songs that Mickey heard more on the radio than any other, both at home and in the car.
The music Willie grew up to was both more varied and more sophisticated. Black Birmingham in the 1930s offered a rich cornucopia of music, ranging from country blues singers to the urban R&B sounds of Louis Jordan and even jazz artists such as Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington—who often played dates in Birmingham’s black clubs in the Fourth Avenue District. In addition, it’s likely that Willie, as a boy, spent more time listening to popular white mainstream radio than Mickey. “My oldest memory,” he told Charles Einstein, “is singing the words of a popular song. Not really a cowboy song, more a popular song that was a takeoff on a cowboy song.” The song was probably Johnny Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand” sung by Bing Crosby. Four-year-old Willie loved to yell “Yippee-i-oh-ky-ay” until members of his family were ready to throw him out the door. “You going to be a singer when you grow up?�
� his aunt Sarah asked. “No,” said Willie. “A cowboy. A singing cowboy.” “We’ll call you Bing,” she said.23 He memorized the words to all manner of popular songs that came over the family radio, “a great piece of furniture in my aunt Sarah’s house in Fairfield. I will never forget that radio.”b24
The radio was Mickey’s main connection to major league baseball. Mutt was a lifelong Cardinals and Stan Musial fan, which made Mickey one too. But while Mickey was restricted to listening to their games on the radio, Willie saw most of his professional heroes in the flesh. By the time Willie was in high school in 1944, he had seen Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson and many of the greats of black ball on trips to Rickwood Field with his dad.c Mickey and Willie shared at least one common baseball fantasy: both emulated the batting stances of Musial and Ted Williams, whom they knew primarily from pictures in the newspaper and from the newsreels that were shown before their beloved Westerns. Over time, Willie gave up trying to bat left-handed. Both boys, though, continued to try to swing like Joe DiMaggio.
DiMaggio was something else. He had burst onto the national scene in 1936, when Mickey and Willie were five, hitting .323 and driving in 125 runs his rookie year. The next season he led the American League with 46 home runs. When Mickey and Willie were growing up, it seemed as if the Yankees won the World Series every year. In fact, they very nearly did, taking four straight from 1936 to 1939 and fielding perhaps the most dominant team in baseball history. They won in 1941 too, the year DiMaggio electrified the country by hitting safely in fifty-six consecutive games. Willie was ten years old that year and still listening to cowboy songs on Aunt Sarah’s radio. But he heard some other things on that radio as well. “The news of Joe DiMaggio’s record-setting 56-game hitting streak. That’s when I stopped wanting to be a cowboy.” When he played ball with his friend Charley Willis, Willie told him to “call me DiMag.” “You crazy?” Charley asked. “I mean it,” Willie told him. “That’s my new name.” That meant, Charley told him, that Willie would have to change his position from the infield to center field. “I don’t care about center field,” Willie told him, “just so long as I hit like him.”25
