Willie Mays: Salad Days

My (Evander’s) neighborhood in Fort Apache the Bronx, is not the best in the world or the worst. But it has its interesting aspects, as all New York neighborhoods do.

Maybe it was in 2003, I ran into a school-friend named Steven, who’d moved into one of the fancy buildings I face from the other side of the tracks: well, the other side of the Henry Hudson Parkway. We invited Steven for lunch so he could meet the family. From our window, he pointed out that we could see his living room. He then lived in a big white building, with the veddy British name Whitehall. Ed Sullivan, who introduced Elvis Presley to the civilized world, not to mention The Beatles to an even-crazier teen America once upon a time, had lived there. Yvonne De Carlo. Ron Blomberg. Some politicos have and do, too.

Steven asked if Willie Mays (as wise-guy kids, he was “Willie Mayonnaise” to some of us) also lived in his building. “How would I know? You live there.”

(Cricket fans everywhere: Mays may have been the greatest center fielder of them all, which takes in Tris Speaker, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle for starters.)

In fact, reading between the lines of the new Mays bio it’s clear he did live there. I also had a nurse we employed, who also worked in the Whitehall, confirm this: Mays lived in one of the penthouse apartments possibly until 2005.

Around that time one day, on walking a half-block south of my building, I’d seen one gentleman pushing another in a wheelchair. It was spring or, more likely, summer. I was too timid to walk across the street, combined with my not wanting to disturb these men.

I am now fairly certain these were Mays pushing Willie McCovey.

But in all my years in the nabe, I’d never seen WM at the cleaners, at the fruit-stand, or at Key Food, among the mayonnaise jars.

It’s thrill enough to know I may have.