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Chalk & Flour. The day their prize outfielder was separated from the Army, the Giants had a savvy scout named Frank Forbes, 61, waiting at the gate to take him in tow. An oldtime Negro athlete (baseball, basketball and boxing), Forbes is the professional godfather to the Giants' Negro ballplayers. With his other charges safely married, Forbes's main preoccupation is Willie.
"When I first .met Willie," says Forbes, "I thought he was the most open, decent, down-to-earth guy I'd ever seen—completely unspoiled and completely natural. I was worried to death about the kind of people he might get mixed up with. He'd have to live in Harlem, and believe me, that can be a bad place, full of people just waiting to part an innocent youngster from his money. Somebody had to see to it that Willie wasn't exploited, sift the chalk from the flour, figure out who was in a racket and who was representing a decent organization."
Forbes arranged to rent a room foi Willie from a friend, Mrs. David Goosby, whose five-room Harlem apartment is little more than a Willie Mays throw from the Polo Grounds. Mrs. Goosby treats Willie a little like a son, occasionally gives him a motherly talk "about taking care of himself." "Not that he needs it often," says Mrs. Goosby. "Willie's a good boy. About all I have to lecture him on besides eating properly is his habit of reading comic books. That boy spends hours, I swear, with those comics."
Willie's eating is hardly a problem. He puts away two big meals a day: fruit, bacon and eggs, hash-brown potatoes and milk for breakfast, steaks or chops and the fixings for dinner. Evenings, after a game or a trip to the movies (preferably westerns), Willie raids the icebox for the makings of a sandwich. Then he usually plays his records for a while. He has a big collection of pop records (leaning to sentimental ballads, Nat "King" Cole or Billy Eckstine variety), and he takes a portable record player and a stack of records along when the team goes on the road.
On the nights that he steps out, Willie outfits himself from a big wardrobe; his closet bulges with expensively tailored sport coats, sharp slacks and monogrammed shirts, but very few ties. Willie hates ties, wears them only for such special events as his increasingly frequent TV and banquet appearances. "He's not flashy," says Mrs. Goosby, "but my, is he fussy. He won't wear anything that's the slightest bit wrinkled or spotted."
A Simple Question. Two or three nights a week, when the Giants are at home, the star centerfielder of the big leagues scoots down the block from the Goosby apartment to play a fast game of stickball with a band of tenor twelve-year-old boys. Capering and joking with the kids, Mays coaches their play, urges them in his high, giggle-edged voice: "Throw harder! Harder!"