📍Fairfield, Alabama, USA
1931 – 1948“I was born in Westfield, Alabama, in May 1931, a company town built by the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company outside Birmingham, where the steel mills glowed day and night. My father, William Howard Mays, known as Cat because he was so quick, worked in the mills and played centre field for the Black team at the local iron plant. My mother, Ann, had been a high school basketball and track star. My parents separated when I was three, and my father and my two aunts, Sarah and Ernestine, raised me. My father played catch with me when I was five, and when I was about ten he let me sit on the bench with his team in the Birmingham Industrial League, the factory baseball leagues that ran through the steel country. That year we moved from Westfield to Fairfield, another mill town nearby, and I was soon playing in sandlot games with grown men. At Fairfield Industrial High School I starred at quarterback and in basketball, but the school had no baseball team, so I played semi-professional baseball with my father on the Fairfield Gray Sox. At seventeen, while I was still at school, I joined the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League, playing at Rickwood Field and earning money on weekends so that I could finish my studies. In 1950 the New York Giants signed me, and I became one of the greatest players in baseball history, famous for The Catch in the 1954 World Series. In 2024 Rickwood Field hosted a Major League game in my honour.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
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