Willie Mays' childhood home in Alabama in state of disrepair

“You lookin’ for Say Hey’s house?”
Howard Russell’s tended yards in this quiet Fairfield neighborhood for about a quarter century, so he knows an explorer when he sees one. He stops the mower he’s pushing on this hellish-hot morning, wipes streams sweat from his face with a pocket towel, and powers down the motor so better to hear.
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s right there,” he says pointing towards near where I’m standing on 57th St. “Right there.” He paused. “Right there behind all that.”
All that was a not-so-small forest swallowing the lot right in front of me. A forest of bushes, shrubs, trees and who knows what wildlife swallowing the entire property and digesting a structure that struggled to peek through one side. Struggled to be seen. Struggled to be remembered.
Struggled to stand.
Struggled to live.
Willie Mays once lived there. Lived there, played there, and thrived there.
Signed a Major League Baseball contract there.
This house cannot die.
Mays was born in Westfield, a Black steel town that no longer exists. His father bought the house in Fairfield and there resided two aunts - Sarah and Ernestine - who helped raise the talented boy.
A photo on a Zillow listing reveals a comfortable light-green 1,641-sqaure-foot home with three bedrooms and a bath. Three steps lead from the street to an elevated front yard, where a white gas lamp guards the walkway leading to seven white steps that reaching a small porch. The front of is covered by a white awning and a brick chimney rises from the right side of the house. One can envision a fireplace Willie and his family might have used on chilly Southern winter nights. Or as decoration.
Who knows when the photo was taken. Google Maps notes that it’s from 12 years ago. Long enough for an untended yard to succumb to a forest that now all but hides maybe the most vital gem in a city itself straining to endure the ravages of time.
Only the chimney rises beyond the tall brush now. A small window is seen through the thickness on the right side of the home-an aging eye straining to see a world that’s left it behind.
“A lady kept it up until she died,” Russell shares. “Then her kids tried until they left.”
The home, states county tax records, was owned by a Mary A. Hinson until 2088, then by her heirs in 2009, until it came into the hands of the Seminole Brothers, LLC, which owned it until 2022. That’s when it landed with the Fairfield Land Bank, the place where tax-neglected properties go to be sold to new owners who promise to revive and retore the property. Or…
This house cannot die.
Ben Yother wants to ensure it does not.
A Birmingham native who now lives in Vestavia, a kid who still speaks of Mays with the reverence of the eight-year-old for whom the Fairfield star was his “favorite player,” Yother has applied to buy the house from the Land Bank. Buy it with the promise to restore it not for profit but prosperity. “I don’t want to make a dime from it,” he told me this week.
Yother appreciates what baseball was in Birmingham during the days of Mays youth. “The Birmingham Industrial League,” he says, “the ACIPCO teams that were so important in the area, the Southern Negro League, the final Negro League World Series that Willie Mays played in. The history has always been important to me.”
He wants any and every young person to climb the three steps from the street, walk the path towards the seven steps onto the porch, then walk through the house where Willie Mays once lived without costing them a nickel. “If I have to restore it myself, I will,” he said. “My wife won’t be happy about it, but I’ll do it.”
It will take a lot to rescue that property on 57th St, to rescue it from the forest, from the ravages of time. The house has not only been negated by neglect. Russell told me about a couple of fires that punished the place, leaving the back porch on its last legs. Folks died there, too, he said.
Yother believes the house can be revived, though he acknowledges time has the advantage. “It’s last call,” he says.
Timing has an advantage, too. It can’t be lost on any of us that this property-standing in obscurity in a city just a long centerfield throw from Rickwood Field (at least for Willie)-is holding on now. Holding on after more than a decade of denial and deterioration.
Holding on as MLB came to Birmingham and finally reconnected and reengaged with its Negro League roots.
Holding on as Mays took his last breath.
The Fairfield Land Bank will likely hold a meeting soon to consider Yother’s application. He’s received quiet support from so many-from the San Franscico Giants, from city officials in Fairfield and Birmingham, from folks at MLB.
From myriad folks who well know: This house cannot die.
And won’t let it.

[@RobAllbanks]

Wow, i know something can be done to preserve it, they give money to everything else around here!

[@sheilasnowden3414]

There is someone currently planning on buying it and restoring the home. Undoubtably will make a huge profit turning it into a tourist attraction.