Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis - Empire State O'Reilly: Willie Mays

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Originally only available in the New York City area, Bill’s Empire State O’Reilly commentary addresses local New York issues, but those issues have implications, impact the country, and mirror problems in other states. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So as you know, I grew up in Levittown on Long Island, and I was looking at pictures of me as an urchin and my house. $8,000. My father bought it on a GI Bill in 1951. He's a Brooklyn guy, moved out to central Nassau, and the house consisted of two bedrooms, tiny, one bath, tiny, kitchen, living room. That's it. There was an upstairs that was unfinished. There was a car port, not a garage. I mean, maybe it was 1,000 square feet, but I doubt it. Anyway, that was where I lived, and everybody else lived in those same house,

because Leavitt just built them all identical. So nobody thought, wow, I wish I had a better house because everybody had the same house. Now, we had no air conditioning. So in the summer, everybody was out. All the urchins were out, okay, playing. And we were playing baseball and stick ball and kickball and dodge ball in the street. There were hundreds of kids in Levittown. As part of that culture, there was racial stuff. Okay? Because the Levitt brothers who built Levittown in New York and Pennsylvania would not sell to blacks. And I've mentioned this before.

So it was white ethnics, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, primarily. Now, my hero, from six years old on, was Willie May's New York Giant Center Field. He died yesterday, 93 years old. Now, Willie was the best baseball player I have ever seen. took me to the polar grounds in 1957 and we had good seats which he was given because my father never would have paid for box seats and Willie I just I remember everything about it to this day I loved Willie Mays now the other side of the East River was Yankee Stadium and Mickey Mantle they played at the same time Mays and Mantle

And Levittown was divided into mantle fans and Mays fans. And it was a lot of racial undertone to it. And the N-word appeared sometimes. But I led the charge to go, no, we're not doing that here. And whenever somebody would bring up disparaging things about African-Americans, I'd say, hey, Willie Mays, come on. I mean, this is a guy who's extraordinary, he's a good guy, play stickball in the streets of Harlem with the kids, he's an icon, he was an icon even then. I mean, Willie Mays was born 1931 in Westfield, Alabama, you can imagine what he went through in his childhood, and he played in the Negro League for the Birmingham Black Barons.

But the guy was just the best, as I said. He's better than DiMaggio, I think. He signed with the Giants in 1950. He made his debut a year later. First Major League batty, it's a home run off of Hall of Famer Warren Spahn for Milwaukee Braves. Then he went into the Army and he came back in 1954 and he won the MVP. So I loved Willie. I mean, I loved them. And I got real personal with those people who would disparage black people.

That's how much of an effect Willie, Mays had on me as a kid. And I convinced a lot of my friends that this race stuff was a bunch of bull and not necessary. Now, I didn't know at that time when I'm seven, eight years old, about the horror that many African Americans experienced in the Deep South. I didn't know about that. But I did know that Willie Mays was a good guy and a fabulous player, and I don't want to hear bad stuff about blacks. And there were a few fistfights. over that. But I wanted to relate that in the sense that Willie died yesterday. I, for many years, gave money to his charitable foundation in San Francisco. The giant organization out there is

first class organization. They really did Willie write. And New York loves Willie May. He's on front page of all the papers today. But I wanted to tell you that story because it was really formulated my view at a very young age of race. H.