Willie Mays had to win a house in San Francisco before he played a game there

Miraloma Drive is on the west side of San Francisco, in the hills next to St. Francis Wood. The neighborhood on that stretch is called Sherwood Forest. The house at number 175 was new in 1957. Its builder was Walter A. Gnesdiloff, and he was asking $37,500.

Willie Mays offered to buy it that November. He was 26, and he had just played his last season for the New York Giants.

Gnesdiloff accepted the offer and then refused to go through with it. Neighbors had complained to him that if a Black family moved onto the street, the price of their houses would fall.

KPIX filmed it. The reel, KPIX 2489, is held at San Francisco State University's Bay Area Television Archive. It aired on Thursday, November 14, 1957. It runs two minutes and thirty-nine seconds, sixteen-millimeter black and white with sound, and the reporter is Fort Pearson.

In the still the archive shows before the film plays, Mays is in a striped knit shirt against a pale wall, his head tipped down a little, and a microphone is held up just under his chin.

By the time KPIX filmed him, Gnesdiloff had changed his mind back. The mayor, George Christopher, had stepped in, and the builder agreed to sell at the price he had first asked. Mays told Pearson what he thought of the week anyway.

"It was a disappointment to me," he said, "because I didn't figure I would have this much trouble trying to buy a place."

He had not yet played a game for San Francisco. That would not happen for 152 more days.

The Postal Service announced this month that Willie Mays will be on a stamp in 2027. It is the 50th stamp in the Black Heritage series, the series in which Jackie Robinson appeared in 1982. The design is a homage to a classic baseball card. It carries two photographs: a portrait of Mays in a New York Giants uniform, and Mays making an over-the-shoulder catch.

That is the New York half of the man, and it is the famous half. He made his major league debut for New York on May 25, 1951, a Friday, at 20. The Giants found him a room in Harlem, in the home of David and Anna Goosby on St. Nicholas Avenue at 155th Street, a short walk from the Polo Grounds. Anna Goosby washed his clothes, and he ate a lot of his meals at her table. People on the block used to wait outside for him to come home. He made the catch in the 1954 World Series, at the Polo Grounds, and the Giants won it. On September 29, 1957, the franchise played its last game in New York, a 9 to 1 loss to Pittsburgh, and Mays had two of the Giants' six hits.

Forty-six days after that, he was on KPIX explaining that he had been told no.

There is a second sentence in the archive's transcription of what he said to Pearson, and it has a stumble in it, the way speech does when somebody types it up from a soundtrack. The meaning comes through. He said that when he went looking for a house, he did not worry about who was living beside him.

He was describing what he had done. He had looked at a house, liked it and offered on it, and the people on the street had been the ones doing the worrying. Six years earlier, on a street in Harlem, the neighbors had stood outside waiting for him.

The Giants arrived as San Francisco's team the next spring. There was a ticker-tape parade downtown on Monday, April 14, 1958, and on Tuesday they played their first game, at Seals Stadium.

Mays played 152 games that season. He had 208 hits and batted .347, the highest average of any season he ever played. He lived at 175 Miraloma Drive.

On Tuesday, September 23, 1958, Fort Pearson came back. KPIX filmed him interviewing Mays and his wife, Margherite, at their home in Sherwood Forest. That film is in the same archive, reel KPIX 70000-2, four minutes and twenty-two seconds. It had been 313 days since the first one.

Pearson started with gossip. There had been items in the papers saying the marriage was in trouble, and that she was not happy in San Francisco. Margherite Mays said there was nothing to either, and called it malicious gossip. Then Pearson brought up the trouble they had had buying the house they now lived in, and asked whether they had been happy since moving in.

She said they were content.

"I think everybody in San Francisco is our friend," she said.

Then Pearson congratulated her husband on his batting average.

The archive at San Francisco State has more of him, and most of it is ordinary, which is the point of having it.

On Friday, June 19, 1959, KPIX filmed him without sound at the Emporium on Market Street, under the department store's dome, signing baseballs and photographs and copies of a "Say Hey" baseball board game with his name on it. The store's advertisement in the Chronicle that morning priced the game at $1.98.

On Wednesday, February 1, 1967, KPIX filmed him at the Frederic Burk School in San Francisco. By then he was 35 and had hit more home runs than anyone alive. The catalog says he traded lines with the grade schoolers and explained to them why they should eat a good breakfast.

On Tuesday, May 14, 1968, KTVU filmed him downtown for 31 seconds, silent, beside a woman the archive names as Mrs. Osceola Washington. A placard says what the drive was for: "Blacks and Whites Together Fund Drive for Youth Activities this Summer. Bayview-Hunters Point Neighborhood Community Center."

That was twenty months after the Hunters Point uprising of September 1966, and the same archive holds that film too. Mays was downtown, raising money for the neighborhood where it had happened.

He played his last game in a San Francisco uniform in 1972, nineteen games into the season, and finished his career with the Mets in New York, where he had started. He died on June 18, 2024, in Palo Alto, at 93.

The stamp has no release date yet. Its portrait is of a young man in a New York uniform.

The film KPIX made of him that November is two minutes and thirty-nine seconds long. He is 26, in a striped knit shirt, and there is a microphone under his chin, and he is talking about a house.

Sources: the Postal Service's 2027 stamp announcement (USPS Employee News, November 10, 2026) and its design description as carried by MLB.com and KTVU; San Francisco State University's Bay Area Television Archive and DIVA collection, film records KPIX 2489 (November 14, 1957), KPIX 70000-2 (September 23, 1958), KRON 15-1 (April 14 and 15, 1958), KPIX 5798 (June 19, 1959), KPIX 30279 (February 1, 1967) and KTVU 16-3 (May 14, 1968); the MLB Stats API for Mays's dates and season lines; the Society for American Baseball Research biography of Mays for the Harlem rooming house, the Polo Grounds finale and Mayor Christopher's role.