Saying a final goodbye to Willie Mays, baseball’s ‘Say hey’ kid

Willie Mays playing stickball in Harlem in 1954. Bettmann/Getty Imagesby Lincoln Mitchell, Columbia University
In 1959, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev visited San Francisco and members of the International Longshoreman’s Union greeted him with cheers, newspaperman Frank Coniff quipped: “This is the damndest city. They cheer Khruschev and boo Willie Mays.”
It was the height of the Cold War and, for Coniff and many of his readers, there was no better symbol of America than