From Waterloo to Willie Mays, with love
Father-son duo from Waterloo helped design and dedicate ballpark to "Say Hey Kid" at home in California in 2015
WATERLOO — Former Waterloo resident Bob Hellman Jr. watched the line form in front of his neighbor’s place every Halloween.
You’d have thought there was a ballgame going on. Well, close.
Hellman’s neighbor five houses down in Atherton Calif. was an old big-league ballplayer. Not just any big-league ballplayer, but one of the best ever. In the eyes of many, THE best ever. The Greatest Of All Time, or the GOAT, as sports-talk aficionados say these days
His neighbor was Willie Mays.
Yep. THAT Willie Mays. The “Say Hey Kid.” The guy who his 660 home runs spending most of his career with the New York and San Francisco Giants. The guy who made the phrase “basket catch” a household word to a generation of young kids. And the fellow who made one of the most sensational, surreal catches of all time in the 1954 World Series, outrunning a line drive off the bat of Vic Wertz of Cleveland in the deepest part of New York’s Polo Grounds — making and over-the-shoulder catch and a sensational throw to hold baserunners.
And the same guy who shrugged off the bright lights of superstardom, saying, “They throw the ball, I hit it. They hit the ball, I catch it…I don’t compare ‘em I just catch ‘em.” Mays passed away June 18 at age 93.
In fact, Willie’s skills as a ballplayer were so surreal that he actually guest starred as a warlock in a Halloween party episode of the hit 1960s TV comedy “Bewitched.” It was right after Willie blasted 52 home runs in 1965 and quickly propelled himself up to second (at that time) on the all-time home run list, behind Babe Ruth.
Which maybe explains why Halloween was a big holiday at the Mays house. Bob Hellman Jr. recounted that Mays handed out candy — and baseballs.
”He’s lived in Atherton since 1964,” Bob Jr. wrote me in 2014, “and each Halloween he personally hands out baseballs, baseball cards and candy to all of the neighborhood kids who come visit him in his living room. The lines are huge each year!”
In 2018, Bob Jr. and family joined Willie at his home to wish him a happy 87th birthday. Bob Sr., a longtime Waterloo advertising agency head, couldn’t resist sharing photos of the occasion with his staff and friends.
Bob Hellman Jr. is a career private investor and managing director of American Infrastructure Partners (AIP) in the San Francisco Bay area. Bob Sr. operated the Hellman Associates ad agency in Waterloo for more than 50 years.
Both Hellmans share a love for baseball. Bob Sr. earned the nickname “Baffling Bobby” as a 14-year old Optimist league pitcher, a name slapped on him by legendary Des Moines Register sportswriter Sec Taylor as the scribe scoured the Iowa landscape for the next Bob Feller and wrote about up-and-coming prospects. The elder Hellman also was well known for a vast, extensive, even exhaustive, collection of baseball memorabilia.
In 2008 Bob Hellman Sr. started a nonprofit group, “Build Our Ballpark,” launching into ball diamond projects in Waterloo-Cedar Falls and beyond, including building and renovating ball diamonds in historically disadvantaged areas like the east side of Waterloo where he grew up. One of the first was Hellman Field near the Walter Cunningham School for Excellence in east Waterloo.
Build Our Ballpark has built or restored 59 playing fields in 13 communities and three states – 18 of which are in Waterloo.
Likewise, Bob Jr. was very involved in Little League in Atherton as a board member and a coach.
So it wasn’t a major-league leap for Bob Jr. and others in Atherton to come up with the idea of building a baseball facility in honor of its most famous and accomplished baseball citizen, Willie Mays.
And when Bob Jr. asked his dad and his Build our Ballpark nonprofit group to become involved, well… “Baffling Bobby” may have been a hurler, but his son’s request was like a hanging curveball out over the plate to a batter. Too good to lay off of.
Homer Field at Willie Mays Ballpark opened in 2015. Bob Sr. recalls the opening “in detail,” he wrote me the morning after Willie Mays’ passing.
"The ballpark was the result of five years of planning, design, (working through) community objections and fund raising,” Bob Sr. wrote. “The end result was a lovely facility complete with a grandstand covered roof,” with “donor plaques and all the amenities…spearheaded by Bob Hellman Jr. - his family living five houses from Mr. Mays.
“Our nonprofit Build Our Ballpark was asked to do the initial design and we were flattered and were invited to the grand opening,” Bob Sr. wrote. “The baseball fan in me was thrilled to be introduced to Willie but held back the obvious over-the-top enthusiasm. I was delighted to be in the company of this man.”
There was a speech by the president of the San Francisco Giants Baseball Club, Larry Baer. Mays was a special assistant to the Giants until his passing. The mayor of Atherton and Bob Hellman Jr. also spoke, with a game between two league teams capping off the day.
Willie Mays issued the following statement about the gesture:
"Baseball brings out the kid in all of us. And as Roy Campanella once said, 'You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little kid in you.' So, I am honored that Bob Hellman and our town of Atherton have honored me through this great gift to our kids. I urge youngsters just coming up to do what I always tried to do -- play the game of baseball with passion, respect, sportsmanship, and most of all, fun.
”With humility and gratitude,
Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid.”
Bob Sr. said of Mays, “When you read the many books written about this ‘greatest of them all’ — I have six in my library — and see in detail what he brought to the game and the joy he derived playing it, you get a glimpse of the once-in-a-lifetime experience I was given.”
Bob Sr. similarly gave the author of this article a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when he called on me to write the dedication plaque to Willie Mays for the ballpark.
I never met Willie Mays. Knowing “Baffling Bobby,” however, is pretty darn cool. He and his wife Betty have established the Hellman Family Fund through the Waterloo Community Foundation to benefit youth activities and facilities throughout the city. Information about that fund can be found here
As Willie Mays once said, “I just played every day and enjoyed what I was doing.” The same can be said of Bob Hellman Sr. And it apparently runs in the family.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Click on their links below to sample their work.
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I love good baseball stories, and this IS one!