IN: Mays was born in 1931 in Westfield, Alabama. His father, Cat Mays, was a talented baseball player with the Negro team for the local iron plant. His mother, Annie Satterwhite, was a gifted basketball and track star in high school. His parents never married.

In May 1972, 41-year-old Mays was traded to the Mets for pitcher Charlie Williams and $50,000 ($292,522 today). At the time, the Giants franchise was losing money. Owner Horace Stoneham could not guarantee Mays a pension after retirement and the Mets offered Mays a coaching position upon his retirement.  Mays had remained popular in New York long after the Giants had left for San Francisco, and the trade was seen as a public relations coup for the Mets. Mets owner Joan Payson, who was a minority shareholder of the Giants when the team was in New York, had long desired to bring Mays back to his baseball roots and was instrumental in making the trade. In his Mets debut on a rainy Sunday afternoon at Shea Stadium on May 14, 1972, Mays put New York ahead to stay with a fifth-inning home run against Don Carrithers and his former team, the Giants. On August 16, 1973 of the following season, in a game against the Cincinnati Reds with Don Gullett on the mound, Mays hit a fourth inning solo home run over the right-center field fence. It was the 660th, and last, home run of his major league career.  Mays played a season and a half with the Mets before retiring; he appeared in 133 games. The Mets honored him on September 25, 1973, (Willie Mays Night) where he thanked the New York fans and said goodbye to baseball. He finished his career in the 1973 World Series, which the Mets lost to the Oakland Athletics in seven games. Mays got the first hit of the Series, but had only seven at-bats (with two hits). The final hit of his career came in Game 2, a key single to help the Mets win. He also fell down in the outfield during a play where he was hindered by the glare of the sun and by the hard outfield. Mays later said, "growing old is just a helpless hurt." His final at bat came on October 16, in Game 3 where he came in as a pinch hitter but grounded into a force play. Mays made his 20th and last All-Star appearance (20 seasons) and 24th All-Star Game appearance on July 24, 1973 when he was used as a pinch hitter.  In 1972 and 1973, Mays was the oldest regular position player in baseball. At age 42, he became the oldest position player to appear in a World Series game. Mays retired after the 1973 season with a lifetime batting average of .302 and 660 home runs. His lifetime total of 7,095 outfield putouts remains the major league record. Mays is the only major league player to have hit a home run in every inning from the 1st through the 16th innings. He finished his career with a record 22 extra-inning home runs.

is there any other interesting information

OUT: In 1972 and 1973, Mays was the oldest regular position player in baseball.


IN: Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, the only child of Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshine man. Butler's father died when she was seven, so Octavia was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in what she would later recall as a strict Baptist environment. Growing up in the racially integrated community of Pasadena allowed Butler to experience cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of racial segregation. She accompanied her mother to her cleaning work, where the two entered white people's houses through back doors, as workers.

Charlie Rose interviewed Octavia Butler in 2000 soon after the award of a MacArthur Fellowship. The highlights are probing questions that arise out of Butler's personal life narrative and her interest in becoming not only a writer, but a writer of science fiction. Rose asked, "What then is central to what you want to say about race?" Butler's response was, "Do I want to say something central about race? Aside from, 'Hey we're here!'?" This points to an essential claim for Butler that the world of science fiction is a world of possibilities, and although race is an innate element, it is embedded in the narrative, not forced upon it.  In an interview by Randall Kenan, Octavia E. Butler discusses how her life experiences as a child shaped most of her thinking. As a writer, Butler was able to use her writing as a vehicle to critique history under the lenses of feminism. In the interview, she discusses the research that had to be done in order to write her bestselling novel, Kindred. Most of it is based on visiting libraries as well as historic landmarks with respect to what she is investigating. Butler admits that she writes science fiction because she does not want her work to be labeled or used as a marketing tool. She wants the readers to be genuinely interested in her work and the story she provides, but at the same time she fears that people will not read her work because of the "science fiction" label that they have.  In an interview with Joshunda Sanders, Butler commented on the space race and its influence on her work. She noted, "I think of the space race as a way of having a nuclear war without having one." She the claimed that Ronald Reagan believed a nuclear war against the Soviet Union was winnable. Butler admitted to being very confused by this idea, and said that it contributed to her idea for the Xenogenesis books. She said "there must be something basic, something really genetically wrong with us if we're falling for this stuff." Butler then commented on how she felt a real fear about nuclear war during the Cold War and that these ideas had a real influence on some of her early works.  In an interview with Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating, for MELUS, Octavia Butler talked about how biology is used to keep groups of people out of power. She said, "What's made of biology is that the people who are in power are going to figure out why this is a good reason for them to stay in power. Look at the tests that show that women have better linguistic abilities: Yet, how many of our ambassadors are women? How many of the politicians are women? This is not looked at; instead, the argument goes that women don't have the mathematical abilities. . . every now and then. So we're much more likely now to be penalized for whatever we're assumed not to have. We're much more likely to find that whatever little genetic thing that's discovered is going to be used against us."  The issue of biology defining women and what they can and can't do has long been a part of feminism.

Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?

OUT:
Butler admits that she writes science fiction because she does not want her work to be labeled or used as a marketing tool.