Her need to visit home came when she saw a fishing charter boat, “Strictly Business, Biloxi, MS,” anchored in the Keys. She went looking for the boat owner and found Captain Mike Moore.
On Friday she was out on the water with Mike and Brandy Moore and their Biloxi Shrimping Trip charter. The rest of the week she’d spent giving people a little relief from the oil with a smile and a story.
She has plenty to tell. There’s the one of how she found Keith Thibodeaux, who played Little Ricky on “I Love Lucy,” appearing with a band at a church in Escatawpa. That tale made it to the National Inquirer.
She asked an Inquirer editor for the hardest job with the biggest payoff and earned $100,000 for being the one to get a photo of Pete Rose in a supermax prison in Illinois. She and a Nashville songwriter hid cameras in their sound speakers. She played a concert for the inmates, got Rose to agree to the photo while he was watching a Cincinnati Reds game on TV, and got out of the prison with the film.
The photograph was named Sports Illustrated Best of the Year and is still influencing her life. She has just been named the media expert for MPM Group, a team of prison security consultants.
Mays also writes for an entertainment magazine and appears on a local television channel in the Florida Keys promoting the area.
She headed back to Key West on Saturday, determined to help South Florida and South Mississippi through the oil crisis by promoting tourism in both areas. She’d like to see the cruise ships that now stop in the Caribbean come to the Keys instead, and she’s sure people who have homes in the Keys will want to visit Biloxi.
Mays said she will tell them, “These are the most charming people in all the world.
Go to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Go feel at home.”