The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (10 page)

As he was growing up, and feeling frustrated and saddened by his parents’ neglectful behavior, Ted could find no solace in his younger brother, Danny, who was a classic juvenile delinquent.

Daniel Arthur Williams was born July 20, 1920, almost two years after Ted. Danny was shorter than his brother, a shade under six feet, and darker.

To compensate for May and Sam’s indifference, Ted had baseball—and his surrogate fathers, who helped look out for him and whose authority he respected—as a touchstone. But Danny had an incorrigible bent that always challenged authority, and he had no singular talent or passion to fall back on.

Early on, Danny turned to shoplifting and petty crime. Once, he brazenly stole his mother’s prize cornet and hocked it at a pawnshop, only to have May spot it one day as she walked by the store. Before long, he took to carrying a gun or a knife
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and swiping candy and cigarettes. “Danny would steal stuff, and they’d put him in a juvenile home called Anthony Home,” Joe Villarino said. “He’d go in and out of there. Danny started smoking when he was six or seven years old. Ted and Danny, they didn’t get along too good. One time I was over there and Ted was running
away and Danny took a knife out of his pocket and threw it at him. Ted ducked around the door, and it missed him. Then I got the hell out of there.”
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By the time he was a teenager, Danny had become a fixture on the San Diego police blotter, and occasionally his name would appear in the paper for some caper or other, to May’s great shame. If he had a court date, he would ignore it and not show up. Once, Danny led San Diego police on a high-speed chase and ditched them—with his mother and cousin Teresa Cordero Contreras in the car with him. “One day Danny drove me and Aunt May to the grocery store,” Contreras said. “Pretty soon a cop came up behind him. He was going too fast, but instead of pulling over, he stepped on the gas and started leading the cop on a chase! He was trying to lose him, and he did. He just pulled into some garage and the cop passed by. I was so scared I couldn’t even think. May was saying ‘Stop, Danny, stop!’ ” When his father had the US Marshal’s job, Danny would sometimes commandeer his dad’s car for joyrides to Santa Barbara, its siren wailing. “They’d catch him and send him back to San Diego,” recalled Danny’s cousin John Cordero, chuckling.
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“I know he was a thorn in my mother’s side, always getting into scrapes,” recalled Ted. “Nothing really serious, but one jam after another—piling up traffic tickets, maybe stealing a bicycle, or owing money on a truck and trying to clear out without paying.… For me, respecting authority was no problem, not then or now. I never got into jams with the police or anything. But some guys have absolutely no respect for authority, and Danny was one of them.”
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Rod Luscomb once took a loaded gun from Danny and had to chase him out of the playground several times for shouting obscenities at young girls. “Ask any cop in San Diego who was the most notorious juvenile delinquent in the city, and I’ll bet you he names Danny,” Luscomb told
Time
in 1950.

Gradually, Danny’s crimes grew more serious and brazen. Once, when Ted brought home a new car, Danny stripped off its tires and sold them. In 1941, after Ted paid to renovate the Utah Street house, Danny stole all the new furniture and hocked it, prompting May to have him arrested.
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And according to Daniel Venzor and Manuel Herrera, when Danny was in his early twenties, he was charged with rape in Santa Barbara, but his lawyer got him off after convincing the judge that the evidence might have been tainted.

“My being in the public eye probably made it tougher for him,” Ted recalled. “He never had too many advantages. He never had the outlets
for expression I did. His life was just an existence.”
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Danny plainly resented his brother’s success and would do anything to get attention. Nevertheless, as the years went by and Ted’s fame grew, Danny would trade on his brother’s celebrity, using it to get free drinks at bars. And with pure chutzpah, he even sent a telegram directly to Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey asking for money.
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In 1940, Danny and Helen Mildred Hansen, a high school sweetheart he’d married, had a son named Daniel. Then, in February of 1942, with World War II on, Danny enlisted in the Army. This was a time when Ted, coming off his .406 season the previous year, had obtained a deferment as the sole supporter of their mother. But if Danny gained any measure of satisfaction from enlisting before Ted, the regimented military life didn’t suit him. He couldn’t take orders, and he frequently went AWOL to visit his wife and son.

By August of 1943, Danny had been dishonorably discharged, and his marriage was over.
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He barely got to know his son. In the late 1940s, Danny met a girl named Betty Jean Klein when she was a dirt-poor fifteen-year-old from Texas. Before long, they were married, and in 1950, they had a son, Samuel Stuart Williams, named after Danny’s father.

“My dad had a troubled life,” said Sam Williams, who works as the sports editor for a weekly newspaper in Northern California. “I think it was hard for him to live in Ted’s shadow. He had a pretty good temper, and that’s why he got into trouble, I think. If we did something he told us not to do, he was strict. Fathers were stricter back then. We would get spanked.”
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In 1951, a second son arrived. He was given the first name John and the middle name Theodore, after Ted. Growing up, the boy resisted being called Ted, but when people seemed to insist on referring to him that way he stopped fighting it. “The name’s haunted me all my life,” said Ted, the namesake nephew, now a graphic designer living in Oakland. “When I was younger I never talked about it, but finally gave in to it because that’s what people wanted to hear.”
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Danny found work as a commercial painter—
MY EXPERIENCE IS YOUR PROTECTION
, his business card said—and took his young family on the road, moving between San Diego, Chicago, and Texas, where his wife’s family lived. Ted thinks his father was trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors.

On the long drives across country, Danny would always keep his gun close by. “He strapped it to the steering column of the car. He said, ‘The
car is my house, and you’re allowed to carry a gun in your house.’ He had a casual respect for the law,” son Ted said, laughing. “He didn’t like rules. And he’d invoke Ted’s name whenever he got in trouble.”

Always short of cash, Danny kept causing problems. One day, he stole and sold a new television May had received from Ted. By the late ’50s, Danny had contracted leukemia, and his behavior grew even more erratic. On a visit to the family homestead in Santa Barbara, he even pulled a gun on May, apparently in a half-baked robbery attempt.

Salvador Herrera witnessed this: “I seen Danny pull a gun on his mother. He was dying of cancer, bone marrow. He was fuckin’ nuts. He wanted money and said, ‘Give me that goddamn purse.’ I couldn’t believe he pulled that fuckin’ gun out. May said, ‘Oh, praise Jesus! Praise Jesus!’ That was crazy shit. Danny was a fuckin’ gangster.”

Ted’s relationship with his brother was always distant, to say the least. When he was with the Red Sox and would send money home to his mother, Ted knew that she was giving much of it to Danny. Bobby Doerr recalled watching Ted read letters from his mother in the Fenway Park clubhouse: “I’d watch his face turn red. She’d be writing him and usually asking for money, and he knew the money was probably going to the brother.”

Ted also knew that while he had had mentors and others to help him in life, Danny didn’t. “I know Danny suffered because of it,” Ted wrote. “I have to think poor Danny had a tormented life.”

At the three public schools he attended—Garfield Elementary, Horace Mann Junior High, and Herbert Hoover High School—Ted was an indifferent student at best. He would carry his bat in to school with him and store it under his desk during the day.

Leila Dickinson Bowen taught for thirty-one years at Garfield Elementary, and in 1928 one of her fifth-grade students was ten-year-old Ted Williams. She knew him as Teddy. “He had those sharp elbows and he used them,” Bowen said. “He’d run out to the playground and shout ‘first ups!’ and if he didn’t get them, he’d take off his cap and throw it as hard as he could down on the ground. Then, he’d cry.… But, that quick, he’d break out in a smile. He was a good boy, never a discipline problem.”
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Another Garfield teacher told May Williams she thought Ted was underweight and not eating enough. May asked how that could be since she was giving her son thirty-five cents a day for lunch in the school cafeteria. A nurse investigated and determined that Ted was giving his money away to kids who couldn’t buy lunch for themselves.
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At Hoover, besides the usual subjects, Ted’s courses included the non–college track typing, print shop, wood shop, and one offering called simply “metal.” He compiled a grade point average of 2.06, and would have been below 2.0 but for phys ed.
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“I was a lousy student,” he wrote. “I always took subjects I wouldn’t have a lot of homework in. I took shop. I was lucky I didn’t cut my fingers off. I wish I had then the inquisitive mind I have now. I feel like I’ve missed so much, and I’m always hammering at myself trying to catch up.”
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Under his high school yearbook picture there was one word:
baseball
.

At print shop, where they learned how to set type on a press, Ted was best known as the class clown. He’d often drop a match in a metal trash can containing the flammable printing detritus, then run off laughing and whooping.

When Ted graduated from Hoover, in February of 1937, the principal gave him a prize for being one of the school’s best typists, along with his friend and Hoover classmate Bob Breitbard. “We did thirty-two words per minute without an error,” said Breitbard. “We thought we were hot stuff.”

Ted was a fan of Hoover’s principal, Floyd Johnson. Ted credited Johnson as an important influence. “He was a man of high principles and he’d tell me that I’d get out of life and baseball… just what I put into it. Well, I’ve tried to put everything into it.”
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Williams would stop by Johnson’s office regularly to talk about baseball and fishing. He’d relax and feel free to put his feet on the principal’s desk. Concluded Johnson: “This was not impudence on Ted’s part, because to him all folks on the campus were just the same—faculty, principal, or kids.”
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Ted’s junior high school included ninth grade, so when he entered Hoover—in February of 1934, on a staggered seasonal schedule—he was a tenth grader. A month earlier, baseball tryouts were held, and Ted’s performance that day must stand as one of the best of all time—indeed, the tale has been told thousands of times.

Les Cassie Jr. was there. He met Ted at the tryout, in fact: “This long, tall kid came in. We were just practicing in a big open area. Ted sat on the porch of the print shop, behind where we were working out. He was just finishing up the ninth grade, so he wasn’t eligible to come out for the varsity yet till he hit the tenth grade. That was going to be the next Monday. There must have been a hundred kids out there. Anyway, Ted yells over to our coach, Wos [Wofford] Caldwell, ‘Hey, Coach, let me hit!’ Finally, Caldwell, who was pitching, said, ‘All right, get up there and hit.’ ”

Williams wore three pairs of socks at the tryout to make his skinny legs look bigger, but once he swung the bat, all eyes turned from him to the sky.
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“Ted hit the first ball on top of the lunch arbor,” recalled Cassie. “That was a series of benches with a roof over it where kids ate lunch, behind the right-field fence. No one had ever hit a ball up there. Must have carried three hundred and fifty feet. He hit the next pitch over there, too. Back-to-back, twice. Caldwell said, ‘What’s your name, kid?’ Ted said, ‘My name’s Ted Williams, and I’ll be back here Monday.’ ”

Despite his splashy debut, Ted was not a regular in his first year; Caldwell apparently didn’t want to rush him. He only played in six games, getting six hits in eighteen at bats for a .333 average.
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That summer of 1934, and the following summer, Ted supplemented his relatively spare high school season with an extensive sandlot schedule, which served to vastly improve, and showcase, his game. He played American Legion ball for the Padre Serra Post team and for a variety of other clubs in county, independent, and semipro leagues, among them San Diego Market, Central, Walter Church Service Station, Cramer’s Bakery, and the North Park Merchants. The clubs played full schedules against each other, and some would also challenge Navy teams from whichever ship was docked in the San Diego harbor, such as the
Lexington
or the
Saratoga.
The Navy had plenty of equipment, of course, so Ted and his pals would usually pilfer extra balls and bats, with the tacit blessing of the fleet.
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“I remember my first home run,” Ted said. “Came against a guy named Hunt in a Sunday game at North Park. Just a poopy fly ball to center, but it made it over the fence. There I was, a little 15-year-old standing in against guys 25 to 30 and this guy could really throw hard. I could barely get the bat around on it, and I hit that homer.”
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The Sunday contests were intense and could draw hundreds of fans at various parks around town. Ted would usually get $3 a game, plus a couple of milk shakes and hamburgers afterward. Occasionally a team might spring for $25 to get a Pacific Coast League player who had an off day. In one Sunday game, Ted homered off Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander, who had retired in 1930 and become a boozy barnstormer on the semipro circuit.
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The teenager’s clutch hitting helped build his reputation. One of his sandlot managers, Travis Hatfield, recalled an instance when the team’s pitcher had to leave for military school after eight innings in a scoreless game. “So Ted pipes up, ‘Let him go, I’ll pitch the ninth.’ ” Hatfield said.
“Well, the other team gets a run off Ted and we came to bat, trailing by a run. Our first batter got out, second one got on and Ted had a chance to come up. The third batter went out and the fans started to leave. Ted looked up and waved them back to their seats. ‘It’s not over yet,’ Ted was yelling at them. And it wasn’t. He poked one out for a home run and we won, 2–1. Boy, did he have a big grin galloping around the bases.”
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