The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (2 page)

T
he Kid appeared in the small room on the night of July 5, 2002. Video cameras rolled, and the flashbulbs popped—just as if he were making another star turn of the sort he had made so many times throughout his celebrated life.

About thirty people had anxiously awaited the arrival of Ted Williams—the great Teddy Ballgame himself: American icon, last of the .400 hitters, war hero, world-class fisherman, perfectionist, enfant terrible. Yet this was no press conference, no card show, no charity event or meet and greet, where Ted would wave and say a few words to the faithful.

For he was dead, after all. Quite dead.

Williams had passed away some twelve hours earlier in Florida, at the age of eighty-three, and then been secretly flown on a small chartered jet to Scottsdale, Arizona, outside Phoenix. There his body had been loaded onto an ambulance and taken, in a motorcade, to the place where this small crowd awaited him, in an operating room at a company called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, located just a mile from the Scottsdale airport.

Alcor was then, and remains today, the leading practitioner of cryonics, a fringe movement that freezes people after they die in the hope that medical technology will someday advance to the point where it will be possible to stop or reverse the aging process and cure now-incurable diseases. At that point, cryonics—not to be confused with cryogenics, the mainstream science that studies how various materials react to extremely low temperatures—aspires to thaw out its frozen charges and bring them back to life. Alcor froze its first “patient,” as it calls its customers, in 1976. By the time Ted arrived, twenty-six years later, the group said it had frozen forty-nine people and had 590 living “members”—those who’d signed up to undergo the procedure when they die and who paid $400 in annual dues in the meantime, while they waited.

On Alcor’s macabre menu, people have two basic options. The first is
called a whole-body procedure, in which the entire body is frozen. The second is known as the neuro, in which only the head is frozen and preserved after being severed from the torso, which is then cremated or buried. A third variation provides for freezing both the torso and the head separately. Alcor stores both the bodies and the heads in huge, Thermos bottle–like tanks known as Dewars, which are filled with liquid nitrogen cooled to minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 2002, the whole-body procedure cost $120,000, the neuro $50,000. Among cryonicists, the neuro was becoming the preferred option. It was cheaper, for one thing, though Alcor liked to say that both procedures were easily affordable through life insurance. Most important for Alcorians, the head contains the brain, which they consider by far the most important organ in the body because it holds the memory. When the patient comes back to life, or is “reanimated,” in cryospeak, he (the believers are overwhelmingly male) will want to remember from whence he came. Furthermore, the brain is the hardest organ to replace. With stem cell research and other advances on the horizon, it will be possible to regenerate tissue, and therefore simply grow a new body beneath your old head. Or so the hope goes.

Inside the Alcor operating room, it took five or six people to lift Ted out of the Ziegler case—the airtight metal container that airlines require for shipping bodies—in which he’d arrived. Under instructions from Alcor, a Florida mortician had filled the box with ice, a cryonics staple applied to the body immediately after death in order to keep it as cool as possible and to help preserve vital organs.

Ted’s body was placed on the operating table, faceup. Attendants quickly pressed fresh bags of ice against his skin, especially around the head, neck, and groin. The table was surrounded by a custom-made six-inch-high white plastic wall to contain the ice and to keep excess fluids from spilling onto the floor during the upcoming operation, which would last about four hours. Technicians then began connecting the major blood vessels to a perfusion machine, which would replace the blood with so-called cryoprotectant solutions. These chemicals, similar to antifreeze, were designed to help prevent the formation of ice crystals, which could cause further cell damage before the intense cooling process could begin.

The Alcor staff then started to drain blood and water from Ted’s body in what Alcor called a washout, replacing them with glycerol and another cryoprotectant known as B2C, which was used for the head only. Then, using a perforator, a standard neurological tool that looks like an electric
drill, a surgeon and his assistant bored two small holes on either side of Ted’s skull so that the surface of the brain could be examined during the perfusion process to guard against swelling. Small wire sensors were inserted into each hole to be used to detect cracking of the skull during the freezing process later.

A green-and-white tube popped out of the perfusion machine, disrupting the washout process and causing “lots” of Williams’s blood to surge over the protective plastic wall on the operating table and spill onto the floor, according to the OR notes, which were taken in an informal style by the lay girlfriend of one of the Alcorians.
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About forty-five minutes later, the surgeon “shut down some tube accidentally” on the machine, and the pressure ratcheted up too quickly, the notes reported, causing the mix of blood and chemicals to pump through Ted’s system at too high, and then at too low, a level. An “enormous amount of arterial leakage,” with blood flowing from Williams’s left eye, was also noted.
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Soon the surgeon announced that he was ready to perform the “cephalic isolation.” This meant Ted Williams’s head was now ready to be cut off. The surgeon took out a carving knife and began to cut—starting below Ted’s neck, slicing through tissue and bone, working his way down through the sixth cervical vertebra, at the top of the spine. At one point, the going slow, the surgeon remarked that he wished he had an electric knife. Finally, he switched to a bone saw to finish the job, and at 9:17 p.m. mountain time, the head of the greatest hitter who ever lived had been sliced off.

After Ted’s head was severed, it was put into a small plastic container and taken to an adjoining room known as the “neuro cool-down area.” There it was placed into a small Dewar connected to a larger Dewar filled with liquid nitrogen. The larger Dewar then began pumping nitrogen gas cooled to minus 202 degrees at a high velocity into the smaller Dewar containing Ted’s head. This went on for about three hours. The goal was to cool all parts of the head below the glass transition temperature, minus 191 degrees, as quickly as possible, after which it would be vitrified, or reach an ice-free state.

Over the next two weeks, a head would normally be placed in a cylindrical tank known as an LR-40 and gradually cooled further, to minus 321 degrees, the temperature at which it would be deemed fit for permanent storage. But in this case, the Alcorians chose to put Ted’s head inside what they called their Cryostar, an intermediate cooling facility
where heads were sometimes stored during the freezing process. The Cryostar was supposed to limit the cracking of the brain that normally occurred as the head was frozen, but the machine was malfunctioning, causing its temperature to fluctuate. As a result, Ted’s brain may have been subjected to more cracking, not less.

The procedure took more than three hours to complete. Ted’s torso was taken to what Alcor called its whole-body cooling bath, a large, thermally insulated rectangular box filled with silicone oil cooled by dry ice. Two drums of oil were at the foot of the bath, connected by a pipe. The torso was wrapped in protective plastic and strapped to a wire-mesh stretcher before being lowered into the oil bath. A lid was placed over the bath, and a pump circulated the oil amid chunks of dry ice, cooling the torso to minus 110 degrees at a rate of 32 degrees per minute. Then Ted’s body was removed and deposited in a large Dewar, where, like his head, it would be cooled further over a period of two weeks.

Each Dewar is ten feet tall, a little more than three feet in diameter, and weighs about 5,400 pounds when full. The capacity is four bodies and five heads. The bodies are wrapped in insulated bags and put inside an aluminum container called a pod. Four pods ring the inside circumference of a Dewar, and in the middle is the “neuro column,” which consists of five large cans about the size of lobster pots, each resting on a shelf, one on top of the other. Each can contains a head.

An eyebolt is screwed into the bone below the neck to make it easier to handle the head when necessary. The heads lie upside down, resting on a can of Bumble Bee tuna, or if a head is larger than normal, perhaps a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. “They wanted the heads resting on something, not just setting at the bottom of the stockpot,” said Cindy Felix, a former facilities operations manager at Alcor. “It’s amazing some of the things they did. They were so high-tech in some areas but almost medieval in others—like the tuna can.”
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Whole bodies, those with the heads still attached, hang in the Dewars upside down. “We protected the head by putting it at the bottom, so that the last thing to be uncovered and thawed in the worst-case scenario is the brain, because we care about the identity and the personality, and most of that is encoded in the brain,” said Tanya Jones, then Alcor’s chief operating officer.
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After Ted’s long procedure was over, the Alcorians were tired but jubilant. Here was the celebrity who could transform cryonics and give it some legitimacy, the kind of boost Walt Disney’s preservation might
have given the movement—had it actually happened and not merely been urban legend.

Of course, for the moment, at least, the company couldn’t say anything because of patient confidentiality rules. And John-Henry Williams, Ted’s son, was keeping them to that. Holding a sweeping power of attorney and health proxy for his father, John-Henry, thirty-three, had become a cryonics disciple. He’d been in secret talks with Alcor for more than a year about freezing Ted when the time came and had given the company strict instructions not to tell anyone his father was there. Alcor executives hoped they could eventually persuade John-Henry to let them go public—perhaps in return for a price concession. Meanwhile, Ted—his head now in a pot, his torso in a pod—settled in to await what would be his greatest comeback ever.

The fundamental question of whether Williams wanted his body to be in the place it now was—an Arizona cryonics facility—and decapitated, at that, was very much in doubt. He had never submitted an application to Alcor or signed up for the cryonics procedure himself, as is standard practice among the facility’s other clients. John-Henry had only faxed Alcor a completed application on his father’s behalf about six hours after Ted was pronounced dead. Moreover, Ted’s will, last revised in 1996, had specified that he wanted to be cremated, not frozen, and he had told scores of friends and associates over the years, at least one as late as 2002, that his wishes were to have his ashes scattered off the Florida Keys, where he had fished for years, along with the ashes of his beloved dog, a Dalmatian named Slugger, who had died in 1999.

John-Henry knew that Ted’s will specified he wished to be cremated, and he also knew that his half sister, Bobby-Jo Williams Ferrell, was vehemently against the idea of her father being frozen. She had told John-Henry so directly when he asked her to consider cryonics for Ted a year before. Bobby-Jo had also notified Alcor by e-mail on the day Williams died, when his body was still in Florida, that she opposed the procedure.

The preparation of Ted’s 1996 will, which was a revision of earlier drafts he had made over the years, was overseen by Eric Abel, a Williams family attorney. John-Henry had confided in Abel about his plans to freeze Ted several years before his death, and Abel had advised him on the issue. Abel said he counseled John-Henry that because of Ted’s stated preference for cremation in his will, it would be prudent for John-Henry to get something in writing from his father, preferably notarized, saying
that he now wanted to be cryonically preserved. But after Ted died and his body was flown to Alcor, Abel said he didn’t know if John-Henry had obtained such a statement, nor did he ask him if he had.
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Besides facing opposition from Bobby-Jo on freezing Ted, John-Henry also encountered resistance from his younger sister, Claudia Williams. But Claudia said she gradually came around to the idea, and that while their father was initially dismissive of cryonics, she and John-Henry were able to convince him and gain his approval in November of 2000 during a private meeting in Ted’s hospital room, shortly before he had a pacemaker installed to boost his failing heart. Claudia and her brother also felt they could dispose of his body as they saw fit. “As far as I was concerned, our father had died, and John-Henry and I could do whatever we wanted with our father,” she said.
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Having no idea Williams had been frozen, his many fans were left to ponder the Kid’s legacy: his magnificent .406 mark in 1941, achieved on the last day of the season, when Ted, in perhaps the defining moment of his career, declined the invitation of his manager to sit out the final day of the year to protect his .39955 average, which would have been rounded to .400, and proceeded to go 6–8 playing both games of a doubleheader; and his consistent flair for delivering other dramatic moments—such as winning the 1941 All-Star Game for the American League with a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth inning, surviving a fiery crash landing in his jet after getting shot down by enemy gunfire in Korea, and hitting a home run on his last time at bat in 1960. They remembered Williams as the driven perfectionist; his swagger, style, and panache in the batter’s box—a shade under six foot four, skinny and loose, hips swaying back and forth, bat cocked close to his body, hands grinding, then unleashing, at the last possible second, his perfect, slightly uppercut swing—and the what-ifs of how much grander his final numbers would have been had he not lost nearly five seasons in his prime fighting two wars, tempered by the realization that serving in the wars had also enhanced his legacy immeasurably. And they recalled the way he loped around the bases in his distinctive home-run trot, head always tucked way down; the way his explosive, often dark persona regularly made more news than his exploits on the field as he feuded with, gestured toward, and spat at a small faction of fans who delighted in taunting him and as he carried on a running war with the sportswriters who, he felt, had pried unjustifiably into his life and knocked him unfairly; and how despite such crude outbursts, Williams consistently
demonstrated a basic sense of generosity and kindness, especially through his work for the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer, for which he raised millions of dollars over the years.