The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (35 page)

Asked by Egan why he chose aviation, Ted quipped, “Hell, I’ve been up in the air for three years. Now I’m beginning to like it!” And why
the Navy as opposed to the Army? “Haw! My girl thinks I look sweet in navy blue.”
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At 6:10 p.m. that evening, Navy officials announced to the rest of the press that Ted Williams had enlisted in the Navy as a seaman second class. It was unclear when he’d have to go in, but he was promised nothing and asked for no favors. “I just want to be in this thing,” he said. When someone asked why he’d chosen a branch of the service that could lead to combat, Ted replied, “I like to hit!”

Though everyone knew his eyesight was exceptional, Williams told the writers he’d fretted that a childhood injury he’d sustained to his right eyeball while swatting walnuts with his brother, Danny, might somehow have caused him to fail the eye exam. But the Navy doctors found his eyesight to be twenty-fifteen. That meant that “a certain letter which the average man can read at a maximum of 20 feet, Ted can read at 30 to 35 feet,” explained Lieutenant Frank R. Philbrook in briefing the press on Ted’s examinations. He said that of Naval aviation applicants Williams’s age, only four or five out of one hundred had eyesight that acute, and he added that Williams’s depth perception was unusually good—a significant attribute for a pilot.

Ted’s blood pressure, pulse rate, and reflexes were all excellent. And “his nerves are very steady,” Philbrook reported.
^*

Though Williams was found to have been well above normal for a high school graduate in aptitude and mechanical tests, Ted said he was worried about that part of the equation. “Like a lot of other kids, I didn’t take the right kind of courses in high school,” he remarked. “Didn’t take the right kind of math or nothing.”

Although Ted was making $30,000 per year with the Red Sox, he would be making only $105 a month from the Navy during training and $245 a month when he was commissioned. Still, Williams pronounced himself “tickled to death to be in this thing.… The minute I got in the cockpit of that plane in Squantum, I knew what I wanted.” Then he added, softly, “I’ve tried to do the right thing from the start. I didn’t want to be pushed into anything by anybody. I knew I was right all the time. Then this thing came along. It was just what I wanted.… All I want is to get into it and do my best to throw a few curves at the enemy.… I’d like to get into one of those big bombers and lay a few eggs just for the thrill of it before it’s over.”
³⁶

Doris Soule surfaced in the next day’s
American
to praise her man. “I’m very proud of Ted,” she said, “but I’m also frightened. I hope he will be safe, and I hope the war will be over before he gets a chance to fight.” She denied reports she and the Kid were about to wed before he went off to war. She said they were not even engaged, and besides, the Navy did not allow its aviators to marry until they were commissioned. While Ted enlisted, Doris did her bit by donating blood to the Red Cross.

The enlistment was breathlessly hailed in the papers. Jerry Nason of the
Globe
wrote that Ted had now “batted 1000 as an American.” Austen Lake of the
American
said Ted had “stood up to the measure of American manhood.” And Colonel Egan, no doubt grateful for his scoop, also pronounced Ted a man, and he added: “Here’s a prediction about Williams. He’ll survive whatever hazards and whatever adventures may lie ahead, however long the war may last, for he was originally constructed to ride out all the storms of life. Then he’ll come back into baseball, even more of a man. And then he’ll become the greatest figure that the game has ever known, which includes a guy by the name of Ruth.”

Before long, Williams made an arrangement with the Navy that would ensure he could finish out the season: he signed up for an indoctrination course in math, physics, and navigation. The class of 250 men met for four hours three nights a week at Mechanic Arts High School in Boston. Johnny Pesky, who had followed Ted’s lead in deciding to enlist, also attended. The first night, Lieutenant F. T. Donahue surprised Ted by inviting him to come up and address his classmates.

“I only hope I prove myself worthy to go through with you,” Ted told the group. “I give you my word I’ll do my best.”
³⁷

By June, the United States had decisively won the Battle of Midway in what would later be viewed as the most significant Naval engagement in the war against the Japanese. Tokyo lost four aircraft carriers and a heavy cruiser, and America began to assert its strategic superiority in the Pacific. Williams read of the exploits of Navy and Marine aviators, some of whom would soon be serving as his instructors.
³⁸

Ted’s enlistment, on his own terms and played out to boffo reviews in the papers, had short-circuited whatever isolated fan bleatings that remained over his 3A status, so any fans who wanted to razz the Kid now had to revert to garden-variety heckling over a misplayed ball, an 0–4 day, or some other demonstrable imperfection. Still, that was often sufficient to get a rise out of the hypersensitive and still immature
Williams. The “wolves,” as Ted liked to call those fans who baited him from the nearby left-field grandstands at Fenway, seemed especially ready to engage him during a doubleheader on July 1 against the Washington Senators, and he gave them every reason to. The day had begun innocently enough, and Ted seemed in good spirits, chatting with the
Globe
’s Gerry Moore about the effects of twilight and night baseball on hitting. He’d gone 1–3 in the first game and made a nice running catch, contributing to a 3–2 Red Sox win.

But in the first inning of the second game, Stan Spence of the Senators blooped a hit into short left between Pesky, the shortstop, and Williams. A heckler called out from the left-field stands: “Why don’t you get off that dime, Ted?”
³⁹
Frosted, Williams glowered at the fan. As the game progressed, his mood grew darker. He seemed to be sulking and going through the motions. By his second time at bat, it “became noticeable he wasn’t giving his best,” Jack Malaney wrote in the
Post.
After he flied out to center, Ted flung his bat high in the air as he trotted down to first and was booed as he veered back to the dugout after the catch.

His next time up, with runners on first and second, Williams took two strikes right down the middle without even moving his bat. It looked like he intended to take three and sit down to make some kind of perverse protest against fan hazing. Then he intentionally fouled a pitch off in the general direction of the wolves in left. On the fourth pitch, he swung in a lazy, half-baked manner, as if intending to flick another foul at his tormentors, but the ball took off to deep left-center. Surprised, Williams jogged down toward first base and then into second, eschewing a possible triple if he’d run hard. Both runners scored. When Bobby Doerr singled, Ted moved leisurely over to third, then scored on a fielder’s choice as the crowd hooted him with a full-throated jeer. When he reached the dugout, Joe Cronin was in his face: “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to play? Get out of here, then!” And he waved his star into the clubhouse.

It was the third time in his short career that Ted had been pulled from a game by Cronin for one transgression or another, but this was the first time he’d actually appeared disinterested at the plate. This time, Williams knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on and berated himself for being a fool as he dressed. He left before the game was finished. The next day, Cronin fined him $250, and Ted fell on his sword.

“I know it was all my fault and Joe did the right thing in taking me out of the game,” Williams told the writers. “I’m just thick-headed
enough, screwy enough and childish enough to let those wolves in left field get under my skin. Some day I’m going to bring 25 pounds of raw hamburger out there and invite those wolves down to enjoy it.… I guess I was just kind of unconscious out there yesterday. I was too lackadaisical. I was going to take three strikes right down the gut. Then I decided I’d try and hit a few line drives at those wolves in left field. I was probably the most surprised guy in the park when I looked up and saw I had hit the fence.”

Williams, as was his wont, took umbrage at almost any criticism, especially if he was performing well. Despite all the distractions of the draft controversy, Ted was hitting .336, and he noted that he was leading the league with 17 home runs and 75 RBIs. “What do they want?” he demanded. It was a question from the individual’s prism, not the team’s. The Red Sox had now won twenty-one of their last twenty-six to draw within three games of the Yankees, from nine and a half in mid-June. And New York was about to come to Fenway for a big three-game series.

The Yankees won two of the three games, and the Red Sox then faded, finishing a distant second to New York. In their end-of-the-year meditations on the season, some of the writers concluded that the early July series was pivotal and blamed Williams’s self-indulgence for striking a discordant note at just the wrong time.

Indeed, his selfish and petulant display made it easy for some of the writers who had just sung Ted’s praises for enlisting in the Navy to jump off his bandwagon. The Colonel flogged him, saying: “He’s not a Splendid Splinter. He’s just a splinter.” Egan suggested that Ted reconsider his decision to be a Naval aviator and become a commando instead, for “he is a born saboteur.”
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In the end, Williams put up phenomenal numbers—an average of .356, with 36 homers and 137 RBIs—and won the Triple Crown. But the writers voted to give the Most Valuable Player award to Yankees second baseman Joe Gordon, whose statistics paled by comparison: Gordon had batted .322, hit 18 home runs, and knocked in 103. Gordon was given 270 total points to Williams’s 249, and was first on 12 of 24 ballots compared to Ted’s 9 of 24. The
Globe
’s Harold Kaese concluded that Ted had lost on “character, disposition, loyalty, and effort.”
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The announcement came in early November, as Williams was preparing to go off to war. One final piece of business he took care of was to take out a $10,000 life insurance policy in which he named his mother as
his beneficiary.
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His first assignment would be a stint in the Navy’s V-5 Civilian Pilot Training Program at Amherst College, in western Massachusetts.

Ted knew he’d be passed over in the MVP balloting by the writers, who mostly detested him, but he was gracious in defeat. “I was glad Gordon got it,” he said. “I really think he kept the Yankees up there. Yeah, I wanted it, but I knew I wasn’t going to get it, and got it out of my mind.… There’s a bigger game to think about now.”

I
n the service, Williams did not want to get by on, or trade on, his celebrity. Now that he’d started his commitment, he actually looked forward to the challenge of establishing his military bona fides out of the spotlight, on his own merits. So he was more than a bit chagrined by the fact that the first impression he created when officially reporting for duty in the Navy at Amherst College was that of a puerile personality looking for special attention and treatment.

He had taken a trip to Chicago and arrived back in Boston by train at 3:00 a.m. on November 16. Breakfasting several hours later at the Shelton Hotel, Ted chanced to meet old friend Hugh Duffy, his .400 mentor.

Duffy, who also resided at the Shelton, was surprised to see Ted, assuming that he’d already left for Amherst. Williams said he wasn’t due there until two o’clock that afternoon, “Eastern War Time.” Further conversation made it apparent that Ted was under the mistaken impression that Amherst was merely a suburb of Boston, not a full ninety miles west of the city. Duffy volunteered to explore train connections from Boston to Springfield, some twenty-five miles from the rustic college town, or to Pittsfield, even farther west, but returned with the news that no connections could come close to getting Williams to his final destination by 2:00 p.m. So while Ted feverishly packed his bags, Duffy arranged for a limousine that could reach Amherst by the appointed hour.
¹

Most of the twenty-nine other Naval Aviation Cadets enrolled in the Civilian Pilot Training Program at Amherst had made far more modest arrivals, via train or bus. Now here was Williams, pulling up in a limo,
as if wishing to underscore the fact that he had just won the American League Triple Crown and hit .406 the year before that. Immediately placed on the defensive, Ted waved off various wiseacres who asked about his choice of transport with a mea culpa about not having known where Amherst was, exactly, and having to get there posthaste. Then he quickly set about the process of becoming one of the boys. He was assigned a room in one of the dorms, Genung House, with Joe Coleman, a rookie pitcher for the Athletics. Three other major leaguers were also in residence: Johnny Sain and Buddy Gremp of the Braves and Ted’s Red Sox teammate Johnny Pesky. (Pesky was officially listed in Navy records under his true name, John M. Paveskovich.)

The Civilian Pilot Training Program had been launched in early 1939 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the goal of providing pilot training to twenty thousand college students a year. The program was designed to provide a shot in the arm for civilian aviation, with the understanding that it would have a military application as well.

In the run-up to World War II, it became clear to the various branches of the US military that its ability to fight a two-front war would be severely limited by a shortage of pilots and training aircraft. Italy and Nazi Germany had already started similar programs and generated thousands of pilots for their war machines, so the military effectively co-opted the Civilian Pilot Training Program and facilitated its graduates’ entry as pilots in the Army Air Forces, Navy, and Marine Corps. At its height, the program was operating in 1,132 colleges and 1,460 flight schools.

At Amherst, besides the thirty V-5 cadets, there were also fifteen members of the Army Air Forces’ enlisted reserve on campus. The small college, known for its prep school–educated undergraduates, was starting its third year running the eight-week program. There was classroom instruction in math, physics, navigation, meteorology, and the like, as well as a rigorous program of physical training, swimming, and scaling the obstacles and barriers of a commando course. Flying lessons were conducted eighteen miles down the road, at the airport in Turners Falls.

The programs amounted to a proving ground for the students. In the case of the Naval cadets, if they passed muster at Amherst, they would be sent on to preflight school in North Carolina to continue their training and, at that point, officially deemed to be in the Navy. If they washed out, they would be sent back to their draft boards for induction into another service branch. For now, the cadets wore service-neutral generically tailored forest-green uniforms. (A request from Ted for a better fit went unheeded.)

There was considerable curiosity in Boston and beyond about how the Kid was faring in the Armed Forces, so officials at Amherst agreed to set aside December 1 as a day when newspapermen could come out and observe an entire day of the training regimen.

Reveille for the cadets was at 6:45, after which they had ten minutes to dress, wash, shave, and get to breakfast. Then they returned to make their beds and clean their rooms. By 8:00 a.m. they were in the gym for calisthenics, followed by maneuvers on the commando course and then swimming.

“It’s great here and I’m really crazy about every bit of it,” Ted declared to the assembled reporters. “I’ll admit I dreaded coming here because I never have had to take orders before and always did as I pleased, came and went as I wanted to and lived my own life. But I’m really stuck on it all, and I think you know me well enough to know that I’d say so if I didn’t like it.”

Ted’s instructors all sang his praises to the writers: he was eager to learn and expected no favors. “Ted Williams has the making of a super pilot,” said Ensign John C. Edgren, adding that the famed Williams temper had so far been a nonissue.
²
“On the contrary, his conduct has been exemplary. Frankly, his superiors are amazed at his attitude. He has been working like a Trojan ever since he reported.”

He had six hours of flying to his credit up to that point and was preparing to make his first solo run in a few days. “I was fighting the training ship the first few times I was given the controls,” Ted said, “but now I’m handling them instinctively.”

Swimming was another matter. Sure, he’d grown up on the water in San Diego, but he revealed to the writers that he’d been afraid to go the beach because he was so skinny. He could swim, but he couldn’t do the breast stroke, which the Navy insisted on so that the cadets could always see what was going on around them in the case of a mishap at sea.

Johnny Pesky did his part to cement the emerging Williams-is-adapting-well story line: “Why Ted is going after this flying stuff as hot and heavy as he did about hitting,” the shortstop said as number 9 stood nearby, listening.

“Well, I’m not getting .400 in this flying course yet, but I’m going to do it,” Williams replied. “Flying is the last thing I’m worrying about. It’s a cinch if you just keep thinking and applying yourself. I like it so much that I’d quit baseball for it.” That was it—the writers had their story:
WILLIAMS WOULD QUIT BASEBALL TO FLY PLANES
read the headline in the
Record
over the Associated Press story describing the day at Amherst.

Both the brass and the writers knew Ted was humoring them and merely ingratiating himself with the Navy. (In the next breath, he said the reason he was rooming with young Joe Coleman of the Athletics was “so I can find out what he’s got. I’ll probably have to hit against him some day.”) But never mind. He’d said he might quit the big leagues to become a pilot, so the writers went with it.

Far more demanding than flying was the classroom work, especially math: “Pesky and I, and I guess the rest of the ballplayers here, have grown very rusty about our math because, no doubt, we have been out of school much longer than the rest of the class.… Therefore I crack that math book every time I get the chance. You have to know what mathematics are all about to be a Navy flier.”

In fact, Pesky was having problems on several fronts. He was struggling in the classroom, couldn’t swim a lick, and had great difficulty flying.
³
The first time he took off, he’d hit the right rudder so hard that the plane almost veered into a lake. The first time he landed, the plane struck the ground with such force that he’d popped up and slammed his head on the roof of the cockpit. Pesky “flew an airplane like he had stone arms,” Ted wrote in his book. “One time at Amherst on a real windy day, we were flying Cubs. If you hold a Cub too tight, the wind blows you off the runway. You have to crab, or you have to slip. Poor John lines up the runway and,
whoosh,
the wind blows him away. Around he goes. He tries again and the wind takes him again. He made eight approaches that day. It looked like they were going to have to shoot him down.”
⁴

Although flying came a lot easier to Williams, he stumbled, too. Once, he was buzzing a bit low over the Connecticut River: “Two of us were flying Cubs and I didn’t see some power lines across the river—we were flying upriver—and I just barely cleared at the last second.”
⁵
Summing up the experience, he said, “I damn near killed myself.”

In their dispatches from Amherst, the writers noted two other things about the military Williams: as part of his uniform, he was required to wear a necktie, which he’d always shunned. He said it had taken him a while to get used to it, but now it didn’t bother him a bit. And the military requirement that he address his superiors as “sir” was becoming so routine that Ted even extended the greeting to some of the reporters. “It was odd for a scribe who had traveled with him since he joined the Sox to hear Ted say, ‘It has been nice seeing you again, SIR,’ as happened at Amherst,” wrote Jack Malaney in the
Sporting News.
⁶

Dr. Warren K. Green, a Harvard-educated astronomy professor who
was in charge of Amherst’s pilot program, said after the press session that there would not be another. “That was the only day we’ll exploit him,” Green said of Williams. “He’s a Naval Aviation Cadet now, not a ballplayer.… He’s a great boy, and I predict he’ll be just as great a flier as he was a batter.”
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Williams plunged into his daily routine and into campus doings. He enjoyed being around students, and even took time to learn the Amherst fight songs. The Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) based at nearby Smith College were a nice bonus. He had a quick, inquisitive mind, and enjoyed stretching it to absorb heretofore foreign concepts, such as celestial navigation. Pesky, for one, marveled at Ted’s learning style. “The guy’s perception was uncanny. He mastered complex problems in 15 minutes which took the average cadet an hour.”
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He so wanted to immerse himself in service life, and to be treated like everyone else, that he spurned an invitation to attend the annual dinner of the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in January.
^*

One day, Ted’s zeal for the task at hand landed him in sick bay. During a competition to see who could do the most chin-ups and push-ups, and to determine who could swim the fastest, Ted came up with a hernia. He had to go to the Chelsea Naval Hospital, outside Boston, for an operation and convalesce until March before he could rejoin his class at its next stop—the Navy Pre-Flight School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

“I’ll never forget getting off the train in Chapel Hill, just at dusk, and marching up in front of the administration building with the other recruits,” Ted remembered. “The cadets already there were hanging out the windows watching us, and as we passed, one guy hollered, ‘OK Williams, we know you’re there, and
you’re going to be sor-ry.
’ I never was sorry. All of it was absolutely different from anything I’d ever been through, and even the hairiest times were interesting.”
⁹

Among the cadets at Chapel Hill then was a future president of the United States: George Herbert Walker Bush. Bush and Williams met only briefly at the time but would become friends later in life. “I was there in the First Battalion,” said Bush, who while attending prep school at Phillips Andover Academy, outside Boston, had loved to go in to
Fenway Park to watch Ted. “Everybody was excited that the big hero was coming.”
¹⁰

The Navy Pre-Flight School had nothing to do with flight. If the physical regimen at Amherst—calisthenics, swimming, and the commando course—had been rigorous, the drill at Chapel Hill was akin to an all-sports marathon designed to build physical and mental stamina. “They really ran us through the wringer there—up by the light of the moon, double time all day, and to bed with the owls,” Pesky told columnist Austen Lake in 1952.
¹¹
“Drill till your tongue bulged.… Sports, hikes, inspections, fatigue. We played all games to test us for versatility—boxing, football, wrestling, swimming, soccer and baseball. The object was to find if we had a nerve cracking point. Some did! A lot of guys, knowing Ted’s reputation as a pop-off, waited for him to explode. But he never blew any fuses or got a single bad behavior demerit. If anything, he took a little stiffer discipline than the others, sort of stuff like, ‘Oh, you’re the great Ted Williams, huh? OK, Mister.’ Ted took it all.”

Williams enjoyed the novelty of trying different sports, especially boxing. He’d always been a fight buff and admired the toughness and courage of boxers. Now he tried his hand in the ring himself, and the instructor, Lieutenant Al Wolff, thought him skilled and polished. Along with Pesky and the other major leaguers from Amherst, Ted of course joined the Chapel Hill baseball team, the Cloudbusters. Later that summer, the mayor of Boston, Maurice Tobin, prevailed upon the Navy to spring Ted from Chapel Hill for a few days so that he could join a group of service All-Stars on July 12 for an exhibition game against the Boston Braves at Fenway Park. The game would support Tobin’s annual charity drive benefiting impoverished children. And a featured attraction, generating more interest than the game itself, was to be a hitting contest between Ted and Babe Ruth. It was the first time the Kid and the Babe had ever met or appeared together. Ruth had a soft spot for Boston because he’d broken in with the Red Sox in 1914 and retired with the Braves in 1935.