The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (37 page)

A year into Ted’s service, there was still considerable interest, especially in Boston, as to how he was faring in the Navy. So four days before Christmas, Huck Finnegan of the
American
arrived in Pensacola to begin work on what would turn into no less than a thirteen-part series starting in early January. Though Finnegan would later become a harsh Williams critic, he was then a reliable supporter to whom the Kid felt comfortable unburdening himself.

It had snowed in Pensacola that December for the first time in forty-four years, and there was still a chill in the air when Finnegan arrived at Saufley Field, twelve miles from Main Side, where Ted was now working on formation flying. At one point, three young men in advanced flight training with Ted were killed in a landing mishap. “They tried some sort of hotshot landing,” Williams recalled years later. “They went in and they were all killed. They were great guys. Young guys.”
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Ted was also being exposed to “pressure chamber” tests. That involved going up to eighteen thousand feet without oxygen and forty thousand feet with it to see if he experienced sinus trouble or “the bends.” Williams later confided to Johnny Pesky that on one test run, he’d blacked out at seventeen thousand feet, and his plane had gone into a dive for fifteen thousand feet before he regained consciousness and pulled it back up at treetop level. The incident didn’t make the papers until Pesky casually mentioned it to a writer years later.
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Williams was friendly and outgoing to Finnegan. Though still wary of calling attention to himself, he seemed eager to have a visitor and was
hungry for news about Boston and the Red Sox, so it wasn’t difficult for Finnegan to get his subject in a talkative mood.

“Gee, I miss baseball,” Ted began, his earlier professed flirtation with a career in flying now formally withdrawn. “You know, I get the feeling sometimes that I’ll never get the chance to play it again. When I look at my roomies, I realize I’m no kid. They’re all 20 and 21. I’m 25. And this war won’t be over in a hurry.” Then he veered away from any self-indulgent wistfulness and returned to the importance of the war. “You know something? I won’t be satisfied with this life until I get myself a Zero,”
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he said. “I’m not fooling. Boy, I thought I got the thrill of a lifetime when I hit that three-run homer in the ’41 All Star game. Downing a Zero would cap that a hundred times. Lousy Japs—attacking Pearl Harbor and spoiling everything.” That priceless quote, delivered with exuberant guilelessness, gave Finnegan the title of his series—“Ted Williams Wants a Zero”—and would soon cause the Kid some annoyance.

Of course, Ted’s wish to bag himself a Zero was predicated on the assumption that first he would get his wings and second he would be assigned combat duty. What if he were made an instructor? Finnegan asked. “Yeah, I thought of that,” Williams replied. That’s why, he announced, he’d decided that he wanted to be a Marine. “You don’t pick your spots there. Orders come from Washington in a sealed envelope. You don’t know—nobody knows what’s to become of you. But in the Navy, you have a selection—that is, if you can make it. And if I wound up an instructor, the wolves would say, ‘I knew it. In the bag. He’ll never leave the country.’ That’s why I want to make the Marines. I’ll have no say in the matter. They can send me to the Southwest Pacific, anywhere they wish. And whatever they do, I’ll have a clear conscience. Ted Williams, Marine lieutenant, flying a fighter. Boy, wouldn’t that be something?”
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After dinner, in the dark, Ted took Finnegan to the hangars of Saufley Field and showed him the various kinds of planes he had flown to date. There was the Piper Cub that he had started on at Amherst. It flew about seventy miles an hour and only weighed about 750 pounds, Ted said, stopping to lift one by the tail—with one hand. Then he pointed out an N2S trainer, which he had flown at Bunker Hill. It weighed a ton and could go one hundred miles an hour. Now he was flying an SNV, a low-winged plane with fixed landing gear that he said weighed two tons and went 120. “Rides much smoother than a lighter plane,” Ted said. “Difference between a light automobile and a heavy one.”

Then he told of another near miss he’d had—the same mistake he’d made at Bunker Hill. “You know, I almost killed myself the other day. Just about to take off when the instructor saw my wing flaps weren’t down. If I had taken off I wouldn’t have been able to gain altitude, and the Sox would have had a gold star on their flag. Wouldn’t the newspapermen have loved that!” He howled with laughter before turning serious. Ted concluded that he was “still in a D league as far as flying is concerned. In baseball, you can make a mistake on a pitch, and you’ve got two strikes left. In this game, one miscue can be fatal.”
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At the end of their evening, around 9:15, Ted walked Finnegan to the bus stop. Waiting on the bench were a sailor and “three Negroes,” Finnegan reported. “How about a regular Pensacola cheer for Ted Williams?” the writer suggested.

“Who’s Ted Williams?” a black woman asked.

“Just a drop in the bucket,” said Williams, starting back to his barracks.
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On Christmas Day, Ted accepted an invitation to dine with an officer, Lieutenant Forrest Twogood, and his wife, along with their guests. Finnegan tagged along. During dinner, Ted held forth on a variety of topics, including his stormy relationship with the writers and the limited amount of time a major leaguer has to make his mark and his money.

“Dough’s all that counts,” Williams said.
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“Who’s going to care about me when I can’t swing a bat? It doesn’t lake them long to forget you.… A big leaguer’s got about 10 years to pile it up. If he doesn’t, nobody’s going to kick in to him when he’s through. I’m not reaching for the moon. But I’ve come down from $250 a day to $2.50 a day, and that’s a sharp drop. I’ve lost one year of baseball already and might lose three more. How do I know I’ll be any good when I go back?”

Finnegan then went to interview Ted’s commander at Saufley, a Marine named Major Graham J. Benson, of Lexington, Kentucky. Benson, remarking that he would be “very disappointed” if Ted were not commissioned in the Marine Corps, rated the ballplayer highly.

“Frankly, I like his work,” Benson said. “I had heard of his pop-off reputation in baseball, and was looking for some sign of temperament. But… his conduct has been exemplary. He’s had chances to pop too.” Once, said Benson, Ted had missed an exam on ground and air traffic procedures known as course rules. When Benson called him in and
asked for an explanation, Ted didn’t offer any excuses. He said he’d just been absorbed in a navigation problem and forgotten about the test. He was assigned duty as a messenger for punishment and carried out the assignment without objection.
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By the time Finnegan’s series started running, on January 9, 1944, Williams had moved on to another station within the Pensacola complex, Whiting Field, where he was learning to fly by instruments. Whiting was a new facility that had been constructed in haste several miles inland, amid the black, piney woods. The base’s red earth turned to mud during the winter rainy season. Ted and the other cadets would go up with instructors in whiny, vibrating SNVs fitted with a dark canvas curtain that would shut out all outside light as well as the view of the horizon, which a pilot uses as his anchor when flying by sight. The cadets practiced landings without being able to see the landing strip, and they flew in intricate patterns, recalibrating their instincts and learning to trust what the instruments told them about their altitude and attitude even if their body felt something different. All this was first simulated on the ground in what was called the Link Trainer, a machine that replicated the experience of flying at various speeds, altitudes, and angles. From the safety of the trainer, cadets would be informed by their instructors if they had passed or failed, a failure often being the equivalent of actually crashing and burning.

Another training device in the same building was more fun—a 1940s-vintage video game of sorts called the Simulated Aerial Combat Machine. A cadet would get into a faux cockpit at one end of what looked like a movie theater and look out at a screen showing films of attacking enemy planes. The idea was to fire off your guns at the planes and hit as many as you could. The whole exercise was accompanied by the dramatic theater-in-the-round sound of screaming planes and bursting bullets. When the lights came on, the cadets would rush to find out how many Japanese fighters they’d shot down.
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As the Finnegan series was unfolding back in Boston, a copy of the second installment, published on January 10—the one in which Ted was quoted as saying he “won’t be satisfied with this life until I get myself a Zero”—found its way to the bulletin board outside the Whiting mess
hall. The clipping had probably been mailed to Pensacola by the parents of a cadet who’d excitedly written home about training with the great Williams. But the cadet who posted the article apparently did so with puckish intent, for as Ted walked in for chow that evening, he was serenaded by hundreds of his peers chanting, “Teddy wants a Zero! Teddy wants a Zero!”—louder and louder, until Williams abruptly stood up from his meal and stalked out of the hall in anger.

Now flying the SNJ-4 and SNJ-5 combat trainers, Williams further revealed his superb reflexes, coordination, and natural feel for the plane. He flew more smoothly than other cadets, most of whom would return from a training flight with their fuel tanks nearly empty. Such throttle jockeys were like drivers who stepped on the gas and braked more than they needed to. Ted, on the other hand, would have about a third of a tank left, conserving fuel by slowly and steadily making adjustments and corrections on the throttle with his hands, cutting the RPMs, and controlling the pitch of the prop.

Another aspect of flying in which Williams’s exceptional hand-eye coordination served him well was gunnery. A plane would tow a cloth sleeve around ten or twelve feet long and five feet wide approximately one hundred yards behind it. A group of four cadets, flying a thousand feet above, would then make dives toward the tow plane and try to shred the sleeve with as many bullets as they could. The proper technique was to lead the target slightly, as a skeet shooter does.

“Ted might have twenty to twenty-three hits, and the rest of us might have six to eight,” recalled Dick Francisco, a Marine fighter pilot who trained with Williams at Pensacola. “In gunnery he was way better than the average pilot. Sometimes the instructor would demonstrate, and Ted would get far more than the instructor as well.”
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Perhaps not surprisingly, the recollections of Ted’s instructors of his performance as a pilot were more exalted than his actual marks and fitness reports. During his first two months at Pensacola, he’d been rated below average on such skills as landings and field approaches. But in the final two months, from mid-February to late April of 1944, preceding his scheduled commissioning in May, Williams had stepped it up and earned an average mark of 3.53 on a scale of 0 to 4 in the key measurement of “officer-like qualities.”
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His 3.53 rating put him in the above-average range of 3.5 to 3.7, short of the “outstanding” range of 3.8 to 3.9. “Cadet Williams has shown a good attitude while in this squadron,” concluded Lieutenant A. B. Koontz in the “remarks” section of the evaluation. “He has been enthusiastic, industrious and cooperative. While in this squadron his progress has been satisfactory and he has performed all duties in an efficient manner. He possesses a good moral and military character and is above average officer material. I would like to have him in my squadron.”

Two key decisions faced by the cadets were whether to receive their commission in the Navy or Marine Corps and what kind of plane they wished to fly. None of the choices was guaranteed. Getting into the Marines was competitive and depended on the needs of the services at the time; only a fraction of a graduating class—perhaps 20 percent—would be designated for the Corps. Ted talked it over with one of his classmates, Raymond Sisk. “Ted said, ‘What do you think? Shall we go for the Marines?’ I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ ” Sisk recalled. “I was kind of fed up with the Navy at that point—a lot of chickenshit. I figured you’d be a man in the Marines.” But it was more about the Corps’ esprit for Ted. He basically bought into his pal Dick Francisco’s view that if you hadn’t served a hitch in the Marines, you still owed your country a military obligation.

Choosing a plane was thought to be a crapshoot. Cadets often assumed they would be denied their first choice, so they might try to game the system by saying a plane was their second or third choice when actually it was their first. But Ted played it straight. He wanted to be a fighter pilot and so chose fighter, scout, and torpedo, in that order. He got his first choice.

“We didn’t hear anything at first,” Sisk said. “Finally they posted the names. They accepted thirty of us as Marines. The ones they took were mainly college graduates. Ted was probably taken for his name, but he was also a good pilot.”

On May 2, 1944, Ted was commissioned and received his wings in a pomp-and-circumstance ceremony at Main Side attended by a full Navy band. Wearing a specially fitted gleaming new white officer’s uniform with starred epaulets, he officially accepted an appointment as a second lieutenant in the Volunteer Marine Corps Reserve. He had graduated forty-ninth in a class of 159 and was given a final mark of 3.186 when his entire five months at Pensacola were factored in. That put him at the high end of the “below average” range of 2.50 to 3.19, but he still
finished in the top third of his class. The cadet who was ranked first only had a mark of 3.598, in the middle of the “above average” range. However, Naval and Marine Corps historians say that during World War II it was common for even the best pilots to receive mediocre grades and fitness reports. Said Hill Goodspeed, a historian at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, “You have some of the foremost fighter pilots to come out of World War II getting average grades, so average was not an uncommon score. I’d say the grading was tough.”
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