The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (38 page)

The first enlisted man Williams encountered after the commissioning ceremony had to salute him. That was a glorious moment. Meanwhile, watching the ceremony in the audience with great pride had been Doris Soule, who’d been patiently waiting for her man for more than three years. She was there not only to witness a milestone in Ted’s life but also to collect on his promise that they would be married as soon as he became an officer and thus eligible to wed under Navy regulations. Two days after the commissioning, Ted and Doris were married. Soon the couple rented a house off the base, in Pensacola proper, and got themselves a German shepherd they named Slugger—naturally. Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey sent down an engraved silver service for the couple. Doris took a job in a local beauty salon.
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Ted’s idea of the perfect honeymoon was to take his new bride fishing in the Everglades.
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Williams chose the most remote area he could find and happily fished away, but Doris refused to leave their cabin because she was afraid of the snakes. Ted assured her there were no snakes, but Doris was (quite literally) unmoved. Finally he talked her into coming out to join him one day. As they headed down a path toward his favorite spot, Doris suddenly let out a scream. An enormous snake had just slithered across the path. Back to the cabin she went.

After commissioning, the next logical assignment for Williams, given his training to date and his skills as a pilot, would have been to go to the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, for final operational, or combat, training before being sent off to the Pacific Fleet. But then he learned he’d received different orders: to become an instructor and remain at Pensacola. As the United States was increasingly in control of the Pacific theater and thus the war against Japan by mid-1944, and since there was a backlog of pilots developing in Pensacola and elsewhere, the assignment effectively meant that he would not see combat in World War II.

Though Ted would claim in his book that he had chosen to become an instructor “because it would mean extra flight training and I figured I would need all I could get if we were going into combat,” he actually had no choice in the matter, according to several people he served with as well as Naval officials.
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“The choice of instruction or combat was made by someone else,” said Goodspeed. And of course, Williams had explicitly told Huck Finnegan for his series in the
American
that he wanted to choose the Marine Corps, since they would make the instructor/combat decision for him, thereby ensuring that the “wolves” would know he had clean hands if he remained stateside.

“Everyone wanted to see combat,” agreed Dick Francisco. “We were young, patriotic, hated Japs, the usual gung-ho stuff. Marines a little more so. To this day a guy doesn’t join the Marines to be stationed in the US. He wants to fight.”

The Marine Corps could have calculated that keeping Williams in the United States as an instructor would bolster the morale of the cadets he taught while boosting Armed Services public relations at home. It would also avoid the horrific headlines that could have ensued had he been sent off to combat and killed in action. But other celebrities and prominent people were accorded no such deference. The actor Tyrone Power was a Marine aviator and saw action in Okinawa, while FDR’s son James Roosevelt was a Marine Raider, part of an elite unit that conducted amphibious light-infantry warfare during World War II, often behind enemy lines. Those who served with Ted at the time said that another factor in the instructor decision might have been that an overzealous Pensacola commander wanted to keep Ted in Florida so he could play in the base’s highly competitive baseball league—a banal but perhaps persuasive hypothesis.

When Ted began his stint as an instructor, he was assigned to Bronson Field, one of the outlying stations in the Pensacola complex, twelve miles west of the city, near the Alabama line. Bronson, which mostly trained fighter pilots, had been Ted’s last post, or final station, as it was called, before he was commissioned, and he had begun playing for the base’s ball team, known as the Bronson Bombers.

Besides Ted, the Bombers had three other major leaguers on their roster: Bob Kennedy, a third baseman for the White Sox; Nick Tremark, who had played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-1930s; and Ray Stoviak, who’d had a cup of coffee with the Phillies in 1938. The Bombers would play two or three games a week, usually drawing a few thousand
fans each time. Mostly they would play against the other bases within the Pensacola complex, but they would also play against other service teams in the region, some from as far away as Texas.

At Bronson Field, Ted served under a lieutenant commander who did not try to conceal the fact that one of his top priorities was to field a winning ball team. The commander “made no bones about it,” recalled Ken Carroll, an instructor with Williams at the time and a former semipro ballplayer who was on the Bombers.
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“He wanted a team to beat the Main Station. I don’t know if he was unhappy being assigned to an outlying field or what. It may have been a political thing with him.”

Williams’s roommate at Whiting Field, Karl Smith, who subsequently became Ted’s lifelong friend, was convinced it was baseball that kept Ted out of combat. “Every base was competitive with the other bases, and every base had a baseball team, so everybody wanted Ted as an instructor.… That’s the one thing that kept him out of combat in World War II.” Others recalled Williams’s commander rescheduling training sessions in order to make certain pilots available for games.

When it came to military baseball during World War II, the acknowledged powerhouse was the Naval Station Great Lakes teams organized by former Tigers catcher Mickey Cochrane, who had tried to woo Ted to the base, outside Chicago, in 1942. Cochrane’s teams won 166 games and lost twenty-six over the first three wartime seasons and featured, at various times, such major-league pitchers as Bob Feller, Virgil Trucks, Denny Galehouse, and Schoolboy Rowe, as well as position players such as Pinky Higgins, Billy Herman, Walker Cooper, Ken Keltner, Johnny Mize, and Gene Woodling.

Right behind Great Lakes in its baseball prowess was the Norfolk Naval Training Station, in Virginia. Norfolk was home to Gene Tunney, the former heavyweight champion who by then was a lieutenant commander in charge of physical training in the Navy. Tunney’s job was to recruit athletes, coaches, and phys ed teachers to oversee conditioning at Navy bases around the country. When the “athletic specialists,” as they were called, showed up for Tunney’s eight-week training course, the base commander, Captain Harry McClure, who favored baseball, had his pick of prime professional talent. McClure proclaimed that the ball games they were playing were “point-blank proof to our enemies that they cannot succeed in overhauling our way of life,” and his Norfolk roster included Williams’s Red Sox pals Charlie Wagner and Dom DiMaggio, the Yankees’ Phil Rizzuto, Walt Masterson of the Senators, and Eddie Robinson of the Indians.

Many major leaguers found safe sinecures in the Army as well, including Tex Hughson of the Red Sox, Harry “the Hat” Walker of the Cardinals, Pete Reiser of the Dodgers, Red Ruffing of the Yankees, and, most notably, the Yankee Clipper himself, Joe DiMaggio. It was Hughson who, reflecting later on his wartime experience, famously said: “I tell them I fought World War II with a baseball bat and glove.”
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Ted was always uninterested in service baseball and, to his credit, never exploited it in an effort to stay out of harm’s way.
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“I didn’t have my heart in it at all, and I played lousy,” Williams recalled. “By this time I was more interested in flying. It was going to be my job for the duration, and I was also enjoying the pleasures of Florida fishing for the first time.”
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He’d read an article in
Field & Stream
magazine about the fight that Florida snook put up when they’re caught. Intrigued, one day Ted and a friend saved their gas ration stamps and drove down to Everglades City to fish the canals there. On his second or third cast, he caught a fifteen-pound snook that took off harder and faster than any fish he’d ever encountered in fresh water. By the next day, Ted and his pal had caught 110 pounds of snook and sold them off at a fish market along the Tamiami Trail for eleven cents a pound.

“It was the first and only time I ever sold a fish. I made up my mind right there that after the war I was going to come down a week early before spring training just to fish the Florida waters. As it turned out, a week wasn’t enough. I stretched it to two weeks, then a month, and before I knew it, I was a Florida resident.”
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Once, when a Bronson Bombers game was rained out, Bob Kennedy
and Ted hired a flat-bottomed boat and went out fishing in the Gulf. “We came up on this alligator in shallow water,” Kennedy remembered. “Ted said, ‘Let’s get the son of a bitch!’ I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ Next thing I know, Ted jumps into the water, and he’s got the head, I got the tail. We throw him into the boat, get him back on shore, and then throw him in the trunk of the car. He was close to six feet. We drove back to Ted’s place that night. He had a little house off base. We put the alligator in a fenced backyard. He didn’t tell Doris. They had a little police-dog pup named Slugger. The next day Doris let the dog out and sees the damn alligator. Luckily she got the dog back in, then she called Ted at the base, screaming.”
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Williams and Kennedy began spending more time together. Once, after Kennedy got married, he and his wife, Claire, went out to dinner with the Williamses. “At dinner Ted said to Claire, ‘Are you and Bob going to have kids?’ ” Kennedy said. “She said she hoped so. Then Ted said, ‘By God, if my wife ever gets pregnant, I’m gonna kick her right in the belly!’ That sounds terrible, but it was an offhand remark. He didn’t mean anything by it.… Doris just looked at him.” Williams also liked to debate religion with Kennedy, who was a strong believer. Once, Ted asked Bob if he believed in God. “Certainly,” replied Kennedy. “Oh, bullshit!” said Ted. “No one will ever prove to me there’s a God.”

Williams generally played center field for the Bronson Bombers. Len Poth, a Navy carrier pilot, was a pitcher on the team. One thing that drew the two men together was their exceptional eyesight. On road trips they would see who could be the first to read the letters on the license plates of cars approaching from the opposite direction. “We played for ten cents a shot. The other guys didn’t have the same kind of eyes we did, and they’d say, ‘Damn it, you’re making it up.’ ”
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As an instructor, Williams would fly seven days straight and get the eighth day off. He got high marks from those he taught. Recalled Frank Maznicki, who had been to Boston College and would go on to play pro football with the Chicago Bears, “He explained everything very well. He explained it so well that it was pretty easy to do. The other cadets I was with thought he was good, too.”
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Williams also earned a reputation for standing up for his students. As a surplus of pilots built up later in the war, he resisted pressure to thin the ranks by giving failing grades to an assigned number of them. Recalled Johnny Pesky, “Ted refused to wash them out, even though he was hauled on the carpet.… He said, ‘If I think a kid’ll make a competentflier,
I won’t wash him,’ and he didn’t. I never met a Marine pilot who trained under Ted who didn’t say, ‘There’s a right Joe.’ ”
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Williams didn’t mingle with his fellow officers much and wasn’t always sensitive to protocol when he did. According to Bob Kennedy, when a group of baseball-crazed senior commanders asked to socialize with Ted once at the Main Side officers’ club, he had one drink with them and excused himself. “Good night, boys,” he said. “It’s past my bedtime.”
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In May of 1945, after more than a year of instructor duty at Bronson Field, Williams suddenly received orders to report the following month to Naval Air Station Jacksonville for combat training before being shipped out to the Pacific to join the fleet. The timing of the transfer seemed curious. The war against Japan was nearing an end, with the decisive Battle of Okinawa, the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific, then in progress and tipping in the Allies’ favor.

Seven years later, in 1952, the
Boston Globe
would report that Williams’s transfer to Jacksonville was punitive, a reaction to Pensacola’s commanders exploiting him for baseball. Citing an unnamed Marine general as her source, reporter Ruth Montgomery wrote that while most of his peers were being sent off to combat, Williams had been assigned to be a flight instructor because his commanding officer “couldn’t bear to part with such a terrific ballplayer.”

She said the situation only came to the attention of Marine Headquarters in Washington when House majority leader John McCormack asked permission for Williams to leave Pensacola to attend “a special Irish celebration” in McCormack’s home city of Boston. When a general saw the request and then called for Ted’s service record, he hit the roof. “We’re not running a war to provide any pink teas for congressmen!” Montgomery quoted the general as saying.
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“Why wasn’t this fighter pilot sent into combat long ago?” Shortly afterward, Williams was shipped off to Jacksonville.

In Jacksonville, Williams continued to hone his skills, learning how to fly the F4U Corsair and setting a base gunnery record for student pilots.
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Williams also had a serious scare in Jacksonville when he crashed his plane while practicing a carrier landing in an incident that wasn’t publicized at the time. It was his fifth near miss since he began flight training at Amherst. After the accident, an unhurt Ted was hauled out of his plane by a Navy fireman from Boston, Jim Dunn. Recalled Dunn’s
son Jimmy, “When he took his helmet and goggles off, my dad saw that it was Ted Williams. He said, ‘Hey, I’ve seen you play ball up in Boston.’ Ted said, ‘Yeah, I’ve played there.’ ”
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