The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (5 page)

May’s life calling, superseding all else, was to be a foot soldier in the Salvation Army. Founded in England in 1865, the Army is an evangelical Christian group that considers itself a church but functions as a relief and social service organization whose adherents forswear drinking, smoking, drugs, and gambling. It rose to prominence by targeting and converting alcoholics, the homeless, drug addicts, unwed mothers, and prostitutes to Christianity. These were the kinds of people May tended to in a colorful mission that ranged from San Diego south to Tijuana and north to Los Angeles.

May was a beloved figure, a star of the street. Indeed, in San Diego during the Depression, “no woman was better known than Salvation May,” wrote Joe Hamelin of the
San Diego Union
in a 1980 series the newspaper published about Ted. “In Salvation Army bonnet and flowing garb, she patrolled the streets in the ’20s and ’30s, collecting for the poor. Some thought her almost saintly. Others thought her eccentric, or simply a ‘nut.’… She knew everyone, and everyone knew her. She would take a downtown office building, start on the top floor, and work her way down without missing an office. There was no tougher job in Depression time than raising funds for charity. No one was better at her craft than May.”
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According to Alice Rasmussen, a colleague of May’s in the Army: “She knew all the people in all the right places, and a lot of people in the wrong places, too. She had access to the mayor, the chief of police, business leaders, and she would go into the red light district—there was white slavery in those days—and minister there as well.”

Kenny Bojens, who eventually became a sports columnist for the local paper, would run into May as she trolled the downtown bars making collections. “I used to run around with a legend of sorts, Gentleman Joe Morgan, the
Union
’s police reporter,” Bojens said in the 1980
Union
series. “May used to call us her ‘Sunshine Boys.’ I remember this one night we were in a night club, the College Inn at Fourth and C, and we were flat broke. May came in, said, ‘How are my little Sunshine Boys tonight?’ and God-blessed the dickens out of us like she’d always do, and asked for a donation. I said, ‘May, we don’t even have the price of a beer,’ which in those days was about 15 cents. And she reached down into her purse and said, ‘Well, let the Army buy you one.’ ”

Another colleague was Alice Psaute, a lifelong Salvationist who made the rounds with May when she was a young woman. “We’d go to prizefights, and in intermissions we’d go around with a tambourine and try to collect money,” Psaute said. “The smoke was so thick you could cut it with a knife. We’d also go to the county jail for meetings on Sunday morning. I played the violin. It made them better so they could get out sooner. May went to the jail many times.”
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So popular and influential was May that in 1924, John D. Spreckels, the richest man in San Diego, quietly paid off the note on the Williamses’ house at 4121 Utah Street, where Ted grew up, in the city’s North Park section. May had acquired the six-room house in December of 1923 for $4,000, agreeing to $20 monthly payments, plus interest, until the note was paid off. But by August 1, 1924, the note was discharged, courtesy of
Spreckels, a sugar-refining industrialist, philanthropist, and publisher of both the
San Diego Union
and the
San Diego Evening Tribune.

When Ted became a star, May would unabashedly trade on his celebrity for the greater good of the Army, telling startled bank or bar patrons, “I’m Ted Williams’s mother. Empty your pockets.”
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Worse, as far as Ted was concerned, she’d work Lane Field after he signed his first pro contract to play for the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League, collecting money in the stands with her tambourine.

Bill Starr, a catcher with the Padres in 1937, told writer Ed Linn about “the time one of the players asked Ted if he knew that his mother had been walking around the stands collecting money and telling everybody Ted Williams was her son. Ted looked down at the floor and didn’t say anything for a long time. And then he said, ‘I know. She embarrasses me.’ The whole clubhouse went absolutely silent. Everybody felt so bad for him.”
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“I was embarrassed about my home, embarrassed that I never had quite as good clothes as some of the kids, embarrassed that my mother was out in the middle of the damn street all the time,” Williams wrote in
My Turn at Bat.
“Until the day she died she did that, and it always embarrassed me, and God knows I respected her and loved her.”
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May had entered the Salvation Army training college in Chicago in 1909, when she was eighteen. She graduated in 1911, was appointed a lieutenant, and sent to Hawaii. She made captain in 1912, but after marrying Ted’s father, Samuel Stuart Williams, in 1913, she was demoted back to envoy status because her husband was not a Salvationist—she’d “married out,” as the Army called it, and therefore could no longer be an officer.

May Williams was lean and tall—about five foot ten. She won awards for selling the most copies of the Army’s newspaper,
War Cry.
She was an accomplished musician, playing piano, guitar, and banjo as well as cornet in the Army band. She was an eccentric presence, sometimes wearing sunglasses in church, as if she were a street celebrity. She’d use magic—making a quarter disappear in a sleight-of-hand trick—to get people’s attention before asking them for a donation. Eventually, the
San Diego Sun
editorialized that “to thousands of San Diegans, rich and poor, Mrs. Williams IS the Salvation Army.”

Sam Williams was born on April 5 of either 1886 or 1888—records conflict—in Ardsley, New York, today a suburb of New York City. He
was the only child born to the former Elizabeth Miller and Nicholas Williams, a barber.

They divorced, and Nicholas Williams later married a British woman, Margaret Higgins. Nicholas and Margaret produced three daughters, all born in Yonkers, New York: Veacy, who was also known as Mae and Vivian, born in 1893; Alice, born in 1895; and Effie, born in 1899—these were Sam Williams’s half sisters and Ted’s aunts.

Effie Williams married John Smith, a short, stocky fireman who worked in Mount Vernon, New York, in Westchester County. In the summer of 1939, his rookie year with the Red Sox, Ted, on instructions from his mother, came to visit his aunt Effie when the team was in New York playing the Yankees. Smith jumped at the chance to bring Ted down to the firehouse to meet the fellas. Edward Donovan, whose father worked for the department, was there the day Ted came.

“I was fifteen,” said Donovan, recounting the moment with rich detail, as if it had happened yesterday. “My father called the house and said, ‘Brother—they called me Brother—come down; I want you to meet a ballplayer. This is Ted Williams.’ Ted shook my hand and he said, ‘When you gonna get in shape, kid?’ I was kind of fat.”
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It was a big event. All the firemen congregated around. Ted walked behind a fire engine, picked up a broom, and started swinging it. It was a beautiful swing, Donovan thought. Ted answered questions with “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” The firemen, mostly Yankees fans, asked Williams if he thought the Red Sox had a chance to win that year. Ted said, “Oh, yeah, I think we’re gonna win.”

“Ted charmed everybody. It was what you call awe-inspiring. He was so tall! And skinny! I don’t know how he could hit those home runs. I don’t think he was more than a hundred and sixty-five pounds.”

Whenever he could in the ensuing years, Donovan would drive down to Yankee Stadium to see Ted play, armed with insider tidbits from John Smith, such as which pitcher gave Ted the toughest time (Ted had confided that it was Eddie Lopat, of the White Sox and later the Yankees). “For a dollar and ten cents we’d get great seats. Hot dogs were a nickel.”

Ted seemed to like his uncle John, who was obsessed with keeping his firehouse, Engine 6, clean. He also liked to play the horses. According to Donovan, in 1949, Ted bought John a new white Ford. John went to Boston to pick it up and gave Eddie a ride in it when he got home. The car had plates that read
ES
41. ES stood for Effie Smith, and the 41 was a
nod to Ted’s .406 year. “Ted would always ask how Aunt Effie was doing,” Donovan said. “He really cared for his aunt. He always called no matter where he was.”

But of his three aunts, Ted was closest to Alice, according to Roselle Romano, a Miami Beach retiree who lived near the sisters and got to know them well when they moved to Florida from Westchester County later in life.

“Alice was a spitfire,” Romano said. “She’d curse you out like a sailor. Vivian and Effie were very much alike. Two ladies. But Alice! What a mouth she had.”
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Alice told Romano that Ted had spent extended time with her in Mount Vernon as a young man. “He was always with Alice. They would all go into Manhattan to go clubbing. Alice said, ‘He came to me. When he left California he came to me.’ That’s exactly how she put it. They had a lot of his plaques in their house.”

Alice would also go out and visit Ted in San Diego. In October of 1941, she was photographed with May outside Lane Field, where Ted, fresh off his .406 season, was on a barnstorming tour with Jimmie Foxx, his Red Sox teammate. Romano recalled that Alice returned home from one trip to San Diego with a dog named Cap that was part coyote. “He was a nasty thing,” she said.

Alice had been the first of the sisters to move to Miami Beach, where she bought a house on 181st Street with her husband, Phil Sheridan, a retired New York City police captain. Then, in the late 1950s, John and Effie decided to come down, too, and bought a place on 177th Street, two houses away from Roselle and her husband, Gennaro, known as Gin. The Romanos were from Fort Lee, New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge from New York.

John and Effie only used their house in the winter, so Effie invited her sister Veacy, whom Romano called Vivian, to use the place when she and John weren’t there. Vivian moved down permanently after her husband, a Con Edison machinist named Tom Grey, died.

The three sisters were petite, none taller than five foot three or so. “John had an Oldsmobile,” said Roselle. “Four doors. John, Effie, Alice, and Vivian sat in the front seat. That’s how small they all were.”

Alice was a brassy blonde, Effie a prim redhead. Vivian dyed her hair red. Effie, though the youngest of the three sisters, was the first to die, in 1971. Vivian died in 1978, Alice in 1984. After they passed, Roselle learned that the sisters were all actually ten years older than they had always said they were.

They were proud of Ted, their famous nephew, but didn’t drop his name. They allowed it to just come up in conversation.

“My husband almost fell off the chair,” Roselle said. “One day they start talking about Ted Williams. They said he was their brother’s child, and their brother had left New York to go to San Diego. They were all crazy for Ted. They’d go down and visit him in the Keys. Three or four times a year, maybe. They were very glad to see one another. Ted to me looks exactly like Vivian. They’d stay for a few days. They were very excited when Ted had his first child.”

Roselle said the sisters thought May Williams was an overbearing wife to their brother, Sam, and that she neglected Ted and his brother. “They said she was an absolute horror. They came back, and they were telling me Ted was so infuriated because him and his brother were out in the dark playing baseball because his mother never came home to cook for them. They were very fond of their brother, Sam. They said he was kind and nice. They thought May overpowered him, and him and the boys had to fend for themselves.”

The sisters didn’t discuss their childhoods much, other than to say that their mother had died shortly after giving birth to Effie and that their father never remarried. In various documents, Effie and Vivian said they worked as bookkeepers, while Alice described herself as a carpet weaver. “They said they were English,” Roselle said. “They bought everything fresh every day. Nobody could cook like those girls. The only thing in the freezer was Howard Johnson’s coffee ice cream. Some days we drove to Fort Lauderdale and we’d go to a fashion show. And we’d have lunch. They were fashionable. They had more money than me. In the afternoon we used to sit on the screen porch and have light conversation. They thought I lived in a circus. Nobody came to their house unless they were invited. I’m Italian—people always in and out.”

Of the three sisters, only Alice drove. One night in Miami Beach, she drove the wrong way down a one-way street. After that, she lost her license, and Roselle had to drive the sisters around wherever they went. Alice grew eccentric as she aged, and took to eating a box of candy before dinner. “They were little square cakes with icing, like an inch square,” said Roselle.

Ted wrote in his autobiography that his father ran away from home at the age of sixteen to enlist in the Army, and—impossibly—served in the Spanish-American War. Sam’s military records show he enlisted in December of 1904, which would have made him sixteen, but if he was
born in 1886, the earliest of the birth dates that he variously cited, he obviously could not have served in the Spanish-American War, which was fought in 1898. Nevertheless, Sam was smitten by Teddy Roosevelt, and over the years, either flatly told people he had been one of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at San Juan Hill or failed to correct the impression that he’d been there.

Although Sam hadn’t been in Cuba, he had served in the Philippines seven years later, part of the Fourteenth Cavalry’s drive to quash the Moro Rebellion. There he saw combat and served under Major General Leonard Wood, who had been Roosevelt’s commanding officer at San Juan Hill. Thus the Rough Rider braggadocio, while unfounded, was at least rooted in a link to Wood, the man who really did lead the charge up the hill.

Sam’s infatuation with Roosevelt was apparently the inspiration for his choice of Teddy as the true first name for his older son. He passed on his own name, Samuel, for Ted’s middle name.
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According to his military records, Sam was just five foot five and three-quarters, so Ted would eventually tower over him by nearly a foot. “Years later I used to kid my dad when we walked together: ‘Come on, Shorty, let’s keep up,’ ” Ted wrote.
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