The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (6 page)

Sam’s stint in the Army was his heyday. “I remember he had a sword, a big saber he used to let me swing, and he always liked to shoot guns and ride horses,” Ted wrote. “I’ve got pictures of him: a little guy, posing behind a horse that was lying down, getting ready to shoot over the horse, and another of him at attention, standing real straight with a bugle slapped against his side.”
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Sam made corporal in October of 1907, two months before he was discharged. He liked the Army so much he decided to reenlist for a second three-year tour in 1908, drawing tamer duty this time—in Hawaii. It was there that he met May Venzor, the budding Salvationist.

Following his discharge in 1911, Sam, perhaps trying to impress May, enrolled in a Salvation Army training program. It was a bad match, and he soon dropped out, but May didn’t hold it against him. They kept courting, and before long, he asked for her hand. May accepted—at great sacrifice to her career. In the scheme of things, May decided that didn’t matter, so on May 13, 1913, she and Sam were wed in Santa Barbara.

The couple first lived in Los Angeles, where Sam took a job as a streetcar conductor. By 1915, they had moved to San Diego, where Sam opened a photo studio downtown, at 820 5th Street, in a second-floor walk-up above a restaurant. He took passport shots and catered to sailors and their girlfriends. At least at first, May was involved in the business, helping her husband with various chores.

Three years later, on August 30, 1918, Ted was born at San Diego’s Sunshine Maternity Home. Before Ted, May had had two other children, both of whom apparently died at birth.
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On Ted’s birth certificate, his name was originally written “Teddy Samuel Williams,” but the typed “Teddy” is crossed out and replaced with a handwritten “Theodore.” Ted said he had later done this himself because he did not like the name Teddy. And the original birth date was typed in as August 20, but the “20” is crossed out and replaced with a handwritten “30.” August 20 may have been the correct date, since the attending physician, J. M. Steade, filled out his portion of the certificate the next day, August 21. Yet compounding the confusion as Ted came of baseball age were references in the San Diego papers to his birthday falling on October 30. May had tried to straighten out the mix-up—at least for the record—years earlier, in 1920, by filing an affidavit with the county clerk, saying that the correct date of birth was August 30 and that “the child’s name should be given as ‘Theodore Samuel Williams.’ ”
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Ted would later explain to
Boston Globe
sportswriter Harold Kaese that he was born in late August but moved his birth date back to October because he did not want the distraction of celebrating a birthday during baseball season.
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When May and Sam Williams arrived in San Diego in 1915, the city was a benign backwater with a population of about fifty-five thousand and a downtown fraying at the edges. San Diego could lay claim to being the birthplace of California: in 1769 the Franciscan priest Junípero Serra made it the first European settlement in the area and built a beautiful network of Spanish missions. But the tides of history and geography worked against the city’s emergence as an important political or economic center. The end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 established the international boundary just south of San Diego, the gold rush passed the city by, and the railroads found San Francisco and Los Angeles to be more felicitous end points for their east-west lines. Until 1919, San Diego had to be content with just a spur line from Los Angeles.

That year, the city finally got its rail link to the East. None of the railroads had been willing to take on the prospect of laying tracks across the hazardous mountains and gorges rising out of San Diego, but in 1905, John D. Spreckels, the industrialist-philanthropist who paid off the Williams family’s mortgage in appreciation of May’s Salvation Army work, underwrote the project. It took fourteen years to build, at a loss of many millions of dollars, and came to be called the Impossible Railroad. But by the time it was built, the connection with the eastern United States seemed moot, as Los Angeles and San Francisco were much better established centers of commerce, and the automobile was emerging as a more convenient mode of travel with the establishment of a coast-to-coast highway system.

Still, San Diego was given a substantial shot in the arm and international attention in 1915 when it hosted a world’s fair to help celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal. Officially known as the Panama-California Exposition, the fair drew tens of thousands of people to see the grand neo-Spanish buildings designed by the architect Bertram Goodhue and the transformation of fourteen-hundred-acre Balboa Park, named for Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first white man known to have crossed the Isthmus of Panama and sight the Pacific.
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Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford all came to San Diego for the celebration. Balboa Stadium was built, along with museums and key elements of urban infrastructure that served as a boon to economic development. A menagerie of animals left over from the fair would become the nucleus for the famed San Diego Zoo, the world’s largest. The exposition was so successful it lasted for two years, through the end of 1916.

The United States’ entry into World War I the following year brought a spike in military activity in San Diego with the opening of Camp Kearny and facilities at North Island and Fort Rosecrans. The Navy had built a coaling station at Point Loma in 1907 and used that as a foundation to greatly expand its presence. Later, the Navy choose San Diego as the base for the Pacific Fleet. A Marine Corps base was launched in 1919 and the Naval Training Center in 1921.

The fair ignited a “smokestacks versus geraniums” debate about how the city should develop, but it was the military and tourists—attracted by San Diego’s near-perfect temperate climate and its proximity to Mexico—who would shape the city more than anything else. San Diego promoted its ties to a romantic Spanish past and collaborated on development
projects with neighboring Tijuana, the better to position itself as the gateway to Mexico. Tijuana became a major tourist attraction during Prohibition, thanks to Agua Caliente, its luxurious casino resort, which featured a racetrack and a championship golf course. Hundreds of thousands of Southern Californians seeking the high life passed through San Diego on their way to Tijuana, the Las Vegas of its day, until Mexico banned gambling in 1935. Many tourists liked enough of what they saw in San Diego, though, and the city’s population nearly doubled in the ’20s, reaching about 148,000 by 1930.

“When I was a kid,” Ted would tell the writer David Halberstam in 1988, “I’d see a falling star and I’d say, ‘Make me the greatest hitter who ever lived.’ ”
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The center of young Williams’s world then, a refuge from the angst and sadness of home, was the University Heights playground. Also known as North Park, it was located just a block and a half from his house, and for seven years, when he was between the ages of nine and sixteen, Ted spent part of virtually every day there. North Park had lights and stayed open till 9:00 p.m.—a good thing, given his parents’ prolonged absences.

The proprietor of the playground, the man who would become the most important baseball influence in Williams’s early life, was Rod Luscomb. Luscomb was eleven years older than Ted. Blond, about six foot three, two-hundred-plus pounds, and friendly, he’d played baseball at the University of Arizona and briefly as a pro in the Class D California State League: Williams would recall him as “my first real hero.”
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Luscomb at first paid little attention to the tall and awkward boy who kept following him around, asking questions about pitching and hitting. But he was impressed when he saw the kid hit—the smooth hip turn, the strong roll of the wrists.

When Rod did his chores around the playground, Ted would be nipping at his heels, all chatter. “He hung [on] to me like a little puppy,” Luscomb told
Time
magazine’s Ed Rees in 1950, in an interview that was part of nearly one hundred pages of unpublished notes and files that Rees and several other correspondents assembled for an April 10, 1950,
Time
cover story on Williams.
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“He would look up and say with his eyes full of excitement, ‘Hey, Lusk, if I get big arms like Jimmie Foxx, and I
could throw like DiMaggio and run like Jesse Owens, think I’d make the big leagues?’ ” Sure he could, Rod would tell him. But then Ted would point to his bony arms and say, “How in hell am I gonna get big arms?” Push-ups, Rod would advise—and Ted would do them, commencing a routine of fifty to one hundred fingertip push-ups a day that he would follow until the end of his professional career. He’d also squeeze a handball constantly to strengthen his wrists.
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One day, when he was about twelve or thirteen and Luscomb was wetting down the infield, Ted, all uncorrupted bluster, said to him: “Lusk, some day when I get a million bucks in the big leagues, I’m gonna build myself a ballpark with cardboard fences all around. Then I’m gonna knock ’em down with homers.”
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The park helped provide some structure to Williams’s life, given the infrequent presence of his parents. But there were limits. Luscomb would arrive at the park at 2:30, and a few times, he noticed that Ted was already there. That meant the boy was playing hooky, since school didn’t get out until three o’clock. Ted tried to explain that he was only trying to get a jump on the other kids so he could get in more at bats, but Luscomb bluntly told Ted he’d have nothing to do with him if he cut school again.

Ted obeyed, but he did have one other ethical lapse. Once, when Luscomb was getting out of the shower, he overheard Ted and a pal discussing whether to steal a new baseball they had spotted in Rod’s locker. When the friend went ahead and swiped it, at Ted’s urging, Rod walked around the corner, caught them red-handed, and banned Ted from the playground for two weeks.
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Ted and Luscomb played a game on the handball court they called big league. They’d hit a softball against a wall, getting singles, doubles, triples, or homers depending on where they hit it and how well they placed their shots. But what most interested Ted was extended batting practice—hardball—and Luscomb was happy to indulge him. They would play nine-inning games, and each would pitch to the other for three innings at a time. Imaginary fielders would be in their designated positions. A ball landing beyond a designated line would be a single, farther out a double, farther than that a triple, and out of the park was a home run. The score was usually close—6–5, 4–3, 7–5, or 3–2—and
each player won about an equal number of games. They pushed each other and threw hard. Rod liked to exploit a weakness of Ted’s at the time—a slow, inside curve—and Ted would bark at him when he threw the pitch: “Hell, Lusk, get back to the bull pen and warm up!”
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Sometimes, Ted would hit Luscomb so hard that Rod would try and cheat in a little and move closer to the plate to reduce the distance he had to throw. When Ted noticed, he’d drill a couple back through the box, forcing Luscomb to retreat.

“I was so eager to play, and hitting a home run off Rod Luscomb in those makeshift games was as big a thrill for me as hitting one in a regular game,” Ted wrote. “We played for blood.”
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These early one-on-one jousts with Luscomb were central to Ted’s emerging view of baseball as more of an individual test of will than a competition between two teams. “I’m sure that during this time the little game between the pitcher and the batter was coming to light for me,” he wrote. “It’s so important, the real crux of baseball, and so many hitters seem to miss it. You’re not playing the Cincinnati Reds or the Cleveland Indians, you’re playing that pitcher—Johnny Vander Meer, Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, whoever he is—and he’s the guy you concentrate on.”
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Williams always believed there was no such thing as a natural hitter. Yes, you had to have good eyesight and strong wrists, but after that, there was only one way to really be great: through hard work and practice.

“I would never have gained a headline for hitting if I hadn’t kept everlastingly at it, and thought of nothing else the year round,” Ted told Joe Cashman, Red Sox beat writer for the
Boston Evening American
and
Daily Record
in July of 1941, during the midst of his .406 season. “I never passed up an opportunity to watch the leading Coast League hitters in action. I read every word of advice about hitting uttered by big league stars. And when I wasn’t sleeping or eating I was practicing swinging. If I didn’t have a bat, I’d take any piece of wood, or make a bat of paper and swing it. If I didn’t have a ball to swing at, I swung at stones, marbles and even peanuts and pop corn thrown at me by pals.”
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Or he’d just swing with an imaginary bat. If he passed a storefront that had a big, clear window, he liked to stop, take a few swings, and check his reflection out. When he did this, he’d be in his own world, oblivious to the merchants inside bemused by the vainglorious displays. The truth was, Ted didn’t want to just
be
good. He wanted to
look
good, too. “I wanted to have a great-looking swing,” he acknowledged. “That was important to me. Everybody wants to look good.”
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The Williams-Luscomb sessions attracted notice. Ted’s pals would often gather and watch, as would some Triple-A players on their way to the majors, such as Earle Brucker, Lee Stine, and the Coscarart brothers, Pete and Joe, all of whom lived in San Diego.

In the heat of the competition, Ted might pop off and snarl at Luscomb. “We’d argue, boy, we’d argue,” Ted wrote. “I was always the kind of kid who spoke his mind, just blurted it out, without thinking of the consequences or what anybody might think.”
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But Luscomb didn’t think Ted impudent. “He always wore a grin on his face,” Rod told
Time
’s Rees. “That’s the first thing I think of now when I recall him as a boy. Also, I greatly admired the qualities he had—aside from his ball-playing abilities. Honest, good-natured and loyal to his friends—he’s a lot better man than many. He was pretty sensitive too. Things would bother him deep down, although he wouldn’t let on. I’m sure a lot of his trouble with the press can be laid to this.”