The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (8 page)

Wiley was amazed at Ted’s power. “When he’d hit, guys would say, ‘Where in the Sam Hill does that skinny drink of water get his power from?’ Ted was unusually strong in his hands and wrists. When I used to hang around his house, I’d see him take a dining room chair and place six or seven big Life magazines on it and get down on one knee and pick the chair up by one leg and raise it up.… When he was 10, 11, 12, he was such a scrawny kid that nobody dreamt he would turn out to be what he was in major league baseball.”
⁵²

Ted may have been scrawny, but he could handle himself in a pinch, Wiley said. “No one would ever want to tangle with him. That guy could really fight. I mean, he was good. He got into scrapes around that playground every once in a while.… He could throw those fists and they were fast.”
⁵³

It was while playing against Wiley that Ted had a playground epiphany of sorts. “Know what was the biggest thing that ever happened to me in baseball?” Ted told
Time
’s Ben Williamson in 1950. “Well, it wasn’t getting picked up by the Red Sox, or the first homer I ever hit for Boston. It was when I was playing with a kid named Wilbert Wiley. We were pals in San Diego and we would take turns pitching to each other. I was 14 then and he was a year or so older—and we’d have some small fry chasing the balls we hit out in a vacant sandlot. Well, Wilbert would always tell me what he was going to throw—fast ball, curve and so on. He had a pretty good roundhouse. And one day I told him never mind calling out what he was going to throw. I said, ‘Come on, throw what you like.’ Well, I could hit anything he threw up there. I could time them right. Boy, I was all swelled up over that. I could hit anything. I knew right then that I was a good hitter.”

Joe Villarino was one of the baseball Villarinos who were fixtures at University Heights. Joe lived five blocks from Ted and would spend forty years working for San Diego Gas and Electric. One of his favorite memories was the day he hit a home run and Ted greeted him at home plate, all smiles. “That was the day of my life,” Villarino said. “Ted said, ‘If there’d been another coat of paint on the fence, it wouldn’t have gone over! He’d hit one the inning or two before. I think that ball’s still going.”
⁵⁴

Del Ballinger moved to San Diego from Monterey, California, when he was thirteen. He had been a batboy for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League and lived near Ted, on Nevada Street. Del told Ed Linn that the first time his father took him to the playground, “I heard a lot of noise and looked through the swings and slides—I’ll never forget this—and saw this big, tall string bean hitting the ball a mile, and all the
other kids were chasing after it.… This was his life. Ted never shagged for anybody. Nobody wanted him to. Everybody loved to see him hit.” But Del said Ted’s legs were so skinny he was nicknamed Birdlegs on the playground, which he hated.
⁵⁵

Roy Engle was a big, strapping catcher who would become the captain of Ted’s high school team. “We played together on the playground all the time,” Engle recalled. “Ted lived at that ballpark, and if he could get somebody to throw the ball to him he’d be happy. I think we all realized Ted was just a little bit different than we were.”
⁵⁶
Engle also played football, and in 1939 he would become a member of USC’s national championship team. “He was the guy I admired,” Ted said of Engle. “He was so strong. Everything he hit was a line drive.… I couldn’t hit it anywhere near as hard as he did.”
⁵⁷

Swede Jensen was the shortstop on Ted’s high school team and later played for the San Diego Padres in the Pacific Coast League. “North Park was our main getout,” Jensen said. “It was a wonderful meeting place. Ted was loud and boisterous. When he started to laugh, he’d fill the place with laughter, wherever he was.” Swede lived on Iowa Street, and he and Ted would often walk to school. Ted would never be without his bat, and he’d always be sure to stop and swing at any bush that dared to be blooming in his path.

Ted Laven would tell the
Boston Globe
years later that when Williams first showed up at North Park he was a right-handed hitter: “He was nine or ten years old and always hit from the right side. How he became a left-handed batter is a funny story. We use to play on a softball diamond. The left field fence was only 150 feet away, and we had a rule that if you hit the ball over the fence you were out.… The right field fence was something like 350 feet away, as I remember. Well, Ted decided he could swing from the left side and have plenty of room to swing. From that day on, Ted was a left-handed batter.”
⁵⁸
Williams himself never related that story. In speaking of his beginnings as a hitter he would say that even though he was right-handed, he’d picked up a bat one day and begun swinging it left-handed, and he’d stayed with it because it felt comfortable. But in hindsight he thought he’d have been a better hitter right-handed, because hitting lefty, his power hand, his right, was farther away from the ball at contact, thereby diminishing his power.
⁵⁹

Some just watched the playground show. Bud Maloney, who would become a sportswriter for the
San Diego Union,
was five years younger than Ted—an avid baseball fan and an early observer of Williams’s coming of age at University Heights. “I was a shy little kid,” Maloney said. “I
just simply watched. I never talked to Ted.”
⁶⁰
As Ted’s sandlot career began to take off, that meant watching him not just at University Heights but at other parks around town. “Almost at every field for some years there was a story that Ted hit a ball here that went over the fence of some guy’s backyard. For years Ted was talked about. He was renowned.”

The emerging acclaim made it easy to find shaggers—playground urchins who were more than happy to chase after the long balls Ted would blast hither and yon. One regular was Ben Press, who went on to become a noted tennis pro in the San Diego area. Press lived a few doors down from Ted, on Utah Street. “Rod would take and throw balls to Ted, and he’d hit them over the fence, and we’d chase them for him,” recalled Press. “We did that for hours every day. I was in awe of Ted.” Williams would usually borrow a quarter from his mother to pay Press or other neighborhood kids for their trouble.
^61
*

Looking back, Ted thought he spent all those early years at the playground more for the love of the game than out of any overarching ambition to be a pro ballplayer, which he had grave doubts he could become anyway, given his skinny frame.

He didn’t follow the major leagues closely. “I was out
doing
it,” he wrote. “That’s all I cared about. If there was any player I thought about imitating, it was Bill Terry. He was having big years for the Giants then, and when I’d be playing, or just swinging a bat, I’d say to myself, OK, Terry’s up, last of the ninth, two men on, two-two count. Giants trailing three to one—announcing the game the way kids do—here’s the pitch… Terry
swings
… And I’d treat myself to another home run.”
⁶²

Terry had hit .401 in 1930, when Williams was twelve, leaving a strong and lasting impression on the boy. “The only players I had ever heard of were Ruth and Gehrig,” Ted said. “And then I read that Bill Terry had hit .400, and that really excited me. Four hundred! I don’t think I even knew what you had to do to hit .400, but I could tell that it was something wonderful. I knew I wanted to do that, too.”
⁶³

Ted did discover life outside the playground. His early heroes were not ballplayers but rather George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles Lindbergh. He was particularly intrigued by aviation. And when Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927 after spending several months that year in San Diego overseeing the construction and testing of his
Spirit of St. Louis,
Ted basked in the reflected glory with other San Diegans.

San Diego’s role in Lindbergh’s historic Atlantic crossing had spurred the city to stake a claim in the aerospace industry, and in 1935, the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation moved its headquarters to San Diego from Buffalo, New York. Once in California, it built one of the largest airframe factories in the world and soon became the city’s largest civilian employer.

Ted would draw pictures of Lindbergh and his plane. “I never drew a picture of Ruth… or any ballplayer,” he said. “But I drew pictures of Lindbergh—and George Washington and Napoleon. Those three guys.”
⁶⁴

Another passion was marbles, and Ted learned the intricacies of the game, throwing around terms like
aggies, immies,
and
puries
. He’d play a game called Boston with Joe Villarino. You drew a big circle in the dirt, got on your knees, and tried to shoot the other guy’s marbles out of the circle. His obsessive play made for holes in the knees of his pants and the toes of his shoes.

On Saturday mornings Joe and Ted would hike up into the hills and go rabbit hunting, swim, and look for Huck Finn–like adventure. “One day,” Villarino remembered, “we was walking around this trail and a rattlesnake come out and Ted shot it with a .45 he had. We laid it aside, and when we came back, he wrapped him around his neck and shoulders and carried it home.

“Another time, at Dobie’s Pond, there was a kid in trouble. He was about eight or nine. We was about fourteen or fifteen. The kid was kinda splashing around. Ted went in and got him. He didn’t make a big deal of it. He didn’t like to be in the limelight too much.”

Saturday afternoons during football season, Ted liked to get home in time to listen to the USC games on the radio. He loved Irvine “Cotton” Warburton, a San Diego boy who was the team’s All-American quarterback in 1933. “On Saturday night we’d listen to Benny Goodman,” Ted wrote. “Swing bands were the thing then. I still prefer swing to anything else.”
⁶⁵

His favorite radio program was
Gang Busters,
which, with the
cooperation of J. Edgar Hoover, dramatized closed FBI cases. Originally launched in 1935 and called
G-men,
the show featured the dramatic sound effects of screeching tires, police sirens, and tommy guns.
⁶⁶

Ted was a fire buff, an early sparky.
⁶⁷
He became a fixture at his neighborhood fire station, playing pinochle with the firemen. When an alarm sounded and the truck responded, they’d put a fireman’s hat on young Ted and let him hop aboard. Williams would hang on to the rear of the truck with one arm, lean out, face to the wind, and wave his arm, shouting with glee.
⁶⁸

Ted also liked to hang out at the Majestic Malt Shop, not far from his house, where you could buy ten-inch-high malts for a quarter, and at Doc Powelson’s drugstore, across from Herbert Hoover High School, which Williams would graduate from. He often mixed his malts with eggs in his perpetual quest to gain weight. (“Let’s malt up,” Ted would say to Wilbert Wiley or some other friend.)

There was also time for mischief—though nothing too serious. Once, Ted and his brother climbed a nearby water tower, got stuck, and the fire department was called to get them down. On Halloween, Ted would join his pals in greasing the trolley tracks in order to wreak havoc on the streetcars. One year, the group pilfered some fruit from downtown storefronts with the intention of using it to raise hell that night. The police caught them. Most were apologetic and let go, but Ted was a smart aleck, so he was hauled in to the station. The cops ended up playing pinochle with him and driving him home at midnight, charmed.
⁶⁹
But beyond such childish pranks, Williams was straight as an arrow—never smoked a cigarette as a kid, always in bed by 10:00 p.m.

Improbably, Ted tried piano lessons for a while, but that didn’t take. And he dabbled at odd jobs.
⁷⁰
Once, he reported to an employment office and spent several hours tossing barrels onto a truck for thirty cents an hour.
⁷¹
In 1934, he worked as a lifeguard under Art Linkletter at a YMCA camp that May sent him to.
⁷²
He drove a delivery truck for a bakery that sponsored a sandlot team he played on. He even did a stint as an elevator operator and waiter at the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego, where, according to the hotel’s proprietor, Edward S. Bernard, Ted “never dropped a room service order, never spilled ice water on hotel guests and never was impolite.”
⁷³

Ted couldn’t afford his own car, but he loved to cruise around town with those who could. Bill Skelley, a teammate of Ted’s on the 1937 Padres, had a maroon 1929 Chrysler roadster, and they’d glide down Broadway with the top down or zip through Balboa Park. When they
passed a golf course where someone was getting ready to tee off, Ted would reach over and honk the horn to try to disrupt the golfer. “Just fooling around,” Skelley said.
⁷⁴

Girls? Forget it. “I never went out with girls, never had any dates, not until I was much more mature-looking,” Ted wrote. “A girl looked at me twice, I’d run the other way.”
⁷⁵

Ted did go to his senior prom in January of 1937, double-dating with his friend Bob Breitbard. “I had an old ’27 Chevy, green with orange wheels,” Breitbard said. “I was ashamed of that thing. My brother had a Dodge with four doors. Later model. So we went in style. It was the first time I’d ever seen Ted in a tie. Ted took Alberta Camus, a girl in our class. She was fairly attractive. As far as I know, I don’t think he ever had a date before that one. We didn’t think that much about girls. Hell, the fellas hung out together.”
⁷⁶

Yet there was no anxiety when it came to voicing his opinion: Williams was high-strung, filled with nervous energy, always biting his fingernails. Ted’s friends found him candid to a fault, unvarnished. If he didn’t like someone, he would tell him so, to his face, rather than gossip behind his back. “I don’t care for you, fella,” he might say.

Ted’s booming voice could be heard above any din. And he used it to good effect, often to shout out an odd greeting cry—
“Ta-ta-weedo”
—when he saw a friend, say, a hundred feet away. No one knew what this meant—it was just a colorful eccentricity. Ben Press remembered that Ted would also use this whoop in triumph when he blasted a home run or hit a winning shot in tennis. A variation that he liked to use in his junior high school metal shop class was: “
Pow-ho-we-hah!
My muscles are bulging!” according to friend Jerry Allen. “Everyone laughed at that and thought it was funny,” Allen said. “My teacher would laugh, too, but he’d tell us he hoped we never yelled like that.”
⁷⁷